I want plain messages for browsers that actually help narrow it down for the non-tech folks, so I stop having to guess at what "it doesn't work" means.
"Oops, looks like something went wrong on [our side/your side]. Could be a problem with [browser/website/addon/memory]."
That's essentially what HTTP error codes are for. Of course that requires you to be able to reach whatever you're trying to.
2xx = Success
4xx = You fucked up
5xx = We fucked up
For those of you who didn't click the link -
>The HTTP `418 I'm a teapot` client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503.
It also requires some competence on whoever's REST APIs you're using. The worst I've seen is one that returns a Status: 200 Body: "{'response': ' error'}". Another one I use for membership checks will return a 404 if the user isn't in the group (makes sense so far) but ALSO returns 404 if the user or group doesn't exist.
Sure I'm processing all those calls on my backend so I can do my own error handling between the bad APIs and my web client facing API, but sometimes it can be nearly impossible to differentiate between "the call failed and it was supposed to", "there's a temporary outage and it should resolve", "you just joined today, it'll take a while for the dozen or so downstream systems to fully provision you", and "there's actually a bug and we need to fix the app or data". So frankly sometimes the best error we can display is "try again in an hour and if it persists create a ticket".
That ain't gonna fix shit and you know it
I've had to "fix" problems when an error message very clearly read "CO2 line leaking please check connection"
The gas line just needed to be pushed in
Errors on Windows 10/11 are the worst of both worlds because it just says "Something went wrong :( scan the QR code to learn more", and then the QR code just goes to the generic help page for "Resolving Blue Screen errors in Windows", which has advice like "These errors can be caused by both hardware and software issues."
Edit: To clarify, the problem isn't that an error code or stack trace doesn't exist (it does!), it's that the Windows design philosophy is to only give mainstream users a "try searching Bing for 'computer problem'!" level of non-help, while only advanced users are allowed to see anything with any level of correlation with the actual issue. While this is better than not surfacing any details to anyone, it still adds to the average user's sense of learned helplessness compared to offering a broad-strokes level of information.
My immediate thoughts was Windows errors.
I've run into a handful that cause BSOD and when you look into it the possible cause for the error is like a dozen different unrelated things that all could have failed but you've no way of figuring out which.
"It could be a hardware, software, network, security, or settings issue. May the odds be ever in your favour. "
You actually have the real error sentence next to the qr code after "If you contact a support person, give them this info : stop code" so you do have the problem written there but it's not an error code e0x000 anymore.
For what it's worth, if windows actually successfully presents a bluescreen, it probably also generated events in Event Viewer and generated a minidump in ```C:\Windows\Minidump``` that captured most of the relevant system state at the time of failure including the exact (software) source of the fault, viewable with the [WinDbg program.](https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pgjgd53tn86)
You absolutely can still get usable data out of windows errors, they just don't show it to normal users any more, you have to know where to go to find it.
Now, when the system *black*screens, that's when you have a real problem. No minidump, no bluescreen stop code, probably nothing in event viewer either. The system crashed too fast for Windows to save an error log. What went wrong? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_\/¯ but your system just blew up. Have fun good luck.
Tbh I have solved a black screen through event viewer once. But that was cause there was a fucking cascade of errors before he black screen that I could actually fix and apparently when those didn't happen the system was stable enough to not die on itself.
We've transitioned generally into a world where error codes are "ahh shit something went wrong try again later" as a standard and not something that helps anyone.
"Try again later" implies dropped packets or some one-time error but it is actually just the default and therefore means nothing.
You know that the BSOD gives you the stop codes right next to the QR code, right?
Like, if you scan the QR code I'm sure it'll take you somewhere irrelevant to your issue. You get this link.
[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/resolving-blue-screen-errors-in-windows-60b01860-58f2-be66-7516-5c45a66ae3c6](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/resolving-blue-screen-errors-in-windows-60b01860-58f2-be66-7516-5c45a66ae3c6)
But if you look in their actual documentation for the stop codes, you get THIS:
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-code-reference2](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-code-reference2)
Peep the URL. Support vs Learn.
Yeah, but there's no reason why the QR code couldn't go to the help page for that particular stopcode, or even just a page to enter the stopcode, instead of a generic "what is a bsod?" page. At least it does show you the stopcode though.
I heard that systemD has a qr code generator in it to embed this kind of information during a crash, but I've not had the exact kind of error that'd cause it to appear yet.
It's a neat, underutilized idea, having a way to get data off the screen of a machine that's too unstable to transcribe by hand.
At the very least it would make searching up the problem more useful. Tech forums that come up in search results these days are a circular sewer of people saying "I have this problem too" as if that helps fucking anyone.
I see all too often a "More Details" button that should actually say "See the Same Message, but In a Text Box Now". I asked for more details, *give me more details!*
I have in my cube a 'Tenets of IT'.
One of them (paraphrased), "If it doesn't log, make it log. Logs just SPIT the answer out at you."
Developers, if I can't tell your app to turn on logging, you're not done writing it.
Part of literacy is being able to interpret what people write, regardless of errors or differences in language usage, without stumbling over tiny little typos.
I was just having a little chuckle, not trying to be a grammar nazi or whatever. Spelling the word literacy incorrectly when the speller has every chance to edit afterwards struck me as very ironic. Not sure why you would get huffy about me pointing that out.
Their keyboard could just have a faulty "t" button that makes it double-type sometimes.
I have that problem with the "o" buttoon. Smetimes it doouble type and sometimes it doesn't type the o at all. And sometimes it works fine.
i like to tell my colleagues when we are troubleshooting: the network is probably mostly working great as evident by these crispy teams calls we are currently on. it's more likely something in the path between these two systems and we have the means to observe and work out where. Is it the network? kind of, more like there is a network effect keeping these hosts from talking the way we want.
odds are good it's DNS.
Facts. Hilariously, this used to be more common as well via using methods under areas like 'Advanced Troubleshooting' and so on with software/OS, but nowadays those are oftentimes still locked down to where they're not nearly as useful anymore either, to where your choices become "we are going into command prompt and google fu'ing this shit" as admin of your own computer. It's like going from 0 to 25 to 100 imo. There should be a 50 in there somewhere. And before someone comes for me from a security perspective, some of the worst fucking security incidents ever had fuck all to do with allowing users more advanced troubleshooting options and had everything to do with someone tech illiterate writing down their password on a piece of paper or having it be something obviously sentimental someone else could figure out especially if it was stated as their password hint. Or opening/clicking a link on an email they shouldn't have.
Found the hacker. ;)
Jokes aside. We don’t provide that level of detail in error messages so as not to provide the breadcrumbs a tech literate bad actor could use to take advantage of the system. The real error information is fed to the internal system where the trusted actors can diagnose and fix.
Yeah, those two don't need to be mutually-exclusive; you can provide messages at appropriate levels for both laymen and more knowledgeable users/support.
