Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I think a much better way would be to just post a public email address for reporting bugs. That's what I'm doing for my (closed source) apps, and it works extremely well.

Even people with limited computer skills know how to use email. This ensures you get the maximum number of bug reports.

When you personally reply to emails (no automatic responses), people are extremely helpful. When I can't immediately reproduce a bug that a customer reported, I ask them a series of questions, and they almost always respond quickly. If you send clear instructions, you will get useful information even from people who have no clue what they are doing.

If you force people to fill out a lot of unnecessary info beforehand, you'll get less bug reports. If you send them automatic replies, they wont respond.




That works for small projects, but doesn't scale brilliantly. At some point, many projects need to handle more bug reports than one person can realistically handle in their spare time, and totally unstructured freeform text slows things down on top of that.


If it becomes too much work for a single person then you just find a second person. When that becomes too much you can find an entire team of people, all contacted by a single email address. This is how customer support is done.

Everybody is more satisfied this way, users get quick feedback that their problem is being looked at, developers get enough information put into the bug tracker to be useful in fixing the issue and the number of useless bugs to wade through goes down immensely.


Most projects and companies don't have the funds to sponsor that level customer support. The modern Internet economy works so well because marginal cost (and price) is tiny. Customer support takes that a way.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: