Comment by ok123456
1 month ago
100% agree.
If it's someone else's project, they have full authority to decide what is and isn't an issue. With large enough projects, you're going to have enough bad actors, people who don't read error messages, and just downright crazy people. Throw in people using AI for dubious purposes like CVE inflation, and it's even worse.
> people who don't read error messages
One of my pet peeves that I will never understand.
I do not expect users to understand what an error means, but I absolutely expect them to tell me what the error says. I try to understand things from the perspective of a non-technical user, but I cannot fathom why even a non-technical user would think that they don't need to include the contents of an error message when seeking help regarding the error. Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error".
Maybe I have too much faith in people. I've seen even software engineers become absolutely blind when dealing with errors. I had a time 10 years ago as a tester when I filed a bug ticket with explicit steps that results in a "broken pipe error". The engineer closed the ticket as "Can Not Reproduce" with a comment saying "I can't complete your steps because I'm getting a 'broken pipe error'".
Just today I've had a "technical" dude complain about something "not working".
He even checked "thing A" and "thing B" which "looked fine", but it still "didn't work". A and B had absolutely nothing to do with each either (they solve completely different problems).
I had to ask multiple times what exactly he was trying to do and what exactly he was experiencing.
I've even had "web devs" shout there must be some kind of "network problem" between their workstation and some web server, because they were getting an http 403 error.
So, yeah. Regular users? I honestly have 0 expectations from them. They just observe that the software doesn't do what they expect and they'll complain.
Your “technical guy” sounds a lot like me.
When debugging stuff with the devs at our work, I tend to overexplain as much as I can, because often there’s some deep link between systems that I don’t understand, but they do.
I’m a pretty firm believer in “no stupid questions (or comments)”, because often going in a strange direction that the devs assure me isn’t the problem, actually turns out to be the problem (maybe thing A actually has some connection to thing B in a very abstract way!).
I think just serving a different perspective or theory can help us all solve the problem faster, so sometimes it’s worth to pull that thread, even if it seems worthless in the moment.
Maybe I’m just lucky that my engineering colleagues are very patient with me (and maybe less lucky that some of our systems are so deeply intertwined), but I do hope they have more than zero expectations from me, as we mean well and just want to support where we can, knowing full well that ya’ll are leagues ahead in the smarts department.
Totally on board with this gripe. Absolutely infuriating. But just one minor devil's advocate on the HTTP 403, although this doesn't excuse it at all.
In Azure "private networking", many components still have a public IP and public dns record associated with the hostname of the given service, which clients may try to connect to if they aren't set up right.
That IP will respond with a 403 error if they try to connect to it. So Azure is indirectly training people that 403 potentially IS a "network issue"... (like their laptop is not connected to VPN, or Private DNS isn't set up right, or traffic isn't being routed correctly or some such).
Yeah, I get that's just plain silly, but it's IAAS/SAAS magic cloud abstraction and that's just the way Microsoft does things.
2 replies →
My theory is that the best, absolute best predictor if someone could be a good programmer (or is) is the ability to read exactly what is written.
Is not math, logic or any of that asides. Is the actual ability to read, exactly, without adding or removing anything.
You can test that theory with Magic the Gathering players. Reading exactly what the card says and interpreting it with the exact text of the rules is core to the game.
> I do not expect users to understand what an error means
I'm not sure I agree.
Reason ?
The old adage "handle errors gracefully".
The "gracefully" part, by definition means taking into account the UX.
Ergo "gracefully" does not mean spitting out either (a) a meaningless generic message or (b) A bunch of incomprehensible tech-speak.
Your error should provide (a) a user-friendly plain-English description and (b) an error ID that you can then cross-reference (e.g. you know "error 42" means the database connection is foobar because the password is wrong)
During your support interaction you can then guide the user through uploading logs or whatever. Preferably through an "upload to support" button you've already carefully coded into your app.
Even if your app is targetting a techie audience, its the same ethos.
If there is a possibility a techie could solve the problem themselves (e.g. by RTFM or checking the config file), then the onus is on you to provide a suitably meaningful error message to help them on their troubleshooting journey.
There are people that when using a computer, if anything goes remotely wrong, they completely lose all notions of language comprehension. You can make messages as non-technical as possible and provide troubleshooting steps, and they just throw their hands up and say "I'm not a computer person! I don't know what it's telling me!"
20 years ago, I worked the self-checkout registers in retail. I'd have people scan an item (With the obvious audible "BEEP"), and then stand there confused about what to do next. The machine is telling them "Please place the item in the bag" and they'd tell me they don't know what to do. I'd say "What's the machine telling you?" "'Please place the item in the bag'" "Okay, then place the item in the bag" "Oh, okay"
It's like they don't understand words if a computer is saying them. But if they're coming from a human, they understand just fine, even if it's the exact same words.
