I submit bug reports all the time. Whenever I am using software, playing a game, or reading email and something goes wrong I try to track down the support email, but my wife thinks I am crazy. What do you do?
1. Is it a giant faceless corporation (e.g. Microsoft, EA, Adobe)? If so, ignore.
2. Is it difficult to reproduce? If so, ignore.
3. Is it so subtle that it isn't really worth my time to track things down? If so, ignore.
4. Is it so amazingly obvious and disruptive that, unless the bug only affects me, they've obviously heard an earful from everyone else who's seen it? If so, ignore.
5. Do they have a twitter account that actually appears to read and respond to people? If not, ignore.
6. Tweet at them and ask them what to do about it.
Occasionally I look for a way to submit bugs for a few minutes and then give up, but the one big company I have had contact with is Apple (https://bugreport.apple.com). I always get some feedback from them.
I submit bug reports when I know it will benefit me. This means that the bug is substantial and the maintainers are responsive. I see it as a wasted effort otherwise.
I think you're missing an important option. If an issue is on github then I'm much more inclined to report any bug I come across.
If it's on some obscure bug tracker that I don't have an account for then the odds of me reporting it are almost zero because chances are there's an alternative to what your software does if it happens to be a show stopper and most of the time if it's a wide spread project there will be fixes to the bug in other places.
It's annoying to make an account, go through all of that stuff and then realize most of the time nothing happens with your report.
6 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] thread1. Is it a giant faceless corporation (e.g. Microsoft, EA, Adobe)? If so, ignore. 2. Is it difficult to reproduce? If so, ignore. 3. Is it so subtle that it isn't really worth my time to track things down? If so, ignore. 4. Is it so amazingly obvious and disruptive that, unless the bug only affects me, they've obviously heard an earful from everyone else who's seen it? If so, ignore. 5. Do they have a twitter account that actually appears to read and respond to people? If not, ignore. 6. Tweet at them and ask them what to do about it.
If it's on some obscure bug tracker that I don't have an account for then the odds of me reporting it are almost zero because chances are there's an alternative to what your software does if it happens to be a show stopper and most of the time if it's a wide spread project there will be fixes to the bug in other places.
It's annoying to make an account, go through all of that stuff and then realize most of the time nothing happens with your report.