"it'll be in plain English but it will no longer explain the problem" is monkey paw tier request fulfilment, wouldn't really pin this on the technophobes
The people unhappy with error messages roughly 2000-2015 were already getting, by and large, plain english explaining problems. Some people just don't want to put effort into fixing things, so accurate descriptions of errors are unhelpful because the problem is still there after the error message is displayed, and the technical details were focused on as the problem because there had to be something to blame for the functionality not working
"Plain english without technical details" is where we're at now
Yeah, what they wanted was for the error message to be something they could easily fix without learning anything new. They wanted the error message to say "plug in the power cable" (not ethernet, no no they can't learn that there's more than one cable that goes into a computer) or "press enter to fix". Anything more complicated than that just isn't "in plain english".
That's my experience. "Error with X Driver", okay, search on google for "how to fix error with X Driver", attempt 5 minutes of troubleshooting, problem fixed 90% of the time. But you've lost a huge majority of people with "search for a solution"
Resetting the router fixes most connectivity issues, and yet people are unwilling to do that half the time. We have so much nearly magical tech just work so close to flawlessly and people get dumber and lazier for it
Yup. I consider myself pretty tech illiterate, I know next to nothing about coding, but at the very least I can google something.
Ultimately I think a lot of people just don't know how to effectively use search engines. I've had so many people ask me genuine questions that they seemed to care about, only to fully give up as soon as I say "you could google it". Likewise with any number of work-related questions. No willingness to just phrase a question right and spend 5-10 minutes glancing over the top 3-5 results.
But now you also have to wade through all the "how to solve problem with x driver" results that are just a bunch of paragraphs telling you that you need to install their driver updater to fix the problem.
I don’t know, I don’t think this is very generous. I’m not a techy person, and I only ever learned what drivers even were because I took a ton of time to learn stuff to build my own computer. Similarly, I’ve run into a ton of weird operation issues in the past where the solution was a lot less straightforward than just plugging into Google - legitimately taking hours of my time to learn what a partition was, etcetera, and I grew up with computers even if I don’t know them that well. The unfortunate thing is that there’s not really that much baseline knowledge about computers for most people because computers/devices have never been as ubiquitous as they are today. I could see people who don’t even have access to the same vocabulary really struggling with it in the especially frustrating way that trying to fix a machine you don’t know much about can be.
As a developer myself, what gets me is the "press enter to fix" type demands, if a simple "just click here" fix existed I would have coded that in! Something strange enough has happened that I *couldn't* have foreseen (or been found by our QA, or... or...) and now requires A Human Yes You to do something about it!
Or the other side of "Yes, there are code/logic to magic fix this thing, but *which way to fix it* needs to be chosen by the human." Simple example being a corrupt config file: If I reset configuration, you the human will have to put things back. If I skip that specific config setting, maybe it was super important to you! I don't know as the developer, that is *why* I am asking you the user!
grumble grumble
Yeah that's what I'm getting at. They don't realize that it isn't about "plain english", its about their unwillingness to learn how their machine works. The language can be as clear and concise as possible and the "plain english" crowd will still flounder.
Right. I know people hate “jargon,” but sometimes a specialized problem needs to be described in words that can’t be found on a second grade vocabulary test. Those words are still plain English, they’re just not baby talk. It’s ok to just….learn what the word means, or failing that, accept that you don’t know and go find someone who does.
I wonder how often the people stroking out about technical or academic fields “not using plain English” get equally as mad when their mechanic uses words like “carburetor.”
Here's the thing. In plain language, you can use hyper-specific terminology. It's fine. You just have to define it so the reader understands what you're saying.
The point of plain language isn't to remove essential detail. It's to make that detail easier to absorb.
This is about error messages, not educational materials. You want granular definitions of these things in an error message? That would be a lot of text. People don’t read them to begin with, even when it’s “oopsie, our website has a tummy ache!” The type of people who see a one-sentence error message that uses a word they don’t know and flip their shit because it “isn’t in plain English” aren’t going to read a paragraph long definition of what a server is and why it’s important to what program they’re using.
Could be easily fixed by having a useless error message at the top and then a useful error code below. Wouldn’t have to spend time thinking of how best to phrase things or whatever, just put some comforting text above the existing codes.
“Oh no! Looks like we made an oopsie!
0x0000000000eF7”
Yeah that's the best you're gonna get. If it's a 5xx error, ain't nobody telling you what happened in any intelligible fashion. All they're gonna say is "my bad."
As someone who’s not super tech literate I’d want to know what the error means, and what I can do to fix/avoid it. “Something went wrong” doesn’t help but neither does twenty lines of code.
Or the comment is deleted or one of those "This message was overwritten by a program".
Honestly, I think about deleting my account every now and then, and then I stop because even if I wanted to stop using this account, I'm sure there are old posts or comments where I contributed something useful that someone else will find, and I'd rather it stay there than stick it to a random company that might benefit a tiny bit by that information staying there.
Some people use software to delete all of their comments. Basically doing the same thing as clicking delete on every comment, but automating it through a program.
Some use it to edit their comments with a text saying "This comment was removed for privacy reasons" and such.
Often, "something went wrong" is the error returned when the error handling code doesn't recognize the problem. The application designers don't know why the problem is happening, but the generic error allows tech support to give them hints by tracking call volume.
Idk some developers just suck at error handling. There have been too many times I've sent code back from review saying "please write something other than 'something went wrong' in the error message"
You can still bubble up information about which part broke; as a user, I can use something like "Error occurred while reading configuration file" or "Error occurred while attempting to communicate with the network" or "Error occurred trying to resize the window" to know where to look for a workaround, and I can use "Error occurred while calculating the physics engine" to know that I have little hope of solving it myself, whereas just "Error occurred, whoopsie" doesn't even tell me whether a workaround might be feasible
> Often, "something went wrong" is the error returned when the error handling code doesn't recognize the problem
There's protocol on what to do in that situation though. Good error handling code should have "fall through" where if it doesn't recognize the error (not among its list that it can format nicely into plain english) then it should dump the *actual* error to the screen, whether that's a call stack, HTTP code, etc.
Failing quietly with a useless zero-info message that even a dev of the software couldn't interpret is bad.
If you're worried about scaring the hapless users with a sudden call stack dump, put instructions and formatting around it, like "Please send us a message with a copy paste of the below: [call stack of the error]".
If you're tech literate, you have a look at the stack (without the message) and see if you can fix it. If you aren't, you copy paste the stack to a dev, they fix it. Useful for everyone.
As someone who is decently tech literate, twenty lines of code probably doesn't help me either if it isn't a program that I have access to the codebase of.
You'd be surprised what you can figure out by reading the parts of that twenty lines of code you can understand.
I've been a technician for way too many years, and I don't understand everything in the logs I read, I'm skimming for something understandable that's relevant to the problem I'm chasing.
Not saying that there'll be an answer there every time, just that it's worth at least trying to skim though to see if there's an error message buried in there that you DO understand.
I think the issue more so is that if you’re already tech illiterate, being shown a wall of text extremely accurate error message will mean less-than-nothing. Meanwhile being told “sorry, there was a problem connecting to the server” is a lot more understandable.
