On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 6:44 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@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@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.