What's in the error report?

Whenever one of the internal functionalities of Infoweb doesn't work as it should, it is crucial that the developers get notified as quickly as possible, so that they may fix the problem before it concerns too many. Therefore, it is possible to submit a generated report if something happens.

To make the report as valuable as possible, this is what it includes:

• date and time
• url (internet address)
• referring url
• error information
• your ip address
• your Infoweb user name if you have logged in

Why the ip address?

Parts of the Infoweb use the ip address to find out what information to show to you. The ip address belongs to the computer itself, and is important for us to adapt Infoweb according to where you are. If the error that occured has something to do with this adaptation, it is simpler to find the error if one knows the ip address.

The user name

Some people have the possibility of logging in to the Infoweb. By knowing the user name, the developers can find out whether or not the error has something to do with logging in or user authentication.

Privacy

Everything that is submitted to the developers in this manner will be used for error fixing and to analyze general usage patterns, and never anything else. We will not use any of this information to track users or by other means learn about single users, and we will anonymize all usage patterns we find.

If you want additional info about how we use the error reports, we'll be happy to tell you. Please send us an email at infoweb-dev@infoweb.ntnu.no

Different situations

There are several situations that lead to the possibility of submitting error message reports. Every error message will contain som info about what went wrong, below is a list of the most probable error situations:

• mysql errors. All Infoweb articles are stored in a mysql database. If there's something wrong with it, the system will have no way of retrieving and displaying articles.
• xml errors. All articles are written in a tailored xml format. If the system can't parse the article format properly, it will have no way of extracting all the information it needs from each article.
• url errors. This is caused by typing a faulty url or following an invalid hyperlink.
• Authentication errors. Some parts of the Infoweb require a login username and password (most of the time logging in isn't needed, nor will and most of the users have the possibility to do so).
• Access errors. The (somewhat cryptic) error codes "Article qualification errors" and "Category qualification errors" imply that the user isn't qualified to access the current article or category.
• Other errors. Other errors may occur, allthough more seldomly, but we have tried formulating the error message as understandable as possible. Please feel free to send us an email and we'll be happy to explain the situation in full.

For those interested, we've also written an article on technical info which explains how the Infoweb is created and what technologies are in use.