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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

> It is extremely difficult for programmer-users to report bugs against the Windows API (we're supposed to direct you to Feedback Hub, but you may as well transmit your message into deep space).

:'‑(

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This is an issue with a lot of MS products. I honestly have no clue how much money one would have to throw at MS to get a bug fixed.

For example Microsoft's *own* Pluton-enabled platforms fail Windows' Device Health Attestation checks due to an incomplete chain (https://call4cloud.nl/2023/04/are-you-there-intune-its-me-ha...).

I've noticed a lot of big products have a user feedback cycle that goes something like this:

- Create new feedback tracker

- Direct feedback to tracker

- Stop paying any attention to tracker

- Tracker is hundreds of pages of users shouting into the void, and much of it out-of-date

- Delete everything

- Create new feedback tracker...

There's nothing worse than having a problem with a product, finding 250 other people on the feedback tracker that have had the same problem over the last three years, and the only official response is some support person on the first page who's saying your feedback is very important to us, and have you tried [troubleshooting that won't work]?

At that scale they have 250 000 people that didn't try the obvious troubleshooting first though. But yes, it's annoying.

They often seem to end up like this:

Topic: Can't select blue wallpaper

Body: Hi, for some reason I can't select blue as a wallpaper colour. I can select any other colour, just not blue. I have Enable All Colours ticked. Anything else I'm missing?

Reply #1: Hi I have this problem too, does anyone know?

Reply #2: Same problem here.

Reply #3: Same problem, I can select any colour except blue.

Reply #4: Hi there User344925. Let me first say that your feedback is incredibly, impossibly important to us. I'm Bob and I'll be your Licensed Support Person today. Let's get started and see if we can solve your problem. I understand you're having trouble setting the colour blue for your wallpaper in personalisation settings. This is a common problem to have, and I'm pleased to say there is a simple fix available. Open Settings -> Personalisation -> Advanced Settings -> Advanced Personalisation Settings, and tick "Enable All Colours". Now you should be able to set any colour you like. Please remember to mark this question as SOLVED at the top and mark my post as the Approved Answer if this solved your problem. Have a great day!

Replies #5-#250: Users with the same problem.

The fundamental problem here is that they have a billion users and most of them don't know what they're talking about. If you create a simple way to contact the company it will soon be full of messages from end users who can't even articulate what their problem is but it's usually some kind of malware or user error and is definitely not a problem with whatever component they're reporting the issue against.

What you really need is a way to report problems which is high friction. You have to submit a git pull request of your ssh public key so you can transmit your bug report via sftp. Now they only get bug reports from people who can figure out how to do that and can actually pay attention to them because it filters out all the spam from people asking Microsoft how to connect their Android to a Mac.

Microsoft makes ~16 billion $ a quarter in profit, of which they return ~10 billion $ to their investors.

They could go and spend 200 million a quarter on decent customer support without making too much of a dent in their financial line.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2023-q2...

$200M is approximately $0.15/user. How much support do you expect to get for that?

How many of these 1 billion users actually need support? Only a tiny fraction.

Uh... what? If there was a free number you could call to get competent technical support, people would spend their entire day on the phone with it instead of reading documentation or hiring IT staff.

Not just high friction, but a formal verification like certification would be interesting.

Nah, you don't want bureaucratic gatekeeping. You want the 14 year old in Kenya or Ukraine with technical competence but no ID to be able to report the bug he finds.

The point is to exclude people who don't know what they're talking about, not people who can't pay registration fees or produce documents.

Delegating first-level bug triage to the community can also work as long as your company is well liked enough to motivate volunteers. For that you just need a public bug tracker that everyone can post to but only allow regular users (e.g. those who have made useful bug reports before) to confirm something is a not yet known bug and forward it to your developers. This way once you do get notified of a real bug you will have access to not just that one report but also potential duplicates that might provide interesting information - which might have never been filed if the first level was too high friction.

I've ran into this too, the feedback hub seems to be populated by first line support types.

I also found a bug in a win32 API and the feedback hub told me to reboot my PC

Unfortunately, the opposite of that is everybody trying to file random things that aren't actionable. See the collection of mail sent to the curl maintainer…

https://github.com/bagder/emails/blob/main/2015/2015-06-08.m...

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