how not to submit a bug
Our customers tend to be spread all over the map when it comes to intelligence, unfortunately. After seeing what some of them say, and how they represent themselves, I know that there are some companies where I'd never purchase their products. The worst of it comes out when they submit bugs to us. You'd think that submitting a bug would be an easy thing to do, but some of them are completely retarded in that respect. There's one who has a very long history of submitting bugs which are basically just catting /dev/urandom. It makes absolutely no sense, and typically requires 3 or 4 iterations back & forth until we get something close to resembling useful information. There's another who does a great job of condensing the problem into a single sentence, yet leaves out all the details. Then there are the real winners who provide a vague description of a problem, and when I ask them for more details, they are either silent for days (after opening the bug as critical), or they respond by providing mind boggling answers which completely invalidate what they initially reported. And it gets even worse when English isn't the person's native language.
Please! If you're reading this and you ever need to submit a bug anywhere, follow these simple steps:
* Specify the version of whatever it is you're reporting the bug against. If you aren't using the latest released version, state why.
* Specify the expected behavior
* Specify the actual behavior (the bug)
* Detail how the bug can be reproduced, preferably in numbered steps.
If you aren't willing to do that much (and that's really just the bare minimum to get a bug going), then don't be shocked & horrified when someone asks you for alot more details.