Telemetry / Bug Reporting

[a-n-d-r]

Thanks in advance for your bug report!

• [X] Have you reproduced issue in safe mode?
• [x] Have you used the debugging guide to try to resolve the issue?
• [X] Have you checked our FAQs to make sure your question isn't answered there?
• [X] Have you checked to make sure your issue does not already exist?
• [X] Have you checked you are on the latest release of Pulsar?

What happened?

Today I've installed Pulsar on a new machine, checked my config.cson and noticed this:

"*":
  "exception-reporting":
    userId: "123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000"

Didn't found anything related to telemetry / bug reports in the settings. After 5 minutes of search, found the core package "exception-reporting" that sends the reports to "bugsnag.com" website.

I think that we should add checkbox in the Settings --> Core --> Telemetry / Bug Reporting to turn on/off bug reports. Then, we have 2 ways:

• Leave bug reports opt-out and change the Privacy Policy of Pulsar.
• Make bug reports opt-in.

Also, we may ask user about bug reports on a first launch of Pulsar.

Pulsar version

1.117.0

OS details

Platform-independent

What steps are needed to reproduce this?

1. Install Pulsar
2. Open config.cson configuration file

[a-n-d-r]

Related to #40

[confused-Techie]

So I'll add quickly onto this. As you can see when I did #40, there was a single change I made to the exception-reporting package.

That was in a function titled shouldReport I changed it to always return false. That's because Atom would check this function prior to ever reporting to see if users had opted out of reporting. So with this function always returning false that means it assumes every single user has opted out, and it should never report anything to bugsnag.

Plus the Pulsar team has never even configured bugsnag, so there's no telemetry we would even be able to see if it was reporting there.

---

So this is to say, that no we are not currently collecting telemetry from any of our users, and our Privacy Policy should still be 100% accurate.

But I can absolutely see how the description of the exception-reporting package could be misleading, especially as it's writing values to user's config files. Considering we never did repurpose the exception-reporting package to log to local files like I had wanted, maybe it's time that we consider removing it entirely.

[a-n-d-r]

Oh, I guess I didn't notice that this package was disabled in #40, apologies.

But I can absolutely see how the description of the exception-reporting package could be misleading, especially as it's writing values to user's config files. Considering we never did repurpose the exception-reporting package to log to local files like I had wanted, maybe it's time that we consider removing it entirely.

I agree, it would be great to remove that package from Pulsar, since it does nothing but take place in config and misleading users.

Btw, thank you so much for Pulsar! It is awesome to use code editor I'm familiar with, regardless of Github/Microsoft decisions