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 the error message would be meaningless for 99% of people. Expected errors are already handled correctly, but unexpected errors like these would say something obscure like “couldn’t read property ‘count’ of undefined”. Very useful
The developers are meeting you halfway. They told you something went wrong, They have the stack trace in the logs.
Being a reasonably knowledgeable individual you could make use of the deeper information at least scratch your itch for what happened, in the end there’s nothing you can do about it there’s a back end problem. But giving that more detailed information to the end user is a fool’s errand.
Let’s say we pick a simple one, the database connector is down. End user gets a message that the database is unconnectable. Forum start to light up with worries of people losing data. Armchair conjecture about backups and data loss and updates abound.
Realistically the VM host at Amazon had a critical update and got updated, but failed to come back up as they do occasionally and someone needs to go and stop and start the instance to get the database online on new hardware. It only takes 15 or 20 minutes.
Now you’ve got thousands of people in your forum pissed off about something that is only mostly out of your control.
Now let’s replace that error with oops something went wrong.
The people on the forms mention that it’s down they ponder about what could possibly be wrong, But without anything to go on it fizzles away, The site comes back up and people just chalk it up to regular internet shenanigans.
The company didn’t get any benefit from giving the end user more information. Your average user just got their knickers and a twist. And a handful of knowledgeable professionals went wow that sucks sorry guys.
I agree that it’s (weirdly) uncommon to be the one saying “please give me more info about the error!”
A simple error code can be endlessly helpful (bonus points if there’s a corresponding support article explaining common codes)
Even if some codes are only useful to internal support, it’s handy to be able to search an error code and see “oh I can just jump straight to submitting a ticket/calling their support” or “oh, this fix might work”
As a developer of many years I hate to tell you sometimes that it’s all the information we have when something breaks also. Most code is a god awful mess. Thankfully I love a good mystery.
Please apply to Crowd Control Productions. You’ll never find a better mystery than current live code that has spaghetti that traces back to 2002 or 2001. The game went live in 2003. There’s one, kinda, server. Technically there are three, but most EvE players only have access to Tranquility, most don’t have access to Singularity, and apparently they have renamed the dev server from Multiplicity to Serinity. Some of us still have access to Serinity because we were able to play test Multiplicity, back in the day.
I hate the process of debugging, but good god, once you’ve spent 5 hours tracking down the dumbest shit and gotten it to work, it’s better than an orgasm.
Let’s talk about the growing number of websites that won’t work with a vpn. Even a local government website won’t work.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie
Verbose errors were nice
I hate the oops part. When you get an error message and it’s not even professional or technical but flimsy, I lose all respect.
At my job an Oops design was suggested. I’m glad I was able to convince us to implement it differently, without that shit tone and unprofessionalism.
professionalism is so last millennium. we’re hip and young and human. and definitely your friend.
Never show the customer a big scary error message. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, dispatch an error event so the engineers can track the issue. They’ll pull detailed logs, and know what to do. Meanwhile, guide the customer to return later with the error screen, and collect their userId if possible. Once the issue is fixed, send them an apology email to let them know they should try again
Most companies just follow the first half of that process, unfortunately
Yah, I love that idea of follow up but I imagine if the software is used by hundreds of thousands or more people, they can’t follow up on every case.You’d think that could be largely automated but who knows.
The why is easy. As others said, the vast majority of error messages are entirely useless for you, the user, because there’s not a single thing you can possibly do to address it. What are you gonna do about a database connection issue, or bad cache, or broken Javascript? Nothing. So don’t worry about it. Besides people are less panicky when they see an oops rather than a stack trace or a cryptic error message.
And don’t worry, people who know how to write up useful support tickets and bug reports know how to do it even when all they can see is an “oops”. Builtin browser dev tools will have information they can use to help the devs.
the vast majority of error messages are entirely useless for you
Hard disagree. Maybe half, at most. And most importantly, if a user can’t do anything about it, what’s the difference between a “error code 487” vs “oops there’s an unspecified error”? What’s the harm in showing an actual error code?
The VAST majority of errors I see are connection issues, or some of my VPN or adblock stuff causing me to be denied access to the website. That’s all stuff I can fix. And it would be a lot faster if I didn’t have to trial-and-error my way to the actual problem first.
See my update/EDIT above. I feel like most of the replies here are on the same track as you but I still think there’s a better way.
Look, the majority of the software is on the server end. Even if they gave you a full stack trace, and you understood it, you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. You want them to give you a way to send in a merge request? I’m sure that would be received here as Google exploiting you for free.
