Comment on Oops, something went wrong!
hperrin@lemmy.ca 9 hours agoI 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 8 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 8 hours ago
Read the next sentence.
unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 7 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.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
It is intentionally and, I would argue, necessarily vague.
First, there is no time frame for these kinds of errors. If it’s just a cache host that’s down, you could retry right now and the load balancer would probably have taken that host out of rotation already. If it’s a primary db that’s down, that may take 5 minutes. If there’s no replica to promote, it might take 30 minutes. If the whole db layer is down, it might take an hour or two. If an entire release needs to be rolled back, it might take a couple hours. There are just too many scenarios and too many variables to give a useful time frame.
Second, you might appreciate an error message like that, but these error messages aren’t written for you and they’re usually not even written by developers. They’re written by designers and translated into many languages. They need to be concise, easily understood, and not easily construed as derogatory or malicious in any language. They are written for the broadest audience. You are not the broadest audience.
Third, we have to design systems as if every user is incompetent and/or malicious, because many of them are. Let me give you an example. I once got an email from another engineer using an internal system my team wrote. He said, “hey I’m getting this error, can you help?” He attached a screenshot showing an error message that read, “Your auth token has expired. Please refresh the page.” He was a senior engineer.
Fourth, and I cannot stress this enough, there is almost always nothing you can do when you hit an error like this. Any information given to you for the vast majority of these kinds of errors would be entirely useless to you. You cannot promote a db shard yourself. You cannot bring up a cache host yourself. You cannot take a host out of load balancer rotation yourself. The only reason this information could possibly benefit you is to satisfy your curiosity.