Engineering · Chapter 12 of 16·2 min read
The Bug Report Button That Never Reported a Bug
It looked completely real — a screenshot of what you were looking at, a text box, a Send button. It had been quietly failing since the day it shipped, because the one thing it actually needed was never built.
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Most of them didn't do anything
Going through it properly, most of those buttons had no destination behind them at all — not a broken link, literally nothing wired up. Click Help center, nothing happens. Click Terms of Service, nothing happens. They sat there looking like navigation and did nothing when pressed, silently, with no error to tell you that.
One of them looked like it worked
Report a bug was the one that actually looked finished. Click it, and it takes a real screenshot of whatever you were looking at, drops it into a preview, gives you a text box to describe what went wrong, and a Send button. Every visible piece of it worked exactly like a real feature.
It looked like a feature that worked. It had never once actually worked.
It was sending reports into nothing
The button sent your report to a specific address on our own server. That address had never been built. Every single report anyone had ever sent through that form — description, screenshot, everything — failed to reach anywhere and was quietly thrown away, with no error shown on screen and nothing logged on our side either. As far as we can tell, it had been this way since the day the button first shipped.
We built the missing half
Fixing it meant actually building the part that was never there: a real place for reports to land, with the same protection every other piece of personal data in Nia already gets, so a report you send is only ever visible to you and to us — never to another user. We wired the same fix into every app that has this menu, not just the one where we first noticed, and fixed every other dead link in that list at the same time.
Why this one stuck with us
Nobody ever emailed us saying "your bug report button doesn't work." Of course they didn't — from where they sat, it worked. Screenshot captured, form filled in, Send clicked, modal closed. Everything a person could observe said it had gone through. That's exactly what makes a silent failure worse than a loud one: a broken button that shows an error gets reported. A broken button that looks successful gets used, and trusted, for as long as nobody happens to go looking.