Show notification for known issues earlier in the report submission process

[trev]

Background

When people submit an issue report, in many cases we know the issue already - e.g. an adware infection. We maintain a list of known issues and notify users about them when the report is submitted. However, it happens on the very last pages and people commonly ignore the message. Some will even keep submitting the same issue over and over again, despite being notified.

What to change

Add a "check for known issues" step after the report type is selected. In this step, download the list of known issues from the server (make sure to cache it for a day) and compare the report data against it. Show a warning page if there is a match. Continuing should not be possible until the user checks "I've read the information above but my issue is different."

TBD: Decide which server this list should live on. It should probably be just a copy of ​https://hg.adblockplus.org/subscriptionlist/file/tip/knownIssues.

[philll]

I strongly disagree doing this change, as it will keep back very valuable data points from us allowing to judge how big an issue might be. I am fine with showing some hint after submission, as Nicole suggested. Once we managed to have some better concept for known malware issues, we can try to do something with more effect.

[trev]

The question is: where are our priorities? Do we want to measure or do we want to help users and filter list authors? We are already showing a hint after the submission and it is clearly being ignored. We can (and should) try to optimize that hint, but I think it is even better for the users to get immediate feedback. And filter list authors will have fewer useless issue reports.

[nicole]

Would it be possible after giving the user a link to repair their malware to give them two options, like "This resolved my issue" and "This didn't resolve my issue, continue with issue report"? Then store both data points?

[greiner]

Replying to trev:

We are already showing a hint after the submission and it is clearly being ignored. We can (and should) try to optimize that hint, [...]

Just for reference, the above mentioned issue was reported in #388.

[philll]

@trev: As you already said, showing the exact same link to users didn't seem to help them a lot, so we will not be helping many more of them by showing it one step earlier. Even worse, it could turn into users flooding the Easylist forum with help requests or users being even more angry about us not letting them report their issue. We should rather come up with a way to really help users there, which we couldn't yet. However, wecould also try to approach the load of reports to filter list authors, by letting them filter for non-malware ones, if we know about them, so there isn't a problem left for them. Then still, we should try to help users in the end.

[trev]

As you already said, showing the exact same link to users didn't seem to help them a lot

That's not what I said. They don't even click that link because currently as far as they are concerned they are already done - the report has been sent, it's our responsibility now.

users flooding the Easylist forum with help requests

Why would they do that after being pointed to a blog post on how to remove malware? They didn't bother going to the forum in the first place, that's why they use the report functionality.

In fact, they are currently complaining about us ignoring reports all over the web.

users being even more angry about us not letting them report their issue

As explained in the description, this is supposed to be merely a warning, not a hard error. Quite a few people will certainly just click "I've read the information above but my issue is different" without even reading and submit their report anyway. We have other (hardcoded) warnings already and there are always people successfully ignoring them. These cannot be helped, but there are other users that will stop and read.

[philll]

Made Firefox and Firefox mobile available as seperate platforms.

[trev]

Mass-closing all bugs in Adblock Plus for Firefox module, the codebase of Adblock Plus 3.0 belongs into Platform and User-Interface modules. Old bugs are unlikely to still apply.