Yeah yeah yeah, the cookies you made for me again last week are OK but honestly I'm sick of them. You're not getting any praise from me. Sorry dude.
I've been eating your home-made cookies for years and still can't figure out why you make them so dry. It's complete BS. All I want is a little moisture in the middle of my cookies. I do NOT understand why you have them crunchy. It makes no sense.
I have had it, and will move on from trying to understand your thinking. Your cookies used to be nice, but now they're a massive piece of garbage, maybe you should check out the cookies in a supermarket.
You simply needed to fill out the 12 page cookie preference form in the foyer and I would have made the cookies to your specification. I apologise for the misunderstanding, we do things differently back home in Europe.
You have to store the biscuits separate from your crisps, in an on-premise flat; otherwise, the GDPR bobbies will be right on your full-stack bollocks in a lorry right soon. Good on ya!
The bread you gave me the other day is pumpernickel. I like pretzel bread. I don't understand, what were you thinking?
I have had it with you and your weak bread magic.
- Sermon attendee
---------------------------
I'm pretty sure that Jesus' reply would have been much snarkier than from the Notepad++ maintainer, who probably has a lot more to gain from being snarky in their reply than from trying to cater to this childish user's outburst.
This is genuinely funny on Don's part, but I'm sure he gets much worse emails. It's one of the 'joys' of running a public facing product on the internet. Over the years of running PortableApps.com I've been threatened with death, rape, abuse, doxxing, DDoS attacks, character attacks, you name it. My personal favorite was a user claiming that my donation of a kidney to my Dad - 4 years before creating portable apps - reflected badly on me and I had only done it so I could gloat about it and use it make money from users.
PortableApps was awesome for the computer labs in college. (Especially back when the only browser installed on those systems was IE.) Thank you for that!
I sympathise with the author. Why should one have to put up with mails like this? I understand the argument of being professional, but it's very draining to have to absorb personal attacks and ill-mannered outbursts while never being able to respond in kind.
Given that the sender didn't provide constructive feedback, is seemingly not contributing financially, and can simply choose to not use the application, I don't see why a response in kind shouldn't be given. To me, Don's response was mild.
There's several people in this thread saying the user did not provide constructive feedback and I disagree. Amongst the emotionally charged venting there's a description of a real struggle the user is encountering while trying to use the software.
Yes, they should've opted for a more civilised approach. No, it doesn't discard the issue that they (and possibly others) are experiencing.
Here's an example of what a constructive, friendly email might look like, in contrast to what Tom sent.
>>>
Hey Don, thanks for all the hard work you've put into Notepad++ over the years. I've never paid you a cent, and yet I've personally made quite a bit of money from using the product.
Despite how obviously useful the product is overall for me, there's a niggle I've got, that I'd love you to solve. Let me know if I can do any hands-on work to help you fix it. I'm probably not good enough to write code, but maybe I could help with testing, writing documentation, or giving you more detail on the issue.
Or maybe I should, you know, give you some cash.
Anyway, the issue I'm having is around using the settings. I'd like to use the application with a specific UI - greenish background, black text, highlighting what's selected. The way I've configured it sort of works, but has a white background when I move the cursor around. This is probably me doing something wrong, but I can't work it out - I've searched on the internet, but can't find a solution. Here are the settings I'm using. [...] Let me know if I can provide more details that would help reproduce the problem.
Thanks again for all that you do to make Notepad++ the great product that it is.
Doesn't have to be this verbose even. Just a "I've been using Notepad++ for years now, thank you so much for it!" and a bit of "I understand that there are many issues that require your attention right now but there's this thing I'm struggling with..." Would've done.
Honestly, this looks like a troll's work. I personally would've ignored him/her because of the adage, "don't feed the trolls"
It’s not a troll (someone being deliberately offensive). If you make something free, you do get some amount of just this kind of entitled, abrasive users. It can be soul-draining and I admire Don’s kindness here.
We’re talking about constructive feedback. This template:
- Praises the product and the hard work
- Says that it is so useful to them [but it wasn’t for this user, though?]
- Volunteers to help with what they want to solve
- … and yet also chastises themselves for probably not being good enough to contribute the most holy CODE. More praise of the author by putting oneself down?
- Finally gets to the suggestion in the fourth and penultimate paragraph
- Oh silly me, it’s probably a user error on my part
- Praises the product again
You’re either taking the piss or are setting the bar so high that none of the “haters” are gonna feel inclined to send someone a matter-of-fact (not rude, and also not this submissive fanperson, either) constructive feedback.
Dunno but I found this thing lying around that I liked:
> I'm having an issue using the settings. I'd like to use the application with a specific UI - greenish background, black text, highlighting what's selected. The way I've configured it sort of works, but has a white background when I move the cursor around. Here are the settings I’m using and a screenshot of the problem.
I'm having an issue using the settings. I'd like to use the application with a specific UI - greenish background, black text, highlighting what's selected. The way I've configured it sort of works, but has a white background when I move the cursor around. Here are the settings I’m using and a screenshot of the problem.
