But ultimately as a non-paid tester of Windows I'm under no obligation to report non-security bugs in any particular way. I like reporting them through twitter and blog posts.
But ultimately as a non-paid tester of Windows I'm under no obligation to report non-security bugs in any particular way. I like reporting them through twitter and blog posts.
But the feedback hub is an abyss of random complaints to filter through. Sometimes we'd see items like "Windows wouldn't save my word document and now I hate windows" and being on the networking team were like "uhhh thanks"
An example is the MediaFoundation AAC encoder in Windows 10. It's unusable, due to a bug that randomly introduces oink artifacts into the output. I submitted it to Feedback Hub, but of course it was too niche to get upvotes. Looked around, OBS Studio ran into the same issue and had to switch to a different AAC encoder, so it wasn't a rare problem. Someone even tried posting on Microsoft Answers reproducing it with the Windows SDK sample, and got only a generic response. Finally someone got through, and the product team mentioned that this was the first they'd heard of it... but at least it's actually fixed for Windows 11.
The design of Feedback Hub partly encourages the current behavior. It used to have a very visible categorization on the left side, but now they're easily missable drop-downs, and the auto-suggestions are completely bonkers. You can type up a bug about graphics errors and it suggests the accessibility and first-time install categories. Lack of curation also doesn't help; there's something to be said for having a light touch, but there are posts consisting of just random letters that have been there for years.
Maybe it wasn't a bug (hah!) but they could have come back to me and at least told me they'd looked at it and it wasn't. I'd have appreciated that. But no.