
Ask HN: A Plea for Public Bug Trackers - mschuster91
In the "old days", when I submitted a email to support@example.com, I usually got a reply email with a ticket ID# and a "Your request has been processed and will be answered shortly", followed by a reply of a CS rep a couple of days later.<p>But a worrying habit these days, as more and more software gets sold/distributed through app stores and "integrated" solutions like Steam is that a majority of the feedback comes through the "rating" system only, no way of contacting a real human.<p>So, when I have a problem with a software, I'm usually lost with searching on Google, where for most of queries crap sites like Quora appear where the content is visible only after a registration, or when it's driver/DLL related, a bunch of scammer sites are the first three Google pages and only then a blog entry written three years ago comes up where someone encountered the same DLL-problem with the software I use and posts a solution.<p>With public open-source software, the bugtrackers are mostly without single-sign-on (when a platform exists which provides SSO for the service, like a game account or in case of Wikimedia's Mediawiki, the Wikimedia SSO) - why?! WHY DO I HAVE TO GO THE EXTRA STEP AND REGISTER AN ACCOUNT TO REPORT SOMETHING YOU F..D UP?!<p>Or, on bugtrackers where there's no backend SSO architecture, there's no way to sign in using FB, Twitter or any other OAuth provider. WHY?<p>What is it what keeps YOU or YOUR COMPANY from providing a public bug tracker? After all, you're likely to have an internal bug tracker for the dev team already, so why don't provide a "public" one linked to the internal one?<p>After all, if customers can help each other (or even you as the developer) you saved money on support and developer time...
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nknighthb
I don't disagree with your frustration at all, but there are some actual
reasons the problem exists. Some of them are:

* A public bug tracker is effectively a forum that must be policed for spam and other nonsense.

* You are assuming too much about internal bug trackers. Some companies really don't have them, and some that do have them, make poor use of them. These aren't necessarily clueless, broken companies, either, some of them work very efficiently with ad-hoc processes that simply don't include anything you'd recognize as a bug tracker. (Obviously these are small companies.)

* About "linking" an internal and public bug tracker: Finicky, error prone, administrative time sink.

* General administrative overhead even for internal bug trackers can be high. I know one company for which two full-time positions carry job descriptions that amount to "bugzilla admin". They make some of the best use of Bugzilla I've ever seen, but it costs a lot of time and money.

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mschuster91
What did not fit in the 2k character limit:

1) customers think that app store feedbacks are bug-report forms, too (the
Android store is FULL of such "ratings")

2) app store ratings are uni-directional, there's no way (in most app stores)
to contact a customer who reported a specific problem and help him to track it
down.

3) as a user, I feel helpless because there's no real, easy way to contact the
developer and submit a bug report. Some devs include e-mail addresses, but I
can only textually describe the problem instead of attaching logcat output,
stack traces etc.

4) For non-app-store-apps, the lack of public bugtrackers makes me feel quite
lost as a customer. Instead of having a searchable public database of bugs,
workarounds and info, either I get nothing at all, or at best a crappy FAQ
database whose contents are mostly copied from the payment processor and deal
with payment problems.