I'm pretty sure your definition is not the one most people use. Google for sentences containing the word "unfriendly" and I'm pretty sure 90%+ of them (if not 99%+ of them) use it as a milder version of "rude", not as "showing no signs of friendliness or rudeness".
To circle back to the point of the original comment, my point was "constructive" and "friendly" are describing different characteristics, and "rude" does not automatically imply "unconstructive" (and of course "constructive" does not imply "kind" either). That fact is precisely what necessitated your use of the word "friendly" in your own comment. You can see this if you Google too—the top result I get when I Google constructive criticism meaning [1] says constructive criticism is "a feedback method that offers specific, actionable recommendations". That's all it means.
I might describe it as a little cold. Since I have no contract with the developer, I’m effectively asking for a favour. Perhaps I’m just awfully British about it.
I agree. And ideally this is what all emails should look like. But you're ignoring the context. Do you know what that guy was going through?
Maybe his wife just cheated on him, divorced him and took half his money, his kids don't want to have anything to do with him, his bank took his house and he just crashed the car. And he tried to use Notepad++ and the same old issue happened and he snapped and sent that email.
99 out of 100 times he would have send the email you mentioned here but he had a horrible day and vented in the email. Does it make it ok? No. Is it understandable? Yes. Should we discard the feedback because he was frustrated? No.
Yes it does. I'm petty and proud. If they wanted it fixed, they would've taken the personal responsibility to have been born with a brain big enough not to be rude.
This suggests a new attack vector on software projects; if I wanted to cripple a competitor, all I would have to do is to first find a real important bug it their software, but then report the bug rudely enough that the developers then want to punish me personally by not fixing the bug. I would then have guaranteed that the bug in my competitor’s software is not fixed, and people will use my software instead.
In other words: Trying to punish rude users by not fixing the bugs they report is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
This is a super-contrived example, but I could still fix the bug, just not specifically for you, on your schedule. The odds that you'd find an issue that impacts more than the odd crank are so thin that this isn't anywhere near a top concern.
Using that logic, I could just as well argue that since you don’t pay me to debate this with you, you don’t deserve a reply from me, since I am not your indentured servant.
In other words: There exists roles and relationships, with attached obligations and expectations, other than those involving money. Free software development is such a relationship, as is this debate.
If you were to post rude comments in Hacker News, you probably wouldn’t get a response, because it would be delete. It kind of proves the very point you’re opposing - being polite begets good responses, rudeness to being ignored.
I have zero expectation that you’d reply. Most conservations on hn don’t end because they wrapped up neatly but because someone had something more important to do and walked away from the conversation.
There are obligations other than money, but none of those exist here. There’s no contractual obligation. He put out something for free and doesn’t need to take an iota of criticism on it by people freeloading. He obviously can, and if he wants certain goals like increasing his user base it might be the smart move to respond to these type of people, but there are no obligations.
A social obligation, in short, is something which a person would be rude not to do, but is not required by law. I’m sure you can think of examples. I am putting forth my opinion that fixing bugs, regardless of how rude a bug report is, is a social obligation.
HN is one of the best places on the internet to politely post a critical or opposing view and get a reasoned response though; doesn't that strike directly at your point? Perhaps that's exactly what I'm doing righbt now, because you weren't a rude jerk? ;)
If I have more problems reported every day than I can fix, the only productive way is to work on issues that people actually put time into reporting in a nice and well worded manner. Because usually only those people give feedback if something is fixed to their liking, stick around for long enough to actually test the fix and are reasonable enough to understand limitations or discuss alternative solutions.
If the only issue my application ever had was reported in such a rude manner, there might be a case to be made to fix it, even though it was reported in a hostile or rude manner. It might make the application better for people who didn't report the issue. But maybe it is more valuable to just spend that time on something fun or enjoyable like coding on something else or eating cake. There is no reason to waste your free time on rude people, when they have the option to just be nice and save you all the anger.
I don’t see why the attitude of the reporting user should be a factor in determining the priority of the bug they are reporting. Surely the severity of the bug, and how many people are likely to be affected are the relevant factors. Sure, if the issue is not well explained, hard to pin down, or might otherwise require cooperation from the user, you have to weigh that into your consideration. However, many users do get surprisingly cooperative once you show them that you actually care about fixing the issue they are reporting; many users are used to being ignored, and might start out having a bad attitude merely by habit.
Even worse than rude, it would be unproductive. If you were to recieve a report about a critical security flaw, would you ignore it simply because the reporting user was rude in the report? I should hope not. So why should normal bug reports (and confusing UI/UX issues are also bugs) be treated any differently?
Please read my entire comment, not merely the first half.
To be excruciatingly explicit: Bugs (and confusing UI/UX) experienced and reported by rude users also affect many non-rude users. If one wants one’s software to be the best it can be, then one should listen to all bug reports; the attitude of the reporting users are irrelevant.
What if he doesn’t care about the “best it can be” because his product is already so widely used? What if he thinks “my product might be a little worse, but I’ll feel a little better”.
I agree that he’d be under an ethical obligation to listen to a rude security report. But it doesn’t follow that he must therefore listen to all rude bug reports.
