

Your App Sucks; One Star - skylarsch
http://skylarsch.com/2014/01/09/your-app-sucks-one-star.html

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makecheck
Exactly. It’s at the point where we practically need a required class in high
school to teach people how to interact constructively with the maintainers of
software. A particularly good class would be the one teaching people that
hardware and software configurations are incredibly complex, varying so much
that even the _best_ software will eventually fail to anticipate some issue.
There are problems that simply _cannot_ be found until a user talks to a
developer!

People who are angry enough to torpedo a project might not realize just how
easy some software fixes can be, _if the developer is told more about the
problem_. When users E-mail me about a problem, often I can fix it within
hours (or even minutes!) once I know what to look for. A return address is
also important because sometimes I have to ask follow-up questions; besides,
when I’m done I always want to send a link to the fixed version.

I’ve done open-source for a long time. In the beginning I was outright shocked
at how some people behaved, much like this article states: even though I had
not received a single E-mail (to my clearly-published address at the time), I
would dig up _scathing_ reviews of my stuff on web sites back in the day. I
used to be mad, and sometimes I wondered why I bothered to work on anything
(much less give it away for free). Eventually though I decided that I needed
to take _all_ input — even the “angry anonymous coward” kind — and use it as
fuel to improve whatever I could.