Just fucking tell me when my adblock is causing you to deny me access, or my connection is too weak/slow. I don’t need a fucking full stack trace.
“Hey boss? I got a user here who’s blocking our ads and cussing us out.”
“Oh dear. Better give him whatever he wants.”
Yeah, otherwise you won’t have a user because I’ll find a competitor that is actually workable on my system.
What I hate even more are error codes
Precise, easily searchable codes that describe the problem? What a ball ache!
This person gets it. Thank you.
Not on Windows, no. “This error code could indicate this or that or something”.
What are you planning to do with information about the error? It’s not like these places have customer support. Usually it’s something like a caching layer failing, and there’s literally nothing you can do about that.
By 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.
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.
These error messages are never (sic) used on data validation issues.
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.
Read the next sentence.
It sounds like your problem is not with these errors in general, but with specific software that uses generic messages when not appropriate.
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 wouldn’t know, because it doesn’t just tell you directly.
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.
If it’s an error code I’ve worked around before, apply same troubleshooting.
If its a new errror code, search the error code to see how other people solved it.
If no one else has solved the error code, try analogous troubleshooting, post results online with the error code name, successful or not.
These kinds of error messages are almost exclusively used for transient errors. You aren’t going to work around a transient error. The best thing you can do (the only thing you can do, really) is to try again later, hence, the message. It’s not helpful to show you a message like “cache-1234.example.com failed to respond within 300 milliseconds”. What are you going to do about that? By the time you submit a support ticket, that host has already been brought back up automatically. So now you’ve just wasted your time and the support staff’s time. The engineers already have a log of that error and a log of whatever error brought down that host, so you’re not telling them anything new by making a support ticket.
I agree with Nouveau_Brunswick here.
And to add: to @[email protected] , are you not also a user of software and do you not see room for improvement in many apps? That’s where I am rn: I just want them to try harder to communicate a tiny bit more info when things go so wrong that a message has to be displayed on my screen. Telling me “There’s nothing you can do to fix the problem” would be a big help, for instance. Make sense?
I am a developer of software. I can guarantee you that what you’re asking for would make my job harder, because I’ve done it, and it has made my job harder. If an error is transient (like, a caching layer error, a db connection error, an external API error, an endpoint connectivity error, etc), giving the user an error code will make it more likely that they’ll file a useless bug report or support ticket. The errors are all logged internally, and we can see when there is a spike in the error count. There’s no reason to give the user an error code, because there’s nothing helpful that the user can do with it, and there’s a lot of unhelpful things a user can do with it.
There are times where a message to the user is appropriate, like if they made a mistake with their input. But there are so many things that could go wrong that the user can’t do anything about. You’re not going to work around your DB shard going down, and a replica will replace it in a few seconds anyway, so giving you an error code does more harm than good. Telling you to try again later is exactly what I would tell you if you filed a support ticket. I don’t want to deal with useless support tickets, and you don’t want to deal with useless error messages.
Modern software stacks are big, complex systems with lots of failure points. We monitor them, and we can tell when you see these errors. If we chose to not show you a specific error code/message, there’s almost definitely a good reason.
So what you’re saying is that your code is garbage and you’re hiding it from users because it’s too much work to fix it.
What I’m saying is that error messages can be helpful or harmful. Knowing that and how to tell the difference is what makes you an expert. Just firing off any information to the user without thinking about it is what makes you a novice, and will eventually get you fired. We’re talking about systems with millions of daily users. If you cause 2,000 unnecessary support tickets or forum posts every day because you don’t know when to send what information to the user, you won’t get very far in tech.
If you have 2000 daily people getting error messages, your code is garbage rofl
And if your company would rather you avoid those tickets by not giving out error codes, your company is also garbage. Which to be fair, is a lot of tech companies.
I feel like you really don’t understand how big tech works. There’s not some single server running every service perfectly. There are tons of different layers and services running on thousands or hundreds of thousands of hosts.
Let’s say you make a request to something like Facebook. Say you’re liking a post. Here’s what happens:
That request goes in through a PoP (point of presence). These are sometimes called edge servers or edge gateways, but at Facebook we called them PoPs. This is a server that’s physically close to you that’s used to terminate the TLS connection. It doesn’t have any user data. Its job is to take your encrypted request, decrypt it, then pass it on to Facebook’s regional data center on their internal network.
The request enters a webby. These are usually called frontend servers, but again, at Facebook we called them webbies. This is a server that runs the monolithic Facebook web app. Again, it doesn’t have any user data. Its job is to take your request and orchestrate actions on deeper services to fulfill that request.
