Comment by ggreer
10 years ago
A mistake, I can understand. But each issue I linked to was not a mistake. Each one was the end result of a series of mistakes stemming from a combination of ignorance, negligence, and (occasionally) incompetence.
Have I done dumb things without realizing? Of course.[1] But in almost 20 years of software development, I have never created issues resembling the ones I linked to. Bug reports are seen by hundreds of people and take up valuable developer time, so I make sure mine are useful.
To use an analogy: Say I'm giving a talk to an audience of a hundred people. I wouldn't do it extemporaneously, without slides, then walk away in the middle of Q&A. And if I did, I wouldn't call it a mistake. I'd call it being a terrible presenter. Yet that's what bad bug reports are like:
User (notifying hundreds of people): "It doesn't work."
Dev: "What version are you using? What error messages do you see? How are you running it?"
User: * crickets *
It's gotten bad enough that I wrote a short post on how to report bugs.[2]
1. http://geoff.greer.fm/2015/08/15/how-to-write-good-bug-repor...
Why would you even respond to a bug report that was "it doesn't work."
Such a vague report tells you all you need to know about whether it's going to be worth your time trying to work with the person who submitted it. Close it immediately as non-actionable.
As much as I respect you for The Silver Surfer, that 5th issue was a very silly mistake.