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aniforprez

Reminds me of the quintessential tweet about error messages

https://twitter.com/cherrikissu/status/972524442600558594?s=...

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Right up there with Slack etcs fake loading messages

"Gearing up the dildonator"

"Implicating the fairies"

"Hogtying George Bush"

Dude - just give me a spinner or a progress bar, and if something errors during the load out give me some sort of stack trace or error ID I can use to help

The one I especially hated: "You look nice today"

1. "Nice" is an adjective with nearly zero meaning. 2. Either you have access to my camera outside of calls and are analysing my appearance (WTF) or you're making stuff up. 3. You're making chat software. Stop trying to butter me up.

Nice reply, you’re on fire today!

No, really, you should find a fire extinguisher.

You sound British.

ProductBoard likes to tell me:

> Without good products, life would be a mistake.

> Make products that matter.

> Product excellence isn't a point in time. It is a state of mind, it is a way of life.

> So many feature requests, so little time.

Maybe they're being silly? I hope so. But I've also met product managers and designers who seem to think like that. It makes me internally sigh every time I have to use their product.

They should at least be reticulating splines.

For purely cosmetic marketing sites I tend to enjoy it

What's the first instance of joke progress messages? Is it "reticulating splines" from SimCity 2000 (1993)? Difficulty: must be presented to the user as if it were an actual status message during some process that might have real status messages, not as something explicitly fictional—despite occurring in a game, that message in SC2K qualifies.

Ah interesting, I was going to ask the same but thought it was from /earliest I knew of was The Sims (2000).

(Actually I only now learn that they're related in series - always thought they were competitors.)

Once I was at /r/androidapps and someone made a new app, asked for feedback, and «experienced devs» told OP something like «instead of „fetching data“ you should be using „getting everything ready“ because it might scare users to think that app is collecting their data».

Are people really that dumb? I'm afraid to use apps made by those people.

We have to remember the median phone user isn't usually tech savvy. Is an average Joe or Stacy who use that device with communicate with friends and family, use Facebook, watch Netflix, and buy from Amazon, and that isn't something bad. Just we have in mind that most people doesn't know tech-related terms and can confuse them.

Maybe if we want to be a bit funnier we will write "changing the break pads" in the loading screen, but in case of error we have to write something clearer, like "error accessing to the game server" or "error reading cars data files", to being able to solve the problem.

Well discord has fake loading messages too, and I think they're funny. Though it's a bit different since discord is not aimed at professionnals, the geeky jokes match better with the gamer audience

With a small group of Corporate Memphis people frowning or looking bewildered.

Give me “Unspecified error” any day over that.

One of the reasonable reasons why errors often get returned generically is because of security though.

Exactly usually the real error message behind the “oopsie” is a stack trace containing sensitive information and environment variables.

It is no use to the user since they can’t do anything and is actually dangerous to give out.

aws exceptionally performs well in this question: in some IAM-related (permission management) API error messages contains encrypted details so it does not leak sensitive data but the support can decrypt an analyze it if the user pastes it back.

An alternative is just showing the request ID so support can look up the error in logging

I don't mean to sound frustrated, because this is a volunteer open-source project, not VC-backed corporate software, but whenever the Emacs package flycheck reports an error message, I find the fact that it says (paraphrased) "Please include these details when filing your error report. Thanks!" to be a bit condescending.

It's just something about being thanked in advance for an action I did not intend to do that irks me. It implies to me that the reward for doing it has been given to me without my consent, and now I'm obligated to follow up on my part to prove I deserve it. It ultimately makes me less likely to file a bug report, stemming from this unease.

It's a really minor thing, and definitely not worth getting angry over, but for some reason I always remember it whenever a discussion about out-of-touch error messages happens.

Relatedly when I opened that link I got "something went wrong. Try reloading" when I opened that. I happen to know that's usually rate limiting with twitter (since Firefox is suspicious, maybe?) so reloading is exactly the wrong thing to do, but switching between the mobile and desktop sites seems to work (maybe they have different quotas?).

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