23 ms·

Show HN: Most users won't report bugs unless you make it stupidly easy

335 points by lakshikag 1y ago

Most feedback tools are built like people actually want to report bugs. They don’t. Unless you make it dead-simple, or better yet - a little fun. After shipping a few SaaS products, I noticed a pattern: Bugs? Yes. Bug reports? No. Not because users didn’t care but because reporting bugs is usually a terrible experience. Most tools want users to: * Fill out a long form * Enter their email * Describe a bug they barely understand * Maybe sign in or create an account * Then maybe submit it Let’s be real: no one’s doing that. Especially not someone just trying to use your product. So I built Bugdrop.app - It’s a little draggable bug icon that users can drop right on the issue, type a quick note, and they’re done. No logins. No forms. Just context-rich feedback that your team can actually use — with screenshots, browser info, even console logs if they hit an error. And weirdly? People actually use it. Even non-technical users click it just because "the little bug looked fun." I didn’t want to build another "feedback suite". I just wanted something lightweight, fast, and so stupidly simple that people actually report stuff. If you've ever had a user say “something’s broken” and then ghost you forever, you probably get where I’m coming from. What I’m most proud of? People are actually using it. And their users? They’re actually reporting stuff. Even non-technical ones. Would love to hear if you’ve faced similar problems, and if this feels like something that would’ve helped in your own projects. Not trying to sell you anything — just sharing something I built to scratch my own itch.

