Topic: Basecamp API / exporting files using API

Hi guys,

We’re definitely interested in expanding our backup facilities. We’ve talked about a few ways of doing this including allowing you to download a mega zip file with all files from all projects. The problem, of course, is that this file would be humongous. Up to 50GB for the Max plan. So it’s not an entirely trivial thing to do.

Another option as mentioned is to list all the attachments as part of the export, but would require programming talent to convert into an actual backup. We’d like to move away from that and have backups be something everyone can easily use without being a programmer.

In any case, we’re looking into this, but I can’t (as with any feature) promise the whens and the hows.

I can say, though, that we’ve been running Basecamp for more than 4 years and been in business for almost a decade (so we’re not some fly-by-night startup that’s going under tomorrow). Your files are very safe with us. That doesn’t mean better backups is not a reasonable request, though. I can totally understand why people want to be able to get their data out and we want to help them to do so.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Dashboard not updating

We have now removed the offending cache and everything should be back to normal. We’ll investigate what’s up and ensure that the cache is invalidated properly before pushing it again.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Dashboard not updating

Hi guys, we pushed an update yesterday to improve the caching performance, but it looks like it’s having some trouble. We’re investigating and will get this fixed ASAP. Sorry for the trouble!

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Posting images via email doesn't work

Hi greg,

Could you forward the message that you’re trying to send with images to support? Remember that images stored in CMYK won’t be able to preview and show in all browsers. They need to be in RGB.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Awful Treatment from 37signals

Hi Mark,

I’m sorry your account was frozen before you had a chance to update it. The “billing department” is actually an automated script we run every night that automatically sends out the warnings (you get two warnings, 3 days apart, before the 3rd warning alerts you that the account has been frozen—so you have a total of 6 days to update the card).

The URL cited in the email is actually just for your account screen. When you go there and try to update your credit card, we’ll automatically switch over to SSL and your entire update will be secure.

Also, you should generally not send credit card numbers over unencrypted email. It’s a lot better to do it over a web-based SSL connection. But if you ever have any trouble with billing or anything else, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at http://basecamphq.com/help/support.

If you go to the URL cited in the original email, you’ll be able to quickly and securely enter your new card information and instantly get access to your account again.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Open Bar Weirdness

Hi Vincel,

Please write support with all the information you have on this, including screenshots if possible. We’ll investigate this issue. This is the first we’ve heard of this.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Error Message - Basecamp is down

Hi Simone,

We’re terribly sorry, but a glitch in a recent system upgrade caused the system to halt for about 1 hour this morning (from about 4:30 CST or 10:30 GMT). The system is now back up and we’ve found and remove the bug that caused this.

We’re truly sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused. We know how important Basecamp is to you all and any interruption in service can be very disruptive. Please accept our deepest apologies.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Status page

It is, Russell. Things were a bit hectic this morning. I’ve updated the dates.

Sorry again, all, for the troubles this morning.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Error Message.

Hi everyone,

We’re terribly sorry, but a glitch in a recent system upgrade caused the system to halt for about 1 hour this morning (from about 4:30 CST or 10:30 GMT). The system is now back up and we’ve found and remove the bug that caused this.

We’re truly sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused. We know how important Basecamp is to you all and any interruption in service can be very disruptive. Please accept our deepest apologies.

Topic: Feature Requests / Basecamp for your domain

Hi jmdenne,

The problem with this is SSL. To run your domain on our servers we need to have an SSL certificate for that domain installed, which isn’t an easy thing to set up.

Google gets around this by doing a redirect. So you go to mail.mydomain.com and it redirects to google.com/a/mydomain.com/. If you want that type of setup, you could already do that today just setting up the redirect on your own server.

If it wasn’t for the SSL-problem, we’d definitely be looking into this.

Topic: Miscellaneous / What's with the new signup page?

No, they’re still there. We’re just currently experimenting with promoting less plans at signup as to not overwhelm people with the paradox of choice. You can still upgrade/downgrade to the remaining plans once you’ve signed up (either starting from free or from one of the other pay plans).

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / myOpenID is down...

Hi guys,

MyOpenID.com is back up again. So if you were using them for your OpenID, you should be good to log in again. Also note that if this should ever occur again, you always have a backdoor in. If you click the “Can’t login?” link on the login form, we’ll send you a temporary username and password that you can use while the OpenID provider you’re using is unavailable.

madmarv, I used redirection this morning from claimid and it worked fine. I used this format:

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Photoshop files convert to HTML when downloaded

I just tried to replicate this in Safari 3 with PDFs and PSDs. It’s correct that Safari by default will show these inline in the browser, but you can just drag the files from the browser to the desktop if you want to save them. Or you can click save-as on the listing page.

matt, what operating system are you on where you’re unable to use save-as?

