To many of us applications are like cars: you get it, turn them on and they run. The running, fine-tuning and servicing of the app/car is left to a professional – in this case developers.
Developers, like mechanics, aren’t psychic and often only know there is something wrong with the running of an application when you inform them. This is called ‘bug reporting’.
But what happens when the mechanics who frisk our applications have troubles of their own?
API, SCHMAY-PI
Canonicals’ Ken VanDine blogged about just such an issue earlier today..
The ‘bug’ concerns Facebook API requests for Facebook notifications in Gwibber. A rather unfair method of allocating API requests per application rather than per user (!) is giving Gwibber users a bum deal.
Ken says:
“For some time now I have been struggling with getting Gwibber working reliably with facebook. Since Gwibber was included by default in Ubuntu, usage has gone way up and we quickly exceeded our API request allocation with Facebook. Facebook allocations are per application, not per user, which means Facebook blocks API requests for everyone, not just the users which are refreshing too often, etc.”
He mentioned that he has tried contacting Facebook but largely been ignored.
So, seizing on the recently announced “Operation Developer Love” initiative, Ken posted a link for users with an interest in seeing the bug resolved/triaged/fixed/whatever can ‘vote’ on it via this link.
As I’ve/other OMG! writers have been criticised in the past for highlighting bugs on which readers have then voted up in their thousands I need to make a disclaimer:
Don’t vote on this bug unless you understand what you’re voting on and why