Ask YC: What do you think of our site, bug.gd?
The idea is simple: you search for an error message on bug.gd. If the solution is there, you win. If not, then we'll ask you (48 hours later) how you figured it out. Your answer is saved to help the next lost soul.
Our latest news is our launch of a Firefox extension that lets you skip the email reminder aspect, saves some keystrokes (auto-paste), and tracks your unsolved errors.
The vision is to get to the point where silly things like computer errors and crashes never need to be solved twice. If someone solves a problem, everyone gets benefit of the answer. We've been asked why users would use the service over searching Google, but we see that as saying you prefer throwing things in the trash over recycling. Some people are like that, but there are many of us that don't want our work to be wasted. As a bonus, since all the solutions submitted are indexed by major search engines, you're helping even those who don't use the site.
Back in October we prepopulated the database with 65,000 Microsoft KB article error messages and it's been growing ever since. Let us know what you think, if you have a moment.
(And, yeah, the logo is intentionally and subtly buggy. We'll get over our silliness eventually.)
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] thread* Site: http://bug.gd
* FireFox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6138
Thanks again for any feedback you guys have.
also: I find the high contrast a little painful to look at.
You can also lie about the email used if you so desire. It's really just there as part of the social contract for using the site.
Any thoughts on a better way to handle that? The whole point of the free/ad-free site is the later reminder to come back and "do the right thing" and help future searchers.
your slogan should be "got error? paste it here."
1 - the user pastes his error message 2 - he gets a list of possible answers 3 - if he finds a suitable answer, he clicks on it 4 - if he does not find an answer, you ask him to give his email adress so that you notify him when an answer is found 5 - if an answer is found you notify him 6 - after 48hours you send him a message with the subject line "nobody found and answer to your question. did you find one?"
But it is a good idea. Maybe I'll give a real e-mail address next time.
We kinda wanted initially wanted the design to "stand out" and be memorable (i.e. we took a risk) since the most important thing by far, when people stumble upon bug.gd, is that they remember it when they next run into an error message.
Burning our site into your retina was kinda part of that plan, but I think we're over that experiment and will likely move to something that's gentler and similar to my favorite minimalist sites (like YC/reddit/Google).
Thanks very much for taking the time to provide feedback. If you don't want to provide an email, the FFE allows you to search without requiring that-- it's an important part of our "try not to scare people away with email requests" strategy and still keep the site working.
An OS X dashboard widget would be very useful, as well.
The problem is (a) the site is free/ad-free and intends to remain as such, and (b) it's difficult to make that optional because it's really the only reason the site exists. To have some mechanism to remind users to provide solutions (in the timeframe that they remember them) is essential.
That's why the widget/extension model is going to be a big part of our plan, because those can allow the user to get subtle reminders/counts without having to have any email address involved.
Still, we'll continue to brainstorm. Any other suggestions would be very welcome. Thanks a lot for the feedback.
You should also have categories (even if they are derived by keywords in the content), which you should display on your solved solutions page. This will reduce the number of "clicks" a search engine spider has to do to get to the full solution pages.
Bonus, have lateral linking to categories and other problems. So if I'm on a bug for rails, you should have a "view all bugs about rails" link that goes to a list view as well a few links to common rails bugs.
We've prototyped some text classification mechanisms to try to pinpoint the product/category from the error message, but I think we're going to wait until we get more of our embeddable libraries released (that could be included in specific products), our planned Dr. Watson replacement available, and maybe some subsites for particular technologies (e.g. Ruby and Python error messages).
We'll see what we can do, but high on the ROI list would be getting the solution pages less 'deep' for search engine crawling-- thanks for the advice there.
Keep in mind (or FYI), our revenue model is actually not focused on ads or anything of that nature. We're looking to use bug.gd as an engine/toolset to sell to corporations that want to have more a P2P tech support model to reduce help desk costs. Lots of little ideas for this, but this project was really driven by the need for this in a large enterprise I was formerly involved with. The productivity gains can be impressive when your employees have a collective wisdom when it comes to problems.
