Eh… Isn’t that fairly close to the definition of entitlement (i.e. you complain when you have no reason to)?
Instead, it is more productive to develop strategies to ignore the noise from entitled voices. You do not need to respond to them. You do not need to convince them. You do not have to keep them happy.
There is: it discourages people from acting entitled.
I believe this is called “please use the template when submitting an issue” and we all know how that goes.
I’ve honestly found myself laughing like a madman at GitHub issues where the maintainer calmly and repeatedly tries to explain to the increasingly disgruntled reporter to UTFT (use the fine template)
Also, "Issues" should really, really have a different name.
Github could improve the experience 10 fold.
The garbage bug reports I see on my projects and others are like, either one sentence or rambling nonsense. The templates don't help much, these users will do their best to ignore them.
As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is probably very welcome.
Most bug reports, especially on complex software should follow something resembling a kind of wizard/state machine (e.g. state: OS has/has not been specified) but instead everything is a text box with a dump of contextual questions, half of which don't even necessarily make sense for the specific bug report you're making.
>As long as you're not doing that, your bug report is probably very welcome.
When barriers are thrown up to the other kind of person it will often make it seem like they are very unwelcome even when they're not - e.g. the first message you see may be a hostile list of "DON'T DO THESE 5 THINGS" because somebody once did each of those things. I'm pretty sure a lot of good bug reports are lost this way.
Taking and cropping a screenshot takes more time than just uploading the plaintext log file conveniently and lovingly placed right next to the executable. Please, just upload the file. Please.
The project was a Big Deal in the circles I was in. Hundreds of thousands of people knew of it, we had hundreds to thousands of active users each with dozens of clients. It was so stressful and I caught so much abuse that I exited software altogether. We did get some money, but my cut worked out to $60 a month.
I still write and publish code, but I don't work on anything that anyone wants to use. I don't get involved in communities and I don't interact with users.
And you know what? I am much happier now.
The solution is quite simple really.
1) have your repo private and release only tarball files or have a read only repo with no pull/merge request functionnality 2) do not use an issue tracker
Basically, do not use a forge such as github/gitlab, at least not publicly. Problem solved.
That works both ways though, a maintainer cannot expect users to not complain (so they have to develop management strategies where they ignore the noise, rather than try to engage/capitulate). A maintainer can also not lament when users do not feel the desire to contribute monetarily.