Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

Maybe adding a clickable/highlighted actual url in the post to make it more stupidly easy to go to your website, if not on the title itself (not sure if you can add that now) could also be a good idea. For stupid people like me that spent more than 10 seconds after reading it trying to figure out where I should click.

Really excited to try this.

1) I'm surprised to not see the bugdrop feature in the admin section, which means I currently have to report the bug here :-)

2) I was also surprised that it didn't seem to need to confirm my email, seems standard these days.

Otherwise, stoked to try this. I already reported a "bug" on your front page and it went very smoothly.

3) Didn't receive an email receipt confirming that the bug was reported after I had entered my email, not sure if that's planned or not.

Thanks!

I don't know if this is the case now, but about a decade ago, in order to report a Bug to Microsoft you had to create a Premier Support ticket, which cost $1000+, but free if it's a Bug. So basically, if what you report is not a Bug, determined by them, it's treated like a Tech Support ticket and no longer free. I recall discussing this with a representative and let them know that I'm basically doing them a favor by reporting the bug -- why would I want to take the chance to possibly have to pay for it if they happen to determine "it's not a bug -- it's a feature". I got the standard corporate-speak answer which I just waved off as ridiculous: "Look, we will absolutely not charge you if it's determined to be a bug"... :|

I've since have seen Microsoft use User Voice and the products (at least Visual Studio) has a great way to give feedback to the team, something I've used multiple times, including for feature requests. And of course, for their Open Source products, they have Github Issues, which is awesome.

I think a lot of people here seem to totally fail to understand the user's perspective. Reporting on bugs is hard, because adding actual, helpful context to a bug is actual (free) labour. Yes, filtering out useless reports is hard for you, but that's the price you are gonna have to pay for having people do free labour (you get some unhelpful reports). You want to increase signal-to-noise ratio by focusing on decreasing the noise, whereas you should actually focus on increasing the signal.

Making simple, useless bug reports is easy and it will always be the easiest. Also the "my neighbour spies for the government" types will anyway always be the most motivated ones. There is no way to make it hard for "bad" reports without making it harder also for useful reports (barring some obvious cases of bots, ip filters etc, which are not what is discussed here and are a general problem not just for bug feedback). By trying to reduce the noise, you also reduce the signal thus get a worse SNR.

The specific tool is smart in trying to increase the signal. If you make it easier for users to add some useful context, MAYBE you get more users actually giving you sth useful, maybe even users who otherwise would not bother to add anything more useful than "it does not work".

I use software that recently made much simpler to make bug reports and add context, and they say they actually receive much better bug reports after. And most importantly, the users actually see that the bugs get fixed, which motivate them to make more, and more detailed, bug reports. Imo getting bugs fixed (and maybe even recognise the users' contribution in reporting them) is the best way to get good bug reports. Honestly, from my user's perspective having my feedback taken seriously is the best motivation for me to continue submitting reports. Because, honestly, sometimes bugs come up in complex situations that may be tricky to understand/reproduce, and it is hard to understand what context is relevant. I am not usually motivated as a user to spend like 20 minutes figuring out exactly how to reproduce a bug, but if I see that the company/engineers actually care and try to make it easy to me to report to them, I may actually do it.

Yes you are gonna have bad interactions also (and remember people have their own jobs/lives/not enough time to always engage with you the way you may want them to in providing feedback), but the point is to increase the good/useful interactions (compared to them), not decrease interactions in general. Unless you do not care much about bug reports anyway, that's also fine.

worse, support that is overly fixed on support sessions and calls to resolve bugs even when in the ticket it clearly states it's not reproducable, only a restart fixes it etc.

Take my logs and everything you get but ffs make it observable enough so that you don't waste my time.