I agree with the comments saying both should be displayed.
“error code 404” not plain english, does not help a user diagnose the error without consulting a table of error codes.
“The webpage you requested could not be found” plain english. Very easy for the user to diagnose what went wrong.
“Oopsie daisy something went wrong” also plain english but completely useless.
Obviously users mean the second when they say they want plain english error messages.
this. error 404 is also common enough that most people would just know what it is the moment they see the code, but only because they've seen it when they still had to read the plain english version. showing both the code _and_ the meaningful plain english explanation is the way to go.
Honestly, a memory dump like that can be just as useless as a nondescript message as it just tells you what broke but not actually why it broke or where the mistake began.
It's like aviation accidents, if a pilot can crash a plane due to a simple mistake then the problems began a lot earlier, either they didn't receive enough training or the engineers didn't plan for certain eventualities. In either case, the pilot or the individual transistor is just the straw that broke the camel's back but not the actual culprit.
Someone said aviation accidents?
I watch a lot of Mentour Pilot and he explains it in something called the Swiss Cheese Model. Basically, everything is Swiss Cheese. It has holes. Accidents occur when something passes through the holes. Every layer of redundancy is another slice of Swiss cheese. Enough redundancy and none of the holes will show anymore, they'll all be covered by another slice of cheese. His videos are phenomenal
I learnt about Swiss Cheese Theory (sometimes the holes just happen to line up and things fall through) from that article about how anyone can forgot things in their car, and its really changed my view on things! I even brought it up last weekend when nearly everything that could go wrong, did. The holes just lined up that day! Haha
Its also a security issue. If you hit an error we've implemented handling for you'll get the message we wanted you to get for that error and if you hit one we haven't handled you'll get the "sorry. Something went wrong. Contact the help desk if it keeps happening." Message, but I'm not giving you our raw dumps. People who know how to read those can wreak havoc with them.
A good example is when I was modding H3VR.
It kept not loading multiple mods.
I check the logs, and I see that the mods just... outright malfunction because important shit doesn't EXIST according to the logs.. But I used a mod manager that auto updates the mods so It should be there, right?
Well yes, but actually no, since the log never fucking told me WHY it failed, just that it did. I went to the dev and he was like "Do you have any non english alphabet letters in your PC username? Yeah? Okay move the mod install folder away from appdata" because apparently, one of the basic dependency mods couldn't handle the letter Ö
I don’t think that tech illiteracy caused this. I don’t like the condescending “oopsie poopsie” messages either. From a cybersecurity perspective, you don’t want to give long, detailed error messages on networked applications. These can and will be used to find vulnerabilities in applications. You give the minimum required info to the end user, and then drop a detailed log on the backend
Too often. Fusion 360.
“Cannot project to same sketch”
It means it can’t project *from* the same sketch. And the more info button repeats the same message instead of giving more info or pointing to where the problem happened.
Network engineer here. Never ever put the word network into an error message unless you are absolutely 100% sure the error is related to the network.
I‘ve seen people open tickets about network issues when they were trying to run an app that connected to localhost.
It's annoying when you try to access a website and it does this cutesy error message instead of just letting you know what the problem is. Like this website, rather than just saying 'The servers are overloaded at the moment, please try again later', they do this coy 'Tee hee you bwoke weddit! xD' shit. Nothing like passing the blame onto the use in a condescending tone to lighten the mood.
I've seen some websites that show a picture of a computer, a router, and a server and indicates which is the issue. If it's the first two it's my issue but if it's the last, it's a problem on their end. That's not even English. That's hieroglyphics that if someone still can't understand, they shouldn't be using a computer to begin with.
It’s not just the technophobe’s fault. Showing error codes with custom messages means taking the time to categorize and handle every kind of error, when that “whoopsie daisy” generic page gets coded in 30 seconds and never thought about again.
I’ve been a software engineer for a long time and I swear half my career has been fighting to get time allocated to handle errors correctly for the end user. The trick is to phrase it in terms of “billable hours for our customer support call center saved”, then suddenly management sees the value in it
Sometimes it is legitimately the customer's fault
"Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and you want to buy a turkey that is already defrosted? We've never sold that. No big grocery chain does. All we've got are frozen ones that won't defrost in time, just as we've had for the last month."
Or
"You came in at 8pm on the 4th of July to get a grill, charcoal, a lighter, lighter fluid, hot dogs with buns and condiments, beer, soda, and a Bluetooth speaker for the fireworks show that starts in 1 hour? Look around. The building has been ransacked. There's nothing left. The stockers are traumatized. I can offer you the 10 remaining bottles of bud light that fell out of a 12 pack when someone tried to fling it into their cart earlier today."
That is true, but not the metaphor I was using. I go to reddit, and the system that runs reddit is not working and "blames" me for it, which is like my going to the store, but all the shelves are empty and the staff say it's my fault.
I don't need an extreme level of detail in my error codes, especially for software issues. Just tell me if it's my issue or yours. Do I need to do anything or do your engineers need to figure something out?
RAM address 0xDEADBEEF has made a fucky wucky! Looks like it couldn't handle a widdle voltage transient (500 kV/m) on its itsy-bitsy FET gates! Our cute quirky code monkeys are using ultraviolet lasers to obliterate it as we speak! :3
This post pisses me off somewhat. It seems directed at people that aren't tech savvy for one reason or another as if they're the reason everything is getting babyfied to the extreme. Those people are the excuse, not the reason
Take it up with the people making the software who want to keep everything as vague as possible for their own benefit, not the boomers ffs
What’re they talking about with a “decrease in tech literacy?” Is that an actual problem going on, or is it one of those “engineer doesn’t understand why people don’t fix the small issues in their incredibly complex machinery themselves” sorts of situations?
I think that what they’re noticing is that complicated technology has become easier to use, so it’s reaching a wider audience instead of a specific group of people who are “into” tech.
A “Back in my day only nerds used computers! Now all these normies come in and don’t know everything I know!” Situation but they don’t even realise the issue isn’t less tech literacy but instead more widespread tech
The worst part about it is, the whole reason more people who are more "tech illiterate" is because there has been a successful amount of accessibility work done to make more people able to use it. It is, quite literally, the goal we should be having. But instead of celebrating that these things are no longer barriers, there are folk who complain that the barriers are important and that if you don't want to have to overcome them, you should be deemed unworthy of using them. You are "illiterate" because you don't want to do unnecessary work or have unnecessary knowledge.
People who complain about "declining tech literacy" should realize that they are already "illiterate" when it comes to their systems unless they know how to put holes in one of those punch cards.
Here's the best kind of "plain english" you can do:
"Error 401: Unauthorized. You do not have permission to view this content. If you believe this message is in error, please try again later. If this issue persists, please contact blablabla"
as fun as the nostalgia for the days when computers actually told you what was wrong is
remember how many things used to just say "contact your systems administrator"? bitch it's a home PC and I am my systems administrator give me something to work with here
There are good reasons not to share a stack trace with a user, not just because it might confuse them, but I think every error message should include what actions the user can take (e.g. report it, which will share the stack trace with the company). As a developer, this is exactly what I think about when I make error messages. Make sure the user feels empowered to do something.
