How to report a problem

Three ways

From inside w0a. Settings has a Report a Problem card. Type what happened, add a contact address if you want an answer, and press Send. This is the fastest route for a bug, because the report arrives with the details below already attached.

By email or Discord. Both are on the Contact page. Email is better for anything about a licence or a payment, because we can match it to your order. Discord is better for a back-and-forth.

After a crash. When w0a fails badly enough to close, it shows a "Critical error:" box and asks whether to send a crash report. Nothing is sent unless you answer Yes, and it asks again every time.

What the in-app report sends

So you know before you press Send:

• What you typed, and the contact address if you gave one. User-profile paths and anything shaped like a licence key are masked in your text too.
• The w0a version, the Windows build, and the CPU and GPU model names.
• If Attach the error log (recommended) is ticked, the last 120 lines of the error log, with your account name, profile paths and key patterns removed.
• Your licence key and a hashed machine ID. These count the limit of one report an hour, and the server stores them hashed.

No screenshot, no file list and nothing else from your PC goes with it.

The card is in English on purpose, in every language w0a runs in, and it asks you to write in English. A person reads every report, and a description that has to be machine-translated first loses the part that matters most: your own words for what went wrong.

What to include

Four things. With these, most reports get an answer on the first reply instead of a round of questions:

1. What you saw, in your own words. "Sound stopped after I ran the optimizer" is more useful than "audio bug".
2. What you did just before. Which page, which button. If a repair card printed something, quote it exactly — the difference between "Fixed — 3 setting(s) put back to the Windows default." and "Nothing to fix — this was already at the Windows default." changes the answer completely.
3. Your Windows version. Press Win+R, type winver, copy the line. The in-app report adds this for you.
4. The last 120 lines of the log, if the problem is a crash or something not starting. It is at %LocalAppData%\w0a\errors.log. If w0a does not start at all, add startup-trace.log from the same folder.

If the problem is about a game feeling different with the background engines on, say which game and roughly when. engine.log in the same folder records what the engines did, line by line, and it stays on your PC unless you send it.

What not to send

• Your licence key in an email or a Discord message, unless the question is about the licence. Discord channels are read by other people.
• Screenshots of the whole desktop. A screenshot of the page is fine; the log is usually more useful.
• The same report twice. If the card says one report per hour, what you wrote stays in the box; send it when the hour is up.

Error lines may already have reached us through Send error diagnostics (Settings > Privacy, on by default, and only with a licence key entered). They tell us that something failed on some machines. Your description of what you were doing never arrives that way; it only arrives when you send it.

What happens then

We read all of it. If it is a bug, it goes on the list and you get told when the fix ships, if you left a contact address. If it is a question whose answer will help other people too, it becomes an article here — which is where most of these pages came from.

If the card says "Could not send", your report did not arrive. Try again later, or use email or Discord instead.

Related

• Where the log file is
• w0a will not start
• What w0a collects about you