I have two ideas with the purpose to lessen the frustration of new users and to lower the burden of spring devs to deal with the same issue over and over again. What do you think?

test-app
Could the spring devs write a small *.exe that can be run independently from the engine and that does some opengl-shader-woodoo? It should crash in the same way as spring does with bad drivers/gfx cards.

This exe could then be distributed with the lobbies and would run at installation time - previous to users trying to play! The lobby could then present the user with a nice window explaining them the situation.

This would produce less frustration than having users register to a forum, search a log file on their hard disk, C&P it somewhere and then finally be told to buy a new gfx card.

spring compatibility DB
Lobbies could collect success/fail data and store it in an online DB:

After some time collecting data it should produce a "spring compatibility DB". This could be referenced at the download page of engine and lobbies.

i think the first one is unrealistic, as .. the only thing that does eveyrthing that spring does, is spring, or spring+something.
trying to write a programm that does eveyrthing that spring does and likely causes problems for some users, even if it were only GFX stuff, would be too much work. though, jk could say more about this.

i like the second thing, and we kind of already have most of that implemented.. as in.. lobbies just had to do the auto-report-on-crash-with-log-files-upload thing. Zydoxes site already parses all of that nicely, and stores it an a DB, from where it can be browsed with a web interface.
the same DB could be accessed to run some algorithm, witch ... when sent the specs of the users system by the lobby, could return a % of fail.

Like hoi said, part of what you suggested is realistic maybe, but then there is also the other issue - namely that this is totally unrewarding development and hard to find someone willing to do it. I would charge 20000$ to do it.

Instead of test-app, you could include a demo file and the lobby tries to play it with spring, with different settings.
Might be realistically doable, but of course still boring

OK... so the 1st idea is unrealistic.
For the 2nd I think lobbies would need to upload stats not only on crash, but also on success.

Does anyone know if it is possible to read the vendor+card+driver+version string by a website when using WebGL?
.... looked it up: there are VENDOR, RENDERER, VERSION strings, but those are of the WebGL implementation, not the gfx card vendor...

So... regarding the work... I'm not inclined on working on the lobbies, but in winter I could write this rather simple website + webservice (and a demo client).

https://github.com/renemilk/spring-infolog

->

http://infologs.springrts.com/php/

not sure what to say about it... just look at it

Ah - wow! - there it is.
Just a nice gui needed, and users can find their hardware and get an idea of how problematic their hardware is.
Where do those infologs come from?

tasclient & springlobby uploaded it, but it was disabled for some reason (instabilities in the upload code i guess...)

imo it would make sense to add the upload code to pr-downloader, so it can be used everywhere... (meh, self-promoting)

sounds good!
in SL, it was disabled cuase of SL crashing when uploading, yes.