This is a rant about how so many apps on many different platforms (TVs, mobile devices, computers, etc…) have decided to not actually show detailed errors any more. Instead, we get something along the lines of:
Oops, somehting went wrong. Please try again later
… and then, well, we get to figure out what just happened and what in the world we need to do about it. And good luck with that, since you have no idea what just failed.
Why software developers?!? Why have you forsaken us?
EDIT 24 hours later: I feel like I need to clarify a few things:
I’ve worked for 8 software companies over 30+ years. I know why putting a DB error into the message users see is a bad idea. I know that makes me uncommon, but I still want more info from these messages.
You all are answering as if there are only two ways this can work: (a) what we have now (which is useless), and (b) a detailed error listing showing a full stack trace. I think the developers could meet me half-way.
What I want is either (a) “Something went wrong on the server, you can’t fix it, but we will” or (b) “Something on your end didn’t work. Check your network or restart the app or do something differently and then try the same thing again”. And if they’re blocking me because I’m using a VPN, fucking say so (but that’s a whole separate thing…)
Some apps do provide enough info so I have a clue what I should do next, and I appreciate the effort they put into helping me. I think what I am really ranting about is I want more developers to take the time to do this instead of reporting all errors with “Oops, try again”. (If the error is in their server, why should I try again?) Give me a hint as to the problem, so I have something to go on.
Cheers y’all. Still love you my techy brothers and sisters.
Because 99% of the time these errors are caused by something on their end that the user is unable to fix, even on the off chance that they understand the problem in the first place. So there isn’t any need to give you more information than “something went wrong, please wait a minute and/or try again”.
Blanket “99%” statements are unfounded. I have had countless issues I was able to fix through error messages and some without.
Source your claim.
I can’t speak for the other user’s claim, but I’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and have written plenty of error messages. When I write a message like these, it’s specifically because the user can’t do anything about it. I’ll log the error to our internal error tracking systems with actual information about it, then give the user a generic message.
If it’s something the user did wrong, and they can fix it, I’ll absolutely give them a message saying that. Usually I won’t even let a user submit a bad request, but sometimes users will bypass frontend restrictions to submit it, so the server always needs to validate it again anyway. The fact that plenty of users won’t even read the message I write is kind of annoying, but at least the users who do read it will know how to fix it.
I’ve tried sending detailed error messages before, and that invariably results in users submitting support tickets and forum posts for things that aren’t helpful. You learn pretty quickly what kind of messages are helpful and what kind aren’t.
I would appreciate the detailed error responses even if the developers don’t think it would be of use to them.
When a project has unexpected downtime, and they do a postmortem explaining exactly what part of their infrastructure failed, what steps they took to resolve it, and how they will prevent it in the future, that is great.
I appreciate transparency. Of course, to expect this from a large corporations is expecting a pig to fly, but detailed error messages are one more step away from “We are the cloud” and one step towards “We are real people providing a service which operates on server infrastructure consisting of…” Its transparent, down-to-earth, and respects people who do want to see behind the scenes.
One company I used even had a white paper explaining their infrastructure as a whole.
This all may not make you more money, but I prefer this to instead treating me with the bare minimum insight into the inner-workings.
I want you to really pay attention to the last paragraph of my previous comment. It’s the most important part. You might like having more information that doesn’t help you, but that comes at the cost of thousands of useless tasks and posts that all have to be manually closed. It’s not only not helpful to give the user detailed error messages in a lot of cases, it’s actively harmful to a business. It doesn’t make any business sense to tell a user that a cache layer host or a db shard is down. As a developer of these kinds of systems, I’m not going to give extra information that you don’t need just to make a few users happy that they get a peek under the hood if it means hurting our support staff.
How is a user sending a support request containing the information: “Site not working. Error message: A surge in requests is overloading the server. Everyone is being ratelimited.” Any different from them just saying “Site not working.”?