As a user of free software you can hope all you want, but you have no right to an expectation that this is the priority. Your right end with the decision to stop using the software, which is exactly what Don said to the original email
maybe when we are all replaced by robots that is true, but its not possible for the average person to take abuse constantly and keep a level head. That's not how our brains are wired
Only true if you're expecting the author to behave like a robot and exist without any kind of emotion. I certainly don't see how you would call that constructive in any way.
Loose analogy, I don't watch videos of retail workers being abused and think, that customer is providing constructive feedback.
Maybe we just use a different definition of "constructive feedback", but my emotional perception of a comment has nothing to do with the classification.
"You suck and your software is a piece of crap" is not constructive feedback because there's no details to act on.
"Fuck you the submit button is obscured by the footer" is constructive even if the message has a personal attack.
You might choose not to act on comments due to emotions, but I don't think it invalidates any constructive feedback contained within.
And this right here is why a large number of engineers never make it pas mid-level. Thinking that the only things that matter are technical and the social aspects of communication are just unnecessary complications
Understanding the things people are actually telling you without getting distracted by anger is also part of communications. You don't have to engage with the rude users but their problems are just as real.
Only true if you're expecting the the person who provided feedback to behave like a robot and exist without any kind of emotions.
Loose analogy, I don't watch videos with people buying a bike with no breaks, fall and get hurt, then go to the vendor and calmly explain to them that they should modify their bike design so the breaks function and think, that customer is behaving like a human being.
See what I did there? :) My analogy might not be great, I give you that. But frustration is a normal human behavior. Granted I strongly believe you should try to vent a different way and then give clam feedback, you can't discard feedback just because the person giving it is frustrated.
We should be able to distinguish between frustrated good feedback and just abuse. I know I was able to get feedback from very hostile messages. And last time I checked I'm not a robot. So it's as skill you can gain.
Open source developers should disregard hostile feedback out of principle, for their own sanity. The feedback might be valuable, but it's ultimately not worth mining for because they get very little for their work, donations at best. Commercial customer support stuff at least get a regular income for their trouble.
Yeah, frustration breeds frustration. So I agree that it's better to disregard it if you can't handle it.
But I'm just wondering, is it possible to ignore the form of the message and listen to the content? Looking back the stoics were very good at controlling their own emotions and dealing with insults. Insults would just not get to them, they would bounce right off them. Is this a skill we've lost as a society?
It seems that nowadays we're focusing external, not internal. Instead of developing a thick skin we're focusing on changing the behavior of the people who's insulting us. To me that seems like a pointless endeavor. You can't change someone else behavior if they don't want to cooperate. And without a thick skin, all it takes is one jerk to ruin your day. With thick skin the insults from a jerk bounces off you and your day is still a good day. So, it seems to me that we should focus inwards instead of outwards. Not saying it's easy. Just saying humans were capable of that in the past, nowadays I don't hear anybody talking about it.
While this the feedback in this mail indicates a problem, even if you remove the emotional language I don't believe it's constructive. Constructive feedback would not just indicate a problem, but also provide guidance/suggestions on how to correct it.
In feedback like this I filter out the useful information. No need to hurt your ego, or go on the offense, if you instead respond by asking questions that show you do care and understand you will often get a more humble response.
> Why should one have to put up with mails like this?
I think we should have universal single character symbol for responding to assenine communications (trolling, entitlement, stupidity and such).
I propose
k
Vertical line sybolises the barrier behind which trolling, entitlement and stupidity remains and the rest sybmolises me propping the barrier with my butt while being completely uninterested.
You may see it also as last step of evolution that brought us such responses as Ok and kthxbye.
>Why should one have to put up with mails like this?
...You don't have to. You can write mail filters that send stuff like this straight to spam. I even did it at a workplace. Admittedly, that is a bit more hairy but now I atleast understand why passive aggressiveness was invented.
> I understand the argument of being professional, but it's very draining to have to absorb personal attacks and ill-mannered outbursts while never being able to respond in kind.
I used to agonize when I'd get feedback like this, rude or not. It is emotionally draining, but I always tried to extract something from it. As mentioned elsewhere, I've reacted poorly in the past and really regret it.
I will point out that this really isn't "in kind." The email response was, but publicly posting it and letting other users know how similar emails will be treated is an escalation.
> but publicly posting it and letting other users know how similar emails will be treated is an escalation
That's an escalation?
Nobody knows to Tom is so he's all good. Everyone else now knows what the dev puts up with and how they feel about it. Maybe someone knows now that being a jerk over email won't get them what they want?
I'd call it "setting boundaries". The author has zero reason to accept anyone's bullshit for a passion project that they give away for free. If author wants to put users who do not understand this dynamic on blast, that is 100% understable and I fully support their response.
There are a lot of people here who work in a business setting and are conflating the sorts of behaviors that can be expected in a paid setting with those more appropriate to a gratis effort.
Yes but what else should you do? Just let it bottle up inside you?
Why? Because you were dumb enough to release software as open source?
