Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Emails getting picked up by spam

Someone once told me they didn’t receive a notification from BC, but since the message he missed was asking him to do something, and he received all the notifications not asking him to do something, I think he was lying. People lie. Quite a lot.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / FireFox - Failed to load Live Bookmark

When you save Live Bookmarks, do you mean the RSS feed? (I’m not familiar with the LB term.) If so… did Firefox prompt you for your Basecamp login credentials when you subscribed to the feed? It’s authenticated, so you should need your username/password to see your feed.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Images in Messages: Why Is This SO HARD?

We actually prefer the current way. First, we usually pass around high-res screenshots, and having those inline would be quite cumbersome. Second, seeing them inline would only be useful the first time; after that, every time you revisited the thread to read a reply, you’d have to scroll past all the images. I can understand how it would be useful for some people, but I need to throw my vote into “keep it as-is”, personally. :)

Topic: Campfire / Can't Delete an Old Chat

Clipper, do you not have a “Delete transcript” link next to the Transcript name? For each day, you should see something along the lines of:

Today, March 5 Chatroom name Delete transcript

(Used as much formatting there as possible to differentiate…)

Topic: Basecamp API / Add my applcation

Hi Monerul. I found 37s’ overview (http://developer.37signals.com/basecamp/) to be just what I needed to get started. The commenting in the Ruby wrapper itself (http://developer.37signals.com/basecamp/basecamp.rb) is also quite good. Those should be plenty to get you started! Best of luck with your app.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Messages Crashing Frequently

Are you using Safari 3 by any chance, Josh?

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / OpenID and iCal Subscriptions

Go to your My Info page in Basecamp. Under the OpenID entry field there is a “Reveal my special username/password” link. Click that to reveal the name/password you can use with apps that don’t accept OpenID.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Error when editing "My Info" and using OpenID

FYI, it’s fixed for me. Thanks!

Topic: Tips & Tricks / Bug / Issue tracker

If Garret Dimon’s still-in-development tracker ever comes to be, the world will be a much better place.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Multiple People on To Dos/Milestones

Ryan, I meant that as a good thing. In the same way that Basecamp’s lack of granular permission-granting encourages trust, the lack of “group task assignment” encourages personal responsibility.

You’re not explicitly telling someone how to work, but by providing a rigid path, you’re implying they should work a certain way. And, to repeat, I like that, because I think the solution you’ve chosen is correct.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Multiple People on To Dos/Milestones

The quick answer is no.

The long answer is, this encourages no one to take specific personal responsibility for a task. In our organization, if “something” is supposed to be handled by multiple people, than that “something” needs to be broken into individual tasks, each of which is assigned to a single person.

If the task is “write a new proposal” and three people are assigned, it’s very likely that each person has a specific role (or at least should be given one), and thus the task really becomes “research requirements”, “prepare first draft”, “edit into final draft”. That way each person knows their precise role and can’t let the others do the lion’s share of the work.

If that sounds like 37s is trying to tell you how to work, you’re right. :) They call it opinionated software for a reason.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / HTML entities in todo list

Try it! :)

Edit: “Try it” is in response to Capable, not Michael.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / RSS feeds overly secured/buggy

Have you tried an alternate feed reader to see if the issue lies with Thunderbird or with the feed itself? There’s also the possibility of time delay; I have noticed that sometimes I receive an email before the feed itself is updated.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Logon page won't load in IE

I know, many people have a good reason. But a boy can dream…

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Logon page won't load in IE

Dear Santa,

Please update all copies of IE6 to IE7. That is all I want for Christmas. Seriously. If you could replace them all with Firefox, I would never need another Christmas gift ever.

Love,
Every Web Developer In The World

P.S. Do the elves and the reindeer ever battle?

Topic: Feature Requests / Strikeouts?

HTML: <s>struck-out text</s>

Topic: Miscellaneous / Basecamp cartoon

In Rob’s defense, the “caption” seems to be a textual description they add to all their cartoons. (Yeah, I had to look and see if this was a repeat offense.) Ostensibly for the blind readers? I wish image tags had an attribute for alternative text. Something like “alt”. That would be sweet. Or maybe “longdesc” for pointing to a more detailed description. Yeah.

