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Tom On 12/15/10 1:06 AM, Christopher Forsythe wrote:
Folks, First off, please go to https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2291/don-t-install-growl-without-asking-and-without-explaining-what-it-is- and upvote this item. If you do not intend to upvote any other features in dropbox, please use all of your votes here. Next, I think we should add https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/2291/don-t-install-growl-without-asking-and-without-explaining-what-it-is- to the thirdpartyapps page, and then tell people to upvote it with all of their available dropbox votes (+5 I think). I just posted to my own twitter account, and our facebook page, and it jumped from 265 to 325 votes in less than 2 minutes. The most voted for item has 75032 votes. so we would only need 15000 people to upvote it by +5. Which seems reasonable with the millions of users we have, and the thousands who are running into this on a monthly basis. Next: I think we need to make some changes with how we're handling the dropbox installation problem. I need some feedback from people who are not on the development team. Dropbox intends to ship a new version this week, which provides a modified version of Growl 1.2 (not 1.2.1) which does the following: - Disables check for updates - Disables all other applications from notifying by default but dropbox - Stop reinstalling Growl once Growl is removed. This effectively is what they think they have to do to make the problem go away until they reimplement a notification system into what they want. I don't think this is acceptable, I think it makes the problem worse in some ways. The not reinstalling is one of the two items which we feel they are violating user trust and tarnishing our good name. The other item is of course to actually tell users they are installing Growl, which they still insist on not doing. I believe that we need to tell users to complain to dropbox explicitly in every interaction with users who run into this issue. If we suspect it's dropbox which installed it, I believe we owe it to the users to at least make them feel somewhat empowered, and this is how I think we should do it. Finally, if this problem is not resolved by March, I believe we should implement a blacklisting system of some kind. I want some feedback on this from our active userbase. We have multiple ideas on how to do this, but effectively we've got 2 items that sound at least promising to me: 1) Just send all of their notifications to a console log, or just don't even post them. 2) Pop a window up telling users about this problem if dropbox registers/notifies, but not be annoying about it. I don't know that I like either option that much, or the others that have been proposed. If anyone has any ideas, it would be appreciated here. Growl effectively has almost 0 defense against this kind of problem currently, and was never designed with this scenario in mind, so we're pretty open to creative ideas if they help our users in the end. That all said, we've run into multiple applications which install Growl in a bad way without telling the user. Dropbox is the main culprit since they reinstall on a more constant basis. However, even companies which have been around for more than 20 years (adobe) have run into this same scenario with us. Finally, I believe we need to update our website to reflect in the developer documentation that doing this is a bad thing. We provide a framework to install Growl if you want to install Growl, which has been used for years with little complaint. I believe we should also improve how this framework works, or stop shipping it and include similar functionality in the main Growl framework, or just not do that at all. Immediately following 2.0 I want us to start on 3.0 and focusing that release on improving things for Developers as the main goal. While 2.0's main goal is to bring us into 2010/2011 practices on certain things and make Growl's user experience better, we have another set of users we need to focus on as well. Chris
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