[CoolGuySteve]

You don’t hear back because almost always your bug is a duplicate of some other one. They can’t share the original with you because it contains data from another customer or from inside the company.

Almost nobody is the first reporter in an OS with billions of users. The only useful thing about those long dupe lists was being able to scan them for one with easier repro steps.

But sometimes that duplicate marking is wrong or some subtly different issue so they ask you if it still reproduces in whatever version contains the fix before closing it.

[toast0]

That makes sense. But when you take 3-5 years to respond to my bug report, I'm going to take at least 3 months to respond to your response. And I'm probably not filing more bugs, because chances are I won't be at my current employer by the time you reply.

When you consitently burn bug reporters, sooner or later there's nobody to file bugs.

[CoolGuySteve]

Because that's probably how long it took for someone to prioritize it.

Even if it's not fixed by the dupe ticket, the volume of bug reports makes it almost certain another ticket for the same issue will come up. And if it doesn't then it probably wasn't that relevant to anyone.