6 ms·

100% agree. If it's someone else's project, they have full authority to decide what is and isn't an issue. With large enough projects, you're going to have eno

by ok123456 10mo ago

100% agree. If it's someone else's project, they have full authority to decide what is and isn't an issue. With large enough projects, you're going to have enough bad actors, people who don't read error messages, and just downright crazy people. Throw in people using AI for dubious purposes like CVE inflation, and it's even worse.

nutjob2 10mo ago
Don't forget the rude, entitled, and aggressive, they are legion. It's simply a great idea. The mindset should be 'understand what's happening', not 'this is the software's fault'. The discussion area also serves as a convenient explanation/exploration of the surrounding issues that is easy to find. It reduces the maintainer's workload and should be the default.
- shevy-java 10mo ago
  [flagged]
NewJazz 10mo ago
Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. That ghostty finds discussions to be a better way to triage user requests/issues is somewhat quirky, although a perfectly valid option. As is just using issues, imo. Just good to make sure users know how to report an issue, and what information to include.
- mitchellh 10mo ago
  To be clear, I think discussions on the whole as a product are pretty bad. I'm not happy having to use them, but given my experience trying different approaches across multiple "popular" projects on GH, this approach has so far been the least bad. Although I'm still sad about it. > Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. Agreed. This highlights GitHub's issue management system being inadequate. (Note: I'm the creator/lead of Ghostty)
cik 10mo ago
You're 100% correct. I had a CVE reported to me in ~2022, shortly after the ChatGPT launch. I spent 4 hours slicing and dicing the issue, responding to how it was wrong, linking to background information, specific lines in the code, and then asking for or what am I missing. The response was literally "shrugs AI". Good for them.
- stinkbeetle 10mo ago
  Yeah but the article / post linked does not say that they won't look at reports of bugs or security problems, just that they are using issues to manage things they have decided are issues that should be worked on, and so public reporting using issues tickets will mess up that system they have. It's purely about their project's use of the issues system in github. Unfortunately there is no such magic bullet for trawling through bug reports from users, but pushing more work out to the reporter can be reasonably effective at avoiding that kind of time wasting. Require that the reporters communicate responsively, that they test things promptly, that they provide reproducers and exact recipes for reproduction. Ask that they run git bisect / creduce / debug options / etc. Proactively close out bugs or mark them appropriately if reporters don't do the work.
ozim 10mo ago
I believe most of it is people expecting stuff to work differently, not having time to wrap their head around proper usage of system, because they need specific outcome and they don't need mastery of the tool. Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything. Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool? I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.
- Hendrikto 10mo ago
  > If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box IME, people cannot even articulate what they want when the know what they want, let alone when they don’t even understand what they want in the first place.
- machomaster 10mo ago
  It is weird to push the idea that Facebook is some kind of pinacle of good and easy to use UI. That's the first one. It's quite the opposite, with people constantly complaining how bad, clunky and confusing Facebook is. And it is not the recent trend either. It has always been this way and e.g. VK has always had a better UI/UX that Facebook (and Telegram's is better that Whatsapp's).
  - philipallstar 10mo ago
    But still, compared to something like email, the previous standard for most people, Facebook was an unbelievable step forward. People complain about anything.
    - machomaster 10mo ago
      Facebook is a step forward in terms of features. But it is a clear regression in terms of UI, easiness, usability, understandability of email. Email is very simple in both concept and practice.
throwaway81523 10mo ago
The trouble here is that github issues is crap. Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc. Github issues is mostly a discussion system that was so inadequate that they supplemented it with another discussion system.
- codeflo 10mo ago
  > Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc. As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
  - trinix912 10mo ago
    IMO it still has poor discoverability, constant filtering between the triage status flags and non-flagged stuff, stuff that might not have been flagged by accident, reporters putting tags on issues themselves, issues can only be closed by non-admins rather than truly deleted, random people complaining about this or that on unrelated tickets... It all stems from the fact that all issues are in this one large pool rather than there being a completely separate list with already vetted stuff that nobody else can write into.
    - smallnix 10mo ago
      Sounds like it could be fixed by making it configurable to hide all issues without a certain tag (or auto-apply a hiding tag) for the issues "landing page".
  - asdfaoeu 10mo ago
    This still puts the onus on the developers to categorise the issues which I'm guessing they don't want to do.
whythough1234 10mo ago
Agreed. We have to stop this “first-class” citizen for anything but general communication platforms. This allows creating a barrier between specialists and common users.
Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago
> people who don't read error messages One of my pet peeves that I will never understand. I do not expect users to understand what an error means, but I absolutely expect them to tell me what the error says. I try to understand things from the perspective of a non-technical user, but I cannot fathom why even a non-technical user would think that they don't need to include the contents of an error message when seeking help regarding the error. Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error". Maybe I have too much faith in people. I've seen even software engineers become absolutely blind when dealing with errors. I had a time 10 years ago as a tester when I filed a bug ticket with explicit steps that results in a "broken pipe error". The engineer closed the ticket as "Can Not Reproduce" with a comment saying "I can't complete your steps because I'm getting a 'broken pipe error'".
- sowbug 10mo ago
  If I can victim-blame for a moment, I don't know what my mom is supposed to do when a streaming service on her TV says there's a problem and will she please report a GUID to the support department. No, my mom is not eidetic, and no, she's not going to upload a photo of her living room. Totally agree with you, though, when the full error message is at least capable of being copied to the clipboard.
  - cinntaile 10mo ago
    Most (all?) photo apps include a crop function, allowing your mom just crop out everything else.
    - monkey34 10mo ago
      I hope you’re being sarcastic. If not, expecting someone’s parent to know how to use a photo app’s crop functionality just to communicate an error state is a failure of understanding typical streaming app users.
      - cinntaile 10mo ago
        I wasn't being sarcastic. This is not a case of not being capable of doing something, it's about not knowing the functionality exists. Cropping is very simple. I assumed the GP didn't know about it either or he would have taught his mom already. Could the manufacturer solve this in a better way? Probably but that won't solve the issue the customer has now.

