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Comment by ogrisel | Hacker News Reader

I think it would help to open an issue on github making explicit the following three points explicit in the report:

- steps to reproduce from scratch;

- what you expected to happen;

- what you actually observed (include the screenshot or video capture in addition to a textual description).

Otherwise, you might risk your report being ignored due to a silent misunderstanding about the mismatch between your expectations and the actual results.

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At the time i wasn't sure if it was PEBCAK, which is why i started a discussion in the forums. As there were no replies, i received no notifications, and so I forgot all about it.

If anyone is interested in opening a bug report you can see the issue here: https://imgur.com/a/hZ1ja9o

Personally, I do not understand why you think there is a bug from this screen capture alone. Maybe because I am that familiar with penpot and figma, but still, I do not find it obvious.

This is why it's important to describe explicitly the three points in text:

- steps to reproduce;

- what you expected to happen;

- what actual result you observe instead.

Something that might be obvious to you but isn't for others will just be silently ignored most of the time.

EDIT: I now see the problem after reading your other reply above:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46064757#46069546

This is why it's important to describe explicitly the difference between what you expected and what you observed. I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.

> This is why it's important to describe explicitly

That is a fair point. I will take it on board when giving people screenshots and videos of bugs in future.

> I did not see the change in button width

There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)

> There's actually a lot more visual changes than that just the button, but I will leave that to the reader as an exercise in spot-the-difference ;)

This is fair. But issues like this will never get my attention in general because I don’t have time to do this exercise - I would much rather have it all spelled out. Even if there are a bunch of related issues they won’t get fixed in a single PR, it likely will be multiple.

I guess my point is that if you really want OSS projects to improve, the issue submitter can’t just ask the maintainer “figure it out”. It totally works this way in the corporate world though (IME).

Edit: I’m sorry to have jumped to conclusions. Leaving my comment up for accountability.

I didn’t ask the maintainer to “figure it out”. I posted a thread in the forum with multiple videos to start a discussion.

People here have stated I should have filed on GitHub, and because I don’t want to link my GitHub to this account I suggested someone else do it.

That was 6 hours ago, and people are still commenting about my lack of a suitable report rather than actually reporting it correctly themselves - as is evident by the lack of a new issue on the github.

I’m sorry for jumping at you like that.

No problem :)

> I swear I did not see the change in button width before reading the linked comment.

I didn’t either! I stared at that gif for a few minutes and I couldn’t tell what the problem is (or what to look for). It wasn’t until you said “changing button width” I knew where to focus my attention.

"Content not available in your region"

So, given that Penpot appears to mostly be developed in the EU, you'd need to fix that part first.

I’m not sure what you are referring to. If you mean the video link, I am in the EU and can see it.

Doesn't work in Austria, doesn't work from the UK, doesn't work from Finland.

I am physically in the EU and its working for me.

I just checked using nordVPN for Austria and Finland and it's working there too, so maybe you have some other issue going on?

I am assuming you are in the UK, as Imgur are specifically blocking the UK: https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/41592665292443-Imgu...

Imgur isn't my site, and I don't vote in the UK, so Im not sure how you expect me to resolve that.

This might help you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46081188

Not being able view imgur in the UK is a pain.

I hate how every time someone even talks about an issue with an open source project, some smart alec replies "well did you raise an issue?" - or worse - "did you send a PR to fix it?".

We are all very aware how bug reporting works. And user criticism of bugs isn't somehow invalidated just because the users didn't go to the sometimes very large effort to report bugs.

I wouldn't have reported this bug either. If the example documents are getting corrupted just by navigating them that indicates that it's just a really buggy project (corroborated by other comments here) that I'm not even going to use, so why would I spend my time working on it?

I can see both sides of the dilemma and I don't necessarily like when a maintainer defaults to "open a PR" but asking for a reproducible issue wherever requested is not too much to ask.

With a PR I understand not wanting to put the effort in as it may not be merged. But offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum is the least you could do. If you want the problem fixed that's the best way forward.

> offering up a reproducible example on the correct forum is the least you could do

I suggested someone do that 8 hrs ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46069471

So far no takers. Just people saying what they would do instead of actually doing it :)

I've done it:

https://github.com/penpot/penpot/issues/7850

Thanks for sharing all the details about the issue, and shame on all the armchair critics :D

Thank you :)

I opened an issue based on the discussion here and it didn't take much time or effort.

(It was one of those form-based issue templates that requires you to explicitly list out Steps to Reproduce, Expected behavior, Actual behavior, OS version, etc. which IMO causes slightly more friction for anyone who knows how to put together a good bug report, but I've also seen enough poorly-specified issues to know that it's necessary sometimes)

"And user criticism of bugs isn't somehow invalidated just because the users didn't go to the sometimes very large effort to report bugs."

Yes, it is.

No it isn't.

Yeah, just let everyone else do the work while you sit back and gripe.

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