That said, I didn’t find the cartoon funny, sorry. But I have high standards. [farts]

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Archiving Project - Free Account

Mitchell, if Basecamp wasn’t providing you with $12/month of productivity, then it probably is best to look for alternatives. “A million times easier” sure sounds worth it, but the value is up to you!

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / RSS feeds overly secured/buggy

Jen, it sounds like you didn’t select Thunderbird’s “Show the article summary instead of loading the web page” option when you were setting up the feed. Try this: delete the feed from Thunderbird and then add it again, this time selecting that option.

When the feed is updated, it includes the complete text of any applicable item (the complete To Do item information, total Message text, etc.) as an “article summary”. But the feed also includes a link back to each item’s page in Basecamp. If you don’t select that option above, Thunderbird tries to fetch and render the contents of the link. It chokes, of course, because despite the included rendering engine, Thunderbird isn’t a browser proper and won’t handle the authentication properly.

If you select that option, Thunderbird will instead render the article summary included in the feed, but will have a link back to the item’s page in Basecamp should you want to load it in an actual browser.

Try that and see if it works! I would also recommend using a “dedicated” RSS feedreader (NetNewsWire or Vienna on the Mac, FeedDemon on a PC), but that’s mostly because I find Thunderbird ugly. :-)

Topic: Miscellaneous / Very slow to use

FWIW, Basecamp (and all the 37s apps) have been lickety-split for me recently, here in the US. There have obviously been backend improvements over the last year that have made it a dream to use.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Excessive Pricing

Can’t answer why or why not, but remember that 37s isn’t just charging you for the “hardware/bandwidth impact” of a feature. They also have to recoup all the development time, preemptively fund support time, and differentiate the package offerings.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / HTML entities in todo list

Let me make sure I understand. The goal is to have a todo item that has this text: “Put a <strong> tag in there”, correct? (Replacing “strong” with whatever you want.)

To accomplish that, you would type this into the todo:

Put a &lt;strong&gt; tag in there

The strings &lt; and &gt; would be converted into < and > on display.

Edit: if the goal is for the todo list to do this automatically so that you can type in the tag as you would in an editor, and it would auto-convert them to entities, the answer is probably no. You’ll have to remember the entity codes. Otherwise people couldn’t style todo items with bold or italics the way they can now (which may not be a bad thing…)

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Backup Basecamp

I personally think the ability to restore project data would create more problems than it would solve. The first and best plan of attack is “Don’t mess up!” (Since all critical deletions in Basecamp require user confirmation, it’s really “Don’t mess up… twice!”) Failing that, the XML export is there to provide you a foolproof (if laborious) way to reconstruct critical data.

As a web app developer myself, I can’t really fathom the difficult in making an export/restore solution work properly. It sounds easy, but has many trailing questions: Do you validate that the two accounts (exporting/restoring) match? How do you handle duplication issues (restored projects that have the same name as extant projects)? Do person/project/permission linkings exist in the export file, and if so, can the export file be edited by hand and then restored to grant someone previously restricted rights? If, instead of restore functionality, Basecamp went with an “undo delete” function, how many functions would have to support undo? How long before you can’t undo something any more? Would you then need a “super-delete, no undo” option?

I understand the frustration faced by your reality, but I think this medicine would hurt more than the sickness. (I think I just garbled a metaphor.)

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Script injection attack?

Yikes. Verified.

There’s this great chapter in this Rails book… ;)

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Can't Synch BC with Freshbooks possible OpenID prob?

When using an OpenID-enabled Basecamp account with an authenticated system that doesn’t support OpenID (RSS feeds, the API), you use your OpenID as your username and a special auto-generated string as your password.

In Basecamp, go to your My Info page, look below your OpenID field for a yellow box. Click “Reveal my special username/password” and use those credentials for any authentication.

I don’t know if that will help your issue specifically, but it sounds like a candidate.