nutjob2 10mo ago

Don't forget the rude, entitled, and aggressive, they are legion. It's simply a great idea. The mindset should be 'understand what's happening', not 'this is the software's fault'. The discussion area also serves as a convenient explanation/exploration of the surrounding issues that is easy to find. It reduces the maintainer's workload and should be the default.

shevy-java 10mo ago
[flagged]

NewJazz 10mo ago

Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. That ghostty finds discussions to be a better way to triage user requests/issues is somewhat quirky, although a perfectly valid option. As is just using issues, imo. Just good to make sure users know how to report an issue, and what information to include.

mitchellh 10mo ago
To be clear, I think discussions on the whole as a product are pretty bad. I'm not happy having to use them, but given my experience trying different approaches across multiple "popular" projects on GH, this approach has so far been the least bad. Although I'm still sad about it. > Yeah but a good issue tracker should be able to help you filter that stuff out. Agreed. This highlights GitHub's issue management system being inadequate. (Note: I'm the creator/lead of Ghostty)

cik 10mo ago

You're 100% correct. I had a CVE reported to me in ~2022, shortly after the ChatGPT launch. I spent 4 hours slicing and dicing the issue, responding to how it was wrong, linking to background information, specific lines in the code, and then asking for or what am I missing. The response was literally "shrugs AI". Good for them.

stinkbeetle 10mo ago
Yeah but the article / post linked does not say that they won't look at reports of bugs or security problems, just that they are using issues to manage things they have decided are issues that should be worked on, and so public reporting using issues tickets will mess up that system they have. It's purely about their project's use of the issues system in github. Unfortunately there is no such magic bullet for trawling through bug reports from users, but pushing more work out to the reporter can be reasonably effective at avoiding that kind of time wasting. Require that the reporters communicate responsively, that they test things promptly, that they provide reproducers and exact recipes for reproduction. Ask that they run git bisect / creduce / debug options / etc. Proactively close out bugs or mark them appropriately if reporters don't do the work.

ozim 10mo ago

I believe most of it is people expecting stuff to work differently, not having time to wrap their head around proper usage of system, because they need specific outcome and they don't need mastery of the tool. Downside is that "Facebookization" created a trend where people expect everything to be obvious and achievable in minimal amount of clicks, without configuring anything. Now "LLMization" will push the trend forward. If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box, why would I need to click around or type some arcane configuration for a tool? I don't think in general it is bad - it is only bad for specialist software where you cannot use that software without deeper understanding, but the expectation is still there.