cosmotic 1y ago
For many corporations, there are probably perverse incentives against making it easy to report bugs.KPI of reported bugs as an indicator of software quality, for example.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  It's not just a problem in the corporate context. Open source projects usually make it a pain in the ass to submit bug reports too, in a clear effort to gatekeep the process to experienced developers. Simply because developers prefer to only deal with other developers and don't want to hear complaints about their software from the unwashed masses.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I can’t imagine I’d keep up a hobby of doing customer service type activities very long.
  - whatevaa 1y ago
    Free software developers already doing work for free. You are demanding more free work?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
  Certainly seems like there must be some KPI against fixing the bugs. You can look to any big tech software and find oodles of long standing bugs which never receive attention.
  - Vilian 1y ago
    Fixing bugs don't create features, that upset execs
5040 1y ago
Kindle made it easy to report errors in ebooks, but I always found myself wondering if the errors I was flagging were even being looked at.
mmsc 1y ago
The difficulty in reporting a bug comes from the friction required to filter the "page doesn't work" with no further explanation reports, or the "my neighbour is a spy for the government and I have proof" reports (real types of reports for a browser company, for example, which surely exist for other places users think that "is" the internet like Facebook). I agree that reporting bugs can be hard, but the amount of spam that follows an effective open form, of craziness to uselessness, outweighs the useful bug reports. Having two types of reports: one which is a simple screenshot taker with the ability to draw a circle over what is wrong, and one which is a more detailed report, would be useful. Some LLM that filters out what is a useless report be a useful report would be good, too.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- graypegg 1y ago
  On the LLM idea, if you could group reports by issue (by parsing the user provided input and whatever context you save from the page screenshot into some embedding) and then only escalate things when several different IPs have reported a similar thing within X amount of time, I think you could handle two birds with one stone. Limits how annoying spammers can be, and also makes the good reports easier to understand since a few bug reports combined should make a better whole. I however wouldn't shorten/transform reports with an LLM, or make spammy reports inaccessible. Just doing the semantic grouping for escalation. It's true you're getting free work from your users, and the human factor is pretty important here, even if an LLM might sometimes misinterpret it.
- airza 1y ago
  With all due respect, That is the price you pay for your users doing _free_ software testing for you! We are on the “listen to your users” mecca and you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.
  - Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
    > you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it. That's entirely the wrong take, IMO. Listening to users is easy, but the users often don't say anything when they speak. Those non-reports are basically spam that should be automatically thrown away.
nemomarx 1y ago
This sounds neat! Do you have a site that describes how it's added to an existing project?
- tln 1y ago
  Not OP but, the website is bugdrop.app FAQ says "The Bugdrop snippet is tiny and loads asynchronously" So, you add a snippet of JS to your site.
- lakshikag 1y ago
  Thank you. It's a simple setup—just copy and paste the JS snippet into your website. I'm also considering creating some video tutorials soon to make it even easier.
LanceJones 1y ago
Congrats on shipping! Here's some quick feedback -- hope it's useful: 1. Is the little bug icon sufficiently visible? I'm not sure... 2. Do visitors automatically know what to do with the bug? You have a tooltip, but do all visitors know what "Spotted a bug?" means? 3. [more of a suggestion; perhaps it does this already] Would be great if the bug position pulled in a CSS class or the content surrounding the "dropped" bug -- to give more context to the site owner.
- lakshikag 1y ago
  1) The site owner can fully customize the widget, including adjusting the size of the bug icon. 2) I'm considering updating the popup text to something more approachable, like "Something’s not working?" or "Spot a problem?" 3) Currently, it doesn't send class names—but that's a great suggestion. Thank you!
graypegg 1y ago
I love the UI concept. Being able to point at a broken thing rather than try to uniquely describe the position/state/path to a broken thing is smart! Hooooever, "bug" could be a bit ambiguous to a lot of people. Looks like in a real deployment, you have a little tooltip that says "Spotted a bug? Drag me there!". That makes sense to developers and the like... but those are also the sorts of people most likely to write a good bug report anyway. The people most unlikely to write a bug report are the sorts of people who will read "spotted a bug" as "there is an insect... game?... on this site?". "Issue" or "Problem" would be better, but keep the bug graphic! It's cute. :)
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  When I took a look quickly, it also shows the "Spotted a bug? Drag me there!" every time the page loads - which could quickly get overwhelming, and make the user wonder why the developer is so certain that they will run into a bug. (Why do developers not make "report a bug" obvious? Because just seeing it implies there are enough bugs that a link is necessary.) I also have no idea how well this works on mobile - and seeing that the Pro plan doesn't remove attribution seems like a mistake.
  - leakycap 1y ago
    I agree - the attribution needs to be removed for paying customers, or at least for me to want to pay for it to use with a client. The phrasing should be customizable. Even better if the bug is an SVG and I can paste in my own SVG for the bug icon. I was worried about how it worked on mobile, and unfortunately on my iPhone I could not find a way to drop the bug where I wanted. It did show a popup eventually but it covers a lot of the page given it doesn't work as expected. Just sharing thoughts/observations; I really like the concept as well.
    - lakshikag 1y ago
      Whitelist options are coming up :) You will be able to customize the tooltip (or remove it), change the Bugdrop branding to your own and more. I'm aware of the issue in mobile devices too, will push an update later tonight to fix it.
ashoeafoot 1y ago
Why not a video snippet? Why a note?
- lakshikag 1y ago
  About 90% of day-to-day users won’t bother recording a video—plus, most people aren’t even aware of the browser’s screen sharing feature and may feel uneasy about what it’s doing. So in my opinion, a simple note is the best way to go.
pxtail 1y ago
I won't report bugs in paid software/services because it's not my job, I'm not paid for it, I'm user of the service, not free workforce so they can reduce amount of QA staff or skip it completely. Give me a discount and then maybe, just maybe I'll think twice about reporting something. Bugs renders your soft unusable? Fine, there is plenty of competition out there who will do it right.
- Supermancho 1y ago
  A clickable link with a form (partially pre-filled) and a big banner that says if the bug is verified I get 10-25% off something AND a followup email (reiterating the offer) + tracking link, would motivate most people I know.
- happyopossum 1y ago
  So you: A) only pay for perfection and B) experience zero friction or cost in moving services?
  - Supermancho 1y ago
    I think trying to argue with the sentiment, misses the point entirely. I think we can all agree, bug reporting could use a renaissance.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- eastbound 1y ago
  I tell my customers that they should spend 1hr per month “improving the vendor”. See, if you rely on a vendor, then you need them to survive. It’s a parasite-host relationship. You need to tell them what you need, and oftentimes they will bend the roadmap in favour of the most demanded features. Alternatives: - They choose their most amusing feature, - They choose the most lucrative feature among the new possible markets while ignoring all bugs, which is the most rational way to address bugs unfortunately, - You don’t tell them, they don’t improve, they die / they triple the price of the product by lack of audience, and you have to migrate your data to another product.
PhilippGille 1y ago
Not a fan of made-up testimonials, but otherwise it looks nice. How do you prevent spam?
I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago
You write that "reporting bugs is usually a terrible experience". I find bugs ALL THE TIME, and yet, when I even try to find a way to contact ANYONE, let alone a developer, they leave no door open at all. No method, no form, no contact name, no nothing. I (along with many, I presume), actually want those companies to excel. I WANT to let them know what to fix. But, they just don't want to hear about it. Really sad I think.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  In my experience it's because the companies have not hired any persons whose job is to triage bug reports. People do find bugs all the time, and making it super frictionless to report bugs will result in a deluge of reports. Some reports will be outright spam, some could be mistaking a feature for a bug, some could be duplicates. Someone needs to do the triage and try to reproduce before the issue is forwarded to developers. Few companies have the role of Quality Test Engineer (QTE) to do this job; most don't so they have no means to triage the bug reports. The only exception is indie apps I pay for on the App Store. There is usually only one or perhaps two people behind it, so by definition that person is SWE, QTE, PM and several jobs rolled into one. And this is unsustainable unless the app is paid.
  - I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago
    Wait... Isn't that what AI is for? To do that for "free" and removing the time an actual person has to spend on it? Separating the spam and duplicates, etc?
    - kccqzy 1y ago
      The difficult part is the step of reproducing the bug. Will companies trust AI enough to allow the AI to operate on their UI, according to instructions written by bug reporters who are strangers on the internet?
- eastbound 1y ago
  I think if you take for example apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, probably all of them have an easy way to contact them (Probably because they get Jira for free, granted).
boricj 1y ago
There's the other side of the coin of reporting bugs besides initial friction: if the user feels like the bug reports end up in a black hole, then they will disincentivized from doing so. What happens after the user files a bug from their point of view? Is there a follow-up, or is it like throwing a message in a bottle?
- lakshikag 1y ago
  I'm thinking of adding an option for users to leave their email for follow-up after submitting a report. That feature should be available in the next couple of days.
Rick76 1y ago
Nature takes the path of least resistance. In my experience, especially people. Make it easy people will use it, make it difficult and they won't. It's the reason apple became apple, even though I don't think the iPhone is intuitive today.
- vorgol 1y ago
  > Make it easy people will use it, make it difficult and they won't. It doesn't have to be difficult. It just has to be not easy.
wingerlang 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
cwillu 1y ago
Reporting bugs is work, and is a two-way street: if submission is a black hole (possibly with some scripted replies from someone uninvolved in fixing bugs), then bugs will not be reported.
lkeskull 1y ago
I imagine it's been quite difficult to educate users to use this tool?
Mystery-Machine 1y ago
Here's a quick bug report: I didn't know how I can check out the app you built. There were no links in your post. Only "Bugdrop.app", the name. I tried Googling it and it turns out Bugdrop.app is your actual domain. You should point that out: Bugdrop.app => https://bugdrop.app/ https://bugdrop.app/ On macOS .app is the standard extension for any installed app.
OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago
What made you go with this design choice instead of Google's "Feedback" button that lets you take a screenshot?
paxys 1y ago
Okay but what have you built?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
sandbox01 1y ago
Love this! That said, wanted to try it on your website, can't report a bug that the bug reporting doesn't work on Safari MacOS... the submit button does not do anything.
- philk10 1y ago
  Seems it needs some text to submit ( and entering just spaces doesn't count ) - ideally the Submit button shouldn't enable until there is valid text?
  - sandbox01 1y ago
    I added that when moving the bug around on macOS Safari it highlights weird sections of the web page, which isn't great.
    - lakshikag 1y ago
      Can you check it now? I've done some changes.
  - lakshikag 1y ago
    The submit button is not clickable until there is a text now. Thanks for the suggestion.
dvh 1y ago
I had really simple feedback form in my Android app that was just text area and submit button. Then some ashole tester from Google put @ in it and suddenly I'm collecting PII. It was easier to just remove the feedback form.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
szundi 1y ago
[dead]
OrvalWintermute 1y ago
this sounds like a vital improvement. Every bug I encounter in my favorite game I do not report because they want: * My email, yet again. * A long form * A bug description rather than a narrative of what I experienced
szundi 1y ago
[dead]
nicce 1y ago
And that is why companies use telemetry. As privacy advocate I still let telemetry to be collected as long as it is transparent. And I can filter it if there is something too disturbing.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
wittjeff 1y ago
Just this week I was working on something similar but specifically for users who have disabilities, so they can more easily report issues to site owners. I also combined general annotation capability so other users (of my browser extension) can read their comments. And also compatibility with Hypothesis (https://github.com/hypothesis https://github.com/hypothesis, https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is), also using the W3C Web Annotation spec. I hadn't thought of the drag-and-drop bug metaphor; I like it. I had also considered recording mouse and keystroke events up until the time that the bug is marked, and then bundling those events (sanitized) with the bug report for more precise repro steps, but of course that's a bigger ask for the opt-in.
Oras 1y ago
Or just use post hog or clarify to have sessions and check them? That helped me to find bugs without reporting. The other method I used is to have audit logs, identify when there are errors in certain steps.
D13Fd 1y ago
The problem with bug reporting is that they rarely seem to get fixed. I used to do a lot more bug reports. But you often hear back nothing, and then the bug is never fixed, even if it would be an easy fix. These days, I don't often report bugs.
- esafak 1y ago
  Transparency in the form of a public ticket tracker would solve that.
  - socalgal2 1y ago
    Apple doesn't have this. They're super successful. I hate it! But, clearly that's not an argument most bean counters are going to care about given such successful companies have some of the worst feedback mechanisms.
    - YetAnotherNick 1y ago
      Apple has one of the most public support community[0]. You can get workarounds for most of the bugs, but never from official devs. Even hours old post has dozens of replies[1]. [0]: https://discussions.apple.com/welcome https://discussions.apple.com/welcome [1]: https://discussions.apple.com/community/macos/sequoia https://discussions.apple.com/community/macos/sequoia
    - hobs 1y ago
      They are not super successful at fixing bugs.
      - cstrahan 1y ago
        They are super successful at creating them, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104554
  - sh34r 1y ago
    Gitlab begs to differ. The number of times I’d google my problem and find a ticket from 6+ years ago with dozens of users participating in the comments, confirming it’s a consistent, common problem, and not a peep from their devs. It’s like their public issue tracker only exists to insult their users.
