The popularity of PVS-Studio free version is gradually growing, so more and more people are contacting to us for support.Most of the questions are the same, that's why we decided to decrease the number of emails and support users of the free version only via Stack Overflow. It will be easier to handle the questions and we will be able to give links to their previous questions. The users will also benefit from it because they will be able to find an answer by searching on Stack Overflow without waiting for a reply in the mail. This decision should make the life of our users and PVS-Studio developers easier.
PVS-Studio is a static analyzer that detects errors in the source code written in C, C++ and C#. The analyzer works under Windows and Linux.
To see the full list of the analyzer abilities, you may watch this presentation on YouTube (47 min.). Yes, this is a long presentation, but it describes the tool in details. PVS-Studio has become quite a complex solution that is why 5 minutes will not be enough to tell about it. This presentation is also available on the SlideShare.
PVS-Studio is a B2B solution aimed at development teams. There was an attempt to create a tool CppCat for individual developers, but it had no success. However, to our mind, individual developers should also have an opportunity to use PVS-Studio. Therefore we created a free version of license that can be used by any developer.
The only condition for using this tool is to add special comments to the code. If the code has these comments, the tool performs the analysis without any restrictions. You may find the details in the article: "How to use PVS-Studio for free".
We are really glad that a bigger number of people start checking their projects using a free version of the analyzer. We view this as a long-term advertising project that would give us new clients in several years.
However, at this point the free version is additional pain. It leads to more expenses for the support. Not to answer the questions would be not professional. However, answering the questions requires more and more time distracting us from our main tasks.
We also see that most of the questions are the same. For example, a lot of people ask ask if they can write comments that would be 70 or 80 characters long. We came to the conclusion that such questions would be easier to discuss via Stack Overflow. It is a very nice platform for discussion, where we will tell about different ways to write these comments, so that people can get instant help. If users need to clarify something, they will also find the answers there. Thus, I hope to decrease the number of questions by 90%, which will make the life of users and our developers better.
Instead of waiting for a response in the mail, they will most probably find answers on Stack Overflow.
From now on we will support our free users only via Stack Overflow.
Please use a tag "pvs-studio", so that your question doesn't remain unanswered.
Our paid customers will continue getting the support by email. Of course we won't mind if any of our clients would want to ask questions via Stack Overflow.
P.S. Of course, the usual Stack Overflow rules still apply. Bug reports and feature requests are not on-topic on Stack Overflow.