4mo ago

Oops, something went wrong!

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.

103 comments

Because 99% of the time these errors are caused by something on their end that the user is unable to fix, even on the off chance that they understand the problem in the first place. So there isn't any need to give you more information than "something went wrong, please wait a minute and/or try again".
- OK but then inherent in what you're saying is also the message, "... and don't contact us about this, because we don't want to deal with it" which is also mildly infuriating to me.
  
  Iit’s an internal error that is not handled properly. They don’t want to tell you the exact error message and detailed information around that, because it would expose the internal state of the backend and that would be a security issue. There is really nothing more that they can tell you, except that a developer needs to look at this (and possibly thousands to tens or hundreds of thousands of similar logged errors) and they probably already are.
  
  You're assuming they aren't already aware of the issue.
  
  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.
  
  The “we don’t want to deal with it” part is something you’re attributing to them with no evidence. As a former SRE, I can guarantee you they are dealing with it.
- In theory, maybe. In practice, I've had a lot of errors in that vein that very much wouldn't go away, and where made much harder to diagnose by their obtuseness.
  Honestly, I even dislike the mindset. Just make a big header with the generic error message and a little one below that gives some details. Having users interested in how your software works is not a bad thing.
- I give my users instructions on how to report an error if they seek assistance. It’s regularly ignored. Instead we get the ubiquitous “Something bad happened … somewhere. HALP!”
  
  "I got an error"
  "What did it say?"
  "I don't know, just something went wrong"
  "👍"
- Blanket "99%" statements are unfounded. I have had countless issues I was able to fix through error messages and some without.
  Source your claim.
  
  I can’t speak for the other user’s claim, but I’ve worked at Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and have written plenty of error messages. When I write a message like these, it’s specifically because the user can’t do anything about it. I’ll log the error to our internal error tracking systems with actual information about it, then give the user a generic message.
  If it’s something the user did wrong, and they can fix it, I’ll absolutely give them a message saying that. Usually I won’t even let a user submit a bad request, but sometimes users will bypass frontend restrictions to submit it, so the server always needs to validate it again anyway. The fact that plenty of users won’t even read the message I write is kind of annoying, but at least the users who do read it will know how to fix it.
  I’ve tried sending detailed error messages before, and that invariably results in users submitting support tickets and forum posts for things that aren’t helpful. You learn pretty quickly what kind of messages are helpful and what kind aren’t.
Error messages are a common way for hackers to gain information about a system. Useless error messages are recommended for security.
If you enter your username as Robert''); DROP TABLE Students;-- giving the error "Oops, something went wrong" is better than "NoSuchTable: 'Students' Table doesn't exist in the database" because now the hacker knows you're using a database that interprets SQL commands and inputs aren't being sanitized.
Hacking programs like Burp Suite have functions that spam sites with all kinds of garbage data and uses error messages and delays in response times to highlight potential vulnerabilities.
- This comment belongs on masterhacker
- Yeah but most of these errors don't even give out a uuid that could be used to relate the error to logs to be resolved by someone.
  Not that that someone exists anyway. Let's face it the entire industry is a massive joke and a pile of shit and with AI coming fast and hard soon you won't even get the privilege of venting to a call center person about it.
  You'll vent to some made-up chatbot named veeblezorp and he will give you an impromptu therapy session about the state of the world. Your computer/tablet/phone/app still won't work properly and veeblezorp will try to get you through the stages of grief about that.
  Just unplug it and don't plug it back in again. Go for a walk. Play with the dog. Hug your children. Stop buying crap online that scales up infinitely to take new customers (and their dollars) but is forever stuck at the sub-garage startup level when it comes to support.
- Security through obscurity is still wack tho
- Same logic as "keep it closed source for security".
- Even if you don't buy into this logic, you still have to do it in quite a few places because the security auditors have a line in their checklist about being able to extract any internal information from error pages
- So in short it's used to mask the developers errors?
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.
Edit after reading your edit:
I still don’t see why you want more information here. Those kinds of errors are almost always server side errors, and reporting more detailed information won’t help you.
You asked “why should I try again?” Answering this would almost always be unhelpful to the vast majority of users. “Try again later, because one of our cache layer hosts was down, and by the time you try again, it’ll have been taken out of the load balancer rotation, so you likely won’t hit that host on your next try.”
It would also cause more confusion with a non-insignificant portion of your users. Users start to misunderstand copy when sentences start to exceed eight words. “Something went wrong. Try again later.” That’s understandable by 100% of people according to that study.
Even saying “there’s nothing you can do about it” will probably be taken negatively by a certain portion of users. Not saying it’s incorrect, just that when you write an error message (or any microcopy for that matter), you should avoid sounding negative to the user. “Something went wrong. Try again later” conveys all the information the user needs in a way that won’t be misinterpreted.
- 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.
  
