Error message when sending feedback via "Help > Report a Problem"

Just Lurking

I'm running the latest Quicken for Mac 6.03. When I attempt to submit feedback (a few paragraphs plus a couple of screenshot attachments in .png format), I receive the following error message:



I've tried multiple times, I've quit and restarted the app, etc.

I subsequently also tried to send a much shorter problem report that reported on the above problem, and that one did appear to transmit successfully.

I've tried removing the screenshots and that didn't help, so I'm wondering whether there's a hidden cap on the length of text that can be submitted? Or perhaps a bug related to the length of text, such as a bug in the feature which is supposed to warn me that I'm over the length limit, or something else?

I'm just speculating but I wanted to report the error and see if anyone else was experiencing it, particularly with longer reports which are pasted into the text box.

Quicken Dan

Regarding the issues with "report a problem" on QuickenMac, one of our beta testers brought this to my attention in the context of working on another problem (I think it was you, @jacobs !), and after some investigation we were able to find and correct two issues that were causing "report a problem" to fail.  We fixed the big one in v6.1 (which is slowly rolling out now), and the other smaller one is coming in a patch any day now.  So, while this doesn't solve the problem this thread is ABOUT, at least it should make gathering the data easier.  

as for which items to select, they are _all_ important in their own ways (they each carry a different kind of information), so unchecking some of them only makes the report less useful to us.  There should no longer be any need to uncheck any of them (I hope!).

Quicken Francisco

Hello @Just Lurking

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. That is a bit odd. I'm wondering if it thinks you may not be signed in here. I know you've tried closing and reopening but lets see if it might work after signing in/out. 

In the top left select Quicken > sign out. Once you're signed out go ahead and sign back in. Once you've done that see if you're able to submit the report.

Let us know if that works. If not we'll see what we can try next.

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

jacobs

@Quicken Francisco This has been a problem for at least 6 months, and I'm surprised this does not exist as a known bug in the database. Can you check to see if it is? It's mentioned in many threads on this forum, but I've never seen it acknowledged as a reported/known bug. 

Just Lurking

RickO said:

I think you are referring to the menu Help > Report a Problem in the Quicken App. There is a known issue where one or more of the default attachments prevents the feedback from being sent. Try unchecking as many of the default attachments as possible and try again.

I unchecked ALL the default attachments and experience the same issue.

Quicken Francisco said:

Hello @Just Lurking

Thank you for reaching out on the community and telling us about your issue. That is a bit odd. I'm wondering if it thinks you may not be signed in here. I know you've tried closing and reopening but lets see if it might work after signing in/out. 

In the top left select Quicken > sign out. Once you're signed out go ahead and sign back in. Once you've done that see if you're able to submit the report.

Let us know if that works. If not we'll see what we can try next.

Thanks,

Quicken Francisco

I tried signing out and then back in and experienced the exact same issue. Any feedback on @jacobs mentioning that this has been a reported issue for several months now? Can you confirm whether it's a known issue? Any other suggestions to try?

Thank you.

Just Lurking

RickO said:

I agree with @jacobs that it has been reported. Neither of us work for Quicken though.

Have you tried sending it (as a test) without your attachment or any of the defaults?

Yes. A short problem report with all the default log files selected went through fine. As I said in my original post, I sent a short problem report that reported on the failure to send my "real" problem report:

I subsequently also tried to send a much shorter problem report that reported on the above problem, and that one did appear to transmit successfully.

I didn't want to try multiple times and clutter the inbox of whomever reads the problem reports, so I'm not sure if the successful transmission was an aberration or not.

I have tried submitting my original problem report without any attachments at all, and it still fails, so I'm lead to believe it's either a length of text issue, or something related to pasting the write-up into the problem field. I have tried stripping the text of all formatting and pasting as raw text, and that also failed. 

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @Just Lurking and all

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue.

They were previous reports of this error in July, see the discussion here. However, a ticket was not opened due to the inability to reliably recreate the issue.

This error does occur from time to time and due to the length of time from the aforementioned post and lack of reports, I don't believe this to be related.

First, if you are using a VPN I would recommend disabling it and attempting to send the report.

If that is not the issue, I would next recommend uninstalling and reinstalling, and attempting to send the report once more.

Please let us know what you find!

-Quicken Tyka

jacobs

@Quicken_Tyka  Here's another: 

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7885004/cannot-report-problem

Just Lurking

Quicken_Tyka said:

Hello @Just Lurking and all

If that is not the issue, I would next recommend uninstalling and reinstalling, and attempting to send the report once more.

Definitely not due to using a VPN. Would be nice if the error message were more descriptive as to what is going on?

