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Guidelines for your support questions

We are very grateful for your help enhancing our products. Each report obviously helps us correct problems but, more importantly, through your feedback, you are constantly keeping us on tracks to make the application simpler, more pertinent and more powerful. Help us help you: to avoid going back and forth, trying to isolate the core information, this page lists the most frequent things we ask in return to our users’ messages. It has proved very useful and we’ll keep updating it.

Summary

  Please…
  – Always indicate platform, system and OutWit version number.
  – Export & attach scraper or macro. No screenshots of scrapers, please!
  – Keep descriptions short. Give a simple and specific example.
  – Do not crop screenshots. Take the whole screen.
  – If you have updated recently, indicate previous version number.
  – READ THE FAQ in the Help menu of the application
    (Install and Troubleshooting, in particular).

    Do read on to know how to help us handle your problem efficiently:


    What to Check For Your Report

     
  • READ THE FAQ — it solves 90% of issues.
    FAQ, troubleshooting info and tutorials are really helpful. (Seriously.)
    • Please read Help>Frequently Asked Questions before asking yours: The FAQ inside OutWit Hub and Email Sourcer are not just a general overview for beginners, they are actually an extremely useful list of tips with precise information, otherwise scattered across the Help.
    • The troubleshooting section of the FAQ, in particular, will give you the way to revert to factory settings if you are experiencing a new unwanted behavior of the application.
    • The tutorials built in OutWit Hub and Email Sourcer (Help>Tutorials) are also very useful and short. They only take a few minutes each and they cover all the main functions.
    • If you are experiencing difficulties accessing the online Help from the application, you can find a PDF version here. (Note that the PDF is not updated as regularly as the online help, so you should prefer the latter.)
  • UPDATE YOUR APPLICATION — even if you just downloaded.
    If you are using a current license or the free version, please make sure that you have the latest update.
  • SHOW RATHER THAN DESCRIBE
    If you are having a problem, give us everything to reproduce it with a short, precise description.
    • do not write long blocks of text with complex descriptions of general processes,
    • determine where your issue resides and focus on this part:
           – Here is WHAT I DO.
        – Here is WHAT I GET.
        – Here is WHAT I WOULD LIKE INSTEAD.
    • make sure you include the relevant URL(s),
    • include a specific and streamlined test case that we can reproduce in a few clicks, with EVERYTHING we need to reproduce it: macro, scraper, list of URLs… (Export them and attach the XML files.)
    • do not hesitate to add screenshots, if necessary (but NOT of your scrapers or macros).
  • Create ONE support ticket per issue.
    • do not reply to our answers by creating a new ticket but add a comment to the same ticket (the link to the complete thread of your support ticket is at the top every email you receive. You need to log in to access the thread),
    • if the issue was solved, please do not add: “Thank you. Oh, by the way, I would also like to know how to…” The ticket content should correspond to its title.
  • No screenshots of html code, scrapers or macros.
    • please do not send us screenshots of your scrapers or macros, or describe them in your message, as we would be forced to retype them. Instead, please Export them and attach the XML files (EVERYTHING we need to reproduce: macro, scraper, list of URLs…).
  • If what you need to show us is not a scraper or an automator:
    Attach screenshots of your whole screen as jpg or png files
    • do not include them into MS Word files or other applications,
    • do not use screencast (unless you really need to send us videos),
    • do not take partial screenshots. Do not just send a dialog or a section of the screen. We already know our dialogs but what is really interesting is the context: the state of the application when it happened,
    • when possible, open the log panel when you take the screenshot, for us to see the list of actions that led there,
  • Subject and Version are required fields.
    • make sure the title of your ticket is meaningful. Don’t call your ticket “outwit hub” or “I have a question” or “Could you help me?”. If we search for it in the future to add a comment and if the title doesn’t give the topic of your question, we may never find it.
    • provide the full and precise version number that you are using. Do not enter “current”, “the latest”, “N/A”, “Yes”, “I don’t know”…
    • if your problem comes after an update, please specify what precise version you had before the update and what version you updated to.
  • TRY THE ADD-ON
    • OutWit Hub (Light, Pro or Enterprise) used to come in two guises: the Standalone executable application and the Firefox add-on. If you are having problems running the Standalone, you can still try the other. The first reason is obviously that it will allow you to work without delay; the second is that it will give you access to the Help and FAQ (with troubleshooting information on how to create a blank profile).
      ** Important Notice: Mozilla’s new add-on signing requirements are incompatible with ours and the very purpose of our application. Unfortunately, like many other developers, we had to discontinue to support Firefox add-on versions. At this point, however, it is still possible to install unsigned extensions on FF44 or previous versions, after typing about:config in the address bar and changing the preference named xpinstall.signatures.required to false.

Support is done by the developers themselves: they need to know your needs to make the application a better tool. Unfortunately their time is limited so, please do not write very long descriptions of processes or expect them to analyze the structure of a website. If this is what you need, read how we can create custom scrapers for you here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2015 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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