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / FTP servers and Terrible Support

Hi Chris,

I’m sorry you felt like you got a curt answer from support. We try to be as helpful as we can while still being brief and direct. Some times that can come across as a bit too harsh. Definitely not intended. We highly appreciate the support of out paying customers.

Regarding FTP servers, we’ve actually discontinued this feature more than a year ago in part because of issues like this. It was too much of a support nightmare and very frequently meant that we had to get spend a long time debugging issues on customer machines. Instead, we drastically increased the storage limits of what comes with Basecamp for free and discontinued the option for FTP hosting for all new customers.

For existing customers who were already on FTP (and where it was working), we’ve left it in as a grandfathered feature. But we haven’t and won’t continue new developments on this feature as it’s discontinued.

All that said, as I replied in the support email, I’ll try to do the best to help you. I do not, however, appreciate the bluster about security or incompetence. That’s completely uncalled for and not a conductive way to talk together.

Topic: How are you using Basecamp? / Associate messages with a todo list item

We just link to the relevant message in the todo. Like “Implement feature X (Story)”. It works pretty well.

Topic: Miscellaneous / Frustrated and confused with 37 Signals products...

skinman, you can indeed use these products together. We do every day. With OpenBar it’s even easier to jump back and forth between them.

Most of our customers don’t use all the products we have. There are lots of people who just need the project collaboration aspects of Basecamp without the contact management of Highrise.

One mega-app would be a lot more intimidating and without the same simplicity and focus. But at the same time, we are thinking about how we can let the applications talk more together on targeted areas. Just like you can use Writeboard and Campfire with Basecamp already.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Amazon S3 down or broken?

richallum is correct. S3 appears to be back and files seem accessible again. There may still be some intermittent issues, though. We’ll take this moment to reflect on how we can better shield ourselves at least partially from utility failures like this in the future. Thanks for your patience through this!

We know losing access to any part of the products is a major inconvenience and that you in essence could care less who’s ultimately to blame or why it happens.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Amazon S3 down or broken?

richallum: Backpack has not yet migrated to S3. Those files are still kept on our servers. It has much, much less data than Basecamp.

raeckel: Correct. That is the same issue.

BTW, I just want to reiterate that what S3 is currently having problems with is the access to the files hosted there. Not the files themselves.

And we know this sucks! Amazon S3 is a utility service that’s not supposed to go down. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we have more details.

Topic: Feature Requests / Yahoo OpenID

We don’t have an ETA, but it’s definitely something we want to make work. We’ll be sure to announce when it’s ready.

Topic: System Announcements / Basecamp interruption of service

All the 37signals properties were offline for two hours this morning between 10AM and 12PM CST (16:00 to 18:00 GMT) as our load balancer blew out and knocked out the network connection for all our servers. No data was lost and the machines all kept running, but they weren’t accessible from the internet.

We’re very, very sorry for this interruption of service. While we were able to report on the progress of this interruption through our http://status.37signals.com (all the products and 37signals.com pointed to that site during the majority of the outage) that’s a small consolation when you want to access data stored on our services right now. It was just not good enough.

While we don’t have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support@37signals.com and we’ll get that taken care of.

Naturally, we’re going to have a long, serious talk with our service provider (Rackspace). They’re supposed to be the best in the business, but in this instance they failed us, so we in turn failed you. We’ll do everything we can to make sure that something as simple as a load balancer (or firewall or switch or any other network equipment) going bad does not cause two hours of downtime.

Again, we’re truly sorry for this interruption. This is not how Fridays are supposed to be.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Add a Company

It’s now on the “Change permissions” part of the “People & Permissions” tab.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / All people are getting assigned to new projects

Okay guys, considering the feedback on this we’re bringing back the “Assign to all future projects” checkbox for firm employees. We’re going to have it on by default, but you can turn it off when you’re creating a new employee, or you can change it back and forth at any point like before.

This will ensure that people who don’t touch any permissions will still get the benefit of “collaboration by default”, but that people who have 70 employees in their firm get the control back on whether all these folks should be added in by default.

Thanks for all the comments on this. This update should be out by tonight.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Writeboard access

Sorry about this. We found the problem and should have a fix pushed very shortly.

Topic: Basecamp API / RuntimeError: can't typecast "true"

Hey, sorry about this guys, we’ve updated the sample basecamp.rb file. It’s available at http://developer.37signals.com/basecamp/basecamp.rb

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Client-made To-Do Lists Bug

The bug is that they should always be able to assign the items to everyone. We’ll get this fixed. If you don’t want to allow your clients to do this, you can turn down their permissions from the People & Permissions tab.