  I agree with Nouveau_Brunswick here.
  And to add: to @hperrin@lemmy.ca , 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?
  
  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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- That's Windows' training bearing fruit.
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.
- 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.
- 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 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"
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??
- Same for Windows hello. "Sorry something went wrong"
  What went wrong, so I can fix it??? It needs a reboot? Restart the camera on device manager?? My face is not clear??? I need to update drivers?? Just logout???
  Client side software must always give clear indications about what's the error. Write in tiny 6 points grey text on a white background but give hints about the solution, don't play a game , thanks
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.
Most common place I see those is when the site doesn't want to talk to a known VPN endpoint. Like another mentioned site owners don't want to given any more info to what they perceive as a possible threat than needed, so they just give a generic failure page.
Reminds me of the old "Oopsie woopsie we made a fucky wucky!!" post
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie
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.
- Ridiculous take. I have debugged countless issues. Those that spit detailed error messages are typically far easier to debug than those that don't.
  For example, returning nothing but exit code 1 to indicate failure. This gives zero information about the reason behind the failure, and only could be acceptable if your program is so simple as to only have very few failure modes.
  I have solved issues by cloning the source code and reading it to understand the issue.
  Don't relegate everyone to the same fate as those so utterly ignorant they can't look up an error code.
  As for the bugs you can't fix? Why do you think Cloudflare tells you when its the website having an issue, and not your browser or them? Knowing the issue isn't something you can change, avoids spending time trying to fix an issue that you have no control over.
  People who can will write up a bug report anyway
  And report what exactly? Your program gives zero information has to why it failed? Now you have dropped the responsibility of figuring that out from the code, which tends to know far more about its failure state, to someone observing from afar. Its inefficient and ridiculous.
  I disagree with you across the board.
Let's talk about the growing number of websites that won't work with a vpn. Even a local government website won't work.
Ringtone for when work calls/texts:
https://youtu.be/t3otBjVZzT0
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.
This is the only error message I need
https://youtu.be/fFtc8zeI6F8
- Ok, I'll replace my error pages with a redirect to that
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
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oopsie-woopsie
Verbose errors were nice
If it doesn't tell you what error it is, isn't an error message, it's just a message that says that something went wrong. Even a calculator has proper error messages that show you actual information about what is wrong
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.”
- "Majority of software" source your claim.
  If you use your computer as a bootloader for Google chrome, maybe. Local software and SASS both benefit from error messages because you cannot assume every error you can do nothing about.
  An error about parsing my password and a stack trace? I can possibly deduce to limit the length, remove special characters, or add special characters and try again.
  "Something went wrong." is lazy and nontransparent.
  
  Just 25 years experience developing websites and apps. Websites are thin clients. Every line of JS that executes in your browser is generated by more server side code, and that’s not even to speak of the middle tier and back end. So yeah. A majority of software is not on the client. Unless you’re doing it incredibly wrong.
  EDIT: oh wait, are you counting the Windows OS, etc? I’m counting code controlled by YouTube which they would even be able to detect an error for.
- 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.
- Do show a big scary error message. I would like to understand what is going on.
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".

103 comments