Back when Stack Overflow was in beta, the original design was really rough, so I mocked up a suggested new design for the main page via Stylish and submitted it to them. Within a day or two, they adopted something almost identical but never acknowledged me. One could argue it was a pretty basic idea (I only spent around 15 minutes on it myself) and they probably arrived there independently, but I still like to believe that I influenced a major site's design.

Or maybe the bug was closed as a duplicate of one they were already aware of? Still impolite of them, of course, but we shouldn’t assume the worst.

It is quite maddening to have to provide personal information to report a bug. My city stopped allowing anonymous reports of broken traffic lights, so every time I report one (much rarer now that they’ve made it harder) I always give bogus information.

> Because they lacked decency and intellectual humility to acknowledge his email despite benefiting from it.

Or their internal communication was haphazard and not designed to handle this case. I could totally imagine the bug report getting passed informally through a game of telephone and losing the connection to the external reporter (e.g. at some point the report got paraphrased, so the developer who fixed it doesn't know where the report came from, and the person who received the initial report doesn't know if it had merit or if it was fixed).

And at that point he'd played the game a lot, so he probably would have quit playing anyway. Were he like me, the fun at that point was the statistics portion anyway, and he'd already found and fixed that, so it was no longer fun either.