Comment on Oops, something went wrong!
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day agoAn expired cert means the browser would show an error message. I can’t send you any message if my cert is expired, because your browser won’t trust the connection.
UX designers have completely different skill sets than software engineers. At a small company, someone might do both roles, but at a company like Google or Microsoft, those are two different job titles. They do work together. In my experience, there’s a general consensus between both high level designers and high level engineers that giving the user useless information in an error message is a bad idea. There’s a reason these messages are similar across lots of companies. It’s because they are the best option for the business. If we need extra details from the user, we’ll have it printed in the console and tell them to open the console. That is incredibly rare, and basically only ever used for a network failure scenario in a service worker.
You can design your software for tech gurus, but you shouldn’t expect Microsoft Teams to be designed for tech gurus. Their customers are the general public (not super tech savvy), so they design for the general public.
You wrote “useless boilerplate error messages” in your comment, and I’m telling you that the useless part cannot be changed. You want useless detailed error messages. Good for you. Write software that gives you useless detailed error messages. Tell everyone about it and see how the general public reacts. I’ve been working in big tech for 17 years, and I am telling you from all of my experience that the general public will react poorly.
Software devs need to make a choice. When we include details, people complain and post useless bug reports and forum posts. When we don’t include details, a much smaller number of people complain, and generally we don’t get useless bug reports and forum posts about it. Which one would you choose?
unhrpetby@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yes. Bad example. Pick any other number of examples. You can probably put a useful time range.
Already commented on that. They believe it to be so, I don’t agree with that choice.
It doesn’t have to be either or. Error messages can have a baseline of mild computer knowledge, and stretch up to people who know what they are doing. You can cater to both.
It doesn’t have to be utterly useless. Just because you can’t fix anything from where you are doesn’t mean you can’t benefit. If the error is deemed unfixable for customers, give a timeframe of when it should be fixed and the intended course of action (what should they do if its not back up soon and they need it to be up). Useless is a choice, but its also subjective. You may find “Something went wrong. Try again later” as not useless. I deem it so.
Unfounded assertion. I have fixed server-client issues before as the client. Let me repeat it: I have fixed server-client issues as the client. There are of course issues I can’t fix
I think our disconnect partly comes from the fact that I am discussing this from a point of view of server operators being fallible. If in theory they always know what is fixable only on the server and never make a mistake in that regard, then we fall back to make a useless error message more useful. But they do make mistakes (or are purposefully hiding information so you don’t know how to get around the error). The Linux example. It would be very easy to justify that in the same way that companies could justify a useless error message for something which could actually be fixed. How many people are going to look at the initframfs logs and know how to chroot in, edit the initramfs init script, and then rebuild the cpio and shove it in boot? Probably less than those that don’t.
You could use this as a justification to hide it completely, but also harm those that could fix it, and also harm error reporting as the users machines just don’t boot the distro. I disagree with this decision.
if that affected ChatGPTs popularity, I couldn’t tell.
So I’ll round it all off with this: improve the error messages as a whole. Add contact information, time till likely fix, course of action (try again later is vague crap). The messages feel like an unhelpful wall, the error equivalent of a chatbot responding to your pleads for support. Also, you might not always be correct in whether something is fixable or not. You could add the detailed error information near the bottom, if people don’t need it then no harm. If people do then its useful. Not adding it and then it being of use could be worse than adding it and it just never being necessary.
I think this topic is wrung out dry.
hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I think you’re trying very hard to ignore all the negative things I’ve told you users do when you include too much information. Maybe just go get a job at one of these big companies and submit a diff adding this information, then read why your diff gets rejected. I’m literally telling you the reasons big companies do this, and you just refuse to believe me. Maybe you’ll believe them.