Crowdsourcing support for accounts not held by agilebits support team?
please pardon the long narrative in advance, as I try to be thorough and cite scenarios which might help make the point...
I've been reading through a number of varied threads today, bouncing around via a handful of site-specific keyword in search results and I'm finding a trend... the agilebits team is more than willing to bend over backwards to help users solve cases specific to sites that might sometimes have 100k+ users and also sites that might have 100 users (of which I bet only a handful use 1P).
I recently had an issue with a major banking site solved by @Megan simply by her taking a screen capture of part of the process and pasting it into my thread. The other side of this story is that without an actual account at that bank, she was only able to get me so far. It was far enough this time, but might not be next time, or for the next person's issue.
I'd be willing to offer up a list of sites to which I'm an account-holder in order to be tagged/notified when the support team needs a little extra help. Perhaps it might come via GTM/Webex screen sharing with them watching and directing what might need to be screen-captured, or simply requesting screen captures of the functional 1P items that have complete data intact?
Now obviously, I'm not going to say what banks, credit cards, etc I have access to publicly in a big list, but perhaps agilebits might want to create and/or maintain some list of willing participants that can be searched when they get stumped. most times, I think they can get through things with the user having the problem, but perhaps sometimes there might be something that's just a bit beyond, and if I have 10min to spare to help them out, I'm happy to do it. earlier today I saw several references to pnc.com (the bank) and claims that their site doesn't work with 1P and/or their IT dept claimed it was incompatible. that's categorically false. the only issue I've ever had with that specific bank was the inability to auto-submit a login form because it spanned two pages and focus left the first field too soon. fields always entered content as expected, for more than 5 years straight. and IT depts (especially financial institutions) rarely will engage in any kind of discussions regarding third-party software—they simply say it won't work. it's not right; it's an excuse.
dunno, could some generic export from watchtower be part of a beta release that would provide a list of urls to agilebits to scan through when in a pickle? just thinking out loud here, but think that since the 1P team has been so good to me over the years, it'd be nice to return the favor. for most other software, a test suite of numerous OSes and app releases and whatnot can help folks work through a problem, but when the issue revolves around personal logins, you cannot expect the 1P support team to have access to everything, and you cannot expect every user to be tech savvy enough to help solve their own problems. heck, it might also allow users to share help on older versions (which was part of my case on something recently) and that watchtower partial export could also spec what OS/1P versions are in play there, and a user of abc.com on legacy OSN/1PvN could help where the test suite cannot match that setup?
when used judiciously and sparingly, having a db of users willing to help with xyz.com (xN) and willing to be tagged in a support thread could be great for the team. if we're busy, no harm. but adding a line to a support reply to the effect of, "would @jeremy12, @johnnyboy, or @jilly be able to add a screen capture of their successful 1P item?" or even asking for something more specific or a private walkthrough wouldn't be too much to ask. if we're busy and cannot, nobody is any more worse off. but if we can, then detailed help might be better than only being able to get to the test-submission of a username which fails because a legit account is not there.
1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
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Comments
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Wow, @JeremyBechtold. I'm speechless and touched that this would occur to you as a user. You're absolutely right that having access to a variety of valid accounts would be useful. I realize this would be opt-in and all of that, but we generally shy away from putting ourselves in a position to know more about our users than is absolutely necessary.
Generally, we're able to test sites out in a way that works without valid credentials. We create dozens of dummy Logins in 1Password each week for testing Login filling. Where possible, we create repeatable test cases from our experiments to make sure that 1Password only gets better without breaking previously functional sites.
That being said, there are times when a site will fail to log the user in even though 1Password filled the credentials properly. This is usually because of some Javascript validations in the page or something similar to that. Our team has a surprisingly wide range of accounts, but of course we can't cover them all.
Your proposal is a really interesting idea, and we'll definitely give it some thought. Perhaps this could be in a future version of Synapse. At any rate, this is just another example of how over-the-top lucky we are to have the best, most passionate users in the world. Thanks a ton!
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Jamie Phelps
Code Wrangler @ AgileBits0 -
for sure! being a web designer, I can't tell you how many times clients have come with bugs I simply could not reproduce and head to guess with context clues as to why they might be experiencing the issues. and of course, when you can't test something, you can only go so far trying to fix it.
if it ever comes up, feel free to reach out to me for inclusion in the list.
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@JeremyBechtold: :love:
Apart from this awesome concept, I also love that you seemingly went to the trouble of @ -mentioning non-existent forum members in your example, so as to not annoy any actual humans. If that wasn't intentional, you should probably just let me keep thinking that anyway. ;)
This is such a cool idea. Though I'm not sure of the logistics, I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to share your thoughts on this, and I hope it can someday become a reality. :chuffed:
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