The past few releases of FeedDemon have an included an error reporting feature which captures unexpected problems and sends us detailed reports on what went wrong. If you’ve never seen this feature in action (and I hope you haven’t), it looks like this:
I’ve been going over the past few months of error reports, and much to my surprise, I discovered that the top three most common problems were never reported in our support forums. If I didn’t add error-reporting to FeedDemon, it’s possible that I’d never have known about these bugs – so if you’re a software developer and you don’t have a similar feature, perhaps that will convince you to add one!
The downside to having an error reporting feature is the dismay you’ll feel if you discover – as I did – that a huge number of problems aren’t your fault, but are instead caused by third-party software (especially anti-virus programs, buggy graphics drivers, and flaky web browsers). These are the most frustrating bugs because your code isn’t wrong, and you can only hack together a workaround rather than truly fix them.
Anyway…thanks to the error reporting feature, I’ve identified and fixed the top 10 most reported errors. All of these fixes are included in FeedDemon 2.8 Beta 2, which was released today.