Anyway, is reinstalling as easy as dragging the app to trash and then re-downloading? Will all my settings (backup location, file location, etc.) be remembered? Thanks.

jacobs

@Quicken_Tyka I'd also like to understand why uninstalling the application and reinstalling is recommended so often. That suggests that the application itself has been altered and is damaged, which is extremely improbable because of the protections in the Mac operating system. And since each update to the Quicken Mac application is a complete re-installation of the application (not patches to the existing application, like on Windows), it just seems unlikely that multiple users have damaged applications. So I'd be interested in why this is an often-repeated troubleshooting step from Quicken. Thanks.

jacobs

@Quicken_Tyka Here's another user who can't use the Report a Problem feature:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20140390/#Comment_20140390

I continue to see users reporting this every week. I haven't thought to flag every one, but it's clearly more than a few isolated people. And because it's a bug in people being able to report a bug, it's particularly frustrating to users and embarrassing to Quicken (or should be).

Also, a quick bump on my question in the post above this…

jacobs

@Quicken_Tyka Here's another:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20140614/#Comment_20140614

I'm not trying to be a pest. Just trying to document that this continues to be an ongoing problem for a significant number of users, and it's frustrating that the developers are unaware of this bug because we as users don't have the ability to test it enough to discover and document what causes the problem.

Quicken Dan

Regarding the issues with "report a problem" on QuickenMac, one of our beta testers brought this to my attention in the context of working on another problem (I think it was you, @jacobs !), and after some investigation we were able to find and correct two issues that were causing "report a problem" to fail.  We fixed the big one in v6.1 (which is slowly rolling out now), and the other smaller one is coming in a patch any day now.  So, while this doesn't solve the problem this thread is ABOUT, at least it should make gathering the data easier.  

as for which items to select, they are _all_ important in their own ways (they each carry a different kind of information), so unchecking some of them only makes the report less useful to us.  There should no longer be any need to uncheck any of them (I hope!).

Blastphemy

I had this same problem just two days ago, and also on the 21st:

Blastphemy said:

I was only able to submit my bug report from 6.0.3 by editing the descriptive text down to just a few lines. However, I still included four .jpg attachments and Details.txt, ConnLog.txt, HTTPLog.txt, OFXLog.txt, and Console.txt. I did not include a Sanitized data file or a screen shot.

Regardless, I just tried to submit the exact same bug report (without removing most of the text) in the latest 6.1 beta build and it was successful as far as I could tell. (It would be nice if a successful submission returned a dialog acknowledging the success.)

I should note that submitting this through the Beta forum's "Provide Beta Feedback" dialog also worked for me today (which is what previously generated the error message quoted above).

Quicken Dan

@Blastphemy You correctly surmised that one of the underlying issues had to do with the length of the comment.  It's still an issue in that it may get truncated, but at least it won't fail outright (we're working on that, but it will take longer to fix).  My suggestion for now would be if you have something really long to say, attach it in a document and keep the comment short.

And I do see two submissions from you today, and two from a few days ago.  

Blastphemy

Apologies that they're all the same bug report, @Quicken Dan! But at least the duplicate submissions proved that a bug report I couldn't submit previously is now accepted by both reporting systems (Report a Problem and Provide Beta Feedback).

Just Lurking

Quicken Dan said:

@Blastphemy You correctly surmised that one of the underlying issues had to do with the length of the comment.  It's still an issue in that it may get truncated, but at least it won't fail outright (we're working on that, but it will take longer to fix).  My suggestion for now would be if you have something really long to say, attach it in a document and keep the comment short.

And I do see two submissions from you today, and two from a few days ago.  

Thanks Dan. Hopefully not too long before you're able to give the user feedback on how long their problem report can be (and / or extend the length that is accepted without truncation).

Do you know off-hand how long the report can be so we can have an idea of when to use the separate document workaround? If I need to write a long report, I will probably compose problem reports in a separate program and use it to count the total number of characters until this is fixed, so it would be useful to know the current limit. Thank you.

Quicken Dan

Just Lurking said:

Quicken Dan said:

@Blastphemy You correctly surmised that one of the underlying issues had to do with the length of the comment.  It's still an issue in that it may get truncated, but at least it won't fail outright (we're working on that, but it will take longer to fix).  My suggestion for now would be if you have something really long to say, attach it in a document and keep the comment short.

And I do see two submissions from you today, and two from a few days ago.  

Thanks Dan. Hopefully not too long before you're able to give the user feedback on how long their problem report can be (and / or extend the length that is accepted without truncation).

Do you know off-hand how long the report can be so we can have an idea of when to use the separate document workaround? If I need to write a long report, I will probably compose problem reports in a separate program and use it to count the total number of characters until this is fixed, so it would be useful to know the current limit. Thank you.

The limit varies a bit because we tack some metadata on to what you typed (like what version of the app you're using, etc), but in practice it's around 3000 characters after the fix (it was closer to 1000 before).  So, bigger than a tweet, smaller than an email .  If you go over, we just truncate it so it won't fail.  

I have an issue in my queue to make this better, but we wanted to get the "make it work" fix out right away while we worked on a "real" fix (which will require coordination with the server team, and lining up of releases, etc etc).  

Just Lurking

@Quicken Dan

That's terrific. More robust / more feedback to the user on any hard limits is always good, but for my part, I think 3k characters is a great start.

I just checked as I had a copy of the original problem report that I was trying to send, and it was (what I considered) a fairly comprehensive write-up, and yet it came in under 2000 characters. 👍