Does publishing software as open source mean that you have to stop having any emotions?
When you email me, regardless of topic, the expectation is a minimal level of manners and politeness. Yes, privacy too, but if it is actually a bug report, there is no such expectation because the content could in principle end up in a bug tracker.
> I don't see why a response in kind shouldn't be given
Well, it feels good in the moment, but crazy people like this always engage, so you get dragged into an argument that drains your emotional reserves for no benefit.
So I have always had this rule for software I get for free:
If I don't plan on helping to make it better, I stay quiet.
I think this is quite good rule. The author is working to provide something for free. If you don't plan on helping, do not waste any time -- you are not entitled to it.
I used to raise bugs with as much information as possible to reproduce or provide patches for the fix myself but these days more often than not I do neither.
I have found that a lot of open source projects really don't want any form of feedback or contribution at all and you sometimes just get abuse for even trying to help. I usually check the history of issues and pull requests to see if there is any chance its worthwhile doing them, more often than not it isn't. Definitely check beforehand how the project usually behaves before applying any effort because the bulk of them are not going to accept anything you might do if you aren't a committer.
One of the very funny things I've found is that proprietary freeware devs are often much more receptive to feedback than open source authors. Rick Brewster (paint.net dev) for example has responded quickly to all of my emails, I also remember Discord being very responsive back in the day (2017-2018), no idea what they're like now.
I send a few words of encouragement describing how awesome the author's software is, and how it made my life (easier). Most seem to be happy to receive such feedback, some don't care. It hurts no-one either way and only takes a couple of minutes.
What is constructive user feedback? That doesn’t help the software become better?
Not that the original email was that, necessarily. But in general.
We have such a code-obsessive—and elitist too—view of “contributing”. Oh so you are not gonna learn a new build system, a new programming language, our code guideline, and how to use our pull request checklist? Tsk tsk, then it’s not interesting to us that people with astigmatism can’t read the texts in our popups.
Per its definition: constructive user feedback should make the developer's work easier, not more difficult. Swearing is obviously bad (maybe not so obvious to some people). Screenshots, steps for reproduction, expected and actual behavior are the minimum, together with willingness to answer questions and try potential workarounds and solutions. Checklists are usually introduced after experiences with unhelpful tickets and PRs.
Granted, not all open source developer might be good at interacting with users. But expectations should be very low since volunteer developers only have limited resoures to spend per user. And companies behind open source projects obviously prioritize their paying customers.
Writing a rude, demanding, and insulting rant is not being helpful. Even when the content can, theoretically, be helpful, the psychological cost on someone who is doing this for free is really too much. Its a great way to get the maintainer to quit.
If you find a bug or think that something could really be improved it's fine, and in fact helpful, to give feedback. The key is always the phrasing and tone.
I just wish they used modal dialogs less. I get a modal dialog to update some plugins I didn't even install every time I open it, when a file has changed, when a file has been deleted, etc.
Modal dialogs should be the exception. Windows explorer is doing the same, modal dialog if anything went wrong, including things that happen all the time (losing network connectivity on a network drive, happens basically every time the computer goes to sleep or wifi gets disconnected, and then you have to click click click for every open folder).
"If you pop up an error box of any sort, they simply will not read it. This may be disconcerting to you as a programmer, because you imagine yourself as conducting a dialog with the user. Hey, user! You can’t open that file, we don’t support that file format! Still, experience shows that the more words you put on that dialog box, the fewer people will actually read it.”
Reading through that site, I see some things that... aged poorly. Like https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/11/21/choices-headaches/ which tells you to avoid giving users choices, which is hiw you get problems like what's happened to some Linux desktops that keep hiding useful functionality. Or https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/09/06/its-not-just-usabi... which promotes the idea of not giving feedback to abusive users, which is an ancestor of the Kafkaesque policies where Youtube or Facebook or Google Play bans you with no explanation of what you did wrong and no way to appeal.
I don’t agree with your examples. In the first one, he describes a specific problem, and I agree with his description and proposed sketched solution. I see no explicit connection with the later problems of modern programs removing options. In the second article, he describes a method for fighting spam, not abusive users, and it was a reasonable idea in 2004. And I seem to recall that even this very forum currently uses that method, so it must still be very effective, which in turn points to Joel being correct. The negative aspects you describe I feel lies more with the centralized monolithic nature of those actors. Of course, a tool can be used badly, but I’m not sure the article has aged that badly.
Nobody is going to read that text, either. People see a box, they immediately close it. Also, even if they did read it, people don’t know what a “disk” is, nor what “wipe” means.
I think you conflate two things: user initiated and program initiated modals. UI wise they are the same, but UX wise they are entirely different things.
For a lot of things you do actually want modals: file open dialog, yes/no dialog and similar so that is styled uniformly across the UI and comes from OS you trust so that the program has access only to the file[s] you explicitly gave access over OS dialog. These are the good modals.
However, modals are designed to take away the focus, interrupt you mid typing and what not. In absolute majority of the cases (and I cannot think of exceptions from the top of my head) you do not want the program to take the focus without explicit user action.