kelipso 1y ago
The most I have tried with reporting bugs in a mobile app is going to settings and seeing if there’s a bug report button or something like that. Not worth the effort considering the low probability of it being even looked at.
_wire_ 1y ago
Any involvement in reporting / fixing bugs is development. Why do app developers think their customers need to be or want to be developers? What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers? Making bug reporting easier means an intentional push to foist more of Development's work upon customers and a bias towards more bugs. BUG OR FEATURE? If you can't tell, then we can understand why Knuth call it "the art" of computer programming, as in the artist's uncertainty of creation as compared to the engineer's confidence. The fact that half the SW industry prefers to avoid a distinction between bugs and features— as in bugs that don't get reported are regarded as features— shows the profligate laziness and opportunism of so called Software Engineering. AI is a stunning example of a global industry built by computer technologists who don't care about understanding their own work, and lack the creative and social spark to conduct themselves as artists. Just listen G. Hinton babble philosophically for 10 minutes and you will grasp the magnitude of incompetence at work.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
  I think reporting problems is just part of being a good citizen that participates in a shared culture. If I visit a park or shop and something is broken, it's worth putting in a bit of effort to report it. If everyone chips in a little bit of effort it makes the overall experience of everyone much better. Are you the type of person to also not return the shopping cart to the corral? The number of hardware and software combinations are impossibly large, so you're unlikely to be handling everything perfectly if the application is doing anything complicated.
- foobarchu 1y ago
  > What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers? I would say most of them. To list a few: - restaurants (almost all of them will send you feedback surveys these days, they also rely on you to tell them if they, for example, cooked your steak to the wrong temp) - property maintenance (again, feedback surveys) - auto mechanics (if the thing they fixed is still broken, a good mechanic wants to know) - doctors (they rely heavily on YOU to tell you what wrong with your body) - democratic political systems (when working correctly) - road infrastructure (the city won't fix potholes nobody is reporting, and they won't do anything about badly tuned traffic lights nobody complains about) - vaccines and medicine (the testing phase may not uncover every possible single side effect, they need recipients/users to report those if they happen) (Please nobody come back with cynical takes on how these aren't helpful in their specific case/location, that's clearly not the point)
qingcharles 1y ago
I love this. Especially the sane pricing. Only thing I would add is after submit it should allow you to enter an email address or something so that (a) the user can get updates on the progress of fixes; and (b) be contacted if the dev needs more info.
- lakshikag 1y ago
  Thank you, Charles. Yes, this is already on my to-do list and should be available in the next couple of days.
SoftTalker 1y ago
> screenshots, browser info, even console logs if they hit an error. Possibly disclosing sensitive information (which the user may not realize).
nailer 1y ago
Bugdrop won't work for most users, since they don't real tooltips. 1. I load https://bugdrop.app/ https://bugdrop.app/ 2. The site days 'try bugdrop' and points to the left bottom corner. 3. I click the bug. Nothing happens. On further inspection, there is sometimes a tooltip that tells me clicking won't work and I need to drag the bug over the part of the UI that failed, but I didn't read that when I first used it and I won't use it a second time.
- lakshikag 1y ago
  Thank you, Nailer. I'll definitely be doing some tweaking around that part.
  - nailer 1y ago
    Thanks! Pardon if my feedback sounded direct, I wanted it to be impactful. I’m imagining somebody will click on the bug, you will show them very visibly that they need to drag the bug to where they need. When they drop it, they can fill in the form or move it somewhere else.
Animats 1y ago
If you submit a really detailed bug report, such as one where the problem was reproduced under a debugger, it becomes a "the reason you suck" speech. This really upsets some dev teams. The usual responses of the "turn it off and on again" and "reinstall" don't make the complaint go away. There are two bugs in Firefox I'd like to report, but it's futile. One is that, launched on Ubuntu, Firestorm does disk I/O for about three minutes on launch. During that period it can't load complex pages, although it loads ones without Javascript fine. The other, again on Ubuntu, is that it freezes when large text boxes are being filled in. This only happens on some sites.
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  I feel like on windows there's similar issue - after crash (force close) Firefox will load UI fast, but spend several minutes to not show black screen instead of websites in my session I remember finding 3 year old reddit post about this, and I have no idea whether the bug got into normal reporting place (where even is it?)
bionhoward 1y ago
FYI, there’s a bug with the bug, it doesn’t move on mobile
rikroots 1y ago
> Would love to hear if you’ve faced similar problems, and if this feels like something that would’ve helped in your own projects. Maybe people could combine this reporting solution with a bug capture solution I built a few weeks ago? It's a web-based screen recorder which allows a user to gather together several different areas of the screen into one place, add a talking head of themselves and demonstrate/explain the problem they've encountered. The resulting video could be added to the bug report. I built the tool because showing the problem is always better than trying to explain it in words. Tool: https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/ https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/ GitHub repo (it can be forked, self-hosted, etc): https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Sounds like a great idea. I have found that users don't give feedback, positive or negative, until they encounter some extreme (usually negative). I have found the best way to encourage feedback, is to make it dirt simple. Just a text entry field, with some way to respond, so you can follow up. Most of the work needs to be on my end.
socalgal2 1y ago
This is a huge problem in Apple iOS land where the only way to leave feedback and tons of apps is to leave a review on the app store and then watch Apple delete it immediately
- leakycap 1y ago
  I've left plenty of complaints on App Store reviews and have never seen a review of mine taken down. Did you break some sort of rule in your review?
briandoyle81 1y ago
I really like how some indie games have put in a widget for feedback. Press F11 or something, click an emoji face, optionally add a description, and click send. The game takes care of sending a screenshot, game state etc. (It tells you it's doing this in the interface)
dmitrygr 1y ago
Working at google taught me to not bother. An android bug I filed the month that I joined was closed a part of "bug bankruptcy" seven years later, having never been triaged. Why bother? When I was quitting - a year after that, the actual bug still existed.
solarkraft 1y ago
When I encounter a bug, I will almost never report it either, I’ll hope that someone else will or the developer will notice themselves while using their product. Reporting a bug is work. If it is certain that the bug will be fixed upon reporting this work may be worth doing for selfish (or non selfish) reasons, but I almost never have confidence that it is.
shmerl 1y ago
I agree. Bug trackers should be easy to use. I wish Debian and ffmpeg would have better bug trackers.
rekabis 1y ago
The worst example I ever experienced was finding an actual flaw within some software with Trac as a version control system - somehow DD-WRT comes to mind - and I submitted a bug report with full reproducibility workflow and everything I could imagine. Essentially, the platinum standard for submitting a bug report in software development. It was immediately rejected. The reasoning? “Did not identify the relevant code in which the error occurred”. Like… WTF???? Edit: confirmed as DD-WRT. I’ve never submitted another bug report to them again. And I’ve submitted hundreds of reports to other projects all over.
throwaway984393 1y ago
[dead]
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
I love this, and I'm so glad it has resulted in more people filing bugs. That said, there is a larger problem going on here that has yet to be addressed by the software industry as a whole. And that is that "bugs" (and "filing" bugs) is a very complex thing. It's not just one thing, it's many, many things. And until we face that and provide a holistic solution for "it", it will continue to be an existential problem. Here's a selection of the different kinds of complexity with "bugs": - Type. Is it a backend or frontend bug? A network bug or an infrastructure bug? An internal or external bug? Is it a "not considered a bug" bug? Is it a bug in documentation, training, intuitiveness, etc? A product- or feature-specific bug? A location-specific bug? A user-specific bug? - Context. Is the user even capable of giving you enough context and information for this bug report to be usable? If so, is automatic? If not, will the user simply give up reporting when this becomes difficult? - Communication. How does the user even report a bug? (I regularly try to file bugs with every tech product I use - because they are constantly riddled with end-user bugs - but I spend hours trying to dig up some way to contact the company to report the bug, and when I finally can contact someone, they refuse to even take my bug report, because it's not one of the read-from-the-script-customer-service responses/actions. And if the user does eventually get in contact with the company, is the developer (or anyone else) even capable of communicating with this user to get more information or inform them of a fix? - Visibility. Quite often, users will experience bugs, and maybe one report comes in about them. This is then captured by customer service or someone else, and maybe they file a ticket. But then for each subsequent request, they just tell the customer they will record it and then.... don't send it to anyone, because they've already sent one such bug and assume it's being fixed. So the developers have no idea how often this bug is actually happening. Often when bugs are reported the devs aren't informed at all. - Impact. Is it just affecting a single user, once or twice, in a niche setting? Is it affecting the same user all the time? Is it affecting a subset of users? All users? Is it affecting all users, but core functionality still works? Is it significantly affecting core functionality? Is it affecting core functionality but there's bigger issues going on so it's actually less of an impact? Are the developers even capable of understanding the impact? (how many of you know exactly how much each specific function affects the business?) - Prioritization. We all have ticketing systems full of hundreds of tickets that sit in the backlog never to be fixed. They're annoying, or difficult, or unsexy, or they're not a new feature. Sexy bugs get prioritized, unsexy bugs sit in the trash heap. - Fixability. Even if all of the rest is provided for... how difficult or easy is it for a developer to fix? Is the developer capable of contextualizing it and making use of the information? Do some of them have difficulty reproducing it, while others don't? Do they have all the training needed on all the systems involved in order to effectively triage/investigate/troubleshoot? Are they given dedicated time each development cycle to fix bugs? Are they even able to track down who is responsible for "fixing" the bug, what with the modern mess of interdependent microservices and siloed development teams? Will they be implementing regression tests to make sure it doesn't come back? Are you rewarding them for this work, in addition to the rewards for "sexy work" (new features implemented, cost saved)? Yes, getting users to file more bugs is fantastic! But that is quite literally the tip of the iceberg.
groby_b 1y ago
I think it's cool you built and shared it - grats on shipping. But you (or your users) are about to learn a few truths about bugs and users :) Foremost: unless your users pay for the product, there's a downside to easy bug reports - the vast majority will be useless, no matter how easy it is. Granted, that's true for paid products too, but at least you can bake the cost for dealing with that into the price of goods. It's absolutely great while you're building traction. Even the most inane post has usually a kernel of truth. It's becoming a problem as you are clear on where you're heading, and the cost of dealing with them outpaces their value. At that point, you either start stochastic sampling (annoying your users who write well thought-out reports, and who are your multipliers), or you spend a fortune to slog through everything. That's when you start writing the "feedback suite" backend :)
Havoc 1y ago
The response is usually the problem. If I file a bug I get either: 1) nothing 2) a reasonable response that may or may not include resolution 3) a shared debugging journey that takes three hours of my life Number 3 devs mean well and have admirable commitment…but I’d rather not sign up for an epic trek to throw a ring into mountain doom. I just want to point out an issue and provide some basic info. So these days the only thing I do for the most part is send crash logs.
drob518 1y ago
Most companies don’t have a user accessible way to file bugs. Often, you have to call support, speak to a muppet, then convince them that your issue is real and they’ll file it. Trust me, I find bugs in products all the time and I actually try to file bug reports, but it’s rare that I can. Some of this is because one of the worst bug-related metrics is “customer found bugs.” This means that your developers missed it during unit testing and your test team missed it during system and final testing. Nobody actually wants customers to be able to file bug reports because they make the team look bad.
- account42 1y ago
  Goodhart's Law in effect.
AngryData 1y ago
I use to report bugs all the time with details of the bug and what I was doing and if possible how to cause it. But then when you encounter the same bugs years later doing some very common task that you momentarily forgot to do your work around for, it made me wonder why I was wasting my time reporting it. These days I rarely report bugs unless it is brand new software released a few weeks ago at most, or a brand new release of older software with a new bug. If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed. So why waste the time? Im not getting paid for it, it likely won't be fixed, and 49/50 bugs I encounter are things that seem impossible to miss with any real QC. Doing decent bug reports as a user most of the time it feels like following the turnip truck to town picking up turnips that fell off the truck, giving them to the farmer, but knowing they will likely be thrown in the trash because they didn't care about them to start with. If they did they would have made sure to not overload the truck to start with and not be obviously dropping so many turnips on the side of the road and leaving them there.
- selcuka 1y ago
  > If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed Yep. That has always been the general industry sentiment [1]: > Here’s another bug that’s not worth fixing: if you have a bug that totally crashes your program when you open gigantic files, but it only happens to your single user who has OS/2 and who, for all you know, doesn’t even use large files. Well, don’t fix it. Worse things have happened at sea. Similarly I’ve generally given up caring about people with 16 color screens or people running off-the-shelf Windows 95 with no upgrades in 7 years. People like that don’t spend much money on packaged software products. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fixin/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fix...
  - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    You missed the important part: >But mostly, it’s worth fixing bugs. Even if they are “harmless” bugs, they may reduce the reputation of your company and your product, which, in the long run, will have a significant impact on your earnings. It’s hard to overcome the reputation of having a buggy product.
