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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice constantly works on improving the import of the DOC/DOCX/XLS/XLSX/etc formats, thus if something doesn't work for you, it's better to file a bug in their bugtracker[1].

[1] https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=gui...

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The site is making ordinary users (other than developers) shy away from submitting bug reports. Come on, you need to make a whole account in Bugzilla for you to report bugs? The best thing would be to have a "Report bug" window directly in the program that lets the user send complaints without hazzle!

The best thing for users maybe. A special kind of hell for the people investigating. And since there are numerous non paying users vs only so many people who have the skills to fix things...

It's incredibly useful to know what problems your users are facing. It doesn't necessarily mean fixing any one particular bug, rather should help prioritize future work.

Of course the developers only want to interact with other developers, never those stinky users who don't even know the proper technical jargon for the bugs they're finding. But that doesn't mean we should pander to developer wishes.

I'm sure if the "stinky users" have a support contract then someone will be happy to look at any kind of report and try to triage or reproduce. Otherwise the least they can do is figure out Bugzilla signup.

> I'm sure if the "stinky users" have a support contract then someone will be happy to look at any kind of report

I'm sure you know that's not true. I'm sure you know that developers hate taking bug reports from users even when those users have support contracts.

The case being discussed here is LibreOffice. Yes in general that is also true, but non paying users don't contribute anything. If they paid at least there's an expectation of fixes. Or at least the money can be used to hire a separate support team.

Interesting that this is a take, because MS Office (and all MS products) don't include such button.

a) Yes they do:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-do-i-give-fee...

https://veroniiiica.com/how-to-use-the-feedback-tool-in-micr...

b) they have automated crash report and usage telemetry to tell them what isn’t working

Creating an account on bugzilla is much easier than on the same github, and it is also used in many projects, so registration makes sense.

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