"Incorrect password. You may have made a mistake entering it. Please try entering it again." "I don't know what that means, I'm going to call up tech support and just say I'm getting an error when I try to log in."
3 replies →
This is not about understanding the message, but switching user mental activity. I go myself in the similar situations many times. One example: I tried to pay my bills in online bank application, but got into error. After several attempts, I did read message and it say "Header size exceed..." . It give me clue that app probably put too much history into cookies. Clear browser data, log in again, and all got works.
Even when error message was clearly understandable for my expertise, it took surprisingly long tome to switch from one mental activity - "Pay bills", to another - "Investigate technical problem". And you have to throw away all short memory to switch into another task. So all rumors about "stupid" users is direct consequence from how human mind works.
2 replies →
This seems to be missing the point. Sometimes users see error messages. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad; and yeah, software engineers should endeavor to make sure that error behaviors are graceful, but of all the not-perfect things in this world, error handling is one of the least perfect, so users do encounter unfortunately ungraceful errors.
In that case (and even sometimes in the more "graceful" cases), we don't always expect the user to know what an error message means.
I've had the experience of getting to sit beside several categories of people across my career and watch them attempt to do something which is causing issues or errors. The pattern I have seen the most is what I can only describe as speedrunning the error. People will try to do the thing they (think they) know how to do. When information or error comes available on the screen, they completely ignore it; if it is a popup, it is closed as quickly as possible and if it is shown somewhere on the screen that doesn't interrupt their flow, then it is completely ignored.
I have given instructions to repeat, but more slowly, and people will still click through errors without a chance to read. I have asked people to go step by step and pause after every step so we can look at what's going on, and they will treat "do thing and close resulting error" as a single step, pausing only after having closed the error.
The only explanation I have that I can understand is that closing errors and popups is a reflex for many people, such that they don't even register doing it. I don't know if this is true or if people would agree with it.
I've seen this with programmers at all levels of seniority. I've seen it with technically capable non-programmers. I've seen it with non-technical people just trying to use some piece of software.
The only thing that's ever been effective for me is to coach people to copy all text and take screenshots of literally everything that is happening on their screen (too many narrow screenshots that obscure useful context, so I ask for whole-screen screenshots only). Some people do well with this. Some never seem to put any effort into the communication.
If I can victim-blame for a moment, I don't know what my mom is supposed to do when a streaming service on her TV says there's a problem and will she please report a GUID to the support department.
No, my mom is not eidetic, and no, she's not going to upload a photo of her living room.
Totally agree with you, though, when the full error message is at least capable of being copied to the clipboard.
Most (all?) photo apps include a crop function, allowing your mom just crop out everything else.
3 replies →
Joel Spolsky solved this over 25 years ago https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...
That solves nothing, just describes the problem.
1 reply →
> Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error".
Worse still, just “it doesn’t work” without even any steps.
I sometimes gave those users an analogy like going to the doctor or a mechanic and not providing enough information, but I don’t think it worked.
My wife’s a doctor. Trust me, this isn’t unique to technical pursuits.
Patient: My foot hurts.
Wife: Which part of it?
Patient: It all hurts.
Wife: Does your heel hurt?
Patient: No.
Wife: Does your arch hurt?
Patient: No.
Wife: Do your toes hurt?
Patient: This one does.
Wife: Does anything but that one toe hurt?
Patient: No.
Wife: puts on a brave smile
The trouble here is that github issues is crap. Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc. Github issues is mostly a discussion system that was so inadequate that they supplemented it with another discussion system.
> Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc.
As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
> Would you consider that too clunky?
Absolutely. It's a patch that can achieve a similar result, but it's a patch indeed. A major features of every ticketing system, if not "the" major feature, is the ticket flow. Which should be opinionated. Customizable with the owner's opinion, but opinionated nonetheless. Using labels to cover missing areas in that flow is a clunky patch, in my book.
IMO it still has poor discoverability, constant filtering between the triage status flags and non-flagged stuff, stuff that might not have been flagged by accident, reporters putting tags on issues themselves, issues can only be closed by non-admins rather than truly deleted, random people complaining about this or that on unrelated tickets...
It all stems from the fact that all issues are in this one large pool rather than there being a completely separate list with already vetted stuff that nobody else can write into.
1 reply →
This still puts the onus on the developers to categorise the issues which I'm guessing they don't want to do.
12 replies →
> As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
Speaking for another large open GitHub project:
Absofuckinglutely yes.
