Recently I missed my RAID failing for a few days because I don’t regularly check the web interface. So I decided to set up notifications. The offered options seemed weird, E-Mail and SMS. Looking at the SMS entry it’s essentially just an extremely limited and buggy http post request.
There is nothing in there that actually relates to SMS, except for the fact that you hardcoded the need for certain parameters. And not only that, the url does not allow all characters either, so certain APIs are not even usable.
Does anyone know why is this implemented this way? Why enforce detecting a username, phone number etc from the url for something that does not get reused? And why disallow URLs containing certain characters?
Specific example: I wanted to connect it to my telegram bot but to do this was not possible as telegram api calls contain a colon in the url and it does not need usernames, passwords and phone numbers as parameters (though ist just ignores them). In the end I had to setup a relay on my own server just to get rid of the colon and then it works like a charm.
The email support is not helpful at all, I described the problem, but the reply was TWICE to send logs and data about my device (PR4100, which is totally irrelevant for this bug but which I did twice) and even then the replies were just explanations on how to set up SMS URLs and that WD was not responsible for third party URLs.
I don’t think anyone can offer anything useful here, unless someone who actually works on the OS reads this, but I had to vent my frustration with this terrible first level support and buggy feature.
