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?

  • cattywampas@lemm.ee
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    17 hours ago

    Because 99% of the time these errors are caused by something on their end that the user is unable to fix, even on the off chance that they understand the problem in the first place. So there isn’t any need to give you more information than “something went wrong, please wait a minute and/or try again”.

    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOP
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      17 hours ago

      OK but then inherent in what you’re saying is also the message, “… and don’t contact us about this, because we don’t want to deal with it” which is also mildly infuriating to me.

      • Thaurin@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        Iit’s an internal error that is not handled properly. They don’t want to tell you the exact error message and detailed information around that, because it would expose the internal state of the backend and that would be a security issue. There is really nothing more that they can tell you, except that a developer needs to look at this (and possibly thousands to tens or hundreds of thousands of similar logged errors) and they probably already are.

        • perishthethought@lemm.eeOP
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          16 hours ago

          Maybe then, the message could be, “An internal error has occurred and we’re going to work on fixing it but there’s nothing you can do to fix it yourself right now”. It’s the “Oops” that fries my grits.

          • AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
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            14 hours ago

            If you’re tech-savvy enough to want detailed error messages, you should also be tech-savvy enough to understand the implied message you just typed out. The ‘Oops’ isn’t for you, it’s for the average user.

          • cattywampas@lemm.ee
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            15 hours ago

            I do agree, the whole “oops sowwy” with a sad Labrador vibe is a little irritating. But I guess they do it cause it’s a harmless and layman-friendly response.

        • Forester@pawb.social
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          15 hours ago

          LMFAO. I probably have to truncate at least five error log files a week on various vps servers at my company because they fill the SSD and crash the OS. We rent servers we don’t dev them for our cx.

          Largest error file I’ve seen so far is 32 GB

          Site owners are normally clueless. Site developers normally can’t give a single fuck and systems administrators like me. Get to pick up the pieces and tell them to tell their Deb to fix it and then we pick it up again and tell them to tell their Dev to fix it let me know when you sense a pattern

          • cattywampas@lemm.ee
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            16 hours ago

            What I’m saying is that when you see one of these messages you should interpret it as “something is wrong on our end, nothing you can or need to do on your end, please hang tight as we’re aware of the issue and working on it”. They don’t give you more info than that because that average person is probably not a dev and doesn’t have any need for more details than that.

            • DaGeek247@fedia.io
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              16 hours ago

              You’re giving an incredibly large allowance for companies that have continuously calculated exactly how much they can fuck over their customers for more money before we decide to use some other product.

      • Of course if their servers and whatnot are shit they won’t straight up tell you they are shit.

        It’s why modern multiplayer games don’t even show everyone’s latency anymore. It would let players know imperically that their servers are shit.

    • VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      15 hours ago

      In theory, maybe. In practice, I’ve had a lot of errors in that vein that very much wouldn’t go away, and where made much harder to diagnose by their obtuseness.

      Honestly, I even dislike the mindset. Just make a big header with the generic error message and a little one below that gives some details. Having users interested in how your software works is not a bad thing.

    • bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
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      16 hours ago

      I give my users instructions on how to report an error if they seek assistance. It’s regularly ignored. Instead we get the ubiquitous “Something bad happened … somewhere. HALP!”