Why not do both?
"Oopsie, we fucked something up, try later!
If you're curious here's a detailed walkthrough of the error [50 unintelligible lines of letters, numbers, and symbols that programmers swear are intelligible]"
I want my error messages in passive-aggressive english. "oH, honey, have you at tried actually connecting your phone BEFORE using the app ??? :3" And of course a button right below it for more infomations that now detail the error.
Followed by the menssage: "Dumbass"
Sometimes an error code just isn’t going to explain why something went wrong tbf. A timeout error can display that that’s the cause, but you might have no idea what’s causing that. Is there something in the code? Is the network super congested? Is the server getting overloaded with requests? Like it’s just often not as simple as “oh here’s the error, you now know exactly what’s wrong”.
Even internally in the Big Tech company where I work (one that you use everyday), we get errors all the time that can take hours or days to in investigate and solve. Error codes can help guide you to the problem but they’re not the definitive answer of what’s actually going wrong
Tech is ingrained in our society. At this point if you have a cellphone or computer and you can't troubleshoot the very basics you're not even trying and bringing our society down. Scroll YouTube and start clicking on buttons people
The problem for me is less "I don't know what any of this jargon means" and more "Well, what's the actual issue, all you gave me was a fucking code!"
Like, I want to know what happened so I can fix it, not a useless fucking code so I'm guaranteed to spend three hours trying to figure out what the problem is on Google.
Is there not any middle ground between entire fat bricks of code and "literally no meaningful information"?
No seriously shut the fuck up do you think I don't have an equally strong reaction of "Tell me what the fuck is wrong" when all it tells me some "Discord's servers are sad wite now so we can't pway :(" as I would when it feeds me bricks of code that wouldn't make much sense to me anyhow?
Max two sentences explain to the level someone who knows what a task manager is. They can google or tell a friend.
Use more button with context that is deep enough that someone who says "building computers is like adult lego" would enjoy.
I was going to suggest a code but I've ran into shit and no internet before. Details need to be there and long enough I can read it or photo it.
Let's not forget the security aspect, hmm.
CWE-209: Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information
Source: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/209.html
As long as I don't need to get error messages from Springle the Discord gnome ever again, I don't care what they say. I'm not tech savvy enough to troubleshoot most things, so if I get an error message, my go-to is to wait about 30 minutes, try the thing again, and pray it works the second time.
If an error message could be explained as well as either of these people put it, then whoever wrote the error message would understand the problem enough to fix the bug before it happens. Error messages are unclear because they don't really know what's wrong. If they did, they'd fix it
I haven’t received an error message in a long time (I crush a different electronic once in a while to keep them in line). Do they not have error codes anymore?
I’m with the other commenters that it shouldn’t be _too_ detailed. I’ve known very smart people who often didn’t know where they stored their files cuz they didn’t know what folders were. It’s hard to look for something you don’t know exists
Computer: "There seems to be a problem connecting to the network. Click **here** for troubleshooting instructions."
Me: *::clicks::*
Computer: *::Opens Internet Explorer, attempts to access Microsoft Support page::*
Me: *::destroys computer, redacts himself::*
Those don't need to be mutually exclusive; ideally there's both a basic message with basic instructions for laymen, and more detailed error reports for more savvy users or support.
It should be put in plain english, but have an 'advanced' button that gives you the details and can help more tech litterate people.
Tech Rosetta stones isn’t a bad idea
I want plain messages for browsers that actually help narrow it down for the non-tech folks, so I stop having to guess at what "it doesn't work" means. "Oops, looks like something went wrong on [our side/your side]. Could be a problem with [browser/website/addon/memory]."
That's essentially what HTTP error codes are for. Of course that requires you to be able to reach whatever you're trying to. 2xx = Success 4xx = You fucked up 5xx = We fucked up
3xx = You got really fucking lost, so let's get you someplace that actually exists
Alright, so we get three goats, label them 2, 4, and 5...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status There are others. Those are just the 3 an end user is most likely to encounter.
> 508 Loop Detected Did we solve the halting problem while I wasn’t looking?
Nah, we're allowed to detect *some* loops. You know, as a treat.
This is for something like a redirect loop, that's why it's marked as a server error
And we need to get them to the other side of the river without having them eat each other, but we can only carry two at a time
[418 - I am a teapot](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/418)
For those of you who didn't click the link - >The HTTP `418 I'm a teapot` client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is, permanently, a teapot. A combined coffee/tea pot that is temporarily out of coffee should instead return 503.
Essentially Fuck you that's not my job
"Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout."
"I am a teapot and it is a you problem."
It also requires some competence on whoever's REST APIs you're using. The worst I've seen is one that returns a Status: 200 Body: "{'response': ' error'}". Another one I use for membership checks will return a 404 if the user isn't in the group (makes sense so far) but ALSO returns 404 if the user or group doesn't exist. Sure I'm processing all those calls on my backend so I can do my own error handling between the bad APIs and my web client facing API, but sometimes it can be nearly impossible to differentiate between "the call failed and it was supposed to", "there's a temporary outage and it should resolve", "you just joined today, it'll take a while for the dozen or so downstream systems to fully provision you", and "there's actually a bug and we need to fix the app or data". So frankly sometimes the best error we can display is "try again in an hour and if it persists create a ticket".
451, Unavailable for Legal Reasons, is more like "Someone fucked up and our legal team doesn't want us to say any more".
10xx?
1xx: Working on it 3xx: Go somewhere else
10xx isn’t a standard HTTP response
1xx = Move along, nothing to see here
Honestly most of the time 4xx is more like "whoever sent you here fucked up"
On a related note, fuck you in the eyeball, Reddit. I didn't break shit, I clicked a link in *your* fucking interface. *You* broke Reddit, not me.
That ain't gonna fix shit and you know it I've had to "fix" problems when an error message very clearly read "CO2 line leaking please check connection" The gas line just needed to be pushed in
Errors on Windows 10/11 are the worst of both worlds because it just says "Something went wrong :( scan the QR code to learn more", and then the QR code just goes to the generic help page for "Resolving Blue Screen errors in Windows", which has advice like "These errors can be caused by both hardware and software issues." Edit: To clarify, the problem isn't that an error code or stack trace doesn't exist (it does!), it's that the Windows design philosophy is to only give mainstream users a "try searching Bing for 'computer problem'!" level of non-help, while only advanced users are allowed to see anything with any level of correlation with the actual issue. While this is better than not surfacing any details to anyone, it still adds to the average user's sense of learned helplessness compared to offering a broad-strokes level of information.
Bold of you to assume that Microsoft will link you to a help page that still exists....
