Comment by al_james | Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_james | Hacker News Reader

This has just given me a (potentially stupid) idea: If a site has a public issue tracking system, thats great, a case like this could be handled. However, lots of sites/services dont have public ticketing systems. At best I can fire off a bug report via email and hope for a response.

How about a site that is a public issue tracker for all sites (or at least ones that dont have their own). So this user could go to this service and issue a bug report for news.ycombinator.com. Other users could look at the bug and say "hey I am having this issue too". Repeatable bugs get floated to the top etc...

Of course, its only good if someone looks at it and responds. But, if this site had enough users, the community would be able to comment and help, and eventually, any service provider that cares about their users might want to be involved (and they can 'claim' their domain somehow).

I think the key point is that you would not expect a response 100% of the time, so the service provider does not need to take time to respond to all issues, only those were several people experience it.

This probably exists though?

It does exist, http://getsatisfaction.com

Arh... but with that, the service provider has to opt-in.. they have to choose to add get satisfaction. I am talking about a place you can go and register issues you are having with a service, even if they have not added any formal issue tracking (either because they are too lazy, too busy or simply dont want to know).

Of course, the trick is to get the service providers to take a look, but with enough user engagement, maybe it would work.

Actually, they have to opt out, which is why GS is such an awful concept.

How do you mean?

Maybe I misunderstand what getsatisfaction is.... could I go there are report a bug on hacker news for example even if hacker news have not joined getsatisfaction?

Maybe I misunderstand what getsatisfaction is.... could I go there are report a bug on hacker news for example even if hacker news have not joined getsatisfaction?

Yup - you misunderstand, and yes you could just report something for a company that's not joined getsatisfaction. A chunk of people see this as a bad thing - see http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-else and http://sachin.posterous.com/get-satisfactioncom-is-blackmail... for example.

Arh yes. Thats almost exactly what I was talking about. I think its a good idea, although getsatisfaction's implementation (language, high fee to remove competing ads) is not great.

https://getsatisfaction.com/ycombinator created over 2 years ago

I've seen several companies use stackoverflow in this manner - appharbor and the google maps team to name just two.

Obviously, these are for technical problems using a public service - user account issues aren't really appropriate though.

Yes thats interesting. In fact stackoverflow is an example of what I mean. Even if the service provider does not choose to use stackoverflow for issue tracking, people will still ask questions (and indirectly report bugs) because of the community. Any technical service provider who cares about users would be stupid not to monitor stackoverflow for discussions about their product and jump in.

However, you are right, stackoverflow is not for the type of issues we are talking about, like "I cant login", "This form gives me an internal server error with this input" etc...

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