I don't like the user initiated modals either, but I understand this is a matter of taste. For example, the search function opens a modal that covers part of the text, and when it's out of focus it's semi transparent. I'd much prefer it to open from the bottom, or the side, or somewhere else, but definitely not on top of the middle of the screen where I'm working. I find other editors much nicer in this regard.
I wish I was as articulate as you. This is exactly what I mean when I see the not responding messages in Mozilla Thunderbird on Fedora/Gnome.
I would probably be ok if it happened very rarely but it happens all the time. I don't know what to replace it with though. We need to convey the user some way that their clicks and keypresses won't do anything because the application is unresponsive but as a user I dislike the dialog window that comes up and goes away after a few seconds.
I think a notification banner at the top of the window like many browsers do is fine, it doesn't block the user, is still visible, you just leave the behaviour that is the most harmless in this particular case (don't lose the changes in the case of notepad++).
"Notepad++ should be understandable by everyone, including the most obtuse people."
This made me laugh out loud. I guess one of the perks of not needing to sell your product is that you can freely speak your mind (see also: SQLite CoC)
Notepad++’s problem is that it doesn’t come with a lisp operating system. If it did then it wouldn’t matter how difficult it was to configure, as developers would be mesmerized by the possibilities
I liked Notepad++ till I got a hold of Sublime Text and went for a proper license. I have not looked back. I only ever install Notepad++ on a work computer where I might not have any other options, thankfully most places I work at let me just install anything.
Also want to note, do not use a highlighter to censor peoples names and emails, its a little too visible in the second screenshot. Seriously the amount of people doing self-doxing I've seen online that use highlighter to "censor" is astounding. Even when you think its not visible all someone has to do is invert the image colors. Just use a solid non-transparent brush on the thing you want to censor.
While the authors' reaction is understandable as the software is free, it's also important to take emails like this to heart. Emails like this come from a place of frustration, and there's usually some underlying issue that can be found and improved on. Sometimes users have been frustrated for a long time, and the small issue at hand is irrelevant. It's the whole experience of the software being too cumbersome that leads to a user throwing in the towel sending an email like this.
>it's also important to take emails like this to heart
If you have a small open source project, absolutely.
In the case of Notepad++ I would say this would be a very fast path to burnout. I don't believe anyone has the mental power to deal with the ammount of assholes out there, you will just crash and burn.
Absolutely, ones mental wellbeing is the most important thing. But for this example, I would make a mental note that this could be an area to improve, not write a response like this–which isn't good for your mental health either.
It's important to separate your work from yourself. The user was frustrated by the software, not by you.
> it's also important to take emails like this to heart.
As someone who works in open source professionally, if I took every email and bug report I got like this to heart, I would have quit software years ago. (Some of my users apparently wish I would.)
Sure, glean some actionable information from it if you want, but if you let every frustrated or angry bug report and email impinge on you emotionally, it will destroy your soul.
I've been using it for about 15 years and too have never been able to figure out all those settings for User Defined Languages, Styles, Global Overrides and the rest. Thankfully, I never needed any of those: the only changes I made to the default settings is more aggressive auto-save, trimming trailing spaces on saving, and always using 4 spaces instead of tabs.
So Notepad++ does gets my praise: it does what I want of it: quickly edits text configs and serves as a stick-it board.
I am not a fan of how the author uses Notepad++ as his soapbox. Yes, I am an unhappy user, and I ended up uninstalling it and got a full refund :) It is not just ideology, technically, it is not my favorite editor.
But that's entirely my opinion, as much as I dislike it, the author can do whatever he wants as long as it is legal, and I don't think he did anything illegal regarding Notepad++. I owe him nothing, and I have no reason to complain, it is not like the world is lacking text editors anyways.
However, I don't believe in the idea that because you didn't pay, you have no right to complain. The author of Notepad++ makes money out of it through donations, maybe in other ways, I think that how he makes a living. And even if you don't pay, you are making the software popular, which helps him getting more donations. Furthermore, if you are committed to it, switching is not easy, "just use something else" is not a great argument. You have the right to get your voice heard if you don't like the way it is going. What you have no right to is harass the author, but that's not because it is free, that's because you shouldn't harass people, no matter how much you paid.
One project I used to use the guy would get tons of random strange messages. He had the perfect way to handle it. I saw it probably several hundred times in a forum he managed for his software.
"oh that is a good idea I will add it to my list of features to add"
Then pretty much never do it and work on whatever he wanted to do.
I think this reaction is natural when you feel like you're doing something for others but it never comes out feeling right.
First, even when we do something for "free" we're usually deriving some value out of it. We enjoy the work. We like the feel of progress, or praise. It's very rarely as altruistic as we want to believe.
Finally, what does this tell users, past, present or future? Are we dealing with people who will take our feedback constructively?
I've been in positions like this and have had this impulse many times but it's not fair to work on something and then demand people kiss your ring for doing so. I've treated users like this and really regret it in retrospect.
Am i reading your response correctly? You disapprove of the software author's response out of a concern over how they got back to a rude inconsiderate individual?
