We are having a serious problem that just started happening today.  Live Support was configured and working correctly for some time.  But today, in the Live Support Operator, when we click on any customer in the list of customers, we get an exception dialog ("Live Support has encountered an error and needs to close").  We need an immediate solution, but no one is online in live help during the business hours that you have stated on your support page.

 

Note that the bug occurs sometime between when the program loads the customer's profile, and when it determines the country and city from the IP address.  The Country and City are set to "Loading".  Screen shot of the problem is attached below. 

 

Please help.

  

 

The thing that's scaring me is that nobody seems to be minding the store here at Cutesoft.  I've logged the problem here and also sent a support email, but there should be someone online according to their stated support policy:

I'd recommend sending an email if you haven't already.  We need to get their attention.

Working with Fiddler, I found that Live Support Operator is making a call to "hostip.info", ostensibly to determine the country and city for an IP address. This call is returning a 502 "unable to connect" error, which may be what is causing the operator program to blow up.  HostIP.info appears to be offline.  Live Support Operator doesn't seem to be able to properly handle that situation.

 

Specifically, it makes a call like:

That's what we found, as well. I'm surprised they don't try/catch those kinds of exceptions and let the application crash like that...

 

It would be helpful to find out from the Support team if this is a temporary problem on the part of hostip....

We are having the same problem.

 

Is there a work around?

jdbino, to work around this, we set up a file on one of our servers called "/api/get.html" with the following contents:

 

<xml>

</xml>

 

Then we had our customer support people add a line to their "hosts" file on their PCs with the IP address of our server, pointing to hostip.info, like this:

 

123.123.123.123 www.hostip.info

 

Note that 123.123.123.123 is not a real address!  I just put that there as an example.

 

So this has the effect of redirecting Live Support's call to hostip.info to our own page.  Now Live Support shows "ERROR" in the Country and City fields instead of blowing up.

 

That's a big pain, but it worked.  Now if only the CuteSoft people would show up for work and tell us what the real fix should be.

Your guys are using version 3.x.

 

Please use the following operator client:

 

 

It should resolve the problem.

 

Keep me posted

 

 

I installed the version indicated.  This appears to essentially resolve the problem, though not perfectly.  hostip.info is back up today, but I tested Live Operator's ability to handle hostip.info being down by modifying my hosts table.  Now, instead of blowing up, Live Operator displays "Loading" in the Country and City areas.  There is no indication of any problem, and "Loading" never goes away.  At least it's not blowing up now.

 

This raises a question.  Every version of Live Operator that I have installed claims to be version 1.0.0.0.  There doesn't seem to be any way to tell what actual version you have installed.  I want to verify that the correct version of Live Operator is installed, how do I do that?

>>Now, instead of blowing up, Live Operator displays "Loading" in the Country and City areas.  There is no indication of any problem, and "Loading" never goes away.  At least it's not blowing up now.

 

I've tried the operator client today. We don't have the loading problems.

 

Could this issue caused by your intranet?

 

Can you try version 4.0?

 

>>Every version of Live Operator that I have installed claims to be version 1.0.0.0. 

We will release the version 4.1 in this weekend. We will put the version number into the live support operator client as well.

Adam, if you'll re-read what I wrote there, you'll see that the "loading" occurs only when hostip.info is down.  Since hostip.info is back up today, naturally you didn't see any problems.  But if hostip.info is down, your program is now not "blowing up", but not fully handling the error.  "Loading" is never replaced with anything to indicate that there is an issue with the hostip.info call.  At least it's no longer throwing an exception.

 

We will take a look at version 4.1, but since we had to make our own code changes to version 3 to fix a couple of bugs, including table structure changes where you didn't check properly for field sizes before updating / inserting records, I am concerned about the upgrade process.  Your web site doesn't say anything (that I could find) about whether you can upgrade an existing installation to version 4, or if you have to start all over again with a new installation, and configure and debug that.  I'll download the 4.0 package and see if I can find any details about the upgrade process within it.

 

You should also note that there is an unanswered question about upgrading to 4.0 on the "1. Cute Live Support standalone" download page, where someone asks "can we upgrade to version 4 from any previous version of cute chat live support?"  This has remained unanswered for about 45 days.  You probably shouldn't allow comments on those pages if you are going to ignore the questions that people ask there.