Due to this path for the company, the core bug.gd site is really intended just to build up solutions to help everyone while remaining free and ad-free. We think of it as a win-win situation and really want all of our new sites to work that way.
Thanks again.
Like the comments before, let me search and read without giving an email address.
Also, the design is horrible.
Which has been an interesting dynamic to watch-- there are some people that are immediately hung up on the mixed-up reflection right away and then there are others who think that it's a proper mirror reflection somehow. The comments on our (interesting? bad?) look-and-feel have gotten us at least 10% of our blog references-- we just want people to remember the site and it's been an unexpected way to gain a little extra attention.
The other problem is that sometimes people after taking some serious time solving a bug, they are not so willing if not to share without a reward, then comeback to the site and write an answer.
Maybe the colors should be a lot more calming and cheerful.
And I agree with everyone else: the design is wince-inducing.
We discussed your question in the initial post up above at the top of the page. It's similar to the analogy of throwing everything in the trash versus recycling it.
Nowadays, there's not much incentive for you to recycle your cans beyond kinda just wanting there to be a better tomorrow. Some people don't care at all about doing the right thing and just toss everything into the trash and always will. Others don't mind doing their part (especially if it's a small part).
It's also the argument some people make about Open Source. Why would I release my not-currently-useful source code to others when I can hold onto it for some endeavor in the future?
bug.gd is a lot like that sort of dilemma-- why are you doing all of that error research and losing it to be reperformed by the next fellow? Why does the guy behind you also have to come along, dig through unhelpful forum posts of "solved it myself, thanks", experts exchange hidden pages, etc, etc? If you take the split second to record a sentence or a link that solved your issue, people don't have to repeat your work.
The long-term goal is that you'd find the solution quicker on bug.gd than anywhere else because we specialize solely in error messages and the solutions come with ratings from other visitors in the results.
Also, bug.gd allows you to search against the entire error message, multi-lines and all (with no 32 word restriction like Google). You won't be able to do that on Google, though we've all lived with having to sit there and manually reconstruct our error message in a form Google likes. (Why do that, though?)
In the end, the people who aren't interested in improving things for everyone with a tad more work will stick with Google and be happy. More than a few of them will be taking advantage of people who do want to do their part and use bug.gd.
We're very much in favor of reducing the barriers that make this model less comfortable (e.g. design and email request, see the Firefox extension above that doesn't require that).
For example, we have a feature nearly ready to go live that allows you to simultaneously search in Google and/or an appropriate KB site. The complicated part is helping the user quickly rebuild the error in a form that those search engines will handle properly, but we abolutely want to help them get the solution to their problem however it may be.
In the end it helps everyone when someone uses bug.gd to solve a problem.
Thanks again for the feedback, and I hope I answered your question to some degree.
btw how do you solve other people's problems? Your site is essentially a programmer/sysadmin centric version of yahoo answers right? why not organize it that way?
There is a link in the bottom for reviewing solved bugs, but we didn't expect a lot of interest in that. We may open it up such that others can provide answers for your unsolved errors, but it wasn't really planned to do that.
It's less like a forum and more like a search engine (of search requests).
We'll work on that more content, less logo part. Thanks much for the comments there.
Sorry. You asked what I think and this is it.
http://blog.ra66i.org/archives/informatics/2007/12/23/a-quic...
Quote from the person who "fixed" the google bug with a popular blog post:
There's a "problem" with the current version of rubygems that's causing somewhat of a FAQ, that as far as I can see, Google doesn't index too well...
I think you're solving a real problem. Google has gotten clumsier about search results, and frequently my searching yields only people with the same question, not an answer. I frequently have to use the cached search result to get google to highlight where, in the mile-long forum page, my keywords appear.
One thing I'd suggest--why use so much screen real estate for each result, but not show an excerpt in that spot? The expandable plus signs being collapsed initially are a negative for me as a user.
Good luck!