What a wonderful insight into the gritty world of open-source software. Scratch that, "software that is used externally" is more fitting. I find that the most offensive (in that we should improve and fix the issue) waste of time at my company is when we are treading water during the back and forth communication to a customer while trying to solve a bug. Lack of log files, reproductions, use cases, version numbers, environment details, etc. Don't forget time zone differences, introducing a very painful days latency.<p>It isn't our customer's fault - some inside have championed for a product feature that creates a "bug report bundle" containing useful details that will assist the debugging developer at my company. Since the product deals with sensitive customer data, this feature has been deemed a non-starter. Does anybody know how to streamline this particular process where sensitive data is involved? It is like trying to drive blind in a woefully slow car!
Sorry non native english speaker and this confused me a bit "others are operation-based synchronizer"<p>Is it that they only sync with a button push or something and you fetch stuff when content changes on server ?
I am maintaining Gmvault (<a href="http://www.gmvault.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.gmvault.org</a>) and unfortunately I have the same issue. I get frustrated because I spend most of the time supporting users. It is good but I have plenty of ideas that I would like to implement in subsequent versions and I do not progress.<p>I would like to attract developers to help me. Which channel is the best in your opinion to do that ?
I use Github so the source is available and the open issues are also public there.<p>Where would you advertise the need for help to be sure to find some somebody ?
One technique for reducing customer support email is to write extensive documentation. Whenever I get a specific question more than once, I'll add the answer to the docs. It turns out that most customers read the docs before emailing, and in my experience it is extremely rare to get questions that are answered in the docs -- and if, I can just send them a link.
very interesting post , thanks!<p>your website forces a certain zoom on my mobile browser and does not let me zoom out so the text is unnaturally huge and images are cutoff at one side... :(