If they were going to submit an issue for a problem that is already known, why would the error message significantly change the difficulty of dealing them?
Because if there’s no error code or specific message, they’re far less likely to submit a ticket. The reason these messages often say, “try again later” is because that is the appropriate action for the user to take.
OK but then inherent in what you’re saying is also the message, “… and don’t contact us about this, because we don’t want to deal with it” which is also mildly infuriating to me.
The “we don’t want to deal with it” part is something you’re attributing to them with no evidence. As a former SRE, I can guarantee you they are dealing with it.
Iit’s an internal error that is not handled properly. They don’t want to tell you the exact error message and detailed information around that, because it would expose the internal state of the backend and that would be a security issue. There is really nothing more that they can tell you, except that a developer needs to look at this (and possibly thousands to tens or hundreds of thousands of similar logged errors) and they probably already are.
Maybe then, the message could be, “An internal error has occurred and we’re going to work on fixing it but there’s nothing you can do to fix it yourself right now”. It’s the “Oops” that fries my grits.
I do agree, the whole “oops sowwy” with a sad Labrador vibe is a little irritating. But I guess they do it cause it’s a harmless and layman-friendly response.
If you’re tech-savvy enough to want detailed error messages, you should also be tech-savvy enough to understand the implied message you just typed out. The ‘Oops’ isn’t for you, it’s for the average user.
It’s almost never an internal error. The vast majority of the time it’s vpn blocking or some such bullshit.
LMFAO. I probably have to truncate at least five error log files a week on various vps servers at my company because they fill the SSD and crash the OS. We rent servers we don’t dev them for our cx.
Largest error file I’ve seen so far is 32 GB
Site owners are normally clueless. Site developers normally can’t give a single fuck and systems administrators like me. Get to pick up the pieces and tell them to tell their Deb to fix it and then we pick it up again and tell them to tell their Dev to fix it let me know when you sense a pattern
Are you not rotating your logs with for example logrotate?
To reiterate, they are not my logs. It’s not my server. It’s a server that the customer is renting and not maintaining and we’re not going to purge their data unless they ask not all logs rotate. Mostly error_log files in garbage wp sites
So literally just found somebody’s exim main log archive.gz that was 12 GB and this is an archive from 2023. I have no idea why it even exists on this mans server still and was not reclaimed with the rest of its older brothers. I’m guessing failed cron idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You’re assuming they aren’t already aware of the issue.
Sorry but how does that help me?
What I’m saying is that when you see one of these messages you should interpret it as “something is wrong on our end, nothing you can or need to do on your end, please hang tight as we’re aware of the issue and working on it”. They don’t give you more info than that because that average person is probably not a dev and doesn’t have any need for more details than that.
But it’s MY Internet, and I want it NOW!!
You’re giving an incredibly large allowance for companies that have continuously calculated exactly how much they can fuck over their customers for more money before we decide to use some other product.
How does telling someone about a problem they’re already aware of help you?
When you’re in a restaurant and your server accidentally dumps the entire tray of food in your lap, would you prefer them to apologize or just stare at you because you already know what the problem is. Clearly you requested food to be delivered to your table and it didn’t make it there.
An apology would be nice, but do you really need to explain to the server that you still haven’t received your food? I think they know that
Of course if their servers and whatnot are shit they won’t straight up tell you they are shit.
It’s why modern multiplayer games don’t even show everyone’s latency anymore. It would let players know imperically that their servers are shit.
In theory, maybe. In practice, I’ve had a lot of errors in that vein that very much wouldn’t go away, and where made much harder to diagnose by their obtuseness.
Honestly, I even dislike the mindset. Just make a big header with the generic error message and a little one below that gives some details. Having users interested in how your software works is not a bad thing.
I give my users instructions on how to report an error if they seek assistance. It’s regularly ignored. Instead we get the ubiquitous “Something bad happened … somewhere. HALP!”
“I got an error”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t know, just something went wrong”
“👍”