OTR failing intermittently

[knoy]

I'm experiencing crippling issues on 4.4.4 with 14.0.1 OTR against a server that had been previously working fine. Occasionally OTR will refuse to work with specific contacts even after rebooting the phone and repeatedly ending/starting new chats. The icon just spins forever and never responds

[knoy]

Guys, it's been over a month and a half since this ticket was filed. Dozens of hours testing, thousands of dollars spent, three separate 'fixes' and still it's not resolved. In fact the new versions have introduced even more bugs. OTR was working 100% reliably in v13, and now I rarely expect messages to actually get received at all, this is a nightmare for me. What needs to be done to fix this? More money? More testing? Hire an external developer to start bugfixing? I will do literally anything required to get this done

[n8fr8]

It will be fixed when it is fixed. You are testing nightlies, not releases. We never asked you to test those, and make no guarantees about what is in them.

It seems like you are happy with the v13 code, so perhaps you should just fork it, and take it to another development team to do what you like. That is the beauty of open-source.

Otherwise, I will continue to stand by our v14 work, and I will ship and update when its ready.

[knoy]

"It wil be fixed when it is fixed" this is a great response to someone who was one of your biggest evangelists and personally gave thousands of dollars to your team as well as contributing code. From a logical perspective as you have not released a new version in weeks, there would have been no way to test your (5 by my count now that I re-read this thread) fixes without testing nightlies. And from a factual perspective, @eighthave instructed me to test the nightlies over email.

I would stick to v13 unfortunately there are multiple bugs in v13 too that will sign the account out without reconnecting, or crash for no apparent reason.

In any case, feel free to close this issue, I'm done with ChatSecure and will no longer be testing or contributing anything further. Keep the money.

[n8fr8]

The phrase "it will be fixed when it is fixed" is not meant to be disrespectful. It is just reality. We can't magically wish complicated bugs like this to be solved. You might have also heard the phrase "it will ship when it is ready". You saying "come on guys!" won't change that - it isn't like we aren't burning candles at both ends, and haven't been open to people contributing for the many years we've been working on this app.

As for money, I received no money from you, and so have nothing to keep. I personally elected to not take it due to knowing it will raise your expectations and demand for a fix on a certain timetable, which I as project lead, didn't want to get involved in, knowing all of our commitments righ tnow.

Still, I am sorry to lose you and your community as users, but for whatever reason, the devices you are using, the network you are on, the server or some combination of them, proved to not be a fit. For every person on this thread with an OTR problem, I can count many more users, including very very novice users, who happily report to me that they use ChatSecure every day and it works for them. Also, there are many many optinos out there - you should definitely check out Xabber, Conversations, Jitsi Android, not to mention Surespot, Telegram and TextSecure, as one of these apps is sure to fit your needs.

[n8fr8]

Also, for those who still care, tagged and built v14.0.6 beta 1:

https://guardianproject.info/releases/ChatSecure-v14.0.6-BETA-1.apk sig: https://guardianproject.info/releases/ChatSecure-v14.0.6-BETA-1.apk.asc

One thing that I noticed while testing on my Nexus 7-CM11 tablet is that the wifi connection was really less reliable than normal, even though my router was just down the hall. This caused sporadic delays in receiving messages, which includes delays in init'ing OTR sessions. Once I moved my Nexus 7 next to the router, everything was fine. So please, in any further bug reports on this issue, or other message delivery issues, please indicate network type (2g, 3g, 4g, wifi) and firmware flavor.

[notfoss]

I can confirm that this problem is still there. In my case, my contact can see my messages, but I am unable to receive any messages. The contact is using pidgin.

I was able to send a verification message to the contact but didn't receive the verification message that the contact sent.

My setup:

• I am on a wifi network.
• Encryption is set to Force.
• ChatSecure v14.0.6 using your f-droid repo.
• Phone: Moto G (2nd gen)
• Android 4.4.4

[n8fr8]

I still need to update our FDroid repo, but we do have a new release out for testing, if you can grab the APK: https://guardianproject.info/releases/ChatSecure-v14.0.7-BETA-2.apk

[notfoss]

@n8fr8, thanks for the update. I can now see my contact's messages (contact uses pidgin) and the contact can authenticate me as well!

[eighthave]

Here's a new odd twist on this bug. I got into the OTR failing state with pidgin, to the point where even unencrypted messages don't go through. I get to this pretty often when debugging since I think having ChatSecure get killed when an OTR session is established is a common way to trigger the problem.

Anyway, in this case, after ChatSecure launched again, I tried sending plain non-OTR messages. They would briefly appear in the correct location in the chat log, then they'd get their datestamp set to 1/1/70 and go to the top of the chat log. Then as I was typing this, 5 minutes later, the messages were finally received in Pidgin, then ChatSecure updated the timestamps and put them in the right spot in the chat log.

Here's a screenshot of the bad date state:

[n8fr8]

@eighthave that is related to you being offline/disconnected... they do need to be queued properly... the date is being nulled out when the send fails i believe. we should queue instead.

[austin987]

Seeing this with ChatSecure v14.2.1. If both contacts force encryption, it seems to work.