The email from the user is more a rant than feedback. Granted some could define literally any response as feedback but to me it doesn't qualify, certainly not as constructive feedback.
You read this right. There's no benefit to publicly chastising a user - even a rude one.
If I'm a user who reads this I'm extremely unlikely to ever offer feedback in even the nicest possible tone.
I think the right move is to extract any possible useful feedback from the email and hit delete. Even if you send this email, publicly posting it seems an even less useful move.
When you have users you will have unsatisfied users. When you have unsatisfied users you will have rude users. If you're rude to your users you will eventually have no users.
It is often a thankless job to maintain a product or service like this but we do get pleasure and enjoyment from it. It's hard to get bad or rude feedback but it comes with the territory.
That we gain some personal joy in maintaining our open source projects does not in any way mean that we need care about inconsiderate jerks throwing rocks at the man years of work we give them for free.
The personal joy is ours to treasure, not something we have to pay users for. Rather, if users want to have commercial grade "smile even though we're being told to go die in a fire for our shitty product" support, then they should pay actual money first. The trips to the psychologist required from that isn't free after all.
> That we gain some personal joy in maintaining our open source projects does not in any way mean that we need care about inconsiderate jerks throwing rocks at the man years of work we give them for free.
Oh I agree. Nobody has to care about this. Trash the email on sight.
This is more about the message being sent to other users. To me this feels very much like one's opinions carry as much weight as they pay for it and if the author doesn't like your feedback you might end up on that next release page.
>If I'm a user who reads this I'm extremely unlikely to ever offer feedback in even the nicest possible tone.
N=1
In human communication escalating to rude language especially when someone else initiated the rude tone is perfectly normal and I would find the opposite to be wierd. People like that guy in the email are entitled pricks and they should be called out for it.
Since the user's email address was hidden, it isn't like their reputation will be harmed or anything. They are just being used as an anonymous example. If they have some embarrassment -- good, being used as an anonymous example is the least damaging way for somebody to learn to be more thoughtful about the types of messages they send out.
Notepad++ is a popular project, I bet he already gets plenty of feedback. Most people probably won't hear about this. Of those who do... some will decide to not send anything. Some will be more careful to produce a useful message and avoid this reaction. Reduce signal slightly while slightly improving SNR? It seems like a wash.
To me this says nothing about how the author would respond to feedback given in a constructive tone.
After reading this I’d still offer constructive feedback in a kind manner in a heartbeat. If, hypothetically, the author still sent me a rude response then I’d simply never contact them again for anything.
Wow, what a horrible attitude. He isn't claiming to be Mother Teresa, he just wants people who are benefiting from his work to not treat him like shit. It's not a big ask.
I have no doubt the author would be very receptive to constructive feedback. But it's hard to listen politely when someone sends a snotty email like that, and belies their own ignorance with questions like "what is a global override anyway???" (Hint: ask that nicely first, because then your other questions might become obvious).
I'm sure author has no shortage of constructive feedback to benefit from. This? This is trash. And that he's turned it into fodder for his own amusement and others, is just one more gift to us all, that yes, he happened to also derive his own pleasure from.
Our users often get emotional and vent their frustration with bad UX in unproductive ways. But that does not mean the feedback is not helpful or constructive.
The users email did in fact contain several constructive complaints about the UX, including settings, user defined languages, styles, global overrides. They discussed difficulty in setting background color and highlight effects. They even provided a comparison to a different product (google search) to demonstrate alternative UX.
I think angry user emails can be some of the most enlightening ones with regards to learning about the real UX
All I can take out from his complaints is that he doesn't understand settings. I don't know what he doesn't understand about them, what exactly is wrong with them. I'm not sure I would call that constructive.
Constructive would be something like: "I wanted to do X, so I tried doing Y, I expected Z to happen, but instead got W".
People who fix bugs, or who work in tech support, understand what is needed in a defect report. Most ordinary users don't; they expect the responder to ask them for the specific information they need. Anyone whose done tech support over the phone knows this.
Some bug-reporting forms nowadays require you to answer roughly those questions, which is a good thing.
End-user feedback doesn't have to be an actionable bug report. If a user contacts you to say simply "I don't like it", that's legitimate feedback; something about your product is annoying enough to cause this user to reach out, rather than silently abandoning your product. The snarky "we will refund your purchase price" response isn't going to elicit information about what caused the annoyance, given that everyone knows the vast majority of users don't pay for Notepad++.
No offense but you need to level up your empathy/reading skills then. This is a canonical example of user feedback. Your user feedback isn't going to be coming from the lead developer on a major product or a Comp Sci PhD or a highly talented software designer that can effortlessly (and for free) breakdown problems and suggest efficient and powerful solutions in a long-form report.
This right here is how users tell us our UX sucks. We either listen or we don't, but how we treat our users is very core to how well our products do.
> No offense but you need to level up your empathy/reading skills then.
Can you deduce what went wrong from what he wrote?
> Your user feedback isn't going to be coming from the lead developer on a major product or a Comp Sci PhD or a highly talented software designer that can effortlessly (and for free) breakdown problems and suggest efficient and powerful solutions in a long-form report.
