These kinds of error messages are almost exclusively used for transient errors. You aren’t going to work around a transient error. The best thing you can do (the only thing you can do, really) is to try again later, hence, the message. It’s not helpful to show you a message like “cache-1234.example.com failed to respond within 300 milliseconds”. What are you going to do about that? By the time you submit a support ticket, that host has already been brought back up automatically. So now you’ve just wasted your time and the support staff’s time. The engineers already have a log of that error and a log of whatever error brought down that host, so you’re not telling them anything new by making a support ticket.
Comment on Oops, something went wrong!
Nouveau_Burnswick@lemmy.world 1 day agoIf it’s an error code I’ve worked around before, apply same troubleshooting.
If its a new errror code, search the error code to see how other people solved it.
If no one else has solved the error code, try analogous troubleshooting, post results online with the error code name, successful or not.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
perishthethought@lemm.ee 1 day ago
I agree with Nouveau_Brunswick here.
And to add: to @hperrin@lemmy.ca , are you not also a user of software and do you not see room for improvement in many apps? That’s where I am rn: I just want them to try harder to communicate a tiny bit more info when things go so wrong that a message has to be displayed on my screen. Telling me “There’s nothing you can do to fix the problem” would be a big help, for instance. Make sense?
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I am a developer of software. I can guarantee you that what you’re asking for would make my job harder, because I’ve done it, and it has made my job harder. If an error is transient (like, a caching layer error, a db connection error, an external API error, an endpoint connectivity error, etc), giving the user an error code will make it more likely that they’ll file a useless bug report or support ticket. The errors are all logged internally, and we can see when there is a spike in the error count. There’s no reason to give the user an error code, because there’s nothing helpful that the user can do with it, and there’s a lot of unhelpful things a user can do with it.
There are times where a message to the user is appropriate, like if they made a mistake with their input. But there are so many things that could go wrong that the user can’t do anything about. You’re not going to work around your DB shard going down, and a replica will replace it in a few seconds anyway, so giving you an error code does more harm than good. Telling you to try again later is exactly what I would tell you if you filed a support ticket. I don’t want to deal with useless support tickets, and you don’t want to deal with useless error messages.
Modern software stacks are big, complex systems with lots of failure points. We monitor them, and we can tell when you see these errors. If we chose to not show you a specific error code/message, there’s almost definitely a good reason.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So what you’re saying is that your code is garbage and you’re hiding it from users because it’s too much work to fix it.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
What I’m saying is that error messages can be helpful or harmful. Knowing that and how to tell the difference is what makes you an expert. Just firing off any information to the user without thinking about it is what makes you a novice, and will eventually get you fired. We’re talking about systems with millions of daily users. If you cause 2,000 unnecessary support tickets every day because you don’t know when to send what information to the user, you won’t get very far in tech.