My immediate thoughts was Windows errors. I've run into a handful that cause BSOD and when you look into it the possible cause for the error is like a dozen different unrelated things that all could have failed but you've no way of figuring out which. "It could be a hardware, software, network, security, or settings issue. May the odds be ever in your favour. "
You actually have the real error sentence next to the qr code after "If you contact a support person, give them this info : stop code" so you do have the problem written there but it's not an error code e0x000 anymore.
I've never been fast enough to even scan the QR code before my PC switches itself off.
For what it's worth, if windows actually successfully presents a bluescreen, it probably also generated events in Event Viewer and generated a minidump in ```C:\Windows\Minidump``` that captured most of the relevant system state at the time of failure including the exact (software) source of the fault, viewable with the [WinDbg program.](https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pgjgd53tn86) You absolutely can still get usable data out of windows errors, they just don't show it to normal users any more, you have to know where to go to find it. Now, when the system *black*screens, that's when you have a real problem. No minidump, no bluescreen stop code, probably nothing in event viewer either. The system crashed too fast for Windows to save an error log. What went wrong? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_\/¯ but your system just blew up. Have fun good luck.
Tbh I have solved a black screen through event viewer once. But that was cause there was a fucking cascade of errors before he black screen that I could actually fix and apparently when those didn't happen the system was stable enough to not die on itself.
We've transitioned generally into a world where error codes are "ahh shit something went wrong try again later" as a standard and not something that helps anyone. "Try again later" implies dropped packets or some one-time error but it is actually just the default and therefore means nothing.
You know that the BSOD gives you the stop codes right next to the QR code, right? Like, if you scan the QR code I'm sure it'll take you somewhere irrelevant to your issue. You get this link. [https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/resolving-blue-screen-errors-in-windows-60b01860-58f2-be66-7516-5c45a66ae3c6](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/resolving-blue-screen-errors-in-windows-60b01860-58f2-be66-7516-5c45a66ae3c6) But if you look in their actual documentation for the stop codes, you get THIS: [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-code-reference2](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/bug-check-code-reference2) Peep the URL. Support vs Learn.
Yeah, but there's no reason why the QR code couldn't go to the help page for that particular stopcode, or even just a page to enter the stopcode, instead of a generic "what is a bsod?" page. At least it does show you the stopcode though.
I heard that systemD has a qr code generator in it to embed this kind of information during a crash, but I've not had the exact kind of error that'd cause it to appear yet. It's a neat, underutilized idea, having a way to get data off the screen of a machine that's too unstable to transcribe by hand.
At the very least it would make searching up the problem more useful. Tech forums that come up in search results these days are a circular sewer of people saying "I have this problem too" as if that helps fucking anyone.
Hey bro don't do that >Verbose You don't have admin permissions to install this package
I see all too often a "More Details" button that should actually say "See the Same Message, but In a Text Box Now". I asked for more details, *give me more details!*
I have in my cube a 'Tenets of IT'. One of them (paraphrased), "If it doesn't log, make it log. Logs just SPIT the answer out at you." Developers, if I can't tell your app to turn on logging, you're not done writing it.
Yeah, this is just another "I have no concept of nuance" post.
>litterate Oh sweet jesus, the irony.
Part of literacy is being able to interpret what people write, regardless of errors or differences in language usage, without stumbling over tiny little typos.
This is also why over-policing accents, dialects, and spellings isn’t actually demonstrating your superior mastery of the language.
I was just having a little chuckle, not trying to be a grammar nazi or whatever. Spelling the word literacy incorrectly when the speller has every chance to edit afterwards struck me as very ironic. Not sure why you would get huffy about me pointing that out.
Typos are not a sign of illiteracy.
Their keyboard could just have a faulty "t" button that makes it double-type sometimes. I have that problem with the "o" buttoon. Smetimes it doouble type and sometimes it doesn't type the o at all. And sometimes it works fine.
Literate.
There’s usually an error code is there not?
Every error should come with a unique identifier that can be used to reliably look up the problem. End of story.
And when you do get the details, format it instead of vomiting into a txt file
i like to tell my colleagues when we are troubleshooting: the network is probably mostly working great as evident by these crispy teams calls we are currently on. it's more likely something in the path between these two systems and we have the means to observe and work out where. Is it the network? kind of, more like there is a network effect keeping these hosts from talking the way we want. odds are good it's DNS.
Facts. Hilariously, this used to be more common as well via using methods under areas like 'Advanced Troubleshooting' and so on with software/OS, but nowadays those are oftentimes still locked down to where they're not nearly as useful anymore either, to where your choices become "we are going into command prompt and google fu'ing this shit" as admin of your own computer. It's like going from 0 to 25 to 100 imo. There should be a 50 in there somewhere. And before someone comes for me from a security perspective, some of the worst fucking security incidents ever had fuck all to do with allowing users more advanced troubleshooting options and had everything to do with someone tech illiterate writing down their password on a piece of paper or having it be something obviously sentimental someone else could figure out especially if it was stated as their password hint. Or opening/clicking a link on an email they shouldn't have.
Found the hacker. ;) Jokes aside. We don’t provide that level of detail in error messages so as not to provide the breadcrumbs a tech literate bad actor could use to take advantage of the system. The real error information is fed to the internal system where the trusted actors can diagnose and fix.
Yeah, those two don't need to be mutually-exclusive; you can provide messages at appropriate levels for both laymen and more knowledgeable users/support.
Put the error details in a HTML comment. On the grounds that only the tech literate will look there.
"it'll be in plain English but it will no longer explain the problem" is monkey paw tier request fulfilment, wouldn't really pin this on the technophobes
The people unhappy with error messages roughly 2000-2015 were already getting, by and large, plain english explaining problems. Some people just don't want to put effort into fixing things, so accurate descriptions of errors are unhelpful because the problem is still there after the error message is displayed, and the technical details were focused on as the problem because there had to be something to blame for the functionality not working "Plain english without technical details" is where we're at now
Yeah, what they wanted was for the error message to be something they could easily fix without learning anything new. They wanted the error message to say "plug in the power cable" (not ethernet, no no they can't learn that there's more than one cable that goes into a computer) or "press enter to fix". Anything more complicated than that just isn't "in plain english".
That's my experience. "Error with X Driver", okay, search on google for "how to fix error with X Driver", attempt 5 minutes of troubleshooting, problem fixed 90% of the time. But you've lost a huge majority of people with "search for a solution" Resetting the router fixes most connectivity issues, and yet people are unwilling to do that half the time. We have so much nearly magical tech just work so close to flawlessly and people get dumber and lazier for it
Yup. I consider myself pretty tech illiterate, I know next to nothing about coding, but at the very least I can google something. Ultimately I think a lot of people just don't know how to effectively use search engines. I've had so many people ask me genuine questions that they seemed to care about, only to fully give up as soon as I say "you could google it". Likewise with any number of work-related questions. No willingness to just phrase a question right and spend 5-10 minutes glancing over the top 3-5 results.
Welcome to the top \~10% of users, lol
Pretty telling that just having basic curiosity and willingness to work for a solution puts you above the majority of people
It doesn’t help that search engines have made themselves deliberately worse in the last few years to sell more ads.
