

Ask HN: How to deal with anonymous rants about your project - makecheck

There are thousands of open-source projects out there, so lots of maintainers.  Who among you has seen this problem...<p>Basically, a user downloads your software, and finds a bug; but, instead of actually <i>telling</i> you about it, they angrily "go public" and rant somewhere.  If you're really unlucky, they'll choose a place with enough pageviews that your project's reputation is quickly tarred, and others wonder why they should even bother to download.<p>What's really insulting about this behavior, is that these are people who have sent no E-mail, filed no bug reports, and donated no money, code, time, or anything else.  The bugs can be obscure, and even hard to reproduce.  These people feel entitled to shred your years of work: they spend a few minutes clicking on something, and head straight for the forums.<p>How do you deal with this?<p>I can tell you as a maintainer that it hurts, but I still try to suck it up, and I respond to even destructive criticism with <i>action</i>.  If I can figure out what problem the person is referring to, I fix it, even if I'll never be able to tell them that it's fixed (and they probably wouldn't care if I did).<p>But sometimes I think people need to be educated again.  Clearly anonymous posters feel invincible in a way that wouldn't translate to real life.  Imagine coming to my house, receiving a wonderful free meal, and then throwing it in my face while screaming how horrible it is because it's missing a dash of salt?
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inerte
Yesterday at work a man came to me and talked about one of his superiors who
criticized this Excel file he (the first man) made. He made the Excel file
because he needed to run some reports, and then word spread around and he
shared the file and it got to this particular superior, who called him and
complained that there were not enough good data filters.

makecheck... (the first) man was pissed.

There was also this man who used to work 2-3 hours per day creating some crazy
Excel files. 16 blocks of with dozens of cells with relevant information, 1000
rows. I made some software for him which generated 99% of the Excel file in 10
minutes. His first comment? Something along the lines of "inerte, this is not
very good, it's taking me 10 minutes to fill the 1% remaining".

From 3 hours down to 10 minutes, and he complained.

Anyway, I'm sharing these two tales to tell you that IT HAPPENS (yes, sadly).

So here's what I think you should do. Fix the bug, say that you did, try to
contact the person who found it, and move on.

And see the bright side. Someone used your app, found a bug on it, and now you
have the OPPORTUNITY to show how quickly you fixed the bug and how you tried
to make your users happy. On the brighter side, what happened and could happen
is something AWESOME. Someone actually found and tried your software. You have
users! And they found bugs for you that you were not able to! And now you have
the chance to show others how do you respond!

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jarsj
May be you don't have a good enough way for the user to report it to you. If
you know your product is going to have problems, have a always visible
feedback form and a live chat one click away from your users.

