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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

Just today, I tried to return something on staples.com. They have a field called "optional comments". I left it empty, and got an error saying "Sorry, but an error has been made. Please check the following highlighted field(s)." with the empty box highlighted in red.

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Did you report the bug? (Perhaps in the "optional comments" field.)

I expect the amount of effort it would take to find someone who could do something about it is more than it's worth.

I've reported bugs in Google products before, but it's usually just not worth chasing a company down for something that doesn't really impact me, and often they'll just refuse to acknowledge the problem or refuse to fix it anyway. E.g. the issue I described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10478264. Since then I usually won't bother unless it's hard to work-around or the company has a known bug-tracker.

I once went to a lot trouble to report a bug in an online precious metals trading site, and they gave me, like, 1% of an ounce of silver as a reward. :-) At the time, I seem to recall figuring out it was about $50. Of course, I had to open an account on their site in order to claim it, and there was a large initial deposit, so blah, nevermind....

I don't think it's safe to compare every internet site to Google. Google is notorious for not having good support, but many other companies take customer feedback very seriously.

I mentioned google as an example of a company with a public bug-tracker, not as an example of one that treats reports poorly.

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