I cannot overstate how bad this workflow is. There seems to be a development now in other platforms becoming more popular (gitlab, forgejo/codeberg, etc.) and I hope to god that it either forces GitHub to improve this pile of expletive or makes these "alternate" platforms not be so alternate anymore so we can move off.
1 reply →
The classification here is not what type of issue it is, it's whether it's an issue or not. Creating an issue for things that aren't issues is fundamentally broken. There's no way to fix that except by piling bad design on bad design to make it so that you can represent non-issues using issues and have everything still be somewhat usable.
Just trying to triage and tag all of them can still be a full-time job’s worth of work in a popular repo.
1 reply →
> Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc.
All of this is possible on GitHub issues and is in fact done by many projects, by this metric I dont see how GitHub Issues is any different than say, JIRA. In both cases, as you mentioned, someone needs to triage those issues, which would, of course, be the developers as well. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
Having used many issue trackers over the years (JIRA, custom tools, GH Issues), I've found GitHub issues to be very usable.
Especially with the new features added last year (parent tickets, better boolean search etc) although I'm not sure if you need to opt in to get those.
In fact, it's become our primary issue tracker at work.
I take the Basecamp philosophy of, “If it’s important enough, we won’t be able to ignore it, and it’s ok for anything else to fall through the cracks until someone feels like working on it.”
Well, that’s a paraphrase, but I remember reading that rough idea on their blog years ago, and it strikes me as perfectly fine for many kinds of projects.
Discussion systems all the way down :-). This is a fair assessment of the github issues system. I suspect that because git(1) can be a change control system for anything there is never any hope of making an effective issue tracker for a particular thing it is being used to manage change on. The choice the project made to allow the developers to determine when something was an issue is essentially adding a semantic layer on top of issues that customizes it for this particular corpus of change management.
You're 100% correct. I had a CVE reported to me in ~2022, shortly after the ChatGPT launch. I spent 4 hours slicing and dicing the issue, responding to how it was wrong, linking to background information, specific lines in the code, and then asking for or what am I missing. The response was literally "shrugs AI". Good for them.
Yeah but the article / post linked does not say that they won't look at reports of bugs or security problems, just that they are using issues to manage things they have decided are issues that should be worked on, and so public reporting using issues tickets will mess up that system they have. It's purely about their project's use of the issues system in github.
Unfortunately there is no such magic bullet for trawling through bug reports from users, but pushing more work out to the reporter can be reasonably effective at avoiding that kind of time wasting. Require that the reporters communicate responsively, that they test things promptly, that they provide reproducers and exact recipes for reproduction. Ask that they run git bisect / creduce / debug options / etc. Proactively close out bugs or mark them appropriately if reporters don't do the work.
Don't forget the rude, entitled, and aggressive, they are legion.
It's simply a great idea. The mindset should be 'understand what's happening', not 'this is the software's fault'.
The discussion area also serves as a convenient explanation/exploration of the surrounding issues that is easy to find. It reduces the maintainer's workload and should be the default.
[flagged]
Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. That ghostty finds discussions to be a better way to triage user requests/issues is somewhat quirky, although a perfectly valid option. As is just using issues, imo. Just good to make sure users know how to report an issue, and what information to include.
To be clear, I think discussions on the whole as a product are pretty bad. I'm not happy having to use them, but given my experience trying different approaches across multiple "popular" projects on GH, this approach has so far been the least bad. Although I'm still sad about it.
> Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out.
Agreed. This highlights GitHub's issue management system being inadequate.
(Note: I'm the creator/lead of Ghostty)
I believe most of it is people expecting stuff to work differently, not having time to wrap their head around proper usage of system, because they need specific outcome and they don't need mastery of the tool.
Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything.
Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool?
I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.
It is weird to push the idea that Facebook is some kind of pinacle of good and easy to use UI. That's the first one. It's quite the opposite, with people constantly complaining how bad, clunky and confusing Facebook is. And it is not the recent trend either. It has always been this way and e.g. VK has always had a better UI/UX that Facebook (and Telegram's is better that Whatsapp's).
Not as pinnacle of good - but pinnacle of “you don’t have to think, just scroll, occasionally like something” ;).
Then people expect accounting software to be just login click one or two buttons.
But still, compared to something like email, the previous standard for most people, Facebook was an unbelievable step forward. People complain about anything.
4 replies →
facebook literally obfuscates their UI to stop you turning off "features" they want to push on you
it is a UI designed to be hard to use
2 replies →
> If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box
IME, people cannot even articulate what they want when the know what they want, let alone when they don’t even understand what they want in the first place.
Agreed. We have to stop this “first-class” citizen for anything but general communication platforms. This allows creating a barrier between specialists and common users.