Advanced issue-reporting for Beta

[indeyets]

• Feature Name: Advanced issue-reporting for Beta
• Start Date: 2021-04-18

Summary

Report useful information about issues happening on "beta" website to developers without obscuring experience of users.

Motivation

We have released "beta" website couple of months ago and we felt there's a need to give beta-testers access to streamlined error-reporting. We introduced "bug" icon which links to "support" group. That was a minimum-effort thing.

This icon served one of its purposes — it nudges users to report things. But it didn't serve the other one: it doesn't give a powerful, non-obtrusive UI. As a result, some of the users tend to ignore this icon/button completely.

User-oriented explanation

All web-pages of "beta" website have a floating bug icon. A click on this icon shows a floating form. Each of the form fields has (info) icon nearby, which shows additional information on hover/tap. The fields are:

• "Message for developers": a field for arbitrary text.
  Info says: "What issue do you see? Tell us! Do you know how to reproduce the problem? Provide us with the steps, we'll be able to help you faster if we can see issue with our own eyes!"
• "copy text as a post to @beta" (checked by default).
  Info says: "We will get your report anyway, but post to @beta might result in a useful discussion and some of volunteers might be able to help you earlier. Turn off this checkbox if you want to avoid public discussion"
• "include user info" checkbox (checked by default, checked-and-locked if "copy text as a post…" is enabled)
  Info says: "We'll know your username if this checkbox is turned on. We will not if it is turned off"
• "include additional technical details" (checked by default)
  Info says: "Technical data about your enivroment will be included if this checkbox is turned on. It includes: Screen dimensions, Window size"

Developer-oriented explanation

We will process repors in Sentry. Developers have access to it, but regular users don't. This way we can provide a degree of privacy to reporters.

So, whenever users submit reports those always end up in Sentry and sometimes (if user wants it) copy ends up in "@beta" group for public analysis.

The flow will include these:

// if user decided to identify herself
  Sentry.setUser({ id, username, ip_address });

// if user decided to provide additional technical details (list not exhaustive)
  Sentry.setTag('freefeed.displaySize', '1920x1080');
  Sentry.setTag('freefeed.viewportSize', '1010x919');
  Sentry.setTag('freefeed.touchSupported', (window.DocumentTouch && document instanceof DocumentTouch) ? 'true' : 'false');

// user's message
  Sentry.captureMessage("Something went wrong");

Message to beta-group will always include OS and user-agent (sentry also preserves these by default) and it is not anonymous. "Additional technical details" are never sent to group.

The text of message will look like:

The "Like" button never works for me. No matter if I click
it with mouse or try to navigate using keyboard it is never
active.

User-agent: Lynx/2.8.9dev.8 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/3.4.9
Report ID: a7de3ecf2d824f8baec9475b2bcd1be3

"Report ID" refers to Sentry identifier which can be user by developers to see additional details about the case.