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> and I say this from more than a decade of experience in enterprise and end user-facing software that gets thousands of feedback/bug reports per day

> part of a triage team

You have to realize your perspective is very different from the perspective of someone building small-scale open source software.

Building small scale open source software, my time is even MORE valuable since I'm not even being paid to read your prose.

"All these 'thank you's and 'please's are annoyingly adding to the verbosity of the bug reports!" said no small-scale open source software maintainer, ever.

I would say that. I don't want to hear "thank you" -- I just want a clear bug report. "Thank you" often comes across as disgenuine, a plea to try to raise the priority of the bug.

I don't really know if it effects me in a major way, but if it even effects me at all, it probably would make me less likely to want to fix a bug.

Wow. I always say thank you and have never meant what you think, and it has never even crossed my mind that it could be read that way. I doubt it means what you think very often.

In a team I worked in many years ago, there was a general consensus that a manager saying "thanks" didn't come across well. It implied that the dev was doing a favour for that person and wanted to do so. Instead, they preferred something along the lines of "good work" or "great job" or similar. This indicated that the work was of value.

This was in person and in a single company, so is a bit different from issues raised by a stranger over the internet in a bug tracker.

Personally, if I don't know the person I say/write "thanks" because I mean it, especially if it's an open source project.

People are wonderfully complex :)

I would absolutely say that if I were receiving several bug reports a day with paragraphs of fluff.

Plenty do. I've even seen one include that in their email signature.

Thank you's are literally the only form of payment small scale open source developers tend to get. If no one cares about your project or likes it or shows appreciation then why bother with it or at least why bother responding to issues?

Perhaps adding some prose along the lines of "Thanks for spending your time on this, I really enjoy using it" to these bug reports is the payment.

For some reason I always think of an episode from The Wire. Rawls is dressing down McNulty for his latest infraction and orders him to have a report to the deputy tomorrow morning, and the points should have "little dots next to them. The deputy likes dots."

Since then I always separate and mark specific items in a report, usually with bullet points. It turns out pretty often, the deputy does, in fact, like dots. But it's also important to avoid duplication.

Figures, lot us figures

I tend to fill my report with figures having self-contained captions. That is the only thing I expect a busy reader to read. The rest of the text is a note to self.

> That doesn't mean they should write prose in their reports.

I, too, would prefer bug reports written in verse.

  It won't do what I want when I click it,
  So now I will open a ticket.
  It should do the right thing
  And not be a pain,
  Would you please help me out now and fix it?

iambic pentameter or haiku? my automated bug report diagnostic tools only read prose written by the Bard, so if you choose the wrong meter, your bug gets tossed to the "won't fix" category

I kind of want that to exist, actually

It would be sweet if you could configure the forms and meters that it would accept.

I can already hear the next start-up pitch:

"We use AI to convert inhuman proze into haikus. Our software improves customer service satisfaction by 30%."