ryao 1y ago
In 2022 and 2023, I made a push to find and fix bugs in OpenZFS using static analysis tools. I found many obscure bugs. One was a theoretical issue that should have affected big endian systems and been an annoyance for users, but there were no bug reports saying anyone had been affected. After I opened a PR with a fix, people told me that they had been affected, but did not think it was worthwhile to file a bug report. This surprised me. This is the PR: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13968 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13968
gpm 1y ago
Built in fun mini game: How far can you get the bug to move (only counting after you release your mouse) without the popup appearing. Multiple clicks are allowed.
hulitu 1y ago
> * Maybe sign in or create an account If you want bug reports, don't do it. Have an email address when one can submit bug reports.
paradox460 1y ago
For me the most fatal part of the big report loop is where you report a bug, and get radio silence, or a curt dismissal, and the bug lingers on. Telegram for MacOS has a bug where it will occasionally crash when you try to delete something. I reported it nearly 2 years ago. It's yet to be fixed On the flip side, I got some of Fireboard's pulse probes last year, and had an issue where they wouldn't connect to my Yoder smoker. Quick ticket and some easy debugging steps I was able to do more or less asynchronously, and a cause and fix was found: the Bluetooth stack on the smoker would crash after a while, so unplugging the smoker when it wasn't in use was an easy fix. The bug still remains in the firmware, but there is a solution that works for me, and so I'm happy with a functional product, while I wait for the firmware update
maeil 1y ago
I strongly recommend going a lot less heavy on the LLM generated writing on HN, it reads far less genuine than when people here right stuff themselves. Just in case you think it's the em-dashes that do it, it is isn't; it was clear by the end of the 2nd paragraph.
theyinwhy 1y ago
Great idea, not working on iOS Safari.
Leo-thorne 1y ago
Totally get this. I once spent days trying to get users to submit decent bug reports through a fancy form and got almost nothing useful. The moment we switched to a simple “click here to report” button with an optional note field, the volume and quality went way up. Simpler is better, especially when the user is already frustrated.
eabeezxjc 1y ago
I confirm, I do it myself. but 90% of my submissions do not result in any response.
- notTooFarGone 1y ago
  worse, support that is overly fixed on support sessions and calls to resolve bugs even when in the ticket it clearly states it's not reproducable, only a restart fixes it etc. Take my logs and everything you get but ffs make it observable enough so that you don't waste my time.
stevoski 1y ago
Your product is similar to one I own. I checked out your website. It’s good. Unsolicited advice: you gotta charge more for this product. A lot more. We charge up to $250/month or $3000/year. Some customers (companies you’ve most likely heard of) pay that, yearly in advance and have done for several years.
erremerre 1y ago
Because it is an extremely futile exercise. I have a bug in my Honor (200 pro) phone were after some time, whatsapp's notifications with no sounds are changed by the SO automatically to Gentle Notification (no popup, only number on icon) I want to have a popup, but without sound. I might have reported several times, well, they have not done anything about it. I also reported something to Lutris just to be told, not our problem wont fix. which is the same feeling of, why have I bother doing this. And after a few of those, if you have a bug, you moved on. In this case I regret going with Honor instead of Samsung, and it would be likely the last Honor phone I got and I do not recommend to anybody. And with Lutris, I would rather use windows and be able to see my screen instead of a black box when logging into epic. If you don't fix the bug, the user will stop reporting, and will find a workaround.
tim1994 1y ago
A couple of years ago I played PUBG which crashed occasionally. I rarely submitted bugs, even if it was as simple as pressing a button in the crash reporter. This is because sending the bug report took a while and blocked you from restarting and rejoining the ongoing game. This applies mostly to multiplayer games but if your app has a crash reporter, give the user a chance to restart the app and report the bug later.
- SunlitCat 1y ago
  The opposite would be something like the bug reporting system in Second Life by Linden Labs (an online world where you can be with a virtual avatar, doing stuff) (at least way back, i dunno if they still have that open). They had a public facing jira open, where people could file bugs and what not about the viewer (the client) and the world (the server). You didn't need some special account or something like that, just your normal Second Life account was enough to get access to that one. Drawback was, you were able to see what happens when filing bugs is easy. Of course, many people used it to file real bugs but also complained about stuff not working like they expected (or how it should work according to them, which brought other people up against them and so on...in the end you were able to read the latest drama here and there, right in the jira entries). Although, to be honest, i thought it was an awesome idea, but you when you open up an easy way for people to report bugs, you need an easy way to explain what bugs are and what not. :)
eithed 1y ago
This looks like bugherd.com
csomar 1y ago
Not potentially a customer because I have very few users that I can track if one of them have issues. So take my suggestions a bit lightly 1. I'd rather have/use a npm package then your minified/package script. You are not Google, so I am going to need some trust there and that happens by making this an open source package. 2. If I am going to implement this on my site, I'd not use that little bug. I'd rather have this custom design/integrated with the rest of my app. So provide API/functions/Hooks to use your library. 3. I'd never consider a one time payment (lifetime subscription) SaaS. That screams: I am going to take your money and disappear in a few months. Also, any product that doesn't have clear bandwidth quotas is probably missing in disclosure.
foxglacier 1y ago
This looks an awful lot like all the "contact us" forms that are mostly broken and give you no feedback as to whether the message got through or not. At least it's easy but you can bet half the sites that use it won't even be receiving the reports, let alone acting on them. In my desktop app, I ask users to email me in a global exception handler. My thinking is that they'll recognize that I don't want to be inundated with reports for the same bug over and over so they're probably the first to find it and it's worth reporting. And I do fix them all otherwise I would be getting spammed by the same reports over and over again.
supermatt 1y ago
> If you've ever had a user say “something’s broken” and then ghost you forever, you probably get where I’m coming from. As a consumer who reports bugs, I’d actually say the opposite problem is just as common — when the company ghosts you after you’ve taken the time to report an issue. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve used the official channels — bug trackers, support forums, contact forms — only to hear nothing back. No acknowledgement, no follow-up, no notification when it’s fixed. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a company let me know that a bug I reported was resolved. Reporting a bug to most companies feels like sending a wishlist to Santa. That’s why many people don’t bother. They assume it’s a waste of time — and most of the time, they’re right. Personally, if a company fails to engage over a bug report, I don’t waste my time reporting anything else. In many cases, I just move to the competition. I’m sure I’m not alone. If a user goes to the time of helping you fix your software, the least you can do is spend some time on them.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  The only exception I’ve found to this in recent years is JetBrains. Every bug I’ve logged with them has been fixed.
- carefulfungi 1y ago
  Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity. For every user who reports a clear, reproducible defect, there 10 others who report non-reproducible issues, who conflate features with bugs, who ghost, who use issues for support or questions, who are just angry about something and think you're an idiot, who report (since fixed) defects against old versions, or who report duplicates to existing issues. It's a very noisy channel. It can lead to a crappy outcome for both the reporter who earnestly tried to help and for the developer who wishes they had the time to carefully address every reported issue but just don't. Sometimes, all that's feasible is making time to triage/acknowledge each issue in a reasonable timeframe and to be forthright about its prioritization. As an aside, I find your opinion that "if I give you my time in the form of a bug report, the least you can do is give me your time" to be common. We rarely have the right to demand another person's attention, though. Especially with respect to non-commercial open source hobbyist maintainers.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
I'll report bugs, give details — via multiple cumbersome steps, iff I can clearly track the status, follow up. Otherwise, even a one-click “send report”’popup isn't worth my effort. This is why I no longer bother reporting anything to Apple. Same crashes/errors keep on for years. I’m convinced those reports go to /fruit/null.
0points 1y ago
> Even non-technical users click it just because "the little bug looked fun." So you want non-bug reports from non-tech people. Why? From my experience, exactly those reports are the ones that will never be addressed.
infecto 1y ago
“Stupidly easy” is bad copy imo. I honestly did not want to scroll through the front page after seeing it. In a sentence it does not have nice flow and from a business perspective it feels immature. I would tighten up that copy a lot but that is just my opinion. Also, might be in the minority but I avoid any products that put ProductHunt flags on the page, especially prominently at the top.
NAHWheatCracker 1y ago
The first job I had as a software engineer was at a trucking company that had a desktop Swing application. If an exception happened, the user would get a pop-up with buttons to email support the stack trace or cancel. The email went to all the IT staff and someone would usually reply within an hour, often with a fix. The engineering work was atrocious looking back. I probably fixed 50 random NullPointerExceptions in my 3 years there this way. But, it was one of the most productive places I've worked at because everything was done simple and there were no barriers between users and developers.
NAHWheatCracker 1y ago
The first job I had as a software engineer was at a trucking company that had a desktop Swing application. If an exception happened, the user would get a pop-up with buttons to email support the stack trace or cancel. The email went to all the IT staff and someone would usually reply within an hour, often with a fix. The engineering work was atrocious looking back. I probably fixed 50 random NullPointerExceptions in my 3 years there this way. But, it was one of the most productive places I've worked at because everything was done simple and there were no barriers between users and developers.
rbanffy 1y ago
I had a lot of success adding links and buttons to report bugs on error pages and messages. Doing that while whatever abnormal state led to the message is still hot allowed me to gather a lot of information about the state of the application to be attached to any bug report. Initially I used the Macintosh bomb icon for it, but some users found that too cryptic compared to a text message.
freehorse 1y ago
Maybe adding a clickable/highlighted actual url in the post to make it more stupidly easy to go to your website, if not on the title itself (not sure if you can add that now) could also be a good idea. For stupid people like me that spent more than 10 seconds after reading it trying to figure out where I should click.
jimkleiber 1y ago
Really excited to try this. 1) I'm surprised to not see the bugdrop feature in the admin section, which means I currently have to report the bug here :-) 2) I was also surprised that it didn't seem to need to confirm my email, seems standard these days. Otherwise, stoked to try this. I already reported a "bug" on your front page and it went very smoothly. 3) Didn't receive an email receipt confirming that the bug was reported after I had entered my email, not sure if that's planned or not. Thanks!
bgro 1y ago
Testing bugs is your full time job. Why should I spend my time doing it for, at best, free, but more likely pay to do so? And even then, the bug is almost always closed without fixing anyway.
kasajian 1y ago
I don't know if this is the case now, but about a decade ago, in order to report a Bug to Microsoft you had to create a Premier Support ticket, which cost $1000+, but free if it's a Bug. So basically, if what you report is not a Bug, determined by them, it's treated like a Tech Support ticket and no longer free. I recall discussing this with a representative and let them know that I'm basically doing them a favor by reporting the bug -- why would I want to take the chance to possibly have to pay for it if they happen to determine "it's not a bug -- it's a feature". I got the standard corporate-speak answer which I just waved off as ridiculous: "Look, we will absolutely not charge you if it's determined to be a bug"... :| I've since have seen Microsoft use User Voice and the products (at least Visual Studio) has a great way to give feedback to the team, something I've used multiple times, including for feature requests. And of course, for their Open Source products, they have Github Issues, which is awesome.
jimmoores 1y ago
JetBrains does a great job with this by actually rewarding users who report bugs with free licenses and such.
endoblast 1y ago
Yes! Similarly for text books, which are riddled with errors, generally speaking. They should have have an email address for reader-submitted errata printed in large friendly letters on the inside front cover.
davidmurdoch 1y ago
Same with engineers working on the code. Track issues in GitHub? They'll write bug reports. Track issues over in Jira, they no longer care enough.
Jzush 1y ago
Can confirm, I prefer to stew in silent rage unless I absolutely need others to know.
theodpHN 1y ago
Cute things that programing managers say: "Problems? We don't have any. In fact, I haven't seen a bug report in more than six months!"
watwut 1y ago
I stopped reporting bugs when projects started to deploy bots that close "stale" bugs. No, someone ignoring my issue for 3 months does not imply issue went away. I was cool when bugs waited for proper prioritization 6 months later. Ok, it took time, but someone is busy. When they are getting closed automatically, there is no reason to bother.
ringeryless 1y ago
yes, Kate editor is a classic example. one clicks the report a bug link in-app and immediately gets a login page. no one has time for this sort of thing. it indicates a disinterest in getting bug reports, making people do homework to report one. i switched editors and got back to work.
spejson 1y ago
I spent a lot of time working in the user research space and the disconnect between what users told me and what they did was so huge that I just built an AI that watches user sessions and figures out bugs and friction. Works well for like 90% of cases
account42 1y ago
As a user the best thing you can do to make me report bugs is to show that you are actually going to fix reported bugs. Taking my time to gather information that will effectively end up in /dev/null is the opposite of fun. Also important is to let me make sure I don't waste time reporting something that is already a known issue. The best way to do this is to have a public bug tracker. Given these preconditions acceptable effort only depends on how invested I am in the product.
dorianjp 1y ago
nice work, sounds like a decent niche to tap into for the right clients
ValdikSS 1y ago
The same applies for translation systems. I translate a bunch of open-source software, if the translation is on weblate, transifex or crowdin. I never going to translate .po files directly. It's just not worth it.

