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Do you ever get scared of being eating up by a community for reporting problems. (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by mtchristo@lemm.ee to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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 ?

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[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 3 points 1 year ago

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]).

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.

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.