[airza]

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.

[mmsc]

>for your users doing _free_ software testing for you!

In comparison to _paid_ software testing, which doesn't change the point at all: if they were paid to find bugs, they wouldn't be paid for useless and unactionable reports.

>you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard

Sometimes - and I'd wager most of the time - they are, yes, unless your product solely attracts technically competent and advanced users that can attempt to understand/reason about what is causing the issue.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> 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.

[keyringlight]

When a mozilla application crashed it'll ask you to leave a comment to try and help resolve the issue when it prompts to send crash info, and you used to be able to see all those comments on https://crash-stats.mozilla.org (it seems to be behind login or restricted access now). There was a lot of vitriol and unhelpful comments that any developer would need to wade through to get to anything to give them a lead

[Vilian]

It also leave a coredump, they can remove repeated entries and then filter by good comments

[tonyedgecombe]

I have a tiny bit of sympathy for this, I have received a bug report that said “Your software doesn’t work”.

I’d always reply though, usually with something equally terse.

[0points]

Most recently, a github user opened a issue on one of my projects and asked "Why should I use this instead of Y".

As a developer sharing my code online, I don't even know where to begin answering that.

This is typical non-tech spam.

[pasc1878]

No this is a valid request.

If a user wants to use a piece of software to do A and several different pieces of code do that - why should they choose yours.

What is your selling point.

Especially if they have been using the other product why should they switch to yours?

[Sohcahtoa82]

If I'm writing FOSS and someone asked me that, I'd just reply with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not making money from it, so trying to convince some random individual to use it is a waste of my time. Sure, I'll describe the features in the README and possibly include comparisons to other software, but I won't go out of my way to convince a specific rando just because they asked.