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

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

#211

Post by account42 » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

carefulfungi wrote: post #191

supermatt wrote: post #142

> If you've ever had a user say “something’s broken” and then ghost you forever, you probably get where I’m coming from. As a consumer who reports bugs, I’d actually say the opposite problem is just as common — when the company ghosts you after you’ve taken the time to report an issue. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve used the official channels — bug trackers, support forums, contact forms — only to hear nothin…

Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity. For every user who reports a clear, reproducible defect, there 10 others who report non-reproducible issues, who conflate features with bugs, who ghost, who use issues for support or questions, who are just angry about something and think you're an id…

> Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity.

The solution to that is to have an additional triaging capacity. That can come from the community if you empower them with e.g. a public bug tracker.

If you truly do not have enough capacity to even fix the valid bugs then you have much bigger problems and no change to the bug reporting mechanisms will help you.

> As an aside, I find your opinion that "if I give you my time in the form of a bug report, the least you can do is give me your time" to be common. We rarely have the right to demand another person's attention, though. Especially with respect to non-commercial open source hobbyist maintainers.

This discussion is in the context of a post about a getting users to report bugs. Users might not be entitled to a response to their bug reports just because they spent their time but you sure as hell are not entitled to users telling you about issues encountered with your software before they inevitably get fed up and move to an alternative. The point is that if users feel they are wasting their time they won't bother - and the first to go will be the high-effort bug reports with useful information.

And this isn't really different for open source hobby projects - as long as you care about improving your software you'd do well to not make users who are willing to make good bug reports feel unwelcome.

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

#212

Post by dorianjp » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

nice work, sounds like a decent niche to tap into for the right clients

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

#213

Post by carefulfungi » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 4:24 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #211

carefulfungi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity. For every user who reports a clear, reproducible defect, there 10 others who report non-reproducible issues, who conflate features with bugs, who ghost, who use issues for support or questions, who are just angry about something and think you're an id…

> Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity. The solution to that is to have an additional triaging capacity. That can come from the community if you empower them with e.g. a public bug tracker. If you truly do not have enough capacity to even fix the valid bugs then you have much bigger probl…

Yes. I have built effective programs that empower community triage and committers.

My point is that a minority of issues to publicly available issue trackers are high quality (or even actionable - beyond triage), despite everyone thinking they are only posting high quality issues.

> you sure as hell are not entitled to users telling you about issues encountered with your software before they inevitably get fed up and move to an alternative

We totally agree on this.

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

#214

Post by ValdikSS » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 7:45 PM UTC

The same applies for translation systems.

I translate a bunch of open-source software, if the translation is on weblate, transifex or crowdin.

I never going to translate .po files directly. It's just not worth it.

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

#215

Post by ryao » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #206

ryao wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It should be obvious to him that it is not happening given that several contributors all responded no. As for closing the bug, no one has volunteered to be the one to do it.

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

#216

Post by mrguyorama » Wed, Jun 11, 2025, 9:40 PM UTC

Vilian wrote: post #85

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difficulty in reporting a bug comes from the friction required to filter the "page doesn't work" with no further explanation reports This so much. I can't tell you how often I've seen someone trying to get tech support on something say "When I load the program, I get an error" but don't even say what the error says. I understand that most people have never worked a QA job and so don't know how to write a good b…

Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2501 It's weird seeing people without computer familiarity using one, it feels like they are blind, they click in a button with a label and a icon, and when you ask todo it again they can't find it(even when you literally tell them the button name), it feels like their vision FOV is limited to a few centimeters, like those horror games flashlight lol, it's my own experience, but yeah, t…

What's worse is how much the modern world and software quality has trained them to just be so helpless.

My mom has been using Windows computers since before I was born. She would spend all sorts of time working on the computer, creating tests for her classes, researching my sister's illness on the pre-2000s internet (with great success even!), had no problem adopting software over the years as things upgraded and changed, had no problems pivoting to using a Macbook at work, had extremely few problems adapting to remote learning, to the point of asking me for advice using OBS to improve her ability to run a virtual classroom (for things like different "scenes" and control over her output video). She broadly understands the concept of "files" and directories and how to move them and transfer them and manage them well.

But at some point, she forgot how the "Start" menu worked! You put her at a Windows desktop and she doesn't know how to start the program she needs to use! Do you know how much goddamned money Microsoft spent ingraining the start button in people's heads in the 90s?

