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From: dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu (Duncan Murdoch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer,comp.windows.ms.programmer,comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: There is now a bugs@borland.com address
Message-ID: <1991Apr2.144054.11264@maytag.waterloo.edu>
Date: 2 Apr 91 14:40:54 GMT
References: <1991Apr1.201525.19100@athena.mit.edu> <1991Apr2.042059.25764@ccad.uiowa.edu>
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In article <1991Apr2.042059.25764@ccad.uiowa.edu> cadsi@ccad.uiowa.edu (CADSI) writes:
>
>(Borland, 6 months is a little
>long though.  Even IBM (AIX) gets back before a few days).

The new bugs@borland arrangement sounds somewhat like the informal arrangement
one of the Compuserve sysops has had in place for about 6 months or a year.
If you sent him email (via the Internet gateway), he'd pass it on the the 
tech support people, who would treat it as if it had arrived by postal mail.

This didn't work very well.  I sent in a number of bug reports, and for a 
couple of them, I received a letter several months later saying something
like "I couldn't duplicate your bug.  Could you send us more details?"
That's a reasonable request, but coming 4 or 5 months after I sent the report,
it's awfully hard to remember exactly what the details were, especially as
Borland didn't even give the date of my report, much less a copy of it or
a summary.

In other cases I received no acknowledgement at all.  Maybe I'll get it in
a few months, or maybe my report was lost in the mail.

If Sidney Markowitz is listening, I'd make the following suggestion to him.
Modify your rules for bugs@borland.com a little bit:  as soon as you receive
a report, send an acknowledgement of receipt, including your internal tracking
number (or whatever you use to keep track of reports).  If someone really
wants to know the status of their report, let them call tech support, quoting
the number, and find out.  And if you want clarification, call/write back
within a few weeks, not a few months, and give some hints as to which problem
you're asking about.

Duncan Murdoch
dmurdoch@watstat.waterloo.edu