He doesn't need to suggest solutions. He just needs to communicate what happened. There is nothing in this mail about what he tried doing with settings - where he clicked and what he expected to happen.
This just seems like free/open source coding vs corporate products. Yes, if you are selling a product to customers, you have to be nice to them, even if they are rude.
Going by their own words, the motivations of OSS maintainers are weird. They complain that people don’t appreciate their efforts. Little money in it. So when do they get some payoff? Apparently these moments of catharsis where they get to vent their frustration against the freeloaders. They’re like rich people who hate taxes and yet pay double on it anyway, just so they can tell off people who they consider to be freeloaders.
Just upload your code and forget about it, then. Or keep the code to yourself. Because the social side of OSS doesn’t seem to be working for you.
There is a subreddit called /r/ChoosingBeggars that is chock full of stories like Tom's email.
The hard thing to keep in mind when you're a creator of free products like this is that the loud, annoying, insulting users are usually in the minority. The unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of people who use and enjoy the creator's stuff are just quiet about it and never tell the creator directly.
Don, great reaction to those entitled bastards reaching out with negativity. Love your work man, keep it up. Npp is the first tool I install on any new pc and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Used to be the first app installed by me as well, until I left Windows after 31 years. The only editor that makes sense to me on the Mac is VS Code. Atom doesn't come close to NPP.
"don't complain that a worthless product is worthless" however sarcastically put, is not a very compelling retort. Because its not worthless, should not have ambition to be worthless, and is an expensive time sink for people who don't ultimately get use out of it.
I've settled on a portable version of Notepad++ 8.3.3. after spending months trying everything from sublime to atom. I wish for so many things, none of the editors available today are customizable enough to fit my work flow.
You should build a page with web form for "official complaints" and after submitting provide information about them being redirected to some non existent complaints department. Venting honeypot ftw.
I don't found it a good joke. Chinese cultures (Chinese as a race but not as nationality), including confucianism, is also inherited by other countries like Taiwan and Singapore, and regions like Hong Kong and Macau.
Variants of the confucianism culture are also developed in Japan and Korea.
So the maintainer may also insulted Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean unintentionally, apart from Chinese (as nationality this time).
The most important missing feature of Notepad++ is the ability to search for a file withing a "project" using some ctrl+p functionality. I know that Notepad++ doesn't have a "project" concept but this could work like this:
* User presses ctrl+p
* Notepad++ searches all parent folders of the current open file until it finds a .git directory, then stops. If no .git file is found abort
* It creates an index of the files contained in the folder with the .git directory recursively (this may take some time when done for the first time but after the 1st time the index will be kept in memory and no time should be needed)
* It displays a box that the user can type parts of the file and moves focus to that box (i.e after the ctrl + p the user can write his query)
* It uses the index to present a list of files that match the user query; the user can navigate the list using the arrow keys
* The user selects a file and can open it in a new tab, optionally he could also replace the current tab or open it in a split pane
The search in Notepad++ has a project based search [0]. Never used it myself because the Find in Files (Ctrl+Shift+F) feature has been good enough when using the Directory and in all sub-folders options.
I would just put that guy's email in the spam folder and forget about it. Adding fuel to the fire by sending a response like that might cause more harm than good.
It seems weird to me. Why do the people approach the creator in such an odd manner? Even if you paid, it does not help anyone by starting the conversation in such a negative way. Now that I think about it, the only time I go in expecting the worst is with one of our vendors.. and even then I try to go in asking rather than accusing.
This is so f’ing awesome I can barely believe it.. it’s as if he channeled the 27bslash6 guy.. yeah yeah I know the 27bslash6 guy is kind of an ahole and I know lots of people have their disagreements with the n++ guy, but all of that be damned I still love this type of wickedly good dark humor…
Coincidentally, I'm closing in on the end of "You're Not Listening" by Kate Murphy.
And while it has nearly zero tech-ness if you will to it (sans the discussion of mobile devices on human relationships), I would recommend it to any who is in tech. Mainly because listening is as important as broadcasting (i.e., speaking, emails, etc.). We need to hear clients, users, managers, etc. It's a quick and easy read.
My only complaint about the book is I hoped for a chapter or two on how to improve your odds to be heard (especially when trying to communicate with someone with average or below listeing skills).
This sounds similar to Andrews & Arnold ISP's response to the UK legislation requiring ISPs to offer a filtered internet at sign-up; their sign-up form has an option "I want a filtered internet", which takes you to a Google search for UK ISPs.
My only complaint ever about Notepad++ is that the search/replace dialog is so big. But, OTOH, the one in Sublime Text is too small. Microsoft Word is just right, and resizable if you need the option. But I hate Word.
Guess the author thinks Confucianism is bullshit (fart). I APPROVE!
The sample image of the first feature is Confucianism surrounded by the fart character. The feature highlight only one found entry per line. That is what you get when you search for fart.
It's stuff like this that leaves me despondent as a technologist. Are these the people whose lives we've spent decades trying to make easier? I'm starting to suspect most people don't actually want their lives to be easier.