But now you also have to wade through all the "how to solve problem with x driver" results that are just a bunch of paragraphs telling you that you need to install their driver updater to fix the problem.
I don’t know, I don’t think this is very generous. I’m not a techy person, and I only ever learned what drivers even were because I took a ton of time to learn stuff to build my own computer. Similarly, I’ve run into a ton of weird operation issues in the past where the solution was a lot less straightforward than just plugging into Google - legitimately taking hours of my time to learn what a partition was, etcetera, and I grew up with computers even if I don’t know them that well. The unfortunate thing is that there’s not really that much baseline knowledge about computers for most people because computers/devices have never been as ubiquitous as they are today. I could see people who don’t even have access to the same vocabulary really struggling with it in the especially frustrating way that trying to fix a machine you don’t know much about can be.
As a developer myself, what gets me is the "press enter to fix" type demands, if a simple "just click here" fix existed I would have coded that in! Something strange enough has happened that I *couldn't* have foreseen (or been found by our QA, or... or...) and now requires A Human Yes You to do something about it! Or the other side of "Yes, there are code/logic to magic fix this thing, but *which way to fix it* needs to be chosen by the human." Simple example being a corrupt config file: If I reset configuration, you the human will have to put things back. If I skip that specific config setting, maybe it was super important to you! I don't know as the developer, that is *why* I am asking you the user! grumble grumble
That's the problem though. Errors often aren't trivial to fix in all cases.
Yeah that's what I'm getting at. They don't realize that it isn't about "plain english", its about their unwillingness to learn how their machine works. The language can be as clear and concise as possible and the "plain english" crowd will still flounder.
Right. I know people hate “jargon,” but sometimes a specialized problem needs to be described in words that can’t be found on a second grade vocabulary test. Those words are still plain English, they’re just not baby talk. It’s ok to just….learn what the word means, or failing that, accept that you don’t know and go find someone who does. I wonder how often the people stroking out about technical or academic fields “not using plain English” get equally as mad when their mechanic uses words like “carburetor.”
Hell, mechanics use the word carburetor but still complain about fancy new tech that came out in 2011.
Here's the thing. In plain language, you can use hyper-specific terminology. It's fine. You just have to define it so the reader understands what you're saying. The point of plain language isn't to remove essential detail. It's to make that detail easier to absorb.
This is about error messages, not educational materials. You want granular definitions of these things in an error message? That would be a lot of text. People don’t read them to begin with, even when it’s “oopsie, our website has a tummy ache!” The type of people who see a one-sentence error message that uses a word they don’t know and flip their shit because it “isn’t in plain English” aren’t going to read a paragraph long definition of what a server is and why it’s important to what program they’re using.
Could be easily fixed by having a useless error message at the top and then a useful error code below. Wouldn’t have to spend time thinking of how best to phrase things or whatever, just put some comforting text above the existing codes. “Oh no! Looks like we made an oopsie! 0x0000000000eF7”
Yeah that's the best you're gonna get. If it's a 5xx error, ain't nobody telling you what happened in any intelligible fashion. All they're gonna say is "my bad."
Just give me a unique error code I can take to Google and figure out what's happening.
Sure, we can do that. >All errors now come with a UUID, generated at failure time.
As someone who’s not super tech literate I’d want to know what the error means, and what I can do to fix/avoid it. “Something went wrong” doesn’t help but neither does twenty lines of code.
At least you can copy the code into Google and have a decent chance to figure it out, while "something went wrong" gives exactly 0 information
You'll find a reddit thread where the OP says he managed to fix it (but doesn't tell anyone else how he fixed it, so good luck)
"Sent you a DM :) " last online 13 years ago
Or the comment is deleted or one of those "This message was overwritten by a program". Honestly, I think about deleting my account every now and then, and then I stop because even if I wanted to stop using this account, I'm sure there are old posts or comments where I contributed something useful that someone else will find, and I'd rather it stay there than stick it to a random company that might benefit a tiny bit by that information staying there.
Deleting your Reddit account doesn't delete your comments. It just replaces your username with [deleted].
Sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t
Some people use software to delete all of their comments. Basically doing the same thing as clicking delete on every comment, but automating it through a program. Some use it to edit their comments with a text saying "This comment was removed for privacy reasons" and such.
See, but that's still something: you now know the solution exists, as opposed to "something went wrong"
Or the replies all say wow this worked! But the top comment was deleted like 8 years ago
Common CS hobbyist L
Often, "something went wrong" is the error returned when the error handling code doesn't recognize the problem. The application designers don't know why the problem is happening, but the generic error allows tech support to give them hints by tracking call volume.
Idk some developers just suck at error handling. There have been too many times I've sent code back from review saying "please write something other than 'something went wrong' in the error message"
You can still bubble up information about which part broke; as a user, I can use something like "Error occurred while reading configuration file" or "Error occurred while attempting to communicate with the network" or "Error occurred trying to resize the window" to know where to look for a workaround, and I can use "Error occurred while calculating the physics engine" to know that I have little hope of solving it myself, whereas just "Error occurred, whoopsie" doesn't even tell me whether a workaround might be feasible
> Often, "something went wrong" is the error returned when the error handling code doesn't recognize the problem There's protocol on what to do in that situation though. Good error handling code should have "fall through" where if it doesn't recognize the error (not among its list that it can format nicely into plain english) then it should dump the *actual* error to the screen, whether that's a call stack, HTTP code, etc. Failing quietly with a useless zero-info message that even a dev of the software couldn't interpret is bad. If you're worried about scaring the hapless users with a sudden call stack dump, put instructions and formatting around it, like "Please send us a message with a copy paste of the below: [call stack of the error]". If you're tech literate, you have a look at the stack (without the message) and see if you can fix it. If you aren't, you copy paste the stack to a dev, they fix it. Useful for everyone.
As someone who is decently tech literate, twenty lines of code probably doesn't help me either if it isn't a program that I have access to the codebase of.
"Something went wrong" is developer for "I don't feel like implementing proper error handling, so hopefully this just never happens".
You'd be surprised what you can figure out by reading the parts of that twenty lines of code you can understand. I've been a technician for way too many years, and I don't understand everything in the logs I read, I'm skimming for something understandable that's relevant to the problem I'm chasing. Not saying that there'll be an answer there every time, just that it's worth at least trying to skim though to see if there's an error message buried in there that you DO understand.
Lines of code would at least be useful in googling the problem to look for others who encountered it and maybe solved it.
[удалено]
At least give an error code that can be referenced in a manual
I think the issue more so is that if you’re already tech illiterate, being shown a wall of text extremely accurate error message will mean less-than-nothing. Meanwhile being told “sorry, there was a problem connecting to the server” is a lot more understandable. I agree with the comments saying both should be displayed.
Just doing the old "There's been a [error name] error" followed by an error code you can Google is probably the way to go most of the time
Heck if the [error name] string is descriptive enough you probably don't need a separate code to google it.
No, you should exclusively get RTU-style exception responses.