First it’s going to check a local memory cache server for sitevars. These control system level switches, like AB tests, and whether certain services are brought down. That server returns the sitevars and the webby proceeds, now knowing which logic paths to take.
For a like, which is a write request between your user account and a post, it will create two DB entries (you likes post, post liked by you). It needs to first get the data from the caching layer, so it will make two requests to TOA, one for your account, and one for the post.
TOA runs in the same regional data center, and if it doesn’t have the two data objects cached, it will request them from the regional db shards.
These regional db shards also run in the same data center, and they’ll return the data.
TOA returns the data back to the webby.
The webby (after doing some permission checks, which probably hit TOA again) now creates the two relationships, likes and liked by, referencing the two data objects, you and the post. TOA is a write-through cache, so the webby sends the writes to TOA.
TOA now needs to send the requests to the db primary shards, since they are the only ones that can handle writes. Your primary shard and the post’s primary shard are probably in different data centers, so TOA now passes the writes to the regional data centers for each primary shard.
A host running TOA in each regional data center for each primary shard now passes the write to each shard.
Each primary shard now writes the data to the local disk, and waits for the binary log to be written to the local journal before returning a success message.
The success message is passed from the local TOA host back to the original region’s TOA host.
When that TOA host gets both requests back successfully, it returns a success back to the webby handling your request.
The webby then returns a success to the PoP you’re still connected to.
The PoP then returns a success to the client running on your device.
The client doesn’t notify you of anything, because it already showed you a filled in like button right after you pressed it.
This was how it worked back in 2013 when I worked there. It probably hasn’t changed a whole lot, but this is also an extremely simplified overview. That request will probably hit hundreds of services. Some of them can fail and the request could still succeed. But some are required to succeed for your request to be considered successful, like the db write operations. Something like a hardware failure on your primary db shard’s disk can’t be overcome with better code. Nor can a lightning strike taking out the cable connecting your PoP be overcome with better code.
These systems are absolutely massive, and there are failures you wouldn’t even think of. When I worked at FB, we had an entire data center go down because the humidity got just high enough that the capacitors in each hosts’ power supplies all failed in a matter of a few minutes. Thousands of users probably got error messages that day, but the automatic failover systems moved all the traffic to a new region and promoted new primary db shards within about ten minutes. The fact that losing an entire data center was mitigated in about ten minutes is actually really impressive. You might think it’s still garbage code, since users got error messages, but I know enough about these systems to be very impressed by that.
If you know a better way to make a system like this that works for billions of users across the planet, you should write a paper and submit it to a local conference. If they approve you for a talk, you can present your designs to an audience there. If the audience is really receptive, your designs could make a big impact in the tech sector. That’s basically what the highest level engineers at these big tech companies do when they design these multi-billion user systems, so it’s definitely possible for you to do it too.
Exactly, it’s especially infuriating on newpipe. WHAT went wrong? It’s an error 500 from YouTube (rare, unfixable, try again) or Google changed something and need to wait for a client fix? Or simply Google blacklisted the IP address or put some captcha that prevents playing the video??
Users ignore error messages.
I have seen my users request support, proceed to demonstrate the issue they’re having, and click through error messages so fast there isn’t even enough time for me to say “WAIT!” Forget about being able to actually read even one word of the message before it’s dismissed from the screen.
They treat the error messages like they are just an annoying mosquito to be swatted away as quickly as possible. This despite the fact that the whole reason I’m standing behind them is so I can see what it’s going wrong and, you know, read the error messages.
So the solution is to remove the error messages? That makes no sense.
I wasn’t saying it was a solution, I was just offering a possible explanation. I understand why someone wouldn’t bother telling the user what’s happening. For my code, I log everything that happens, and tell the user to call me. When I get the call, I check the log and use that to figure out what went wrong.
Distressingly typical user communication:
User: There was an error message.
Me: What did the error say?
User: I don’t know. Something about the problem.
If you remove error codes, all you’ve done is guarantee every interaction is like that.
You’ve got it backwards. Once every interaction is like that, you stop showing error codes.
I have trouble with my colleagues in IT doing the same crap. They come to me to ask me to help them with a problem, and they don’t have the errors!
That’s Windows’ training bearing fruit.
Them:
“What? Oh that? That always happens”
Me:
Grrrrr
Yeah, you’re right, but I still would prefer to see something telling me whether something I did caused the problem or something went wrong in the software / on the server. From this thread, I’m getting that my wishes will not be heard.
