Do bug reports actually get attention?

Dear readers, players and moderators.

Thank you for giving us plenty of nice time here on your excellent chess website. A person like me is never going to donate anything however, thus the only way to really give back to the community is to do something like report a bug.

Earlier this week for the 1st time I did actually find a provable bug and reported it but did not get any real response. Then I noticed another person also reporting a bug, and it just being ignored.

Is this something which is the norm here? I am just a freeloader; it's not for me to really have the opportunity to give an opinion. But I do feel this is the only way in which a freeloader can show appreciation. Did try to make suggestions over the years but they were always just laughed at. (Being able to thank the computer players, for example. Rewording the variant descriptions which say the game "otherwise follows normal chess rules.'' Catching cheaters who use Stockfish to help them lose rather than win... I can't think of others right now.)

This is another player's unanswered bug report...
https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/mysteriously-gained-5-minutes-on-2nd-move-of-the-game

This one is the writer's...
https://lichess.org/forum/lichess-feedback/most-bizarre-thing-in-12-years

Thank you, and happy winnings.

most developers don't hang out on the forums. they prefer discord. there's a link to the discord somewhere on the lichess site.

your feedback could be a bug, but it's not reproducible and not common, millions of games are played without issue.

there was a long standing bug where an opponent's move wouldn't show on your screen. So your screen still showed your opponent's clock ticking down, when actually your opponent made their move and your clock is ticking down. I saw that a few times, but not in years. I assume it was eventually fixed. It was a rare occurrence and not reproducible, so hard to find.

I don't think I've seen someone complain of wrong moves being displayed before.

My feeling is people with slow or unreliable internet and further away from france are more likely to experience weirdness. I imagine people behind the great firewall of china might be the worse off.

You could try uploading your photos to imgur.com or any other image hosting site. you'll get a link and you can copy and paste the link.

edit. oh, and were you playing on a phone or computer? you might want to give more details. there;s the old mobile app, the new mobile app, lots of different operating systems and browsers, all of that information is needed. also what your internet connection is like. maybe running a ping to lichess1.org and pasting the results might help as well.

Creating a github issue is another more reliable way to get attention to your report.

I think bug reports are taken very seriously. You can check the github repository which shows the tremendous amount of development work done every day, and lots of issues and fixes. And usually this is not announced.

However, as pointed out, some reports are hard to process. If you provide no information about your used platform, and it is not reproducible, and nobody else experiences it in millions of games - how would one go about it? And chances are, this might be false report due to some user misclick or perception error. Unless there is something very obvious to do, throwing resources at this seems a bad idea.

As for improvement suggestions, some make it into lichess, others don't. This might be a matter of resources, but often suggestions only look great to the person proposing them. Mostly every new feature comes with downsides as well, sometimes in terms of complexity, sometimes in terms of usability, sometimes it just wouldn't do what the user thinks it would do, sometimes it is just not the desired direction to go.

you did a good job already in trying to get the dev's attention, but i have some minor improvement suggestions:

1. it is well known that the devs sit all day in front of their computers, bored out of their minds. then they click random forum topics. so it is imperative that the title of your forum topic be as non-descriptive as possible. it can't make the devs think of work, otherwise they won't check it out. you did a good job already with

Most bizarre thing in 12 years.

but a dev could still presume that the "bizarre thing" might be related to software and avoid your topic. so better be even more general, for example

thing i noticed during 12 years

or, as a master class example, just:

thing

2. the devs enjoy helping people who put in no effort at all themselves. i applaud how you noted that you took a picture but didn't know how to add it to your forum post. implying that using google is too much work – chef's kiss.

https://i.imgur.com/TC86Agg.gif

however, you could improve even on that by being more of a dick about it. for example, you could say:

i can't believe that your shitty forum does not have the capability of adding pictures.

that way, the devs will want to impress you by hunting your bug.

3. the devs are socially awkward nerds. they do not know how to talk to people, so it's considered polite to not give too many details, so that there are obvious questions they can ask. you did a good job already by not mentioning how you use lichess, which os or browser you use. but you could do even better: you accidentally let slip that this is about game play. you could be more vague about that, so that they can ask you whether this is about the study, analysis board, games and so on.

4. the devs love to help people who do not follow site rules. talking about your abusive multiaccounting was a nice touch, but multiaccounting is a rather obscure terms of service violation, the dev in question might not even notice it. instead, you could mention how you keep using new accounts to avoid detection of your massive engine use. that will definitely catch a dev's attention!