Have you ever been scared or hesitant about reporting flaws or bugs to a community with a strong staunch fanbase ??
Obviously there are different ways of reporting and starting discussions, but I brought up the courage to report a flaw on a subreddit (not to be named) that I knew is very sensitive to criticisme, and I was flooded with downvotes and even was subject to gaslighting, so I gave up on that software and became even more hesitant about reporting problems on other FOSS communities .
Is this mindset very prevalent among all open source communities? have you faced something similar ?
I hear what you are saying.
but did you ever consider how github could be a stop gate to many many tech illeterate people, who don’t know how to post an issue or report a bug using github, having to sign-up to website they might never use again, figure up how to fill-in the ever so eleborate issue forms, and have to activate 2FA everytime they want to comment on the issue weeks after it has been posted. that’s why you see many project subreddits are full with bug reports and help requests. its easiers for the commons.
Git technology is def a godsend for developpers but could also be a barrier to less techy people how don’t know how to report, or if it is a problem in the software or something they are doing wrong. that’s why I think we need to be more welcoming and less standoffish to people with less know how.
Maybe having a simple form on the project website that can mirror the bug reports to github is oneway to provide people with an easier solution to give feedback that they might not give otherwise.
I guess at the end of the day you’d have to decide for yourself whether you’d prefer submitting bugs to a social media spot (if the project has one), which is a lot more open to drama from others than on GitHub (which is not to say that drama doesn’t happen on Git[Hub/Lab/etc]).
A couple of issues with this:
It’d be easier to spam / fill with junk, and would require either a custom solution that every project would have to reinvent the wheel on, or another centralized service that acts as the “gatekeeper” to spam… in which you just have the GitHub issue all over again
This method doesn’t give developers an easy way to respond/follow-up on the report. It is very common for “bug reports” to not actually contain enough information on how to reproduce the problem unfortunately. You could say, add a field for an email address (which would need to be filtered out before posting to Git and stored somewhere / tied to the issue that gets opened) but I think most people would be against giving every single individual project their email address than GitLab/GitHub/etc. Additionally if we’re focusing on tech illiterate people as you mentioned, its unlikely they’d even respond to a follow-up email.
No, most projects have a support email. I rarely see them not include that.