The “Contact GlassWire” page Contact GlassWire uses images for the email addresses including the main Help Desk email address shown in this screenshot:
Because it is an image I have to type in the email address manually and try to avoid spelling mistakes.
The overall impression of the current practice is that GlassWire.com is amateurish compared with other sites.
Suggestion - Open new email
It would be much easier if you used the common practice of allowing users to click on the email address to open a new email message. It is pretty simple html to create an email if I click on it as, for example, Discourse does:
Suggestion - Prepopulate the email content for standard responses
When you refer users to contact the help desk you can have templates set up for various kinds of message. For example, this could be used when I am referred to contact the help desk to get a logging version of GlassWire:
Instead of telling me what to do, provide the link in the post and pre-populate the message with the relevant details so the user only has to press Send.
Here’s an example of what that would look like to the user:
P.S. I just noticed in another thread that you also request a reference to the original thread as here:
The link to the thread could be prepopulated as in my example:
Another good reason for improving your support is to support the users who are providing valuable testing of GlassWire which remains very buggy. Give more consideration to making it easy for us to get the support we need with as little work on our part as possible. It is worth investing a bit more in this area because you will get more consideration from us in the longer term.
Since last year, I haven’t had two weeks operation without GlassWire falling over. Some of the bugs punch big holes in my history and the most common reinstall procedure also removes my history.
We have our email listed as an image to limit the amount of spam/junk we get to a somewhat reasonable amount. Once you have a relatively popular website, if your email address is easily accessible it becomes unusable quickly.
We could probably switch to a web form but we don’t get a ton of complaints so far, but we’ll keep your feedback in mind.
You could just obfuscate the email and feed it a database of known spam sources… and why not just put something in the nginx config that blocks many of that bad bots at the get go… I use it on my own sites.
set $bad_ua 0;
if ($http_user_agent ~ "WebBandit") {
set $bad_ua 1;
}
if ($http_user_agent ~ "webbandit") {
set $bad_ua 1;
}
if ($http_user_agent ~ "Acunetix") {
set $bad_ua 1;
}
if ($http_user_agent ~ "binlar") {
set $bad_ua 1;
}
if ($http_user_agent ~ "BlackWidow") {
set $bad_ua 1;
}
etc. etc. etc.
I do this for a couple of my larger clients whom have email as their life-blood and this helps tremendously. This could easily be set as a .yml template for discourse… or just an include to your server side (assuming you do run on nginx).
Just a suggestion that seems relevant. I just saved your emails to my contacts so I don’t have to type nothing more than glasswire to get a list of emails. Better than all the other work
I said “amateurish” because you don’t have an effective spam filtering solution which is an essential feature of every other site I rely upon. That’s why they have usable email links. It’s not that hard to do. Every web hosting solution I’ve used has a usable spam filtering solution with it because even the smallest sites with a published email link get spammed like crazy.
You didn’t respond to my point about GlassWire lacking customer focus in this area. You’re offloading additional work onto your most useful customers when you should be making it easier for us. We don’t get any benefit from testing the software. Nominally, we are “beta” testing but the types of bugs found suggest that we are still in the “alpha” loop.
Just because you don’t get a lot of complaints doesn’t mean that it isn’t an issue. I didn’t suggest these improvements before now because it was too much bother to do so. But it has always been a constant issue.
