Feedback

[thequakesoldier]

First off, I want to thank the developers for their time and effort in designing what I believe is the best available VOIP software available today.

As a user of the Mumble and Murmur client/server over the past 6 months, I want to share my observations on the biggest shortfalls:

1.) 90% of the time when a user has issues connecting to my server, it is because they have started the program with the Backwards Compatible option. I believe for a great many of them, this is simply because they are missing the Start Menu icon for the regular mode, and thus are forced to drill down to the actual install folder and click the exe manually. For others, it is simply their misunderstanding of the proper icon to click to start the program properly. Right from the start, this trouble makes many of them lament the fact that I am not using Ventrilo, and makes a bad impression of an otherwise incredible piece of software.

2.) The next most common issue people have is that they get caught up looking for a place to enter the password to my server on the Add New Server window. At least one out of every three new Mumble users who enter my server come in with the server password as their Username. I know this sounds silly, but it happens so often it is incredible. If the developers really like having the password asked for in a separate dialog, then I would suggest adding a note in the "Add New Server" interface saying that the user will be prompted for a password if one is required.

3.) Finally, many users are not interested in taking advantage of the Overlay feature and become extremely annoyed when they can't figure out how to turn it off. It not only requires them to navigate to the proper configuration page to disable the feature, but it also requires a restart of their game client. I have had a few instances where people flat-out uninstall the Mumble client rather than take the time to correct the situation. While I consider the Overlay feature to be one of the best advantages of the Mumble sofware, I would agree that it should default to being off.

[hacst]

Thanks for your feedback. Glad to hear you like Mumble. About the issues you mentioned:

@1) The backwards compatible client will go away in the next release (it is already gone from the snapshot builds iirc). We had to keep it around for some time after the introduction of 1.2.X to give servers time to migrate from 1.1.X. Fortunately 1.1.X use levels have dropped low enough for us to not have to ship it for every user anymore.

@2) That's unfortunate. Since Mumble (by default) authenticates using certificates instead of passwords we decided not to have a password box in the new connection dialog (an exception to that is SuperUser which is always password authenticated and hence also gets a password box). I personally like the reduced clutter but if users don't get it....would be great if you could create a feature request so we can figure out what to do about it (or whether we'll just keep it as it is :lol: ).

@3) The problem with defaults is that if a feature is default off for most users it simply doesn't exist. If it's default on they at least notice it and, if the don't like it, search for a way to disable it. What however might be a good idea is to add an overlay page to our configuration wizard. The overlay is a pretty intrusive piece of software and users should be able to disable it before it first activates. Now if users keep discarding / clicking through the wizard without reading (as they unfortunately do) they won't see this but imho it is a good compromise.

Also a notice that you will have to restart other applications for the overlay to go away completely might be in order when the overlay is disabled.

Again feature requests would be nice so we can track things properly.

Thanks again for your feedback. We really rely on our users telling us what bugs them. Unfortunately, since we are doing all of this in our spare time and there aren't that many of us developers, we cannot do everything and it might take time before we get around to things. We do care though ;-)

Regards,

.D0T