Hendrikto 10mo ago
> If I can make a video with Sora by typing what I want in the box IME, people cannot even articulate what they want when the know what they want, let alone when they don’t even understand what they want in the first place.
machomaster 10mo ago
It is weird to push the idea that Facebook is some kind of pinacle of good and easy to use UI. That's the first one. It's quite the opposite, with people constantly complaining how bad, clunky and confusing Facebook is. And it is not the recent trend either. It has always been this way and e.g. VK has always had a better UI/UX that Facebook (and Telegram's is better that Whatsapp's).
- philipallstar 10mo ago
  But still, compared to something like email, the previous standard for most people, Facebook was an unbelievable step forward. People complain about anything.
  - machomaster 10mo ago
    Facebook is a step forward in terms of features. But it is a clear regression in terms of UI, easiness, usability, understandability of email. Email is very simple in both concept and practice.

throwaway81523 10mo ago

The trouble here is that github issues is crap. Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc. Github issues is mostly a discussion system that was so inadequate that they supplemented it with another discussion system.

codeflo 10mo ago
> Most bug trackers have ways to triage submissions. When a rando submits something, it has status "unconfirmed". Developers can then recategorize it, delete it, mark it as invalid, confirm that it's a real bug and mark it "confirmed", etc. As far as I'm aware, most large open GitHub projects use tags for that kind of classification. Would you consider that too clunky?
- trinix912 10mo ago
  IMO it still has poor discoverability, constant filtering between the triage status flags and non-flagged stuff, stuff that might not have been flagged by accident, reporters putting tags on issues themselves, issues can only be closed by non-admins rather than truly deleted, random people complaining about this or that on unrelated tickets... It all stems from the fact that all issues are in this one large pool rather than there being a completely separate list with already vetted stuff that nobody else can write into.
  - smallnix 10mo ago
    Sounds like it could be fixed by making it configurable to hide all issues without a certain tag (or auto-apply a hiding tag) for the issues "landing page".
- asdfaoeu 10mo ago
  This still puts the onus on the developers to categorise the issues which I'm guessing they don't want to do.

whythough1234 10mo ago

Agreed. We have to stop this “first-class” citizen for anything but general communication platforms. This allows creating a barrier between specialists and common users.

Sohcahtoa82 10mo ago

> people who don't read error messages One of my pet peeves that I will never understand. I do not expect users to understand what an error means, but I absolutely expect them to tell me what the error says. I try to understand things from the perspective of a non-technical user, but I cannot fathom why even a non-technical user would think that they don't need to include the contents of an error message when seeking help regarding the error. Instead, it's "When I do X, I get an error". Maybe I have too much faith in people. I've seen even software engineers become absolutely blind when dealing with errors. I had a time 10 years ago as a tester when I filed a bug ticket with explicit steps that results in a "broken pipe error". The engineer closed the ticket as "Can Not Reproduce" with a comment saying "I can't complete your steps because I'm getting a 'broken pipe error'".

sowbug 10mo ago
If I can victim-blame for a moment, I don't know what my mom is supposed to do when a streaming service on her TV says there's a problem and will she please report a GUID to the support department. No, my mom is not eidetic, and no, she's not going to upload a photo of her living room. Totally agree with you, though, when the full error message is at least capable of being copied to the clipboard.
- cinntaile 10mo ago
  Most (all?) photo apps include a crop function, allowing your mom just crop out everything else.
  - monkey34 10mo ago
    I hope you’re being sarcastic. If not, expecting someone’s parent to know how to use a photo app’s crop functionality just to communicate an error state is a failure of understanding typical streaming app users.
    - cinntaile 10mo ago
      I wasn't being sarcastic. This is not a case of not being capable of doing something, it's about not knowing the functionality exists. Cropping is very simple. I assumed the GP didn't know about it either or he would have taught his mom already. Could the manufacturer solve this in a better way? Probably but that won't solve the issue the customer has now.