LWN: Comments on "Lost user questions and GitHub"

Lost user questions and GitHub

robbe — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 11:03:29 +0000

I found the number of 300 questions per day pretty low. For such a large service ... and for such a large team. Having 15 minute per question is not bad, but maybe these tickets are harder nuts than I thought.

Lost user questions and GitHub

raven667 — Sat, 28 May 2016 14:04:42 +0000

Although this pains me to say, my mistake. I took your reference to "one minute" to be more colloquial usage rather than a specific reference to the article, changing the discussion to one about how long a user should have to flounder about looking for appropriate contact information, rather than about how to present the information so that the user can file their report quickly and efficiently.

Lost user questions and GitHub

bfields — Fri, 27 May 2016 21:52:22 +0000

Eh, I don't know, obviously there's value even to automatic bug reporting--it may be the only way to catch those rare race conditions, for example. Depending on the details, I might prefer to make it easy to complain, and then invest in filtering.

Lost user questions and GitHub

andresfreund — Fri, 27 May 2016 21:06:28 +0000

> Talking about "one minute of looking" is kind of moving the goalposts to avoid the discussion.

Huh? Upthread:

> GitHub's server logs indicate that most visitors who file support requests spend less than one minute on the repository page before contacting support

And that's what lsl responded to in https://lwn.net/Articles/688808/

Lost user questions and GitHub

raven667 — Fri, 27 May 2016 21:01:32 +0000

Of course not, but we are specifically talking about cases where the contact information is difficult to find and bugs are confusing to report, where it takes more than 5 minutes to find out the information because it is buried or the developer hasn't thought clearly about how the process works for someone who isn't already a member of the project (doesn't have Github account already for example). Talking about "one minute of looking" is kind of moving the goalposts to avoid the discussion.

Lost user questions and GitHub

andresfreund — Fri, 27 May 2016 20:41:03 +0000

Valuing your own time isn't the same thing as assuming that the reporter of an issue is dumb. And reporting after a minute of looking at something comes pretty close to not valuing the responder's time on the reporter's side.

Lost user questions and GitHub

raven667 — Fri, 27 May 2016 20:21:10 +0000

I couldn't disagree more strongly, your comment seems to imply that you do not value anyone you feel is not as smart as you are or who has different experience than you, if you are having problems with your users or other developers being unable to find the right contact information, maybe the information is too difficult to find and comply with. I'm not down with the idea that a program was difficult to write that it should be difficult to use, or provide feedback on.

Lost user questions and GitHub

lsl — Fri, 27 May 2016 14:18:08 +0000

> GitHub's server logs indicate that most visitors who file support requests spend less than one minute on the repository page before contacting support, she said; projects need to optimize for that and put their contact information where it cannot be missed.

I don't know. It's somewhat hard to imagine that the kind of people who don't even take a single minute to read and think before firing off an email to an arbitrary unrelated address are the crowd I want to optimize for.

It's optimizing for the entirely wrong thing. When there's already not enough time to deal with all the requests coming in, shouldn't I optimize for those submitters that have done their homework (and thus not only found the contact addresses but also the SubmittingPatches or ReportingBugs documents)? Seems more fair to me.

It's unfortunate that the folks at Github have to deal with the fallout.

Lost user questions and GitHub

mathstuf — Fri, 27 May 2016 03:31:11 +0000

If by triaging you mean managing tags, milestones, and assignees (or even being an assignee), yes. Triaging by comment is public though. I've pointed out numerous obsolete bugs via comment before. Usually a developer will come by and close if they're still around :) .

Lost user questions and GitHub

misc — Thu, 26 May 2016 14:12:51 +0000

Correct me if I am wrong, but triaging on github imply to have commit access, that's kinda a problem if you are ok to give triage to people, but do not want them to mess with the repo ?

(other solutions is to use a bot, or a dedicated application, I guess)