335 points by lakshikag 1y ago

cosmotic 1y ago

For many corporations, there are probably perverse incentives against making it easy to report bugs.KPI of reported bugs as an indicator of software quality, for example.

lupusreal 1y ago
It's not just a problem in the corporate context. Open source projects usually make it a pain in the ass to submit bug reports too, in a clear effort to gatekeep the process to experienced developers. Simply because developers prefer to only deal with other developers and don't want to hear complaints about their software from the unwashed masses.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I can’t imagine I’d keep up a hobby of doing customer service type activities very long.
- whatevaa 1y ago
  Free software developers already doing work for free. You are demanding more free work?
0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
Certainly seems like there must be some KPI against fixing the bugs. You can look to any big tech software and find oodles of long standing bugs which never receive attention.
- Vilian 1y ago
  Fixing bugs don't create features, that upset execs

5040 1y ago

Kindle made it easy to report errors in ebooks, but I always found myself wondering if the errors I was flagging were even being looked at.

mmsc 1y ago

The difficulty in reporting a bug comes from the friction required to filter the "page doesn't work" with no further explanation reports, or the "my neighbour is a spy for the government and I have proof" reports (real types of reports for a browser company, for example, which surely exist for other places users think that "is" the internet like Facebook). I agree that reporting bugs can be hard, but the amount of spam that follows an effective open form, of craziness to uselessness, outweighs the useful bug reports. Having two types of reports: one which is a simple screenshot taker with the ability to draw a circle over what is wrong, and one which is a more detailed report, would be useful. Some LLM that filters out what is a useless report be a useful report would be good, too.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
graypegg 1y ago
On the LLM idea, if you could group reports by issue (by parsing the user provided input and whatever context you save from the page screenshot into some embedding) and then only escalate things when several different IPs have reported a similar thing within X amount of time, I think you could handle two birds with one stone. Limits how annoying spammers can be, and also makes the good reports easier to understand since a few bug reports combined should make a better whole. I however wouldn't shorten/transform reports with an LLM, or make spammy reports inaccessible. Just doing the semantic grouping for escalation. It's true you're getting free work from your users, and the human factor is pretty important here, even if an LLM might sometimes misinterpret it.
airza 1y ago
With all due respect, That is the price you pay for your users doing _free_ software testing for you! We are on the “listen to your users” mecca and you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
  > you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it. That's entirely the wrong take, IMO. Listening to users is easy, but the users often don't say anything when they speak. Those non-reports are basically spam that should be automatically thrown away.

nemomarx 1y ago

This sounds neat! Do you have a site that describes how it's added to an existing project?

tln 1y ago
Not OP but, the website is bugdrop.app FAQ says "The Bugdrop snippet is tiny and loads asynchronously" So, you add a snippet of JS to your site.
lakshikag 1y ago
Thank you. It's a simple setup—just copy and paste the JS snippet into your website. I'm also considering creating some video tutorials soon to make it even easier.

LanceJones 1y ago

Congrats on shipping! Here's some quick feedback -- hope it's useful: 1. Is the little bug icon sufficiently visible? I'm not sure... 2. Do visitors automatically know what to do with the bug? You have a tooltip, but do all visitors know what "Spotted a bug?" means? 3. [more of a suggestion; perhaps it does this already] Would be great if the bug position pulled in a CSS class or the content surrounding the "dropped" bug -- to give more context to the site owner.

lakshikag 1y ago
1) The site owner can fully customize the widget, including adjusting the size of the bug icon. 2) I'm considering updating the popup text to something more approachable, like "Something’s not working?" or "Spot a problem?" 3) Currently, it doesn't send class names—but that's a great suggestion. Thank you!

graypegg 1y ago

I love the UI concept. Being able to point at a broken thing rather than try to uniquely describe the position/state/path to a broken thing is smart! Hooooever, "bug" could be a bit ambiguous to a lot of people. Looks like in a real deployment, you have a little tooltip that says "Spotted a bug? Drag me there!". That makes sense to developers and the like... but those are also the sorts of people most likely to write a good bug report anyway. The people most unlikely to write a bug report are the sorts of people who will read "spotted a bug" as "there is an insect... game?... on this site?". "Issue" or "Problem" would be better, but keep the bug graphic! It's cute. :)

gjsman-1000 1y ago
When I took a look quickly, it also shows the "Spotted a bug? Drag me there!" every time the page loads - which could quickly get overwhelming, and make the user wonder why the developer is so certain that they will run into a bug. (Why do developers not make "report a bug" obvious? Because just seeing it implies there are enough bugs that a link is necessary.) I also have no idea how well this works on mobile - and seeing that the Pro plan doesn't remove attribution seems like a mistake.
- leakycap 1y ago
  I agree - the attribution needs to be removed for paying customers, or at least for me to want to pay for it to use with a client. The phrasing should be customizable. Even better if the bug is an SVG and I can paste in my own SVG for the bug icon. I was worried about how it worked on mobile, and unfortunately on my iPhone I could not find a way to drop the bug where I wanted. It did show a popup eventually but it covers a lot of the page given it doesn't work as expected. Just sharing thoughts/observations; I really like the concept as well.
  - lakshikag 1y ago
    Whitelist options are coming up :) You will be able to customize the tooltip (or remove it), change the Bugdrop branding to your own and more. I'm aware of the issue in mobile devices too, will push an update later tonight to fix it.

ashoeafoot 1y ago

Why not a video snippet? Why a note?

lakshikag 1y ago
About 90% of day-to-day users won’t bother recording a video—plus, most people aren’t even aware of the browser’s screen sharing feature and may feel uneasy about what it’s doing. So in my opinion, a simple note is the best way to go.

pxtail 1y ago

I won't report bugs in paid software/services because it's not my job, I'm not paid for it, I'm user of the service, not free workforce so they can reduce amount of QA staff or skip it completely. Give me a discount and then maybe, just maybe I'll think twice about reporting something. Bugs renders your soft unusable? Fine, there is plenty of competition out there who will do it right.

Supermancho 1y ago
A clickable link with a form (partially pre-filled) and a big banner that says if the bug is verified I get 10-25% off something AND a followup email (reiterating the offer) + tracking link, would motivate most people I know.
happyopossum 1y ago
So you: A) only pay for perfection and B) experience zero friction or cost in moving services?
- Supermancho 1y ago
  I think trying to argue with the sentiment, misses the point entirely. I think we can all agree, bug reporting could use a renaissance.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
eastbound 1y ago
I tell my customers that they should spend 1hr per month “improving the vendor”. See, if you rely on a vendor, then you need them to survive. It’s a parasite-host relationship. You need to tell them what you need, and oftentimes they will bend the roadmap in favour of the most demanded features. Alternatives: - They choose their most amusing feature, - They choose the most lucrative feature among the new possible markets while ignoring all bugs, which is the most rational way to address bugs unfortunately, - You don’t tell them, they don’t improve, they die / they triple the price of the product by lack of audience, and you have to migrate your data to another product.

PhilippGille 1y ago

Not a fan of made-up testimonials, but otherwise it looks nice. How do you prevent spam?

I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago

You write that "reporting bugs is usually a terrible experience". I find bugs ALL THE TIME, and yet, when I even try to find a way to contact ANYONE, let alone a developer, they leave no door open at all. No method, no form, no contact name, no nothing. I (along with many, I presume), actually want those companies to excel. I WANT to let them know what to fix. But, they just don't want to hear about it. Really sad I think.

kccqzy 1y ago
In my experience it's because the companies have not hired any persons whose job is to triage bug reports. People do find bugs all the time, and making it super frictionless to report bugs will result in a deluge of reports. Some reports will be outright spam, some could be mistaking a feature for a bug, some could be duplicates. Someone needs to do the triage and try to reproduce before the issue is forwarded to developers. Few companies have the role of Quality Test Engineer (QTE) to do this job; most don't so they have no means to triage the bug reports. The only exception is indie apps I pay for on the App Store. There is usually only one or perhaps two people behind it, so by definition that person is SWE, QTE, PM and several jobs rolled into one. And this is unsustainable unless the app is paid.
- I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago
  Wait... Isn't that what AI is for? To do that for "free" and removing the time an actual person has to spend on it? Separating the spam and duplicates, etc?
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    The difficult part is the step of reproducing the bug. Will companies trust AI enough to allow the AI to operate on their UI, according to instructions written by bug reporters who are strangers on the internet?
eastbound 1y ago
I think if you take for example apps on the Atlassian Marketplace, probably all of them have an easy way to contact them (Probably because they get Jira for free, granted).

boricj 1y ago

There's the other side of the coin of reporting bugs besides initial friction: if the user feels like the bug reports end up in a black hole, then they will disincentivized from doing so. What happens after the user files a bug from their point of view? Is there a follow-up, or is it like throwing a message in a bottle?

lakshikag 1y ago
I'm thinking of adding an option for users to leave their email for follow-up after submitting a report. That feature should be available in the next couple of days.

Rick76 1y ago

Nature takes the path of least resistance. In my experience, especially people. Make it easy people will use it, make it difficult and they won't. It's the reason apple became apple, even though I don't think the iPhone is intuitive today.

vorgol 1y ago
> Make it easy people will use it, make it difficult and they won't. It doesn't have to be difficult. It just has to be not easy.

wingerlang 1y ago

[flagged]

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

cwillu 1y ago

Reporting bugs is work, and is a two-way street: if submission is a black hole (possibly with some scripted replies from someone uninvolved in fixing bugs), then bugs will not be reported.

lkeskull 1y ago

I imagine it's been quite difficult to educate users to use this tool?

