Show HN: Idea for Bugs Reporting Startup | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Idea for Bugs Reporting Startup

4 pointswaqasaday4 comments

Every once in awhile, while visiting some of my favourite sites, I find some bugs, both small & big.

1) For instance, if you click at More on TechCrunchTV in the footer of TC, it'll go to TechCrunch.tv which is redirected to TechCrunch.com

2) I just tried to submitted a set of free icons at IconFinders, despite the fact that I was sign in. It wouldn't let me submit the form at the last step. So I just stopped it for now (or will not try again at all).

The solution I propose is a directory, where any business can make a Wiki for bug reporting and the users can report bugs, vote on existing one, and other tools / feedback to help the site owners.

Why I think the solution will work, is because many time as a user we are out of time / energy to report the bug effectively on the site. Assuming it'll might go un-noticed.

On the other hands, sites can quickly fix their bugs if they are getting effective reporting and reward the reporter.

What are your thoughts? Someone please do it during the weekend.

The biggest problem I see here is that many companies keep their bug-lists to themselves, and actively do not wish to publish them in an externally visible fashion.

Open source projects benefit from having a public bug-tracker, but commercial entities like to pretend their software is bug-free and so they do not.

I wish you luck.

I agree with the fact that businesses don't like to publish - but if such community is built the businesses will be benefited more than everyone.

Are you sure about that? It seems that businesses wanting this is both crucial to the idea, but also unproven. For example, consider two very close competitors in the widget-making market, A and B. If A adds this, then:

1) They might get better bug reports and be able to fix them better, giving a less buggy product and making them better than B - good for A

2) A user reviewing both A and B might see that A has a list of bugs, and (most likely mistakenly)assume since B doesn't have such a list that B has no bugs. They assume B is better - bad for A

I suspect it depends on a lot of other factors which of those results is more pronounced, but it is unproven which way it would go for any given business.

Or, companies could do user tests, functional testing, etc. This service is pretty affordable: http://html5testing.co/

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