
Two Open-source Emails a Day for Five and a Half Years - lenidot
http://moniker.net/2013/07/10/two-open-source-emails-a-day-for-five-and-a-half-years/
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jevinskie
What a wonderful insight into the gritty world of open-source software.
Scratch that, "software that is used externally" is more fitting. I find that
the most offensive (in that we should improve and fix the issue) waste of time
at my company is when we are treading water during the back and forth
communication to a customer while trying to solve a bug. Lack of log files,
reproductions, use cases, version numbers, environment details, etc. Don't
forget time zone differences, introducing a very painful days latency.

It isn't our customer's fault - some inside have championed for a product
feature that creates a "bug report bundle" containing useful details that will
assist the debugging developer at my company. Since the product deals with
sensitive customer data, this feature has been deemed a non-starter. Does
anybody know how to streamline this particular process where sensitive data is
involved? It is like trying to drive blind in a woefully slow car!

~~~
wladimir
We have the same problem with Bitcoin. On one hand we'd love a system that
automatically collects a stack trace, memory dump, information about the
environment on a crash and sends it to us (like Google Breakpad does). On the
other hand it opens a whole can of worms if accidentally a private key is
sent. Encryption is no solution in this case; the data still is stored
somewhere which could be compromised. It's very hard to automatically collect
diagnostic data without potentially collecting sensitive data...

~~~
lenidot
Yep, the zindus addon has this problem. Very hard (impossible?) to do
something automatic and risk free.

I'm not happy with the answer that I settled on with zindus:
[http://zindus.com/i/reporting-bugs](http://zindus.com/i/reporting-bugs)
because there is a lot of sensitive information in a logfile.

Even when someone gives permission and sends you a logfile, if there is
sensitive data it creates a maintenance burden on your end to deal with it
appropriately.

One (not very good) idea: pass the diagnostic data through some sort of
anonymizer. Unappetizing because it would involve a lot of work and would need
heuristics that could only be learned through trial and error.

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cfontes
Sorry non native english speaker and this confused me a bit "others are
operation-based synchronizer"

Is it that they only sync with a button push or something and you fetch stuff
when content changes on server ?

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jdpage
An operation-based synchronizer is a synchronizer which sends just the changes
(the "operations") to the server, rather than the whole new state. So if I add
a line of text to something, then it would send back a message to the server
saying "this line of text was added".

Presumably, a state-based synchronizer sends the entire updated state every
time, but I don't know offhand.

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zoobert
I am maintaining Gmvault ([http://www.gmvault.org](http://www.gmvault.org))
and unfortunately I have the same issue. I get frustrated because I spend most
of the time supporting users. It is good but I have plenty of ideas that I
would like to implement in subsequent versions and I do not progress.

I would like to attract developers to help me. Which channel is the best in
your opinion to do that ? I use Github so the source is available and the open
issues are also public there.

Where would you advertise the need for help to be sure to find some somebody ?

~~~
lenidot
A big ad on gmvault.org ?

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jakobe
One technique for reducing customer support email is to write extensive
documentation. Whenever I get a specific question more than once, I'll add the
answer to the docs. It turns out that most customers read the docs before
emailing, and in my experience it is extremely rare to get questions that are
answered in the docs -- and if, I can just send them a link.

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rapind
Very informative post. Thanks.

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marcrosoft
Was the email analysis put together with various scripts or did you use
something that can output this if given access to archived email?

~~~
lenidot
Just scripts.

Wouldn't be super hard to make the analyzer more generic.

What would you use it for?

~~~
RyJones
Your website is blocked by McAfee's web filter as malicious.

~~~
lenidot
RyJones, do they give you a "if you believe this is an error url?"

~~~
RyJones
this thread details the whitelisting process.

[https://community.mcafee.com/message/240277](https://community.mcafee.com/message/240277)

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c54
X11 isn't an OS.. although it might as well be.

Meanwhile I'm waiting patiently for Wayland

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hnha
very interesting post , thanks!

your website forces a certain zoom on my mobile browser and does not let me
zoom out so the text is unnaturally huge and images are cutoff at one side...
:(

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cheez
This has a lot of lessons for marketing commercial software.

