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On 6/1/10 6:21 AM, Bryan Clark wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:5AE3E5B6-0FB1-48F0-812A-5EFB84811248@gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div>I like it a lot! I wanted to go over them here to make sure
i understand them. I'll add more random ideas inline as well.<br>
</div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana;
font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">
<p>> an extension that helps deals with the top few support
issues, solving them if possible, giving more diagnostic
information if not possible to solve.</p>
<p>Would a use case for this idea be: person opens a tab to find
the top 10 GS issues listed (possible quick search on some
more). Each issue has an embedded "solution" which could be a
workaround or a small script that makes the necessary changes.
<br>
</p>
</span></blockquote>
I've been thinking of this as a diagnostic and repair tool for
common issues, like Windows has, except that we would actually solve
some issues :-) So you click on an item that corresponds to your
problem; we run some diagnostics, perhaps ask some more questions,
and then attempt a repair, or give some advice.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:5AE3E5B6-0FB1-48F0-812A-5EFB84811248@gmail.com"
type="cite">> Message send/receive issues - reprobe settings,
username, etc. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">
<p><span class="Apple-style-span" style=""></span></p>
<br>
<p>If I understand this it sounds like it could be built into
the top issues some how. A static one that always is around.
Or we could just try to attach it to connection errors and
it's completely separate. Either use case doesn't matter right
now, I'm just trying to understand it a bit more. <br>
</p>
</span></blockquote>
So I'm thinking that the extension would mainly be static issues,
because the main benefit of having this in an extension is that we
can do more than a web page in terms of trying to diagnose and fix
issues. From the user's point of view, I was thinking that they have
a serious issue; they go to Get Satisfaction, and are told, either
through the web site, or by a someone responding to their issue, to
install the support extension and try to diagnose the problem. I
wasn't thinking of the extension as something users would
permanently install and use whenever they have support issues. But
we could do both.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:5AE3E5B6-0FB1-48F0-812A-5EFB84811248@gmail.com"
type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">
<p><br>
</p>
<p>> Profile discovery/import.</p>
<p>Matbe a use case is: on startup if we are having profile
errors we open a support tab that helps the person find their
profile and restart. A person could also go manually into this
page to import and old profile, perhaps from a backup. <span
class="Apple-style-span" style=""> </span><br>
</p>
</span></blockquote>
Yes, something like that. I think in the case of prefs.js getting
horked, or profiles.ini getting horked, we may be able to tell that
this isn't a brand new install of Thunderbird.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:5AE3E5B6-0FB1-48F0-812A-5EFB84811248@gmail.com"
type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">
<p> </p>
<p>> Easy way to clear the disk cache, and rebuild
indexes/offline stores.</p>
<p>Maybe a use case here is just having this be a static issue
in our top issues page with a solution having these options.
<br>
</p>
</span></blockquote>
Finding the UI for these things can be a challenge for some users...<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:5AE3E5B6-0FB1-48F0-812A-5EFB84811248@gmail.com"
type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">
<p><br>
</p>
<p>> Turn on folder compaction, if not already turned on,
and/or compact folders.</p>
<p>I don't really understand this. At first I thought a possible
use case might be something that lists all your accounts and
folders with the currently used size of the folder and allows
you to compact them and change the compact settings. <br>
</p>
</span></blockquote>
This is more of a diagnostic thing - user has some non-specific
issue (mail is slow, missing messages...). We'd run through the
folders and see if there's a ton of wasted space, or folders are
near 4GB, and if so, just clean them up. This is something that
might work its way into the core code, or we'd just flip the default
for compaction...<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:5AE3E5B6-0FB1-48F0-812A-5EFB84811248@gmail.com"
type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">
<p><br>
</p>
<p>> Check for virus checkers known to cause issues,
especially ones that intercept the communication between
Thunderbird and the mail server.</p>
<p>This made me think that we could have something that looks
for extensions known to cause issues from the GS forums. I'm
not sure if those virus checkers use extensions our not and
that might be a separate idea.</p>
</span></blockquote>
The virus checkers that completely break us have extension
components, but the virus checkers that prevent mail from being
retrieved or sent, or slow down file access tend not to have
extensions.<br>
<blockquote
cite="mid:5AE3E5B6-0FB1-48F0-812A-5EFB84811248@gmail.com"
type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:
verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px;">
<p>If we could somehow detect the installation (and usage) of
the virus checker I could see a use case where we open up a
notification bar that warns them and maybe takes the person to
a issue / solution page. I see this similar to when gmail
started detecting firebug running and alerting people that it
really slowed things down. <span class="Apple-style-span"
style=""> </span></p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>> Check for non-default settings the user may have
accidentally toggled and gotten confused</p>
</span>
<div>I like this one a lot. The "where did this go?" helper. I'd
see the use case as perhaps: opening the support page with the
top support issues. It could be broken out into individual
issues or one "pieces are missing" issue which has buttons to
try changing the settings. If we listed the common settings and
highlighted the changed ones people could click "restore" to get
back to the default setting. A "restore all" button could also
be at the top to just revert all the common custom settings. A
further piece might then help them enter a GS issue if those
items didn't fix it.</div>
</blockquote>
yes, that sounds cool. <br>
<br>
- David<br>
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