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”.
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.
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.
It’s almost never an internal error. The vast majority of the time it’s vpn blocking or some such bullshit.
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.
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?
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)_/¯
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
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.
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”
“👍”