Some people like to send mail in MS Word format. Please don't send us bug reports, or any other mail, as a Word document. Word documents are roughly fifty times larger than writing the same report in plain text. In addition, most of the PuTTY team read their e-mail on Unix machines, so copying the file to a Windows box to run Word is very inconvenient. Not only that, but several of us don't even have a copy of Word!
Some people like to send us screen shots when demonstrating a problem. Please don't do this without checking with us first - we almost never actually need the information in the screen shot. Sending a screen shot of an error box is almost certainly unnecessary when you could just tell us in plain text what the error was. (On some versions of Windows, pressing Ctrl-C when the error box is displayed will copy the text of the message to the clipboard.) Sending a full-screen shot is occasionally useful, but it's probably still wise to check whether we need it before sending it.
If you must mail a screen shot, don't send it as a .BMP file. BMP s have no compression and they are much larger than other image formats such as PNG, TIFF and GIF. Convert the file to a properly compressed image format before sending it.
Please don't mail us executables, at all. Our mail server blocks all incoming e-mail containing executables, as a defence against the vast numbers of e-mail viruses we receive every day. If you mail us an executable, it will just bounce.
If you have made a tiny modification to the PuTTY code, please send us a patch to the source code if possible, rather than sending us a huge .ZIP file containing the complete sources plus your modification. If you've only changed 10 lines, we'd prefer to receive a mail that's 30 lines long than one containing multiple megabytes of data we already have.
B.1.2 Other places to ask for help
There are two Usenet newsgroups that are particularly relevant to the PuTTY tools:
•
comp.security.ssh
, for questions specific to using the SSH protocol;
•
comp.terminals
, for issues relating to terminal emulation (for instance, keyboard problems).
Please use the newsgroup most appropriate to your query, and remember that these are general newsgroups, not specifically about PuTTY.
If you don't have direct access to Usenet, you can access these newsgroups through Google Groups (
groups.google.com
).
B.2 Reporting bugs
If you think you have found a bug in PuTTY, your first steps should be:
•Check the
Wishlist page
on the PuTTY website, and see if we already know about the problem. If we do, it is almost
certainly not necessary to mail us about it, unless you think you have extra information that might be helpful to us in fixing it. (Of course, if we actually need specific extra information about a particular bug, the Wishlist page will say so.)
•Check the
Change Log
on the PuTTY website, and see if we have already fixed the bug in the
development snapshots.
•Check the
FAQ
on the PuTTY website (also provided as
appendix A
in the manual), and see if it answers your question. The
FAQ lists the most common things which people think are bugs, but which aren't bugs.
•Download the latest development snapshot and see if the problem still happens with that. This really is worth doing. As a general rule we aren't very interested in bugs that appear in the release version but not in the development version, because that usually means they are bugs we have already fixed. On the other hand, if you can find a bug in the development version that doesn't appear in the release, that's likely to be a new bug we've introduced since the release and we're definitely interested in it.
If none of those options solved your problem, and you still need to report a bug to us, it is useful if you include some general information:
•Tell us what version of PuTTY you are running. To find this out, use the ‘About PuTTY’ option from the System menu. Please do not just tell us ‘I'm running the latest version’; e-mail can be delayed and it may not be obvious which version was the latest at the time you sent the message.
•PuTTY is a multi-platform application; tell us what version of what OS you are running PuTTY on. (If you're running on Unix, or Windows for Alpha, tell us, or we'll assume you're running on Windows for Intel as this is overwhelmingly the case.)
•Tell us what protocol you are connecting with: SSH, Telnet, Rlogin or Raw mode.
•Tell us what kind of server you are connecting to; what OS, and if possible what SSH server (if you're using SSH). You can get some of this information from the PuTTY Event Log (see
section 3.1.3.1
in the manual).