Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Online or Offline??? Gmail or Gtalk doesn't matter

This is a strange behavior I observed while I was chatting online with my friend.

Application Used: Gtalk and Gmail chat
Reproducibility: 100%
Machine specific: No

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I expect people chatting with me to reply within 5-10 seconds after I send them a message.
I also promise to reply instantly unless I'm not infront of my monitor.

It so happened that I sent my friend a message and I did not get any reply for a minute.

I got irritated by him not responding and I started banging the keys on my keyboard.
Infact I banged only one key - the DOT '.'

I pressed the '.' (DOT without quotes) and pressed enter key.
This continued for 15-20 times continuously.

Then these messages were displayed on Gmail chat window(pop up) and Gtalk application respectively.






















As you can see on both the screenshots, the user is still Online indicated by the Green dot against the name.
And the message reads: "The user did not receive your chat" or "The user's email is offline and can't receive messages right now"

I liked this bug... Use of emotions helped me find this bug.
I don't really care if this is fixed or not but the behavior definitely brought a smile on my face.

:)

5 comments:

Parimala Hariprasad said...

Nice Catch Ajay.

Critical Defects are most often found by accident :-)

I have come to realise that there are a whole bunch of bugs yet to be unleashed on Gmail (both email and chat applications).

Happy Testing,
Pari - http://curioustester.blogspot.com

Amith said...

When you do the dot thing, Gtalk thinks that you are Spamming and it give the messages that the user is offline. I mean, you can spam using Bots right?

Dhanasekar said...

I do experienced this,and like to share one more bug found out of frustration . I was testing a computer game called Driver,I was supposed to shoot couple of guys and cross the road and escape.It was so tough to clear that and I was killed on every attempt.A message appears after that to restart the level,if I click yes it will ask me to confirm,there if I click No,it will go back.In frustration I was click Yes in first option and No in second option,so i was jumping between those two dialogue boxes,after 32 attempts the game crashed.What next? The submission suppose to happen that week end was stopped and awarded with Bug of the Week title :)
what does submission means in game testing?
I was testing in PS 2 console,game developers should submit the game to Sony to get PS 2 certified,you can't submit a build with crashes

vivek said...

Here are steps how it occur and explanation :

1. Set the chat as off the record with target user (how?). This can be done only when the other user is online. (need help?)
2. Now try sending chat to that user when he is invisible or offline.
3. If he is invisible, then he will receive chat.
4. But if he Is offline, then you will receive error “ did not receive your chat”.

Explanation:

Point 1: When a chat is set off the record, it will no longer get stored in your Gmail account.

Point 2: When you send a chat message to offline or invisible user, it gets delivered by default. At receiving end if user is online, a chat screen pops up showing him your message. If he is offline, your chat message will go to inbox as a mail.

Now if you put together above points then you will notice that, when you set chat off the record it can’t be delivered to inbox as mail, so it will be delivered only if user is online (no matter if he is invisible).

Now the only tricky part is finding a user online for once to set chat off the records. This doesn’t seem hard as invisible status is still limited to Gmail version of Google Talk and you may be in luck if your friend uses Google Talk desktop
clients/gadgets or third party IM client to chat.

Edward said...

Years ago Gmail had many bugs, but today it is very practical and efficient when using email.




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