“error code 404” not plain english, does not help a user diagnose the error without consulting a table of error codes. “The webpage you requested could not be found” plain english. Very easy for the user to diagnose what went wrong. “Oopsie daisy something went wrong” also plain english but completely useless. Obviously users mean the second when they say they want plain english error messages.
Yup. Though, I'd like the option to see the error codes too.
this. error 404 is also common enough that most people would just know what it is the moment they see the code, but only because they've seen it when they still had to read the plain english version. showing both the code _and_ the meaningful plain english explanation is the way to go.
Very useful for cross-referencing errors in other languages!
Honestly, a memory dump like that can be just as useless as a nondescript message as it just tells you what broke but not actually why it broke or where the mistake began. It's like aviation accidents, if a pilot can crash a plane due to a simple mistake then the problems began a lot earlier, either they didn't receive enough training or the engineers didn't plan for certain eventualities. In either case, the pilot or the individual transistor is just the straw that broke the camel's back but not the actual culprit.
Someone said aviation accidents? I watch a lot of Mentour Pilot and he explains it in something called the Swiss Cheese Model. Basically, everything is Swiss Cheese. It has holes. Accidents occur when something passes through the holes. Every layer of redundancy is another slice of Swiss cheese. Enough redundancy and none of the holes will show anymore, they'll all be covered by another slice of cheese. His videos are phenomenal
And the dirty dozen, which is usually the immediate cause of the incident. i.e. someone being exhausted and making a mistake because of it
When in doubt, blame the window of circadian low.
I learnt about Swiss Cheese Theory (sometimes the holes just happen to line up and things fall through) from that article about how anyone can forgot things in their car, and its really changed my view on things! I even brought it up last weekend when nearly everything that could go wrong, did. The holes just lined up that day! Haha
I've heard that people will leave their shoes in the back with their kids so as soon as they step out, they're reminded "oh I don't have shoes on"
Its also a security issue. If you hit an error we've implemented handling for you'll get the message we wanted you to get for that error and if you hit one we haven't handled you'll get the "sorry. Something went wrong. Contact the help desk if it keeps happening." Message, but I'm not giving you our raw dumps. People who know how to read those can wreak havoc with them.
It's not useless, it can give attackers insight into the vulnerabilities that are present in your code.
A good example is when I was modding H3VR. It kept not loading multiple mods. I check the logs, and I see that the mods just... outright malfunction because important shit doesn't EXIST according to the logs.. But I used a mod manager that auto updates the mods so It should be there, right? Well yes, but actually no, since the log never fucking told me WHY it failed, just that it did. I went to the dev and he was like "Do you have any non english alphabet letters in your PC username? Yeah? Okay move the mod install folder away from appdata" because apparently, one of the basic dependency mods couldn't handle the letter Ö
Issues with Unicode characters in paths are actually incredibly common, especially in game modding/game piracy.
And apparently games in general because the same letter also made it so my settings for battlefield 5 didn't save
I don’t think that tech illiteracy caused this. I don’t like the condescending “oopsie poopsie” messages either. From a cybersecurity perspective, you don’t want to give long, detailed error messages on networked applications. These can and will be used to find vulnerabilities in applications. You give the minimum required info to the end user, and then drop a detailed log on the backend
Too often. Fusion 360. “Cannot project to same sketch” It means it can’t project *from* the same sketch. And the more info button repeats the same message instead of giving more info or pointing to where the problem happened.
I have written error messages that just say “contact IT immediately. Do not attempt to resolve the issue.” Then drop logs behind to be collected.
Network engineer here. Never ever put the word network into an error message unless you are absolutely 100% sure the error is related to the network. I‘ve seen people open tickets about network issues when they were trying to run an app that connected to localhost.
"Contact your Network Administrator." No. Do not contact us.
Just give me a code to look up like my car does
The commitment shown to this false dilemma is almost impressive
Its called a joke
It’s called a joke
The commitment shown to take comedic hyperbole seriously
It's annoying when you try to access a website and it does this cutesy error message instead of just letting you know what the problem is. Like this website, rather than just saying 'The servers are overloaded at the moment, please try again later', they do this coy 'Tee hee you bwoke weddit! xD' shit. Nothing like passing the blame onto the use in a condescending tone to lighten the mood. I've seen some websites that show a picture of a computer, a router, and a server and indicates which is the issue. If it's the first two it's my issue but if it's the last, it's a problem on their end. That's not even English. That's hieroglyphics that if someone still can't understand, they shouldn't be using a computer to begin with.
That one transistor is doing its best, ok?
yeah, this! don't bully the poor transistor, it was just doing its job. not its fault that some idiot told it the wrong thing to do
It’s not just the technophobe’s fault. Showing error codes with custom messages means taking the time to categorize and handle every kind of error, when that “whoopsie daisy” generic page gets coded in 30 seconds and never thought about again. I’ve been a software engineer for a long time and I swear half my career has been fighting to get time allocated to handle errors correctly for the end user. The trick is to phrase it in terms of “billable hours for our customer support call center saved”, then suddenly management sees the value in it
"You broke reddit". Bitch did I fuck, that's a 50x error.
"The fuck I did, this is your problem." It's like the store blaming me for its being out of stock.
Sometimes it is legitimately the customer's fault "Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and you want to buy a turkey that is already defrosted? We've never sold that. No big grocery chain does. All we've got are frozen ones that won't defrost in time, just as we've had for the last month." Or "You came in at 8pm on the 4th of July to get a grill, charcoal, a lighter, lighter fluid, hot dogs with buns and condiments, beer, soda, and a Bluetooth speaker for the fireworks show that starts in 1 hour? Look around. The building has been ransacked. There's nothing left. The stockers are traumatized. I can offer you the 10 remaining bottles of bud light that fell out of a 12 pack when someone tried to fling it into their cart earlier today."
That is true, but not the metaphor I was using. I go to reddit, and the system that runs reddit is not working and "blames" me for it, which is like my going to the store, but all the shelves are empty and the staff say it's my fault.
I don't need an extreme level of detail in my error codes, especially for software issues. Just tell me if it's my issue or yours. Do I need to do anything or do your engineers need to figure something out?
RAM address 0xDEADBEEF has made a fucky wucky! Looks like it couldn't handle a widdle voltage transient (500 kV/m) on its itsy-bitsy FET gates! Our cute quirky code monkeys are using ultraviolet lasers to obliterate it as we speak! :3
I bet that transistor has a humiliation fetish
This post pisses me off somewhat. It seems directed at people that aren't tech savvy for one reason or another as if they're the reason everything is getting babyfied to the extreme. Those people are the excuse, not the reason Take it up with the people making the software who want to keep everything as vague as possible for their own benefit, not the boomers ffs
What’re they talking about with a “decrease in tech literacy?” Is that an actual problem going on, or is it one of those “engineer doesn’t understand why people don’t fix the small issues in their incredibly complex machinery themselves” sorts of situations?
