Integrate third-party bug report tool?

Add-ons Development
#1

Hello guys,

It’s been a while that I’m thinking of integrating a tool such as bugsnag or sentry into my addon, to get a better view about crashes and bugs occurring for my users, and detect new issues that my own tests might have missed before the release. This would of course be tied to a setting, and could be turned on/off by the users.

But I’m actually wondering if it’s something that would be alright, or if sending data to a third-party service from an addon (even for this kind of needs) would be frown upon?

And in that case, what’s your solution of choice to gain insights on what goes wrong for your users?

Would love your feedback on this :slight_smile:

#2

Well, you’ll have to comply with data protection laws, so have your users accept a privacy policy (so you need an opt-in mechanism). I think something like that is also in the add-on review policies, but to be sure, check there!

Lastly, the tool would have to work without any lib you load in from remotely, so it’d need to be a npm package or just some fetch() requests to a REST API.

#3

Thanks a lot for the answer Martin. I’ll check the addon review policy, thanks for the pointer. The problem with opt-in for this kind of system is that it makes sense if bug tracking is enabled for most users, I’m not sure it’ll be worth implementing if the addon privacy rule state this must be opt-in… Maybe it’ll still be useful, i don’t know :frowning:

To be honest, I was suspecting this kind of privacy issues, and that’s exactly why I needed the opinion of community members. I didn’t find so many posts about this here, although I suppose addon developers do have some bug tracking systems in place? How do you guys deal with this?

Yep you’re perfectly right. The technical part is no big deal :slight_smile:

#4

Maybe you can show the opt-in when the error occurs with a button “Send report” with some privacy policy link and a checkbox “Automatically send errors”. I think most people will click it if you design it right (in a way that they will understand they are helping you making the addon better).

I use only very simple bug-tracking - in the error window I’ve placed anchor element with mailto protocol with prefilled body that contains the bug info. This way user can send the report with e-mail with single click and a bonus is that I can contact them back if I need more info.

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