Comment on Oops, something went wrong!
unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 11 hours agoBy nature of software consisting of a client and a server, there are certainly errors that can be bypassed on the client side.
Server side software does not mean “there is literally no errors that are dependent on client input.” That’s ridiculous to think, but pervasive in this comment section it seems.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
I don’t know why you think what I said means that. These error messages are never used on data validation issues. At least, I’ve never seen a data validation issue return an error like this, and I would never write an error like this for a data validation issue.
These messages come from 500-series errors. Usually caching layer errors, load balancer layer errors, edge termination layer errors, or db layer errors. In other words, there was probably nothing wrong with the request, it just couldn’t be fulfilled successfully, hence the “try again later” part in a lot of these messages.
unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
You are incorrect. I have had issues that were exactly that. Such as a password that was failing to be accepted and then giving generic error responses, which I then had to trial-and-error brute force to find which part of my password they weren’t allowing on the backend.
You stance might become easier to defend if you avoid absolutes.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
Read the next sentence.
unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
The error is unnecessarily vague.
If the message is supposed to mean “There is an internal error that is of little use to you, so you can only wait while we fix it. Try again in 10 minutes.” Then say that. That tells me a developer made a conscious decision to classify the failure mode as one which I cannot fix. They are explaining to you what type of error they perceive it to be.
Instead we have “Something went wrong. Try again later.” which doesn’t say that directly. This could just be them designing their systems as though every user is incompetent, and denying you the information to fix the issue yourself.
You would never know, because it doesn’t just tell you directly.