yes, Kate editor is a classic example. one clicks the report a bug link in-app and immediately gets a login page. no one has time for this sort of thing. it indicates a disinterest in getting bug reports, making people do homework to report one.
i switched editors and got back to work.
Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
201–210 of 226 posts
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#202The problem with bug reporting is that they rarely seem to get fixed. I used to do a lot more bug reports. But you often hear back nothing, and then the bug is never fixed, even if it would be an easy fix. These days, I don't often report bugs.
Same experience. Not even a tech person but I have reported obvious typos a few times. I think I got a thank you letter once and it was two months after I reported, that’s it.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#203I spent a lot of time working in the user research space and the disconnect between what users told me and what they did was so huge that I just built an AI that watches user sessions and figures out bugs and friction. Works well for like 90% of cases
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#204As a user the best thing you can do to make me report bugs is to show that you are actually going to fix reported bugs. Taking my time to gather information that will effectively end up in /dev/null is the opposite of fun.
Also important is to let me make sure I don't waste time reporting something that is already a known issue.
The best way to do this is to have a public bug tracker.
Given these preconditions acceptable effort only depends on how invested I am in the product.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some teams have a frickin' bad attitude and couldn't care less. Try submitting a bug about how menus are displayed 5px from where they are supposed to be in a GTK app rendered on a X11-server that runs on the Windows desktop and see if the GTK developers care. Or try telling the react-testing-framework folks that they're asking me to put handrails in my bathroom when my house is burning down. Have experiences like th…
Don't forget all major OSS repositories using a stale bot to close any issue regardless of how many people reported it or how serious it is. Close and lock at times. Yikes.
Yeah if I see a bot like that I just don't bother with bug reports to that project. Absolutely disrespectful to not even bother having a human look at the bug to decide if it can be closed.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget all major OSS repositories using a stale bot to close any issue regardless of how many people reported it or how serious it is. Close and lock at times. Yikes.
I have seen OpenZFS adopt one, but whenever I have seen a bug that has merit closed by the stale bot, it is reopened by a contributor and a not-stale flag is added to prevent it from being automatically closed again. Note that I am a contributor, but I am not one of the ones who is reopening bugs and marking them as not stale. The few times I saw such a bug and would have done it, someone else beat me to it. The stal…
> The stale bot approach does help in cases where a bug does not have merit. For example, not that long ago, a user opened a bug asking us to rename the ZFS Event Daemon so a text editor could adopt the daemon’s name. The consensus among contributors on the discussion is that we will not do it, but no one has volunteered to be the one to close the bug. The stale bot will be closing that one for us.
That doesn't sound like an even remotely ideal way to handle that. Don't just needlessly string the original reporter along until some arbitrary time limit expires.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some teams have a frickin' bad attitude and couldn't care less. Try submitting a bug about how menus are displayed 5px from where they are supposed to be in a GTK app rendered on a X11-server that runs on the Windows desktop and see if the GTK developers care. Or try telling the react-testing-framework folks that they're asking me to put handrails in my bathroom when my house is burning down. Have experiences like th…
GTK is developed entirely by volunteers. None of the "rules" of bug reporting in this thread apply. If it's a business selling something to you? Sure, don't bother if they don't seem to care. But with volunteer-driven FOSS projects, what you want as an end user is much, much lower on the list of priorities compared to a business product. Even if you have implemented the "fix" [1] yourself, they might still not accept…
This doesn't change the original point that such behavior makes it less likely for users to bother with detailed bug reports. Bug reporting in OSS isn't just the developers doing free work for the users to fix their issues, it is also the users doing free work for the developer QA-testing their software.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Factorio also has automatic opt-out crash reporter. A lot of people in here are against opt-out, but once they added this years ago, they fixed tons of crashes which were NEVER reported.
The aversion to opt-out exists because it's associated with tech corporations tracking everything in a maliciously intransparent way, using some convoluted opt-out process as an excuse to give the illusion of respect for the user. If a game just sends info about a crash I couldn't care less.
I disagree and think it should still be opt in. Crash reports tend to include memory dump which can easily include information about the system (environment variables) that the user did not mean to share. It's not unreasonable to pop up a dialog before uploading crash reports which also gives the user an opportunity to optionally add additional information.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#209The problem with bug reporting is that they rarely seem to get fixed. I used to do a lot more bug reports. But you often hear back nothing, and then the bug is never fixed, even if it would be an easy fix. These days, I don't often report bugs.
The devs for the game factorio encourage players to post bugs on the forums. The devs use forums as a issue tracker and respond to bugs with fixes. I have no idea if that makes it more satisfying to report bugs or not, but I always thought it was cool.
A forum is better then nothing but a proper bug tracker tends to be less chaotic. Depends on the features of the particular forum software though.
Re: Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy
#210Most companies don’t have a user accessible way to file bugs. Often, you have to call support, speak to a muppet, then convince them that your issue is real and they’ll file it. Trust me, I find bugs in products all the time and I actually try to file bug reports, but it’s rare that I can. Some of this is because one of the worst bug-related metrics is “customer found bugs.” This means that your developers missed it…
Goodhart's Law in effect.