Comment by andsoitis
2 years ago
I agree with your sentiment of "Unless that guy specifically says he's going to maintain it for free you are entitled to exactly absolutely nothing"
That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.
>so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise
I believe this is called “please use the template when submitting an issue” and we all know how that goes.
I’ve honestly found myself laughing like a madman at GitHub issues where the maintainer calmly and repeatedly tries to explain to the increasingly disgruntled reporter to UTFT (use the fine template)
I keep thinking that GitHub (and GitLab, and etc) made the initial costs to interacting with the developers unhealthily low. The barrier of having to create an account or adding your email to a newsletter on the older distributed systems was extremely good on filtering out that kind of thing.
Also, "Issues" should really, really have a different name.
Issues is where you find all the people with issues...
I got so sick of people uploading screenshots of the in-app log console that I spent significant effort to make that control not render during a screenshot.
Taking and cropping a screenshot takes more time than just uploading the plaintext log file conveniently and lovingly placed right next to the executable. Please, just upload the file. Please.
The project was a Big Deal in the circles I was in. Hundreds of thousands of people knew of it, we had hundreds to thousands of active users each with dozens of clients. It was so stressful and I caught so much abuse that I exited software altogether. We did get some money, but my cut worked out to $60 a month.
I still write and publish code, but I don't work on anything that anyone wants to use. I don't get involved in communities and I don't interact with users.
And you know what? I am much happier now.
To be fair the UX on those things is abysmal.
Github could improve the experience 10 fold.
UX can help a bit, but fundamentally the problem is people who have an issue or question but are completely unable to communicate it in a way that can be understood and addressed.
The garbage bug reports I see on my projects and others are like, either one sentence or rambling nonsense. The templates don't help much, these users will do their best to ignore them.
As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is probably very welcome.
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> a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain
Eh… Isn’t that fairly close to the definition of entitlement (i.e. you complain when you have no reason to)?
As a maintainer you cannot control how people behave. There’s no point in lamenting that people act entitled.
Instead, it is more productive to develop strategies to ignore the noise from entitled voices. You do not need to respond to them. You do not need to convince them. You do not have to keep them happy.
> There’s no point in lamenting that people act entitled.
There is: it discourages people from acting entitled.
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> That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.
The solution is quite simple really.
1) have your repo private and release only tarball files or have a read only repo with no pull/merge request functionnality 2) do not use an issue tracker
Basically, do not use a forge such as github/gitlab, at least not publicly. Problem solved.
GitHub also lets you turn off the issue tracker, which is wonderful for projects which are ""incidentally open source"" where I have no plans to maintain it beyond my own personal needs