Feature request: developer’s email to report tracebacks

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xavimat
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Feature request: developer’s email to report tracebacks

#1 Post by xavimat »

Ren'Py has a great log/error/traceback system. When the game has a bug, it presents the traceback to the end user with some options: Rollback, Ignore, Reload, Console, Open or Copy traceback, Quit…, and even some useful tips when hovering these buttons (the “_exception” screen). This information is useful for the developer, but not for many end users, that does not really understand what is going on. Usually, they write an email to the developer, who asks them to send the traceback; maybe the email address or other contact information is no easily available.

In my experience, lots of times someone tells me that “there was an error” and, when I ask what error it was, they look at me surprised as if actually “reading the error” was some incredibly hard challenge.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Add a “config.email” variable (optional, obviously) that is presented in the error screen, with the suggestion of writing an email to the developer with the traceback. Or/and maybe a “config.contact_form” with the URL of a contact form, to avoid displaying the email address.

2. Maybe hide the traceback information in builds (when config.developer == False), with a button to show it, instead of showing it in the first place. It could make more friendly to some end users (who don’t know/understand the code) the annoying process of reporting a bug.

3. If it were possible, the most user-friendly would be to make the bug(traceback) report automatically. With an URL for a contact form, the traceback could be sent automatically as data to the URL. With an email address, I don’t know if Ren’Py itself could send directly an email with the traceback, or simply create the traceback with a first line explaining that it’s useful to send that text to the email provided.
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