[Scummvm-devel] Improved reporting of unknown MD5s / new game variants

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Thu Oct 28 23:36:42 CEST 2010


Am 28.10.2010 um 17:30 schrieb Pierre-Yves GĂ©rardy:

> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 14:00, Max Horn <max at quendi.de> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> A very simple first improvement would be to copy the relevant data to the
>> clipboard and show a message indicating that: "An unknown game variant was
>> detected. Relevant info was copied to the clipboard. Please report it to the
>> ScummVM team by doing XYZ." (this text is obviously just meant to convey the
>> idea, not to be used ;).
>> 
> 
> This would erase whatever is in the clipboard, which could be an unpleasant
> surprise, sometimes (rarely, I concede, but causing data loss is evil IMO).

I thought about that too, and it's easy to solve, just add a "copy this to clipboard" button, which the user does not have to use, presto.

> 
> 
>> But even tighter integration is achievable with relatively little effort, I
>> think: We could offer a "Report by email" button in the GUI dialog, which
>> would open up the user's default email client with a precomposed email with
>> right address, subject and pre-filled body. At least
> 
> 
> What about opening a web page with a pre-filled form (pass the hash through
> the URL)? There are system APIs for this on both Windows and OS X, and most
> probably in Linux too (although it may be window manger dependent). On
> Windows, the default browser is used.

This works with the exact same "open URL" approach, sure. Code is virtually identical on OS X, at least.

And it avoids the problem Yotam pointed out with people using gmail/yahoo/hotmail/... as their primary means of sending email.


> You could use a negative captcha strategy[1] to fend spam...

Sounds nice, yeah :)

I am less scared of regular spammers, though, more of individual idiots who think it would be a cool prank to call that form (with custom tailored code, which easily bypasses the negative captacha) to submit a couple thousand bogus forms... But rate throttling could probably mitigate that mostly.

How'd we implement the form, anyway? Would it send an email to a fixed address (fixed inside the PHP code driving the form) ? That recipient email address could be a mailing list, so that it's archived, and we can easily adjust who reads the data, anybody could subscribe. Shouldn't be too hard to code... 




Bye,
Max



More information about the Scummvm-devel mailing list