On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
People are really bad at complaining, especially web
users. We've had
prolonged obvious glitches which must have effected hundreds of
thousands of people and maybe we get a couple of reports.
Like this:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7906
October 17, 2006: All hangul (Korean) usernames stop working.
November 13, 2006: Someone files a bug.
November 13, 2006: A developer asks for clarification.
November 14, 2006: The user provides enough clarification to allow the
bug to be easily tracked down and fixed by any developer.
Silence. New Korean Wikipedia users create only ASCII usernames for
seven months.
May 7, 2007: The original reporter provides a one-line patch that
fixes the problem, spending who knows how much effort to come up with
it.
May 8, 2007: Developer commits the fix, which ends up being two lines
for good measure.
If we had more people complaining more loudly, we'd have fixed that
within a day or two. But . . .
On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 7:13 PM, Tisza Gerő <gtisza(a)gmail.com> wrote:
By the same line of thought, they can use nostalgia or
some other old skin.
No, that's not the same line of thought. There is a difference
between deliberately breaking Monobook when it currently works, on the
one hand; and not putting in the effort to get Vector to work in the
first place, on the other. The latter is entirely reasonable, given
IE5's market share. The former is not reasonable.
At
any rate, few people know there are skins in the first place, and even fewer
would be willing to bother with them
Sure. But those people are not worth the effort to get new skins like
Vector to support IE5. Spending a few hours getting basic
functionality for a few hundred thousand IE5 users, rather than
spending those few hours adding a minor feature for a billion people,
is not reasonable. Especially since the IE5 users probably have
access to other computers anyway.