Dailyish Bug Bounty Hunt! Earn Goodies, Save the Empire!!

Calling All Permies, we need your help!  

The mission of Permies.com is to infect more brains with permaculture.  We do this in a lot of ways.  It is a group effort.  

One of the most powerful tools we have in infecting brains is the Dailyish Email.  

But the Dailyish is experiencing some bad juju.  New signups are not what they should be.  Many people who begin the signup process abandon before getting on the list.  We know this because of codes and wizardry and stuff.

This is where you come in.



We need people - lots of people - to step up to help us find these bugs.  It looks a lot like this:

1) Get a new email address.  Probably a bunch.  You can google "disposable email address" to find sites that will make this easy.
2) Go to permies.com.  Make sure you're signed out of your main account, or use a different browser.
3) Sign up in any one (or all) of a hundred different ways.  These range from making a post, to claiming a freebie, on desktop and mobile.  
4) Record your findings.  Take screen shots.  Make suggestions.  Mock up new ideas.
5) Submit your findings to this thread.  

You may be asking,

what's in it for me?

Well, of course, making the world a better place.

But we'd also like sweeten the deal:

We have a special super duper brain infection fund that will allow us to give you goodies for every bug you find!  The size of the goodie will be commensurate with the size of the bug, and range from things like:

-find a little bug, get a little free item from the digital marketplace
-find a big bug, get a big free item from the digital marketplace
-find the biggest bugs and see the dailyish signup rise to what it should be, and earn some actual, spendable currency.

Examples of Level 1 bug rewards include your choice of:
the skiddable structures documentary
Justin Rhodes' 45-minute video tour of Wheaton Labs bascamp
6 Ways to Keep Chickens ebook
Cooking with a Rocket Oven microdoc
the 12 rocket mass heaters documentary
the Hugelkultur Micro Documentary
the Rocket Mass Heater podcast gob

Examples of Level 2 bug rewards include your choice of:  
Tour of Wheaton Labs, the Movie
the Better World Book, ebook or audiobook version

Examples of Level 3 bug rewards include your choice of:
World Domination Gardening, 3-movie set
Better Wood Heat, 3-movie set
177-hour PDC/ATC video package

Level 4 bugs, what seem to be the most significant problems with the Dailyish Signup, will entitle you to your choice of $200 cryptocurrency or $100 paypal.



So roll up them sleeves, get on your sleuthing outfit, and clack yer keys.  This is the Bug Hunt Bounty, and it's open season.

So here is a bug - probably a very minor bug, but - I have discovered that if a user's address is listed as a "secondary" address for an existing Dailyish subscriber - then that "secondary" address is unable to sign up for the Dailyish!  

I know this because I had my wife's address listed as a secondary address (thinking it was like a recovery address or something).  Then, when she tried to sign up for the Dailyish, it would never succeed.  Furthermore, it would sign her out and sign me in, causing confusion from a user standpoint.  Took me a few tries before realizing what was happening.  

Hey, to make things easier for y'all sorting through the data, maybe we should all make our first name "BugTest" so you can easily sort through who the bug testing new accounts are (and potentially remove them after 30 days or something)  

Apparently "BugTest" is a realistic enough first name.

So here might be one... (sorry, I am not allowed to save screenshots from my work computer). Your current freebie options have workable links that lead to an email sign up. But your upcoming freebies have unlinked buttons. So an unwitting subscriber might scroll down to the bottom and choose one that is not yet available and end up at a dead-end link. Here was my process:

1) I made sure I was not logged in to my regular permies account, then clicked on the subscribe button, which led me here:

https://permies.com/wiki/135969/Daily-ish-Email

2) Awesome! I clicked on the big round button, which led me here:

https://permies.com/goodies?t=dailyb1#freebies

3) I clicked on the 'get for free' button for the
introduction to welding movie in 47 minutes
which led me here:

https://permies.com/goodies?t=dailyb1#free

...And that's where the trail meets a dead end. The link does not work. It does not bring me anywhere to sign up and there's nothing that says 'coming soon' or 'choose another option.' I tried a number of them and it seems to be just on the options listed under the 'More Premium Freebies' subtitle.

As a layman, I would not spend the time to click on multiple links to find one that works just to sign up for a newsletter. So perhaps it would help to clarify by replacing the 'get for free' button with a 'coming soon!' button on options that are not yet available.

Hope that helps!

Leah Beninato wrote:
As a layman, I would not spend the time to click on multiple links to find one that works just to sign up for a newsletter. So perhaps it would help to clarify by replacing the 'get for free' button with a 'coming soon!' button on options that are not yet available.

Those are valuable observations, Leah, thank you!

If you get a chance, could you make some sort of mockup of your suggestions?  Could use simple computer paint program, or even a crayon and napkin . . .  Visualizing possible improvements is a very important part of the bug hunt bounty.

Next person so find a bug I will give them PIE!

Thanks for the apples and pie, guys! Yummy!