But it's just gone. Because modern web based stuff follows no patterns. It makes no sense. Shit just happens sometimes, with no feedback, with no warning, and sometimes breaks while only leaving a damn error message in the javascript console, and the behavior changes from one day to the next. The only way people who aren't experts can hope to navigate this hellhole is to learn EXACT workflows and never change them and never think of changing them and never attempt to do anything novel in case it breaks everything without warning and don't pay heed to any dialogs because they don't contain useful info anyway.

Like, what did we expect to happen when we punished people for trying to build mental models of this stuff? You cannot build simple mental models of webapps. Companies don't want you to, because then you might not be as bamboozled and you might be less susceptible to advertising.

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

#217

Post by account42 » Thu, Jun 12, 2025, 7:27 AM UTC

ryao wrote: post #215

account42 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It should be obvious to him that it is not happening given that several contributors all responded no. As for closing the bug, no one has volunteered to be the one to do it.

If it isn't obvious enough for any contributors to close the bug the it won't be obvious for an outsider.

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

#218

Post by TuningYourCode » Thu, Jun 12, 2025, 8:09 AM UTC

sh34r wrote: post #89

esafak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transparency in the form of a public ticket tracker would solve that.

Gitlab begs to differ. The number of times I’d google my problem and find a ticket from 6+ years ago with dozens of users participating in the comments, confirming it’s a consistent, common problem, and not a peep from their devs. It’s like their public issue tracker only exists to insult their users.

Well just look into atlassian issue tracker. It‘s the same for them and sometimes bugs are old enough to drink alcohol.

The sad part is that their cloud services also often don‘t support basic features which their self hosted software offer…

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

#219

Post by al_borland » Thu, Jun 12, 2025, 9:46 AM UTC

handsclean wrote: post #122

AngryData wrote: post #103

I use to report bugs all the time with details of the bug and what I was doing and if possible how to cause it. But then when you encounter the same bugs years later doing some very common task that you momentarily forgot to do your work around for, it made me wonder why I was wasting my time reporting it. These days I rarely report bugs unless it is brand new software released a few weeks ago at most, or a brand new…

It depends on the company. I’d never dream of reporting a bug to Apple, they don’t care. I think your turnip truck analogy applies there. On the other hand, iA Writer consistently replies thoughtfully and usually fixes the bug. It’s so important to treat companies individually instead of just according to some blanket impression of the world. Individual treatment means good companies benefit and grow, while blanket t…

I submitted a feature request to Apple to allow silencing the ringer for anyone who isn’t in my Contacts list. A year later with the next major update, the “Silence Unknown Callers” feature came to iOS. It appears it worked, either that or it was just a wild coincidence. Of course many other feature requests I’ve submitted over the years still do not exist, such as a global toggle for explicit vs clean music (when it’s just me I always want the original version, but if there are kids in the car, I want an easy way to clean everything up).

I know someone else who has called Apple’s support line and spoken with engineers on bugs that were uncovered. He then got follow up emails to install the latest macOS update as it contained a fix to the bug he stumbled across.

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

#220

Post by al_borland » Thu, Jun 12, 2025, 9:58 AM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #116

AngryData wrote: post #103

I use to report bugs all the time with details of the bug and what I was doing and if possible how to cause it. But then when you encounter the same bugs years later doing some very common task that you momentarily forgot to do your work around for, it made me wonder why I was wasting my time reporting it. These days I rarely report bugs unless it is brand new software released a few weeks ago at most, or a brand new…

I've reported bugs in a few projects. In my experience, the smaller the team behind the software, the more likely your bug will be fixed. I think I've reported bugs to Bloomz (the awful communication app my school uses), jpmonette/feed (the node/typescript RSS feed generation library), and I think at one point I reported one to Newsblur, and they all got fixed.

This has been my experience as well.

I submitted a bug report on Things To Get Me (an Amazon wishlist alternative) on a holiday weekend, fully not expecting to hear anything until at least Monday. It wasn’t anything too major. Within the hour I not only had a response, but a change was pushed to prod after a little back and forth with the developer.

A couple years ago I signed up for write.as and the founder/ceo reached out to have video chat just to see how things were going or if there was anything I’d want to see in the future.