Theme

When it breaks

Telling us about it.

Sending one

1. /report.
2. Say what you were doing and what happened. A line or two is plenty.
3. Review, then Send.

Nothing leaves the machine until you press Send. The Attachments tab lists the files going with it, your drawing among them, and each one can be unticked; the Review tab lays out everything that will arrive - the parts, this machine, the program, your words - and Plain text under it shows the exact text as it travels.

What goes with it

• A picture of the screen as it is now.
• The drawing itself, so the fault can be reproduced rather than imagined. Untick that if you would rather not send your work - the rest still helps.
• The last few dozen things you did, with the tool, the view and where you clicked.
• How the frames have been going: how many took longer than a fortieth of a second, the worst one, and which part of the frame was slow. So "it felt glitchy" arrives with the numbers already in it.
• How the program is set up and what it was in the middle of: how it was started, the window and the screen it is on, the theme and grid, the view cube, what each tool is set to, and every open sheet with its view, scale, snap and zoom. A file named when the program was started is written as <file>, and sheets are numbered, not named.
• What machine this is - memory, processor, graphics, operating system. Nothing about you.

To see all of that before sending anything, type /state for the program and /sysinfo for the machine.

What makes a report easy to act on

• Send it while it is on the screen. The picture and the last few dozen actions are the most useful part, and they are gone once you carry on.
• Say what you expected. "It should have snapped to the guide" says more than "snapping is broken", because it says which of the several things it might have snapped to you meant.
• One fault per report where you can. Two in one are two things to find and one place to say they were fixed.

What happens to it

It is encrypted on your computer and lands on our own web host, where only we can open it; the host sees a sealed file, and the address it came from, as any website does. It is read as evidence - something to reproduce and check - rather than as an instruction. Nothing in a report says who sent it, and there is therefore no way to write back. If you want an answer rather than a fix, this is not the road.

A plain copy of every report and postcard sent is kept beside the program, in houston-sent, so you can read back exactly what went. One that could not go out - no network, the host down - waits, still encrypted, and is sent the next time the program starts.

What you get instead is the fix, in a release, with a line about it in What's new. Several of the things in there this month started as two sentences and a screenshot from somebody who was annoyed.

Things not to worry about

• Sending the same thing twice. Two reports of one fault is a better problem than none.
• Not being sure it is a bug. "This felt wrong and I do not know why" is a useful report - half of them turn out to be something that is technically working and reads as broken, which is worth fixing too.
• Not knowing the words for it. Describe what you did and what you saw. The picture and the last few dozen actions carry the rest.
• Your drawing. Untick it if you would rather not send it. It makes a fault quicker to find and it is never required.

The postcard

The second time the program starts it asks, once, whether it may send us a postcard: one note saying what sort of computer it is running on - the operating system, processor, memory, graphics and screen - and, if you care to say, what you want to use it for. All of the text is on the screen before you answer, Close is as easy as Send, and whichever you press it never asks again.

It is not a bug report and it is not tracking. There is no serial number or identifier in it, nothing that names you or your machine, and no way to tell two postcards apart; it goes the same encrypted way a report goes, and we count it as one machine. We are two people making this and we cannot otherwise tell whether anybody is trying it - that is the whole reason. /postcard brings the window back if you change your mind, and --offline means it is never asked at all.