Intercom has the benefit of acting as an inbox on our side, unlike comments posted on LW (which may not be seen by any LW team member).
In an ideal world, would Github Issues be better for tracking bug reports? Probably, yes. But Github Issues require that the user reporting an issue navigate to a different page and have a Github account, which approximately makes it a non-starter as the top-of-funnel.
Intercom’s message re: response times has some limited configurability but it’s difficult to make it say exactly the right thing here. Triaging bug reports from Intercom messages is a standard part of our daily workflow,so you shouldn’t model yourself as imposing unusual costs on the team by reporting bugs through Intercom.
re: reliability—yep, we are not totally reliable here. There are probably relatively easy process improvements here that we will end up not implementing because figuring out & implementing such process improvements takes time, which means it’s competing with everything else we might decide to spend time on. Nevertheless I’m sorry about the variety of dropped balls; it’s possible we will try to improve something here.
re: issue tracker—right now our process is approximately “toss bugs into a dedicated slack channel, shared with the EA forum”. The EA forum has a more developed issue-tracking process, so some of those do find their way to Github Issues (eventually).
Thanks for the reply. I think we’ve reached the limits of what can be discussed in a comment thread. Would you be interested in doing a dialogue on this topic? I’m thinking of a somewhat broader phrasing, something like: “Would better support for open-source contributions free up or cost LW team resources?” or “LW and open-source contributions: costs & benefits”, or similar.
(And, re: “I’m sorry about the variety of dropped balls”, I want to be clear that I appreciate everything you and the team do, and I understand that you’re a small team with a big mission. The reason why I gave examples of when the Intercom process was less than 100% reliable was not meant as blame, but just to support my argument that the tool seems ill-suited for certain kinds of reliability, like follow-ups.)
Intercom has the benefit of acting as an inbox on our side, unlike comments posted on LW (which may not be seen by any LW team member).
In an ideal world, would Github Issues be better for tracking bug reports? Probably, yes. But Github Issues require that the user reporting an issue navigate to a different page and have a Github account, which approximately makes it a non-starter as the top-of-funnel.
Intercom’s message re: response times has some limited configurability but it’s difficult to make it say exactly the right thing here. Triaging bug reports from Intercom messages is a standard part of our daily workflow,so you shouldn’t model yourself as imposing unusual costs on the team by reporting bugs through Intercom.
re: reliability—yep, we are not totally reliable here. There are probably relatively easy process improvements here that we will end up not implementing because figuring out & implementing such process improvements takes time, which means it’s competing with everything else we might decide to spend time on. Nevertheless I’m sorry about the variety of dropped balls; it’s possible we will try to improve something here.
re: issue tracker—right now our process is approximately “toss bugs into a dedicated slack channel, shared with the EA forum”. The EA forum has a more developed issue-tracking process, so some of those do find their way to Github Issues (eventually).
Thanks for the reply. I think we’ve reached the limits of what can be discussed in a comment thread. Would you be interested in doing a dialogue on this topic? I’m thinking of a somewhat broader phrasing, something like: “Would better support for open-source contributions free up or cost LW team resources?” or “LW and open-source contributions: costs & benefits”, or similar.
(And, re: “I’m sorry about the variety of dropped balls”, I want to be clear that I appreciate everything you and the team do, and I understand that you’re a small team with a big mission. The reason why I gave examples of when the Intercom process was less than 100% reliable was not meant as blame, but just to support my argument that the tool seems ill-suited for certain kinds of reliability, like follow-ups.)