See my update/EDIT above. I feel like most of the replies here are on the same track as you but I still think there’s a better way.
Comment on Oops, something went wrong!
herrvogel@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The why is easy. As others said, the vast majority of error messages are entirely useless for you, the user, because there’s not a single thing you can possibly do to address it. What are you gonna do about a database connection issue, or bad cache, or broken Javascript? Nothing. So don’t worry about it. Besides people are less panicky when they see an oops rather than a stack trace or a cryptic error message.
And don’t worry, people who know how to write up useful support tickets and bug reports know how to do it even when all they can see is an “oops”. Builtin browser dev tools will have information they can use to help the devs.
perishthethought@lemm.ee 2 days ago
unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Ridiculous take. I have debugged countless issues. Those that spit detailed error messages are typically far easier to debug than those that don’t.
For example, returning nothing but exit code 1 to indicate failure. This gives zero information about the reason behind the failure, and only could be acceptable if your program is so simple as to only have very few failure modes.
I have solved issues by cloning the source code and reading it to understand the issue.
Don’t relegate everyone to the same fate as those so utterly ignorant they can’t look up an error code.
As for the bugs you can’t fix? Why do you think Cloudflare tells you when its the website having an issue, and not your browser or them? Knowing the issue isn’t something you can change, avoids spending time trying to fix an issue that you have no control over.
I disagree with you across the board.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Hard disagree. Maybe half, at most. And most importantly, if a user can’t do anything about it, what’s the difference between a “error code 487” vs “oops there’s an unspecified error”? What’s the harm in showing an actual error code?
The VAST majority of errors I see are connection issues, or some of my VPN or adblock stuff causing me to be denied access to the website. That’s all stuff I can fix.