Comment on Oops, something went wrong!
cattywampas@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Because 99% of the time these errors are caused by something on their end that the user is unable to fix, even on the off chance that they understand the problem in the first place. So there isn’t any need to give you more information than “something went wrong, please wait a minute and/or try again”.
In theory, maybe. In practice, I’ve had a lot of errors in that vein that very much wouldn’t go away, and where made much harder to diagnose by their obtuseness.
Honestly, I even dislike the mindset. Just make a big header with the generic error message and a little one below that gives some details. Having users interested in how your software works is not a bad thing.
I give my users instructions on how to report an error if they seek assistance. It’s regularly ignored. Instead we get the ubiquitous “Something bad happened … somewhere. HALP!”
“I got an error” “What did it say?” “I don’t know, just something went wrong” “👍”
Blanket “99%” statements are unfounded. I have had countless issues I was able to fix through error messages and some without.
Source your claim.
I can’t speak for the other user’s claim, but I’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and have written plenty of error messages. When I write a message like these, it’s specifically because the user can’t do anything about it. I’ll log the error to our internal error tracking systems with actual information about it, then give the user a generic message.
If it’s something the user did wrong, and they can fix it, I’ll absolutely give them a message saying that. Usually I won’t even let a user submit a bad request, but sometimes users will bypass frontend restrictions to submit it, so the server always needs to validate it again anyway. The fact that plenty of users won’t even read the message I write is kind of annoying, but at least the users who do read it will know how to fix it.
I’ve tried sending detailed error messages before, and that invariably results in users submitting support tickets and forum posts for things that aren’t helpful. You learn pretty quickly what kind of messages are helpful and what kind aren’t.
I would appreciate the detailed error responses even if the developers don’t think it would be of use to them.
When a project has unexpected downtime, and they do a postmortem explaining exactly what part of their infrastructure failed, what steps they took to resolve it, and how they will prevent it in the future, that is great.
I appreciate transparency. Of course, to expect this from a large corporations is expecting a pig to fly, but detailed error messages are one more step away from “We are the cloud” and one step towards “We are real people providing a service which operates on server infrastructure consisting of…” Its transparent, down-to-earth, and respects people who do want to see behind the scenes.
One company I used even had a white paper explaining their infrastructure as a whole.
This is all much appreciated.
I want you to really pay attention to the last paragraph of my previous comment. It’s the most important part. You might like having more information that doesn’t help you, but that comes at the cost of thousands of useless tasks and posts that all have to be manually closed. It’s not only not helpful to give the user detailed error messages in a lot of cases, it’s actively harmful to a business. It doesn’t make any business sense to tell a user that a cache layer host or a db shard is down. As a developer of these kinds of systems, I’m not going to give extra information that you don’t need just to make a few users happy that they get a peek under the hood if it means hurting our support staff.
perishthethought@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
OK but then inherent in what you’re saying is also the message, “… and don’t contact us about this, because we don’t want to deal with it” which is also mildly infuriating to me.
Thaurin@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
It’s not that it’s an internal error that is not handled properly. They don’t want to tell you the exact error message and detailed information around that, because it would expose the internal state of the backend and that would be a security issue. There is really nothing more that they can tell you, except that a developer needs to look at this (and possibly thousands to tens or hundreds of thousands of similar logged errors).
perishthethought@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Maybe then, the message could be, “An internal error has occurred and we’re going to work on fixing it but there’s nothing you can do to fix it yourself right now”. It’s the “Oops” that fries my grits.
cattywampas@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I do agree, the whole “oops sowwy” with a sad Labrador vibe is a little irritating. But I guess they do it cause it’s a harmless and layman-friendly response.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
If you’re tech-savvy enough to want detailed error messages, you should also be tech-savvy enough to understand the implied message you just typed out. The ‘Oops’ isn’t for you, it’s for the average user.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It’s almost never an internal error. The vast majority of the time it’s vpn blocking or some such bullshit.
Forester@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
LMFAO. I probably have to truncate at least five error log files a week on various vps servers at my company because they fill the SSD and crash the OS. We rent servers we don’t dev them for our cx.
Thaurin@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Are you not rotating your logs with for example logrotate?
cattywampas@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
You’re assuming they aren’t already aware of the issue.
perishthethought@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Sorry but how does that help me?
cattywampas@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
What I’m saying is that when you see one of these messages you should interpret it as “something is wrong on our end, nothing you can or need to do on your end, please hang tight as we’re aware of the issue and working on it”
spongebue@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
How does telling someone about a problem they’re already aware of help you?
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 weeks ago
Of course if their servers and whatnot are shit they won’t straight up tell you they are shit.
It’s why modern multiplayer games don’t even show everyone’s latency anymore. It would let players know imperically that their servers are shit.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
The “we don’t want to deal with it” part is something you’re attributing to them with no evidence. As a former SRE, I can guarantee you they are dealing with it.