Deal with cases in which users cannot access external sources

[ceilican]

One user ("Olena") has experienced a problem in which the options page failed to load www.google.com/jsapi. As a consequence, the options do not load. Most probable explanation is that Google is blocked in her country.

[ceilican]

[ceilican]

If something doesn't work in MTW because a user cannot access Google Translate, Yandex Translate, Bing Translate or any other external website on which MTW depends (e.g. because these services are blocked in her country or because they are temporarily unavailable), the user should be informed about this. Othwerwise the user might think that the problem is in MTW and give MTW a low rating.

[ankit-m]

@ceilican right now, all the errors are logged as an error in the console with the appropriate messages. Do you want it to alert the user? Alerts are usually not preferred and sometimes blocked by browsers.

[ceilican]

There are three types of users in relation to how they behave when MTW does not work for them:

1. Those who will contact us to ask why it is not working.

2. Those who will simply stop using MTW.

3. Those who will immediately give MTW a 1-star rating in the web store and write bad reviews.

Logging the error is sufficient to deal with users of type 1. With those users, we can tell them to send us a screenshot of the logged errors and then explain to them why it is not working.

My biggest worry are users of type 3.

I agree that showing a pop-up alert should be avoided. But we must defend ourselves from users of type 3 somehow. A less invasive alternative to a popup alert would be a "troubleshooting" tab in the options page, where the user could see the log of recent error messages without opening the javascript console. What do you think?

[ankit-m]

@ceilican, I like the idea of putting important messages in a tab. I will work on it and try to come up with something.