Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 226 posts

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

#61

Post by _wire_ »

Any involvement in reporting / fixing bugs is development. Why do app developers think their customers need to be or want to be developers?

What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers?

Making bug reporting easier means an intentional push to foist more of Development's work upon customers and a bias towards more bugs.

BUG OR FEATURE?

If you can't tell, then we can understand why Knuth call it "the art" of computer programming, as in the artist's uncertainty of creation as compared to the engineer's confidence.

The fact that half the SW industry prefers to avoid a distinction between bugs and features— as in bugs that don't get reported are regarded as features— shows the profligate laziness and opportunism of so called Software Engineering.

AI is a stunning example of a global industry built by computer technologists who don't care about understanding their own work, and lack the creative and social spark to conduct themselves as artists.

Just listen G. Hinton babble philosophically for 10 minutes and you will grasp the magnitude of incompetence at work.

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

#62

Post by qingcharles »

I love this. Especially the sane pricing.

Only thing I would add is after submit it should allow you to enter an email address or something so that (a) the user can get updates on the progress of fixes; and (b) be contacted if the dev needs more info.

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

#63

Post by esafak »

D13Fd wrote: post #59

The 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.

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

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

#64

Post by unclad5968 »

D13Fd wrote: post #59

The 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.

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

#65

Post by PaulHoule »

D13Fd wrote: post #59

The 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.

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 that and you'll conclude it isn't worth filing bug reports.

Now the linux-industrial complex is a special case, if you are a software engineer and know how to isolate a problem and submit a great bug report you will often hear from people who will say you sent them the best bug report all quarter. It helps if the team is working with web tech, younger, more diverse, and never heard of the GPL.

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

#66

Post by keyringlight »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #35
airza wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, That is the price you pay for your users doing _free_ software testing for you! We are on the “listen to your users” mecca and you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.

> you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it. That's entirely the wrong take, IMO. Listening to users is easy, but the users often don't say anything when they speak. Those non-reports are basically spam that should be automatically thrown away.

When a mozilla application crashed it'll ask you to leave a comment to try and help resolve the issue when it prompts to send crash info, and you used to be able to see all those comments on https://crash-stats.mozilla.org (it seems to be behind login or restricted access now). There was a lot of vitriol and unhelpful comments that any developer would need to wade through to get to anything to give them a lead

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

#68

Post by n_plus_1_acc »

unclad5968 wrote: post #64
D13Fd wrote: post #59

The 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.

I would defibitely file bugs with factorio because of the devs, but never found any. Truly amazing game.

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

#69

Post by nailer »

Bugdrop won't work for most users, since they don't real tooltips.

1. I load https://bugdrop.app/

2. The site days 'try bugdrop' and points to the left bottom corner.

3. I click the bug. Nothing happens.

On further inspection, there is sometimes a tooltip that tells me clicking won't work and I need to drag the bug over the part of the UI that failed, but I didn't read that when I first used it and I won't use it a second time.

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

#70

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

cosmotic wrote: post #19

For many corporations, there are probably perverse incentives against making it easy to report bugs.KPI of reported bugs as an indicator of software quality, for example.

Certainly seems like there must be some KPI against fixing the bugs. You can look to any big tech software and find oodles of long standing bugs which never receive attention.
Post reply on HN