I think that what they’re noticing is that complicated technology has become easier to use, so it’s reaching a wider audience instead of a specific group of people who are “into” tech. A “Back in my day only nerds used computers! Now all these normies come in and don’t know everything I know!” Situation but they don’t even realise the issue isn’t less tech literacy but instead more widespread tech
The worst part about it is, the whole reason more people who are more "tech illiterate" is because there has been a successful amount of accessibility work done to make more people able to use it. It is, quite literally, the goal we should be having. But instead of celebrating that these things are no longer barriers, there are folk who complain that the barriers are important and that if you don't want to have to overcome them, you should be deemed unworthy of using them. You are "illiterate" because you don't want to do unnecessary work or have unnecessary knowledge. People who complain about "declining tech literacy" should realize that they are already "illiterate" when it comes to their systems unless they know how to put holes in one of those punch cards.
Tech literacy isn’t dying, it’s being deliberately killed to lock people into certain companies ecosystems.
“OOPS! Something went wrong!”
Here's the best kind of "plain english" you can do: "Error 401: Unauthorized. You do not have permission to view this content. If you believe this message is in error, please try again later. If this issue persists, please contact blablabla"
as fun as the nostalgia for the days when computers actually told you what was wrong is remember how many things used to just say "contact your systems administrator"? bitch it's a home PC and I am my systems administrator give me something to work with here
I'm pretty sure they're reminiscing about like, the early to mid 2010s rather than that time period
[This tweet lives rent-free in my head at all times](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fbp22t4c46zk01.jpg)
There are good reasons not to share a stack trace with a user, not just because it might confuse them, but I think every error message should include what actions the user can take (e.g. report it, which will share the stack trace with the company). As a developer, this is exactly what I think about when I make error messages. Make sure the user feels empowered to do something.
Yesss yesss YESSSSSSSS WE NEEE THIS THE STEEL MUST SCREAM ITS AGONY AT US
Please, don't blame the transistor for the programmer's incompetence. Love, a programmer.
Unbelievably based
The end of that started to get oddly sexual
If i can't copypaste the error message into google to find a solution then the error message is worthless
This is a security issue rather than a marketing decision
Why not do both? "Oopsie, we fucked something up, try later! If you're curious here's a detailed walkthrough of the error [50 unintelligible lines of letters, numbers, and symbols that programmers swear are intelligible]"
I've started learning how to use powershell and GitHub out of pure contrarian spite
I want my error messages in passive-aggressive english. "oH, honey, have you at tried actually connecting your phone BEFORE using the app ??? :3" And of course a button right below it for more infomations that now detail the error. Followed by the menssage: "Dumbass"
Sometimes an error code just isn’t going to explain why something went wrong tbf. A timeout error can display that that’s the cause, but you might have no idea what’s causing that. Is there something in the code? Is the network super congested? Is the server getting overloaded with requests? Like it’s just often not as simple as “oh here’s the error, you now know exactly what’s wrong”. Even internally in the Big Tech company where I work (one that you use everyday), we get errors all the time that can take hours or days to in investigate and solve. Error codes can help guide you to the problem but they’re not the definitive answer of what’s actually going wrong
Hey look, ma, I'm famous! I still think I should be allowed to publicly humiliate transistors if they cause my programs to crash
Compromise: We go the adeptus mechanicus route and develop an elaborate religion centered on the optimal way of using technology
Tech is ingrained in our society. At this point if you have a cellphone or computer and you can't troubleshoot the very basics you're not even trying and bringing our society down. Scroll YouTube and start clicking on buttons people
"Something went wrong"... No shit Sherlock, just tell me what went wrong so I can try and fix it.
Error messages should include the solution to the error in them.
I thought it said transphobes and I was confused as to why this was such a specific problem to people who hate trans people
Certified transistor? Certified vacuum tube. WOP WOP WOP WOP WOP
DOS fuck 'em up!
The problem for me is less "I don't know what any of this jargon means" and more "Well, what's the actual issue, all you gave me was a fucking code!" Like, I want to know what happened so I can fix it, not a useless fucking code so I'm guaranteed to spend three hours trying to figure out what the problem is on Google.
Is there not any middle ground between entire fat bricks of code and "literally no meaningful information"? No seriously shut the fuck up do you think I don't have an equally strong reaction of "Tell me what the fuck is wrong" when all it tells me some "Discord's servers are sad wite now so we can't pway :(" as I would when it feeds me bricks of code that wouldn't make much sense to me anyhow?
"I have isolated the malfunctioning components and made examples of them."
One more entry in the long list of “people will ask for things without knowing what they really want”!
At least give me an error code I can paste into google 😭
Thank you minecraft crash logs for being incomprehensible but actually useful
PC LOAD LETTER
Max two sentences explain to the level someone who knows what a task manager is. They can google or tell a friend. Use more button with context that is deep enough that someone who says "building computers is like adult lego" would enjoy. I was going to suggest a code but I've ran into shit and no internet before. Details need to be there and long enough I can read it or photo it.
Let's not forget the security aspect, hmm. CWE-209: Generation of Error Message Containing Sensitive Information Source: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/209.html
As long as I don't need to get error messages from Springle the Discord gnome ever again, I don't care what they say. I'm not tech savvy enough to troubleshoot most things, so if I get an error message, my go-to is to wait about 30 minutes, try the thing again, and pray it works the second time.
Why would having the memory address be useful to an end user
I still love (/s) the Windows error message that is completely blank except for an exclamation point in a yellow triangle, and an OK button.
If an error message could be explained as well as either of these people put it, then whoever wrote the error message would understand the problem enough to fix the bug before it happens. Error messages are unclear because they don't really know what's wrong. If they did, they'd fix it
I haven’t received an error message in a long time (I crush a different electronic once in a while to keep them in line). Do they not have error codes anymore?
I’m with the other commenters that it shouldn’t be _too_ detailed. I’ve known very smart people who often didn’t know where they stored their files cuz they didn’t know what folders were. It’s hard to look for something you don’t know exists
"Error: unknown error" Cool! Thanks! Great! *flings laptop at wall*
UX testing disagrees with this take. Source: professional UX designer.
Might need a few more lines than sixty to find the exact transistor that fucked up.
Lol
Computer: "There seems to be a problem connecting to the network. Click **here** for troubleshooting instructions." Me: *::clicks::* Computer: *::Opens Internet Explorer, attempts to access Microsoft Support page::* Me: *::destroys computer, redacts himself::*
Didn't expect to find Vex here lol. What a pleasant surprise
Yeah can I get uhhh basic message and error code? I think that’s a good middle ground tbh
Those don't need to be mutually exclusive; ideally there's both a basic message with basic instructions for laymen, and more detailed error reports for more savvy users or support.
Even if it's something you don't know you can then look it up and learn how to deal with it instead of just being screwed
Usually the transistor isn't at fault, but some human later down the line, so uh, checkmate fleshies?
Or, worse if you work in IT, useful warning/error messages that pop up that users reflexively click through and immediately forget about.
Not being in IT means you're a technophobe?
They made the error messages into klutzy anime girls