Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Or have proper analytics. If a user emails you and says "It crashes after a few hours" rather than feeling bad for them, you ask them what their steam/game id is and you look them up in the crash reporter system and see exactly what happens rather than relying on a few programmer consumers doing the work for you.

View on HN

But not analytics that are too good, or certain people will write a lot of inflammatory articles about how your software is nothing but evil spyware.

Seriously, though, having a robust and automatic crash reporting system very much helps track down bugs you're never going to get a good report on or be able to directly reproduce.

It's not really that hard to do this: ask bug reporters to attach their logs. Don't just take them preemptively "just in case".

If I asked users to attach a bug report file, most of them would complain and tell me to stop waisting their time and get the problem fixed. I have many times explained to users that I found their issue in our reporting and have not ever got a negative response.

The average user does not give two shits that you can see exactly what line of code their instance of your game crashed at. They want to play a video game and not play find the bug with you.

The vast majority of users would not even be as nice as to email you saying there was a crash. They would just immediately complain on twitter or refund the product if it wasn’t resolved without any interaction.

You're in a thread talking about Linux users who file good bug reports.

The average user also has no idea what/how much information is contained in those automated reports. If you are just sending a build ID and a stack trace, sure. If you are sending memory dumps (even partial) or associating those stack dumps with identifying information (e.g. steam IDs) then you really should be asking for informed consent before you do that. And no, it being a common practice to just collect as much information as you can does not make it an OK practice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com