App feedback

[bosscube]

The app is good for viewing your balance, but the auto-summon isn’t much better than my method, which is a homescreen widget that sends a quick text to the bots. I may save a tap with the app, but I still have to wait for the bot to call, answer it, and then manually merge the calls. Is it possible to have the app answer the call itself and merge them? Otherwise I’ll probably just stick to my text shortcuts, since I have the added benefit of configuring it to choose a specific bot based on the text message.

[rsegal47]

+1
I was going to suggest this same thought.

[mark_marasch]

boxjuice and rsegal47,

The thing the app will give you that your shortcut won’t is the score. If you have the app in one of the “advise” modes, notifications will give you a spam caller score that lets you know if you should even answer the call.

If you couple the scoring with Jolly Roger’s voicemail options, you can simply decline a high-scoring call and it will go to a pirate without any further actions required by you. Of course, not all spam callers will have high scores, but I find that the scores really do catch most of them.

We would love to have the app answer, merge, mute the calls, etc. but the Android operating system limits the actions an app can take. Though the permissions say something about allowing the app to make and receive calls, the permissions only really allow the app to see caller ID and the app state.

You can select which bot is used with a given number on your account page. That selection will determine what is used when you summon using the app, too.

Feel free to use your text shortcut to summon pirates, of course! Use the approach that works best for you.

Thanks for the excellent feedback!

Mark W. Marasch
Ethical Developer Group

[bosscube]

I have to disagree that the service catches most of the spam calls by score. In fact, I’d say the opposite is true. 95% of the calls I get are geo-spoofed. They’re usually valid, personal numbers that obviously won’t come up with a score. That’s why it would be an incredibly useful feature to be able to blacklist numbers with regex rules. At the moment I just reject the call and block it, but that’s not a solution since they’ll just call back with a different number. Now, what I could do is find an app that lets me blacklist numbers by regex, and then I won’t even get the call, and Jolly Roger keeps working as my voicemail. But, then I don’t get to bot them. If the Jolly Roger app could allow us to blacklist and automatically bot based on regex rules, that would be the best of both worlds.

[steveadmin]

FYI….you can specify rules for blacklisting via the Pirate Porthole. For example, to blacklist all calls from 212-555 just enter “1212555” or “1212555*” into the blacklist (the star is equivalent to a blank). We have not generalized this to accept more flexible regex because we have not seen the need, but if you think there is helpful use-case for more flexible blacklist patterns, we are very interested.
Thanks, Steve

ps. here is a tutorial that shows us using blacklists with patterns: https://jollyrogertelephone.com/tutorials/#TutNewUser5

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