RSS Feed

Plugin Developer Discussion

Ran into an interesting issue today regarding my FB Scratchout plug-in.

As it happens, someone is running an older version that had a bug when a case was submitted through the public interface that has been fixed in the most recent version posted on the plug-in gallery. I know this because I got the standard error e-mail error report from a user pressing the "Report error" button in the error notification system.

Normally, I'd just reply with advice to upgrade the plug-in, but in this case it appears the user was a customer of whomever is running that version of FogBugz using the public interface. They'd probably have no idea what to do if I recommended a plug-in upgrade to software they don't even know they are using.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to the best protocol for dealing with this situation as I assume they probably don't want me contacting their customers directly.

Another option is that they have an open discussion group that allows public submissions called "Suggestion Box" I might be able to notify the administrator through this. But again, I'm not sure how they would feel about be me using a public forum to call out a flaw in their installation.

I also suppose this error was logged and will show up on the admin screen for someone that can address it. So I suppose I could just ignore the support request, but that just doesn't feel right either.

Suggestion: Perhaps it would be a good idea on the error report e-mails for plug-ins for they to automatically send a CC to the site administrator too? At least then I would have an e-mail address that would be appropriate to send the technical support to.


One other issue: The error report e-mail included a link with the ticket number to check the status of the case that caused the error, which allows me to view the details of the case. That seems like it might be a privacy concern. I don't know if they want to forward this info to the plug-in author. Although, I'm not sure what you could do about this.

Very good point that we never thought about!  I've opened a case for it.  I think we might just add a "Some errors" notification for admins if something goes wrong for a public user since you probably want to know when your customers are trying to submit bug reports and failing.

The more I think about it. You might not want to let non-admins submit bug-reports or notifications to plug-in authors at all. Maybe it should ONLY notify the admin and then give the admin the option to foward them to the plug-in author?

I agree all error reports should flow through the site admin and reports to the plugin-developers should include site-admin contact info.