Mystery-Machine 1y ago

Here's a quick bug report: I didn't know how I can check out the app you built. There were no links in your post. Only "Bugdrop.app", the name. I tried Googling it and it turns out Bugdrop.app is your actual domain. You should point that out: Bugdrop.app => https://bugdrop.app/ https://bugdrop.app/ On macOS .app is the standard extension for any installed app.

OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago

What made you go with this design choice instead of Google's "Feedback" button that lets you take a screenshot?

paxys 1y ago

Okay but what have you built?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

sandbox01 1y ago

Love this! That said, wanted to try it on your website, can't report a bug that the bug reporting doesn't work on Safari MacOS... the submit button does not do anything.

philk10 1y ago
Seems it needs some text to submit ( and entering just spaces doesn't count ) - ideally the Submit button shouldn't enable until there is valid text?
- sandbox01 1y ago
  I added that when moving the bug around on macOS Safari it highlights weird sections of the web page, which isn't great.
  - lakshikag 1y ago
    Can you check it now? I've done some changes.
- lakshikag 1y ago
  The submit button is not clickable until there is a text now. Thanks for the suggestion.

dvh 1y ago

I had really simple feedback form in my Android app that was just text area and submit button. Then some ashole tester from Google put @ in it and suddenly I'm collecting PII. It was easier to just remove the feedback form.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

szundi 1y ago

[dead]

OrvalWintermute 1y ago

this sounds like a vital improvement. Every bug I encounter in my favorite game I do not report because they want: * My email, yet again. * A long form * A bug description rather than a narrative of what I experienced

szundi 1y ago

[dead]

nicce 1y ago

And that is why companies use telemetry. As privacy advocate I still let telemetry to be collected as long as it is transparent. And I can filter it if there is something too disturbing.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

wittjeff 1y ago

Just this week I was working on something similar but specifically for users who have disabilities, so they can more easily report issues to site owners. I also combined general annotation capability so other users (of my browser extension) can read their comments. And also compatibility with Hypothesis (https://github.com/hypothesis https://github.com/hypothesis, https://hypothes.is https://hypothes.is), also using the W3C Web Annotation spec. I hadn't thought of the drag-and-drop bug metaphor; I like it. I had also considered recording mouse and keystroke events up until the time that the bug is marked, and then bundling those events (sanitized) with the bug report for more precise repro steps, but of course that's a bigger ask for the opt-in.

Oras 1y ago

Or just use post hog or clarify to have sessions and check them? That helped me to find bugs without reporting. The other method I used is to have audit logs, identify when there are errors in certain steps.

D13Fd 1y ago

The problem with bug reporting is that they rarely seem to get fixed. I used to do a lot more bug reports. But you often hear back nothing, and then the bug is never fixed, even if it would be an easy fix. These days, I don't often report bugs.

esafak 1y ago
Transparency in the form of a public ticket tracker would solve that.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  Apple doesn't have this. They're super successful. I hate it! But, clearly that's not an argument most bean counters are going to care about given such successful companies have some of the worst feedback mechanisms.
  - YetAnotherNick 1y ago
    Apple has one of the most public support community[0]. You can get workarounds for most of the bugs, but never from official devs. Even hours old post has dozens of replies[1]. [0]: https://discussions.apple.com/welcome https://discussions.apple.com/welcome [1]: https://discussions.apple.com/community/macos/sequoia https://discussions.apple.com/community/macos/sequoia
  - hobs 1y ago
    They are not super successful at fixing bugs.
    - cstrahan 1y ago
      They are super successful at creating them, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104554 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38104554
- sh34r 1y ago
  Gitlab begs to differ. The number of times I’d google my problem and find a ticket from 6+ years ago with dozens of users participating in the comments, confirming it’s a consistent, common problem, and not a peep from their devs. It’s like their public issue tracker only exists to insult their users.

kelipso 1y ago

The most I have tried with reporting bugs in a mobile app is going to settings and seeing if there’s a bug report button or something like that. Not worth the effort considering the low probability of it being even looked at.

_wire_ 1y ago

Any involvement in reporting / fixing bugs is development. Why do app developers think their customers need to be or want to be developers? What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers? Making bug reporting easier means an intentional push to foist more of Development's work upon customers and a bias towards more bugs. BUG OR FEATURE? If you can't tell, then we can understand why Knuth call it "the art" of computer programming, as in the artist's uncertainty of creation as compared to the engineer's confidence. The fact that half the SW industry prefers to avoid a distinction between bugs and features— as in bugs that don't get reported are regarded as features— shows the profligate laziness and opportunism of so called Software Engineering. AI is a stunning example of a global industry built by computer technologists who don't care about understanding their own work, and lack the creative and social spark to conduct themselves as artists. Just listen G. Hinton babble philosophically for 10 minutes and you will grasp the magnitude of incompetence at work.

TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
I think reporting problems is just part of being a good citizen that participates in a shared culture. If I visit a park or shop and something is broken, it's worth putting in a bit of effort to report it. If everyone chips in a little bit of effort it makes the overall experience of everyone much better. Are you the type of person to also not return the shopping cart to the corral? The number of hardware and software combinations are impossibly large, so you're unlikely to be handling everything perfectly if the application is doing anything complicated.
foobarchu 1y ago
> What other industry relies on its customers as implicit developers? I would say most of them. To list a few: - restaurants (almost all of them will send you feedback surveys these days, they also rely on you to tell them if they, for example, cooked your steak to the wrong temp) - property maintenance (again, feedback surveys) - auto mechanics (if the thing they fixed is still broken, a good mechanic wants to know) - doctors (they rely heavily on YOU to tell you what wrong with your body) - democratic political systems (when working correctly) - road infrastructure (the city won't fix potholes nobody is reporting, and they won't do anything about badly tuned traffic lights nobody complains about) - vaccines and medicine (the testing phase may not uncover every possible single side effect, they need recipients/users to report those if they happen) (Please nobody come back with cynical takes on how these aren't helpful in their specific case/location, that's clearly not the point)

qingcharles 1y ago

I love this. Especially the sane pricing. Only thing I would add is after submit it should allow you to enter an email address or something so that (a) the user can get updates on the progress of fixes; and (b) be contacted if the dev needs more info.

lakshikag 1y ago
Thank you, Charles. Yes, this is already on my to-do list and should be available in the next couple of days.

SoftTalker 1y ago

> screenshots, browser info, even console logs if they hit an error. Possibly disclosing sensitive information (which the user may not realize).

nailer 1y ago

Bugdrop won't work for most users, since they don't real tooltips. 1. I load https://bugdrop.app/ https://bugdrop.app/ 2. The site days 'try bugdrop' and points to the left bottom corner. 3. I click the bug. Nothing happens. On further inspection, there is sometimes a tooltip that tells me clicking won't work and I need to drag the bug over the part of the UI that failed, but I didn't read that when I first used it and I won't use it a second time.

lakshikag 1y ago
Thank you, Nailer. I'll definitely be doing some tweaking around that part.
- nailer 1y ago
  Thanks! Pardon if my feedback sounded direct, I wanted it to be impactful. I’m imagining somebody will click on the bug, you will show them very visibly that they need to drag the bug to where they need. When they drop it, they can fill in the form or move it somewhere else.

Animats 1y ago

If you submit a really detailed bug report, such as one where the problem was reproduced under a debugger, it becomes a "the reason you suck" speech. This really upsets some dev teams. The usual responses of the "turn it off and on again" and "reinstall" don't make the complaint go away. There are two bugs in Firefox I'd like to report, but it's futile. One is that, launched on Ubuntu, Firestorm does disk I/O for about three minutes on launch. During that period it can't load complex pages, although it loads ones without Javascript fine. The other, again on Ubuntu, is that it freezes when large text boxes are being filled in. This only happens on some sites.

NooneAtAll3 1y ago
I feel like on windows there's similar issue - after crash (force close) Firefox will load UI fast, but spend several minutes to not show black screen instead of websites in my session I remember finding 3 year old reddit post about this, and I have no idea whether the bug got into normal reporting place (where even is it?)

bionhoward 1y ago

FYI, there’s a bug with the bug, it doesn’t move on mobile

rikroots 1y ago

> Would love to hear if you’ve faced similar problems, and if this feels like something that would’ve helped in your own projects. Maybe people could combine this reporting solution with a bug capture solution I built a few weeks ago? It's a web-based screen recorder which allows a user to gather together several different areas of the screen into one place, add a talking head of themselves and demonstrate/explain the problem they've encountered. The resulting video could be added to the bug report. I built the tool because showing the problem is always better than trying to explain it in words. Tool: https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/ https://kaliedarik.github.io/sc-screen-recorder/ GitHub repo (it can be forked, self-hosted, etc): https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

Sounds like a great idea. I have found that users don't give feedback, positive or negative, until they encounter some extreme (usually negative). I have found the best way to encourage feedback, is to make it dirt simple. Just a text entry field, with some way to respond, so you can follow up. Most of the work needs to be on my end.

socalgal2 1y ago

This is a huge problem in Apple iOS land where the only way to leave feedback and tons of apps is to leave a review on the app store and then watch Apple delete it immediately

leakycap 1y ago
I've left plenty of complaints on App Store reviews and have never seen a review of mine taken down. Did you break some sort of rule in your review?

briandoyle81 1y ago

I really like how some indie games have put in a widget for feedback. Press F11 or something, click an emoji face, optionally add a description, and click send. The game takes care of sending a screenshot, game state etc. (It tells you it's doing this in the interface)

dmitrygr 1y ago

Working at google taught me to not bother. An android bug I filed the month that I joined was closed a part of "bug bankruptcy" seven years later, having never been triaged. Why bother? When I was quitting - a year after that, the actual bug still existed.