This was what I was trying to describe earlier:

For many newbies who have not yet been bitten by the permies bug, they are very likely stumbling onto permies in their half-hearted attempt to relieve the boredom of their humdrum job and have mere moments before they go back to looking busy for the boss. The attention span is no better than a squirrel! 🐿

We want catch the squirrel before it escapes!

So:
The first two pics are unclear to a newbie. When I see a green box that says ‘get for free’ I get excited and click on it (I’m not going to notice the fine print). And then *buzz kill* it’s not available, I cannot easily sign up from this page, I can’t even buy it from this page. That means I’m now disappointed AND I have to do more work to find the right link to sign up… oh look! here’s a different yummy acorn from some other website!…. And off goes my squirrel brain and I forget all about permies.

The second two pics are some suggestions to avoid buzz-killers and make it as easy as possible to sign up/or spend money/or both! I personally would get rid of the dead end page all together and keep it all on that one freebies page.
But this is just one option to consider, of course!

Cheers!

Thanks for helping infect brains!
It would be especially useful if people using mobile devices can have a go at this: the screen layout and buttons are different to that on a PC.

This is not the type of bug you're discussing above, but the links in the dailyish today weren't links. They were linked in bbcode instead of html. My email client doesn't seem to understand bbcode, so they show as plain text, complete with tags. I copy/ pasted one to my browser and that worked fine. The tiny ad link is a clickable link as normal.

I don't know what software dailyishes are made with, but it's possible bbcode is disabled or that the links need html tags. (The bbcode disabled answer only makes sense if the tiny ad link is added in a different step or different software.)

Hi T,

That was actually an error on my part! I do apologize for sloppy email.

I have a bug. I’m signed up to the daily ish email and get it to my email address, but on the scavenger hunt thing on my profile it says I’m not signed up. Attached is picture to prove I am receiving the emails.

I am happy to announce to that we have fixed all the bugs that you guys had found on the freebies (goodies) page. These fixes will be on production with the next release of our forum software. Which is planned to take place later today or tomorrow. I'll update this thread when it is done.

I can't thank you guys enough for finding these bugs and dead ends.

That said, I think we are still waiting for a level 3 / level 4 type bug.

A qualifying level 3 or 4 bug would be something that would prevent the user from completing the flow of email signups. For instance, imagine that when you enter your email, it asks you to check your inbox for a verification email, but such email never shows up. Or, maybe the email arrives, but when you click the verification link in it, it just doesn't work. This sorta serious bug could hurt our user base a lot.

This type of bug doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the goodies/freebies. For example, there could be something that when you try to sign up for a new permies account, it just doesn't take your email. Or, maybe it takes your email and sign you up for a new permies account, but it never asks you to sign up to the dailyish email.

Our internal statistics indicate that we have a serious bug like this hidden somewhere deep inside the software. We just never found it so far.

Who wants to take a stab at this bug hunt adventure?

Devaka Cooray wrote:
... I think we are still waiting for a level 3 / level 4 type bug.

A qualifying level 3 or 4 bug would be something that would prevent the user from completing the flow of email signups. For instance, imagine that when you enter your email, it asks you to check your inbox for a verification email, but such email never shows up. Or, maybe the email arrives, but when you click the verification link in it, it just doesn't work. This sorta serious bug could hurt our user base a lot.

This type of bug doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the goodies/freebies. For example, there could be something that when you try to sign up for a new permies account, it just doesn't take your email. Or, maybe it takes your email and sign you up for a new permies account, but it never asks you to sign up to the dailyish email.

Our internal statistics indicate that we have a serious bug like this hidden somewhere deep inside the software. We just never found it so far.

Who wants to take a stab at this bug hunt adventure?

I'm sure lots of Permies, do, Devaka!

Hi, "bug_1.png" and "bug_2.png" in attachment.

How to reproduce :
1- go to https://permies.com/forums/user/login
2- click on the "real sounding name policy" link -> a new tab opens to https://permies.com/name.jsp
3- in the section "daily-ish email sign-up updated" enter an email and click "Sign up!"
4- **bug_1** a browser error popup appears : "The information you have entered on this page will be sent over an insecure connection and could be read by a third party." (Firefox here - text probably depends on the browser)
5- click on "Continue" anyway -> a new tab opens to https://permies.com/forums/email/subscribeEmail
6- **bug_2** error "Please enter email" on the middle of the page, without any further explanation.

Clément Rossignol wrote:Hi, "bug_1.png" and "bug_2.png" in attachment.

Clément, I followed your directions, and the same exact thing happened - thank you for the super clear submission!  Let me see if our developer, Devaka has any input on this signup pathway.  

I signed up with another e-mail address back when you asked for bug finders. I signed up for the dailyish and it all went swimmingly. It gave me access to the freebies. Just now, I added that e-mail address as my secondary address for my main account. And that process worked perfectly as well. So, no bugs to report!