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Some forum classics:

* "PM'ed you the fix."

* "Ignore this thread, I figured it out."

* Find a thread discussing the issue, reply to it, then "Thread closed, don't necropost" from a moderator.

* Open a new thread about the issue, then "Thread closed, use the search function next time" from a moderator.

* The fix was hosted on Megaupload or RapidShare

I once found a pastebin with a log containing the error message that I was getting.

This log also had a user id. I took a long shot, googled the id and emailed the person. It turned out they had found the fix, it was in a recent dev build of a library.

I feel the same way, when all hope is lost and I have to join a Discord channel for help. Finding the solution via the search there feels like modern day gold panning.

I hope you were a good netizen and posted the solution somewhere indexable.

Like where?

If your goal is just to publicly document a resolution, stackexchange sites let you post a question and answer it yourself.

The solution was actually pretty recent, so I'm hoping the docs will be updated soon. If not, I'll submit a pull request.

I went through a simulation issue where I spent days on a problem, had a Microsoft engineer asking for logs and generally wasting my time, eventually found it to be a hp firmware limitation.

I wrote a page on my own blog about it. Was I a good netizen? Because I can only find reddit threads of people being unable to solve it with a google search.

> I wrote a page on my own blog about it. Was I a good netizen?

Yes! Although I don't know why search engines aren't picking it up. But at least you can point people to a blog post, instead of telling them to join a discord, and try to search their archives.

I would assume because Reddit is so heavily prioritized that without quoting the blog directly you’d need to pan through 6+ pages of crud to find it.

I love when people do this. It makes the internet feel a lot cozier. I still get replies and private messages about really old Reddit comments.

My favorite is being blocked by a bug, searching for the solution, and finding the fix I documented several years earlier. (My memory has faults.)

I actually keep a blog for this specific reason: so I can log the bugs I fixed and find how I fixed them when they show up again.

I let Google crawl and index my fix history for me.

Hey this is a good stackoverflow answer, why can't I upvote it? Oh.

Or the not-so-fun version of that, finding the question I posted on Stack Overflow years ago with zero answers. :cry:

I always find it funny when an early reporter decides to include irrelevant information in their post, which then causes every single reply to do the same thing. i.e.

I get a segfault when I run the tool. OS: Debian. RAM: 8G. RGB lights: 4. Breakfast: French toast.

...

I have the same problem. Breakfast: bacon and eggs.

I get the same problem with online comments.

Breakfast: iced latte and chocolate croissant. Two sugars.

It's a serious problem. Someone should really get on that and raise awareness.

Breakfast: french-style omelette on toast

Are you using synthetic sugar? I heard those cause cancer in lizards.

I have run into similar problems with unattended sign-in logs.

So you arrive somewhere like a reception desk, a church, a funeral, and there's a sign-in log with, say, five columns labeled at the top, and a long list of people who've already logged in there.

So I politely try not to scrutinize the other personal info which people have left, but I also try to figure out how to sign in on my own, and I read the column headings, but then in some of the columns, people have sort of invented their own conventions on the data entry. So, do I go with a strict interpretation of the host's intentions, or do I follow suit with previous visitors and imitate their usage?

I feel like there's a variant of Postel's Law that should apply here.

"Be gracious to the host's request for data; be self-assertive with your willingness to divulge data."

that's preferable to people that give zero details

My favourite variation on this is the short movie by Joel Haver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnUpTyKSjag

"Who? Who are the 12 people who found this helpful?"

Haha. somewhere in the middle of the thread , the issue should have been closed and then further down, we still have thread on the same bug :)

“Never mind; I’ve resolved the issue. Closing the thread now.”

https://xkcd.com/979/

One of my favorites is finding such a post, getting hopeful to find an answer, and then realizing it was me who wrote the post years and years ago.

I once was helping a coworker with a problem and asked about it on a related forum. Later that week he came over and told me how he found a forum where someone else who had the same problem, and their username looked a lot like my name…

In our internal Q&A system I make it a point to describe what the resolution was, even when the mistake is something obvious or embarrassing that I did. I like to think my legacy will be leaving several dozen self-answered questions on common problems that other developers didn't feel the need to type up.

Parent is being sarcastic :) of course what you mention is the right thing to do but too often you see what parent posted. Infuriating.

So, dear HN reader, what's your unsolvable bug - the cursed combination of search terms that inevitably leads you to one of these unsolved (unsolvable) threads?

Mine is "Windows 11 optical spdif dolby 5.1 realtek digital". The entire first page of search results is purple.

Bluetooth audio on windows. that's it. it just sucks and sucks all of the time

The 2024 equivalent will be walls of AI-generated text.

:shudder: It's the next generation of Rickrolling.

My favorite was when I was in college. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to get my WiFi card for my school-issued laptop working in Linux. Someone else posted a fix (with a full explanation of what to do!) and I followed it and it worked!

Then I look at the username and it’s my classmate from down the hall in the same dorm.

And I’m pretty sure I actually did end up in a beach house with them at some point.

Somewhere in the annals of cks's blog is a discussion of why it's a good idea to document things you don't do.

We all instinctively know that we should document why we do things that we've done, especially when the rationale was intricate, cost money/time/effort, or there's a business-critical reason for it. But what about the things we don't do?

We can spend a lot of time/money/effort contemplating an action, discussing it and weighing the options, and then at the end of the day/week, we decide that it's better not to do it at all. Shouldn't we document that decision process as well? Won't it save time in the future when someone gets the same bright idea?

I ran into a GitHub issue template a long time ago that had a required section for alternate solutions. It’s amazing how often you find a better solution when you are forced to enumerate viable solutions and compare them.

My favourite one is these two related GitHub issues:

    IIS Application Pool Recycle returns unexpected 503
    https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/10117

    reopen issue #10117 - IIS app pool recycle throws 503 errors
    https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/41340

It's been a journey of nearly five years, but I guess... it's about the friends you make on the way, right?

Any year now, Microsoft will fix their only web application framework such that a "Hello World" app doesn't crash.

Soon! Any year now... any year.

100% accurate. This is my common experience now that vBulletin forums are no longer the #1 way of communicating on the interwebs.

There have been many times where it's been a DenverCoder situation though.

The real bugs were the friends we made along the way!

webkit bugzilla :)

bugs.kde.org :)

Vaguely reminiscent of another Xkcd: https://xkcd.com/979

LOL. There should be at least a commment from someone trying out a 2year old SO answer that did not fix it. :-)

I'm sure at least one of the "[here], [here], and [here]" links resolved to SO.

And another to experts-exchange.com of course.

And a few ones from people whose problems are so dissimilar from the original bug that the only way they could have arrived at the thread is the 57th page of Google search for the word "problem".

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