solarkraft 1y ago

When I encounter a bug, I will almost never report it either, I’ll hope that someone else will or the developer will notice themselves while using their product. Reporting a bug is work. If it is certain that the bug will be fixed upon reporting this work may be worth doing for selfish (or non selfish) reasons, but I almost never have confidence that it is.

shmerl 1y ago

I agree. Bug trackers should be easy to use. I wish Debian and ffmpeg would have better bug trackers.

rekabis 1y ago

The worst example I ever experienced was finding an actual flaw within some software with Trac as a version control system - somehow DD-WRT comes to mind - and I submitted a bug report with full reproducibility workflow and everything I could imagine. Essentially, the platinum standard for submitting a bug report in software development. It was immediately rejected. The reasoning? “Did not identify the relevant code in which the error occurred”. Like… WTF???? Edit: confirmed as DD-WRT. I’ve never submitted another bug report to them again. And I’ve submitted hundreds of reports to other projects all over.

throwaway984393 1y ago

[dead]

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

I love this, and I'm so glad it has resulted in more people filing bugs. That said, there is a larger problem going on here that has yet to be addressed by the software industry as a whole. And that is that "bugs" (and "filing" bugs) is a very complex thing. It's not just one thing, it's many, many things. And until we face that and provide a holistic solution for "it", it will continue to be an existential problem. Here's a selection of the different kinds of complexity with "bugs": - Type. Is it a backend or frontend bug? A network bug or an infrastructure bug? An internal or external bug? Is it a "not considered a bug" bug? Is it a bug in documentation, training, intuitiveness, etc? A product- or feature-specific bug? A location-specific bug? A user-specific bug? - Context. Is the user even capable of giving you enough context and information for this bug report to be usable? If so, is automatic? If not, will the user simply give up reporting when this becomes difficult? - Communication. How does the user even report a bug? (I regularly try to file bugs with every tech product I use - because they are constantly riddled with end-user bugs - but I spend hours trying to dig up some way to contact the company to report the bug, and when I finally can contact someone, they refuse to even take my bug report, because it's not one of the read-from-the-script-customer-service responses/actions. And if the user does eventually get in contact with the company, is the developer (or anyone else) even capable of communicating with this user to get more information or inform them of a fix? - Visibility. Quite often, users will experience bugs, and maybe one report comes in about them. This is then captured by customer service or someone else, and maybe they file a ticket. But then for each subsequent request, they just tell the customer they will record it and then.... don't send it to anyone, because they've already sent one such bug and assume it's being fixed. So the developers have no idea how often this bug is actually happening. Often when bugs are reported the devs aren't informed at all. - Impact. Is it just affecting a single user, once or twice, in a niche setting? Is it affecting the same user all the time? Is it affecting a subset of users? All users? Is it affecting all users, but core functionality still works? Is it significantly affecting core functionality? Is it affecting core functionality but there's bigger issues going on so it's actually less of an impact? Are the developers even capable of understanding the impact? (how many of you know exactly how much each specific function affects the business?) - Prioritization. We all have ticketing systems full of hundreds of tickets that sit in the backlog never to be fixed. They're annoying, or difficult, or unsexy, or they're not a new feature. Sexy bugs get prioritized, unsexy bugs sit in the trash heap. - Fixability. Even if all of the rest is provided for... how difficult or easy is it for a developer to fix? Is the developer capable of contextualizing it and making use of the information? Do some of them have difficulty reproducing it, while others don't? Do they have all the training needed on all the systems involved in order to effectively triage/investigate/troubleshoot? Are they given dedicated time each development cycle to fix bugs? Are they even able to track down who is responsible for "fixing" the bug, what with the modern mess of interdependent microservices and siloed development teams? Will they be implementing regression tests to make sure it doesn't come back? Are you rewarding them for this work, in addition to the rewards for "sexy work" (new features implemented, cost saved)? Yes, getting users to file more bugs is fantastic! But that is quite literally the tip of the iceberg.

groby_b 1y ago

I think it's cool you built and shared it - grats on shipping. But you (or your users) are about to learn a few truths about bugs and users :) Foremost: unless your users pay for the product, there's a downside to easy bug reports - the vast majority will be useless, no matter how easy it is. Granted, that's true for paid products too, but at least you can bake the cost for dealing with that into the price of goods. It's absolutely great while you're building traction. Even the most inane post has usually a kernel of truth. It's becoming a problem as you are clear on where you're heading, and the cost of dealing with them outpaces their value. At that point, you either start stochastic sampling (annoying your users who write well thought-out reports, and who are your multipliers), or you spend a fortune to slog through everything. That's when you start writing the "feedback suite" backend :)

Havoc 1y ago

The response is usually the problem. If I file a bug I get either: 1) nothing 2) a reasonable response that may or may not include resolution 3) a shared debugging journey that takes three hours of my life Number 3 devs mean well and have admirable commitment…but I’d rather not sign up for an epic trek to throw a ring into mountain doom. I just want to point out an issue and provide some basic info. So these days the only thing I do for the most part is send crash logs.

drob518 1y ago

Most companies don’t have a user accessible way to file bugs. Often, you have to call support, speak to a muppet, then convince them that your issue is real and they’ll file it. Trust me, I find bugs in products all the time and I actually try to file bug reports, but it’s rare that I can. Some of this is because one of the worst bug-related metrics is “customer found bugs.” This means that your developers missed it during unit testing and your test team missed it during system and final testing. Nobody actually wants customers to be able to file bug reports because they make the team look bad.

account42 1y ago
Goodhart's Law in effect.

AngryData 1y ago

I use to report bugs all the time with details of the bug and what I was doing and if possible how to cause it. But then when you encounter the same bugs years later doing some very common task that you momentarily forgot to do your work around for, it made me wonder why I was wasting my time reporting it. These days I rarely report bugs unless it is brand new software released a few weeks ago at most, or a brand new release of older software with a new bug. If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed. So why waste the time? Im not getting paid for it, it likely won't be fixed, and 49/50 bugs I encounter are things that seem impossible to miss with any real QC. Doing decent bug reports as a user most of the time it feels like following the turnip truck to town picking up turnips that fell off the truck, giving them to the farmer, but knowing they will likely be thrown in the trash because they didn't care about them to start with. If they did they would have made sure to not overload the truck to start with and not be obviously dropping so many turnips on the side of the road and leaving them there.

selcuka 1y ago
> If something isn't completely breaking the use case of a program, or doesn't have any viable work around, I just don't expect it to ever get fixed Yep. That has always been the general industry sentiment [1]: > Here’s another bug that’s not worth fixing: if you have a bug that totally crashes your program when you open gigantic files, but it only happens to your single user who has OS/2 and who, for all you know, doesn’t even use large files. Well, don’t fix it. Worse things have happened at sea. Similarly I’ve generally given up caring about people with 16 color screens or people running off-the-shelf Windows 95 with no upgrades in 7 years. People like that don’t spend much money on packaged software products. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fixin/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/07/31/hard-assed-bug-fix...
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  You missed the important part: >But mostly, it’s worth fixing bugs. Even if they are “harmless” bugs, they may reduce the reputation of your company and your product, which, in the long run, will have a significant impact on your earnings. It’s hard to overcome the reputation of having a buggy product.

ryao 1y ago

In 2022 and 2023, I made a push to find and fix bugs in OpenZFS using static analysis tools. I found many obscure bugs. One was a theoretical issue that should have affected big endian systems and been an annoyance for users, but there were no bug reports saying anyone had been affected. After I opened a PR with a fix, people told me that they had been affected, but did not think it was worthwhile to file a bug report. This surprised me. This is the PR: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13968 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/13968

gpm 1y ago

Built in fun mini game: How far can you get the bug to move (only counting after you release your mouse) without the popup appearing. Multiple clicks are allowed.

hulitu 1y ago

> * Maybe sign in or create an account If you want bug reports, don't do it. Have an email address when one can submit bug reports.

paradox460 1y ago

For me the most fatal part of the big report loop is where you report a bug, and get radio silence, or a curt dismissal, and the bug lingers on. Telegram for MacOS has a bug where it will occasionally crash when you try to delete something. I reported it nearly 2 years ago. It's yet to be fixed On the flip side, I got some of Fireboard's pulse probes last year, and had an issue where they wouldn't connect to my Yoder smoker. Quick ticket and some easy debugging steps I was able to do more or less asynchronously, and a cause and fix was found: the Bluetooth stack on the smoker would crash after a while, so unplugging the smoker when it wasn't in use was an easy fix. The bug still remains in the firmware, but there is a solution that works for me, and so I'm happy with a functional product, while I wait for the firmware update

maeil 1y ago

I strongly recommend going a lot less heavy on the LLM generated writing on HN, it reads far less genuine than when people here right stuff themselves. Just in case you think it's the em-dashes that do it, it is isn't; it was clear by the end of the 2nd paragraph.

theyinwhy 1y ago

Great idea, not working on iOS Safari.

Leo-thorne 1y ago

Totally get this. I once spent days trying to get users to submit decent bug reports through a fancy form and got almost nothing useful. The moment we switched to a simple “click here to report” button with an optional note field, the volume and quality went way up. Simpler is better, especially when the user is already frustrated.

eabeezxjc 1y ago

I confirm, I do it myself. but 90% of my submissions do not result in any response.

notTooFarGone 1y ago
worse, support that is overly fixed on support sessions and calls to resolve bugs even when in the ticket it clearly states it's not reproducable, only a restart fixes it etc. Take my logs and everything you get but ffs make it observable enough so that you don't waste my time.

stevoski 1y ago

Your product is similar to one I own. I checked out your website. It’s good. Unsolicited advice: you gotta charge more for this product. A lot more. We charge up to $250/month or $3000/year. Some customers (companies you’ve most likely heard of) pay that, yearly in advance and have done for several years.

erremerre 1y ago

Because it is an extremely futile exercise. I have a bug in my Honor (200 pro) phone were after some time, whatsapp's notifications with no sounds are changed by the SO automatically to Gentle Notification (no popup, only number on icon) I want to have a popup, but without sound. I might have reported several times, well, they have not done anything about it. I also reported something to Lutris just to be told, not our problem wont fix. which is the same feeling of, why have I bother doing this. And after a few of those, if you have a bug, you moved on. In this case I regret going with Honor instead of Samsung, and it would be likely the last Honor phone I got and I do not recommend to anybody. And with Lutris, I would rather use windows and be able to see my screen instead of a black box when logging into epic. If you don't fix the bug, the user will stop reporting, and will find a workaround.

tim1994 1y ago

A couple of years ago I played PUBG which crashed occasionally. I rarely submitted bugs, even if it was as simple as pressing a button in the crash reporter. This is because sending the bug report took a while and blocked you from restarting and rejoining the ongoing game. This applies mostly to multiplayer games but if your app has a crash reporter, give the user a chance to restart the app and report the bug later.

