How often do you submit a bug-report or feature request to a product (or library you use?)
I think I've never reported a bug to Slack or Discord - two proprietary applications. Not that there are no bugs and I did not have feature requests.
I just don't know where to report them and I don't think they will care much. Maybe there is a "support" address, but my experience with many similar companies is that the support will explain to me why it is a feature and not a bug.
I started to use Zulip, which is an alternative to the Slack and Discord, just a few weeks ago. I already found and reported 3 bugs and had 1 feature request. 2 bugs were already fixed. The 3rd one I reported only two days ago, but it was already confirmed. (BTW The same bug exists in WhatsApp and probably many other applications and it is probably actually a bug in Android and not in the applications.)
And the feature request? I'll probably implement it and send a pull-request.
Question
How often do you submit bug-reports and feature requests?
Does it depend on the project/product being open source?
Top comments (4)
For OSS projects, especially small ones, I try to submit fixes rather than bug reports when I can. Feature requests hardly ever, they usually get ignored anyway. People have enough to do.
For proprietary software I don’t report things any more. Between the terrible triaging, “you’re holding it wrong” and ghosting it’s not worth it. IntelliJ is the only exception, they are really good at addressing issues.
No. The primary driving factor in providing feedback is our dependency on said resource.
Bug Reports: Often with open source software. But it generally depends on how easy it is to do, if it's on github and the are signs of life in the issues and PRs.
Feature Requests: Rarely, less than a handful a year. I have low expectations. But generally the same with Bug Reports, with less frequency.
If I include my own repositories in my answer, then very often, especially feature requests. I use GitHub Projects, and thus Issues and PRs, to keep track of what I'm working on.
If I don't count my projects.... For bugs, whenever I encounter one. For feature requests, occasionally but not often. In the past year, I submitted issues to around 9 or 10 repositories (not including mine). Maybe around 12 issues total (multiple to a couple repos). Around 1 per month. More of these were probably bug reports than feature requests.
Yes. I can't remember ever submitting a bug report or feature request to a closed source product.