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

> 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/ GitHub repo (it can be forked, self-hosted, etc): https://github.com/KaliedaRik/sc-screen-recorder

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.

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.

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.

> screenshots, browser info, even console logs if they hit an error.

Possibly disclosing sensitive information (which the user may not realize).

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.

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

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.

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.

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://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.

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.

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. :)