SunlitCat 1y ago
The opposite would be something like the bug reporting system in Second Life by Linden Labs (an online world where you can be with a virtual avatar, doing stuff) (at least way back, i dunno if they still have that open). They had a public facing jira open, where people could file bugs and what not about the viewer (the client) and the world (the server). You didn't need some special account or something like that, just your normal Second Life account was enough to get access to that one. Drawback was, you were able to see what happens when filing bugs is easy. Of course, many people used it to file real bugs but also complained about stuff not working like they expected (or how it should work according to them, which brought other people up against them and so on...in the end you were able to read the latest drama here and there, right in the jira entries). Although, to be honest, i thought it was an awesome idea, but you when you open up an easy way for people to report bugs, you need an easy way to explain what bugs are and what not. :)

eithed 1y ago

This looks like bugherd.com

csomar 1y ago

Not potentially a customer because I have very few users that I can track if one of them have issues. So take my suggestions a bit lightly 1. I'd rather have/use a npm package then your minified/package script. You are not Google, so I am going to need some trust there and that happens by making this an open source package. 2. If I am going to implement this on my site, I'd not use that little bug. I'd rather have this custom design/integrated with the rest of my app. So provide API/functions/Hooks to use your library. 3. I'd never consider a one time payment (lifetime subscription) SaaS. That screams: I am going to take your money and disappear in a few months. Also, any product that doesn't have clear bandwidth quotas is probably missing in disclosure.

foxglacier 1y ago

This looks an awful lot like all the "contact us" forms that are mostly broken and give you no feedback as to whether the message got through or not. At least it's easy but you can bet half the sites that use it won't even be receiving the reports, let alone acting on them. In my desktop app, I ask users to email me in a global exception handler. My thinking is that they'll recognize that I don't want to be inundated with reports for the same bug over and over so they're probably the first to find it and it's worth reporting. And I do fix them all otherwise I would be getting spammed by the same reports over and over again.

supermatt 1y ago

> If you've ever had a user say “something’s broken” and then ghost you forever, you probably get where I’m coming from. As a consumer who reports bugs, I’d actually say the opposite problem is just as common — when the company ghosts you after you’ve taken the time to report an issue. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve used the official channels — bug trackers, support forums, contact forms — only to hear nothing back. No acknowledgement, no follow-up, no notification when it’s fixed. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a company let me know that a bug I reported was resolved. Reporting a bug to most companies feels like sending a wishlist to Santa. That’s why many people don’t bother. They assume it’s a waste of time — and most of the time, they’re right. Personally, if a company fails to engage over a bug report, I don’t waste my time reporting anything else. In many cases, I just move to the competition. I’m sure I’m not alone. If a user goes to the time of helping you fix your software, the least you can do is spend some time on them.

tonyedgecombe 1y ago
The only exception I’ve found to this in recent years is JetBrains. Every bug I’ve logged with them has been fixed.
carefulfungi 1y ago
Having run engineering teams for some reasonably popular open source products, my experience is that community reported issues can easily out-pace engineering capacity. For every user who reports a clear, reproducible defect, there 10 others who report non-reproducible issues, who conflate features with bugs, who ghost, who use issues for support or questions, who are just angry about something and think you're an idiot, who report (since fixed) defects against old versions, or who report duplicates to existing issues. It's a very noisy channel. It can lead to a crappy outcome for both the reporter who earnestly tried to help and for the developer who wishes they had the time to carefully address every reported issue but just don't. Sometimes, all that's feasible is making time to triage/acknowledge each issue in a reasonable timeframe and to be forthright about its prioritization. As an aside, I find your opinion that "if I give you my time in the form of a bug report, the least you can do is give me your time" to be common. We rarely have the right to demand another person's attention, though. Especially with respect to non-commercial open source hobbyist maintainers.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

I'll report bugs, give details — via multiple cumbersome steps, iff I can clearly track the status, follow up. Otherwise, even a one-click “send report”’popup isn't worth my effort. This is why I no longer bother reporting anything to Apple. Same crashes/errors keep on for years. I’m convinced those reports go to /fruit/null.

0points 1y ago

> Even non-technical users click it just because "the little bug looked fun." So you want non-bug reports from non-tech people. Why? From my experience, exactly those reports are the ones that will never be addressed.

infecto 1y ago

“Stupidly easy” is bad copy imo. I honestly did not want to scroll through the front page after seeing it. In a sentence it does not have nice flow and from a business perspective it feels immature. I would tighten up that copy a lot but that is just my opinion. Also, might be in the minority but I avoid any products that put ProductHunt flags on the page, especially prominently at the top.

NAHWheatCracker 1y ago

The first job I had as a software engineer was at a trucking company that had a desktop Swing application. If an exception happened, the user would get a pop-up with buttons to email support the stack trace or cancel. The email went to all the IT staff and someone would usually reply within an hour, often with a fix. The engineering work was atrocious looking back. I probably fixed 50 random NullPointerExceptions in my 3 years there this way. But, it was one of the most productive places I've worked at because everything was done simple and there were no barriers between users and developers.

NAHWheatCracker 1y ago

rbanffy 1y ago

I had a lot of success adding links and buttons to report bugs on error pages and messages. Doing that while whatever abnormal state led to the message is still hot allowed me to gather a lot of information about the state of the application to be attached to any bug report. Initially I used the Macintosh bomb icon for it, but some users found that too cryptic compared to a text message.

freehorse 1y ago

Maybe adding a clickable/highlighted actual url in the post to make it more stupidly easy to go to your website, if not on the title itself (not sure if you can add that now) could also be a good idea. For stupid people like me that spent more than 10 seconds after reading it trying to figure out where I should click.

jimkleiber 1y ago

Really excited to try this. 1) I'm surprised to not see the bugdrop feature in the admin section, which means I currently have to report the bug here :-) 2) I was also surprised that it didn't seem to need to confirm my email, seems standard these days. Otherwise, stoked to try this. I already reported a "bug" on your front page and it went very smoothly. 3) Didn't receive an email receipt confirming that the bug was reported after I had entered my email, not sure if that's planned or not. Thanks!

bgro 1y ago

Testing bugs is your full time job. Why should I spend my time doing it for, at best, free, but more likely pay to do so? And even then, the bug is almost always closed without fixing anyway.

kasajian 1y ago

I don't know if this is the case now, but about a decade ago, in order to report a Bug to Microsoft you had to create a Premier Support ticket, which cost $1000+, but free if it's a Bug. So basically, if what you report is not a Bug, determined by them, it's treated like a Tech Support ticket and no longer free. I recall discussing this with a representative and let them know that I'm basically doing them a favor by reporting the bug -- why would I want to take the chance to possibly have to pay for it if they happen to determine "it's not a bug -- it's a feature". I got the standard corporate-speak answer which I just waved off as ridiculous: "Look, we will absolutely not charge you if it's determined to be a bug"... :| I've since have seen Microsoft use User Voice and the products (at least Visual Studio) has a great way to give feedback to the team, something I've used multiple times, including for feature requests. And of course, for their Open Source products, they have Github Issues, which is awesome.

jimmoores 1y ago

JetBrains does a great job with this by actually rewarding users who report bugs with free licenses and such.

endoblast 1y ago

Yes! Similarly for text books, which are riddled with errors, generally speaking. They should have have an email address for reader-submitted errata printed in large friendly letters on the inside front cover.

davidmurdoch 1y ago

Same with engineers working on the code. Track issues in GitHub? They'll write bug reports. Track issues over in Jira, they no longer care enough.

Jzush 1y ago

Can confirm, I prefer to stew in silent rage unless I absolutely need others to know.

theodpHN 1y ago

Cute things that programing managers say: "Problems? We don't have any. In fact, I haven't seen a bug report in more than six months!"

watwut 1y ago

I stopped reporting bugs when projects started to deploy bots that close "stale" bugs. No, someone ignoring my issue for 3 months does not imply issue went away. I was cool when bugs waited for proper prioritization 6 months later. Ok, it took time, but someone is busy. When they are getting closed automatically, there is no reason to bother.

ringeryless 1y ago

yes, Kate editor is a classic example. one clicks the report a bug link in-app and immediately gets a login page. no one has time for this sort of thing. it indicates a disinterest in getting bug reports, making people do homework to report one. i switched editors and got back to work.

spejson 1y ago

I spent a lot of time working in the user research space and the disconnect between what users told me and what they did was so huge that I just built an AI that watches user sessions and figures out bugs and friction. Works well for like 90% of cases

account42 1y ago

As a user the best thing you can do to make me report bugs is to show that you are actually going to fix reported bugs. Taking my time to gather information that will effectively end up in /dev/null is the opposite of fun. Also important is to let me make sure I don't waste time reporting something that is already a known issue. The best way to do this is to have a public bug tracker. Given these preconditions acceptable effort only depends on how invested I am in the product.

dorianjp 1y ago

nice work, sounds like a decent niche to tap into for the right clients

ValdikSS 1y ago

The same applies for translation systems. I translate a bunch of open-source software, if the translation is on weblate, transifex or crowdin. I never going to translate .po files directly. It's just not worth it.