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<body><div style="font-family:Arial;">I read this mail only now when I decided to reduce the pile of crud that had accumulated in my VLC-Dev folder. If everything has already been done, feel free to ignore this comment.<br></div>
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<div style="font-family:Arial;" dir="ltr">I can testify that the previous approach was very annoying especially if VLC crashed multiple times in a row as I had to click through stuff multiple times, sometimes waiting for the box to show up first, and overall modal message boxes are very jarring in general. However, it’s a good thing to let people know and give a choice about pushing bug reports to somewhere on the Internet, which I expect of every well-mannered program, so the one asking for confirmation will have to stay (which it will, as I understood this).<br></div>
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<blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;">I think we are going about this the wrong way, and that it certainly make sense to invoke <code>MessageBox</code> with relevant contents if a bug-report fails to upload<br></div>
</blockquote><div>As seems to be the way things are and as outlined above, I will have to vouch for the opposite approach here. It’s at first totally inconsequential for users if their bug reports aren’t being sent, except for maybe not receiving bug fixes in the long run. It’s just not a priority at all and thus doesn’t warrant annoying them with modal message boxes, pulling attention to them (away from everything else) and requiring explicit action to proceed with what they wanted to do.<br></div>
<div style="font-family:Arial;">The report sending can also slow down users if they experience multiple crashes in a row, as every attempt takes time to finish.<br></div>
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<blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;">(maybe even ask if the user would like to save it somewhere for later access in that case).<br></div>
</blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;">This is a very good idea, they should be saved in some accessible location like the user’s 'vlc' directory by default and this location then documented on the ’Net as well as been given an entry in the 'Help' menu of the main GUI. I would go even further in that the sending should be totally asynchronous and maybe even be done by a small mini-service, which could be started by a scheduled task on Windows. It might have been easy to implement sending it at the next program start and it even has the advantage of giving predictable behaviour, but other than that I’d say that it has never been nice. That said, I’ll admit that I don’t want to implement this myself. It’s certainly a chunk of work to do and as such I don’t expect it to be done soon, but maybe, one day, someone will. In the meantime, I guess that archiving stuff (don’t forget to limit the storage consumed by this to maybe a few MiB at most) and pointing to the archive from the GUI is within reach, however.<br></div>
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<blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;">I am personally not a big fan of diagnostics […]<br></div>
</blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;">Regarding the wording, I’d vouch for mentioning the relevant party, which I cannot see without looking at the code in the file (it’s not in the diff) and also plainly stating that VLC couldn’t connect to it. Just use something like<br></div>
<div style="font-family:Arial;">"VLC couldn’t connect to the bug report server. (Plain FTP to infestation.videolan.org, TCP from port 49873 to port 23 [and from port 53581 to port 48278])".<br></div>
<div style="font-family:Arial;">I guessed that VLC doesn’t use secured FTP and I also suppose that it’s much rarer that the first connection would succeed but the second one won’t (that’s why I put the second port combo in braces). Also note how I managed to pack all the technical info into it that users would need to configure their firewalls properly and how I separated it from the short non-technical info that anyone could read to know what happened even if they had no clue about FTP and ports. I’m a bit proud of this feat. :)<br></div>
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