Comment by mikrl
2 years ago
>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.
UX is partly about how to accommodate that without throwing up hoops to jump through to the people who aren't a waste of space.
Most bug reports, especially on complex software should follow something resembling a kind of wizard/state machine (e.g. state: OS has/has not been specified) but instead everything is a text box with a dump of contextual questions, half of which don't even necessarily make sense for the specific bug report you're making.
>As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is probably very welcome.
When barriers are thrown up to the other kind of person it will often make it seem like they are very unwelcome even when they're not - e.g. the first message you see may be a hostile list of "DON'T DO THESE 5 THINGS" because somebody once did each of those things. I'm pretty sure a lot of good bug reports are lost this way.