So he didn't report the bug to Microsoft? His final comments were just to say:
"This issue has been known for eight years, on many versions of Windows, and it still hasn’t been corrected or even documented. I hope that changes now."
I reported the documentation bug. I don't use Feedback Hub because it never works for this type of issue. I know that some Microsoft developers will see this blog post and I hope that internal bugs get filed.
But ultimately as a non-paid tester of Windows I'm under no obligation to report non-security bugs in any particular way. I like reporting them through twitter and blog posts.
Back when I worked on Windows, we would triage Windows Feedback hub reported issues once a sprint (~2 weeks). But only those which had at least 2-5 upvotes on them. One-off bugs usually meant they weren't being widespread impactful and weren't as higher priority on our list (even if that isn't the case).
But the feedback hub is an abyss of random complaints to filter through. Sometimes we'd see items like "Windows wouldn't save my word document and now I hate windows" and being on the networking team were like "uhhh thanks"
As an external developer, it's become clear to me that some bugs don't get fixed simply because feedback doesn't get through to the product teams.
An example is the MediaFoundation AAC encoder in Windows 10. It's unusable, due to a bug that randomly introduces oink artifacts into the output. I submitted it to Feedback Hub, but of course it was too niche to get upvotes. Looked around, OBS Studio ran into the same issue and had to switch to a different AAC encoder, so it wasn't a rare problem. Someone even tried posting on Microsoft Answers reproducing it with the Windows SDK sample, and got only a generic response. Finally someone got through, and the product team mentioned that this was the first they'd heard of it... but at least it's actually fixed for Windows 11.
The design of Feedback Hub partly encourages the current behavior. It used to have a very visible categorization on the left side, but now they're easily missable drop-downs, and the auto-suggestions are completely bonkers. You can type up a bug about graphics errors and it suggests the accessibility and first-time install categories. Lack of curation also doesn't help; there's something to be said for having a light touch, but there are posts consisting of just random letters that have been there for years.
I understand it's impossible for a dev team to comb through all user feedback for a product as omnipresent as Windows, but the downside of this is probably that high quality feedback gets buried, because the average user might not understand the tech jibber jabber even if they have the same problem, so they don't upvote and just file a new report maybe not even describing the problem itself, just some random side effect that happens to annoy them.
I reported a probably Windows perf bug. Nothing happened. I reported it again. Basically they weren't interested despite my careful spelling it out. Time wasted. Fuck them.
Maybe it wasn't a bug (hah!) but they could have come back to me and at least told me they'd looked at it and it wasn't. I'd have appreciated that. But no.
"This issue has been known for eight years, on many versions of Windows, and it still hasn’t been corrected or even documented. I hope that changes now."