I've been writing software professionally for twenty years, and the worst thing that ever happened to the internet, in my mind, was making it essential to people's lives. I suspect if it started out as essential in the 90s, the free software movement would never have happened.
No, for every unhappy black text on greenish background google disliking user there's literally tens of thousands of happy users that have used notepad++ for over a decade. Those are the regular people who are satisfied and don't bother the author with presumptuous emails.
As a heads up to folks if decide you want/should/need to remove information from an image then just remove it. Don't scribble over it, highlight it, warp it, etc, just remove it. In this case the email is still visible on a good monitor without any modifications and clearly visible on any device without much effort.
Well, the guy might have been a donor--is he really willing to send that money back? I use notepad++ for the same reason I use VLC--I'm pretty sure it doesn't come with any malware. I don't really like it, and have certainly been tempted to complain. You know--complain productively.
Notepad++ is great, my only complaint is that I don't like how heavyweight the ctrl+f process is, where you have a full-on popup window rather than just a little area for the search box somewhere along the edge of the window, like most apps do.
I'm not opposed to also having this, but imo it should be, like ctrl+shift+f or something.
That's how Android Studio works, for example. Ctrl+f brings up a find-replace subwindow at the top of the screen that works for that one file, but you can also do a "search across entire project" or "search across subdirectories" that comes up in a popup.
Does anyone still use notepad++? I agree with the user and left it a long time ago. The settings are truly arcane and whenever I end up using notepad++ randomly I just use google "notepad++ <setting> <change>" and rote follow a guide as opposed to attempt to learn that mess. (Not to mention command palettes have been useful for like 10+ years and going back to windows modal hell like its 2001 is just not fun)
I would never send such an email though
And the reply of "I'll refund you your nothing" is just as bad as the first email, but I guess if you don't make money, you're not a professional and don't have to act like it lol. Still comes across as a bad look, even if you're donating your time, you should be receptive to the user experience and a frustrated user is a useful datapoint for a good PM/dev.
I think the point is not so much that the user is complaining, but the way the user is complaining. - Even more because it does not provide any helpful advice or idea.
So no, even as a professional you're not obliged to handle such users. As others already have pointed out. If you have a problem with a free software (or any free product), but can't provide any value, just do not communicate.
I disagree, as I mentioned elsewhere, the user made several helpful comments. It's not the users job to provide "ideas", that's for your product team (or you if you're alone).
It's the users job to explain the UX and problems with it. This user mentioned what, 5 or 6 different parts of the user experience that suck? And mentioned alternative user experiences that are superior.
I personally think the users email is raw and mean but still an extremely useful insight into the user experience with a lot of actionable stuff. I agree with the user. The programs settings, global overrides, styles, handling of user languages, etc are a nightmare for UX compared to modern products.
A good developer takes this email and empathizes with the UX problems, even if they won't redesign anything. A bad/petty developer gets snarky and mean and insults the user.
> A good developer takes this email and empathizes with the UX problems, even if they won't redesign anything. A bad/petty developer gets snarky and mean and insults the user.
Good developers aren't robots either. You get that kind of email, the best course of action is to delete it and move on.
If it's a large enough project you'll get the same feedback sooner or later from other users anyway, and that will be users with whom you can (and want to) communicate with.
I don't use it for development. But general scratch pad for throwaway text files and notes is pretty nice. And the editing options are good enough for my use case.
My students won't use anything else, because it is probably the best free text editor on Windows. For me, configuration is exasperating and functionality has various areas of friction. I use a proprietary editor for my own work (EditPad Pro).
I would still use it if it worked on Linux. Notepadqq is buggy for me. But Notepad++ on Windows is pretty solid and I've never had issues with the settings.
Notepad++ is acceptable for a free Windows text editor, but it had serious crash problems when I last tried it - luckily, there are probably 2,000 alternatives or so. (I usually use micro, Acme and/or ed these days).
It's not a trait of HN. Sarcasm does not translate well to purely text communication. I've heard several people make the same kind of argument you just did and actually mean it, so when I read your post, I assumed you were not being sarcastic.
I spent far too much time on Reddit and the chans, where sarcasm often is the default mode. Here, everything is business-casual, but serious, even the trolls. :)
Agreed. I used to laugh myself to tears on slashdot. I don't think I have ever laughed at anything on HN. HN is like on of those really good devs that is good because they have several intertwined personality disorders that make them good at programming pedantry. Ultimately their inability to loosen up makes them just an OK dev.
Yeah yeah yeah, the cookies you made for me again last week are OK but honestly I'm sick of them. You're not getting any praise from me. Sorry dude.
I've been eating your home-made cookies for years and still can't figure out why you make them so dry. It's complete BS. All I want is a little moisture in the middle of my cookies. I do NOT understand why you have them crunchy. It makes no sense.
I have had it, and will move on from trying to understand your thinking. Your cookies used to be nice, but now they're a massive piece of garbage, maybe you should check out the cookies in a supermarket.
- Your neighbour