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Wow, remember when people tracked bugs? Welcome to the next level.

I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then.

I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases.

Boy, those were the days.

Failing that, developers used to put their email addresses in their source code!

Nah, if you do that, someone might email you, we can't have that.

Here are some recent examples that made my head go all explodo:

  • jPlayer: "We provide support for jPlayer through the jPlayer Google Group." Yeah, no you don't. You provide a lighting rod to ignore. E.g.,
    "iOS race condition in jPlayer ("play", secs)": Jan 14, 4 views, 0 replies. (Not "dup", not "worksforme", not "that's weird" -- just flat-out, up-front evidence that nobody even read it, because I'm pretty sure that all 4 of those views were me.)

  • Premium Pixels: It's a nice piece of work, but it has bugs. I tried to report them. Apparently this dude doesn't actually use email. The only way I could find to contact him in more than 140 characters was to hold my nose and send a Facebook message. Which he ignored.

  • ImageMagick: Back in May, I sent a long, coherent bug report with test cases to the address on the web site,, and got back a bullshit 1-line blow-off ("Did you try X?" "Yes, I tried X, I said that in the second sentence of my bug report.") So last week I re-sent it, saying, "Hey guys, bug's still there, my web logs show that you haven't even clicked on my test case once. Pretty please?" And now... User unknown

    To their credit, at least they seem to have also removed the email address from their web site.

The world has gone mad. MAD I TELL YOU.

Anyway, now I've discovered that on Firefox fails to play at all if secs != 0, with no error message, and I guess there's actually no way to inform anyone who might know what to do about this. Awesome.

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