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by throwway120385 494 days ago
There's also a level of professionalism depending on the product. When I'm responsible for an MSP team I'm very polite to them and always try to get them good, detailed, high-quality information when I'm telling them about problems with their work product, because I want them to do good work quickly and that's the best way to do that.
1 comments
ryandrake 494 days ago
Yea, I'm not sure it's open-source vs other software. It's public vs. professional insiders.

My company's bug tracker is mostly internally-filed bugs, but accepts bugs from the public. The difference in tone and attitude is night and day. The public-filed bugs can be wild, varying across: Rude, entitled, arrogant, demanding, incoherent, insulting, irrelevant, impatient... They are also the worst when it comes to actually including enough information to investigate. Frequently filed without logs, without reproduction steps, sometimes without even saying what the filer thinks is wrong. We get bugs with titles "It doesn't work" and with a text description that reads like a fever dream from someone very unwell.

We do have strong personalities among employees, but bug reports tend to be professionally and competently written, contain enough information to debug, and always, always leave out insults and personal attacks. The general public (at least many of the ones technical enough to file bug reports) does not seem to have the emotional regulation required to communicate professionally and respectfully.

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kelnos 494 days ago
> Frequently filed without logs, without reproduction steps, sometimes without even saying what the filer thinks is wrong.

In projects where this is a problem, I've made an issue template that clearly requests all the stuff I think I'll need. There's a big note at the top of the template that says it's not optional and that if it isn't filled out fully, I'll close the issue without comment.

And then I do that, every time. Sometimes they fill it out and reopen, sometimes they don't. Either way, I don't end up wasting time trying to help people who don't respect my time.

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