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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with any points but they missed a big one. If at all possible, include some application (or attempt at a globally) unique error code on each of your errors - i.e. YCOM-HN-9021. When you provide a clearly googleable string you can help your users independently resolve the issue and you can also set up google alerts on the string - if you roll out a new feature that took 3 months to develop and a week later google tells you that YCOM-HN-9021 is up 9000% you probably broke something. If at all possible make yourself open to client communication but most users won't reach out about an error - users have very low trust in customer care in the modern world (and it is, honestly, often more trouble than it's worth) and are more likely to turn to reddit/technical forums for a solution. It is extremely advantageous to try and track these users.

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If you do this, please make it alphanumeric, like the above comment's example and make sure your prefix is unique. Modern search engines, especially Google, are very bad at finding literal strings if searched without quotes (many users don't know to do that) and have all sorts of gotchas that make finding errors near impossible.

Some bad examples (both from Microsoft): - "Code -4" (putting a minus in front of a word makes Google exclude that word from results), - "0x00071153" (search engines love to omit the 0x and give you a bunch of phone numbers instead)

This one helped me recently to access my UPS MyChoice account. Got an error message on login attempt, but really didn't give enough of a darn to waste my time calling their support (as was recommended in the message). Reddit was full of reports with a tip that it was related to forced password reset where the old password doesn't meet new complexity requirements, and I was able to download the mobile app and reset my password.

UPS owes that reddit user a beer for helping out at least 30 people (by up votes) at zero cost to themselves.

IBM has done this for decades. For many products, especially on the mainframe, every message has a unique identifier, typically with a prefix for the module or subsystem that generated it, a message number, and an action or severity code, such as “I” for information or “E” for error.

A series of Messages and Codes books is supposed to list every message, each with an explanation and suggested user, administrator, or programmer response.

This was more important when messages were practically limited to a single line on a CRT or teletypewriter, and customers had only the printed or microfiche documentation, not online help or websites, but it’s still valuable today.

Error -41: sit by a lake

https://xkcd.com/1024/

Likewise Digital, all VMS error codes are "SUB-S-NAME" (so a permissions error when dealing with a file woule be something like "%RMS-E-NOPERM" (I think that's "rotating mass storage" rather than "Richard M. Stallman"). I think that even harks back to various OSes on the PDP-11, but cannot say for sure.

Im always amused when I see the HN community get excited about something that the greybeards figured out 40 or 50 years ago. Turns out grandma knew what she was doing after all. If only there was a better way for the wisdom of sages to be transmitted to this generation without eyerolling over IBM and DEC.

Now get off my lawn!

Another one is to generate a globally unique id for that failure. In a web application the user can share the id with you and you can look in the log and see the associated error.

That seems like a good idea, but the problem is that any ID long enough to be sensibly globally unique is likely to be a long string of random-ish characters, and unless the end user has at least a screen cap – highly unlikely – there's about a 0.0001% chance you'll get the code correctly.

On the flip side, if you're willing to give up globally unique for "unique enough within and reasonable time frame" then you can go with just a few characters or even short words.

We did this. Basically showing the semi-unique request-id / correlation-id to the user, or include it in our response headers in our APIs. So when people contacted us with a screenshot or a dump of a request that failed, it was easy to find the exact one in our logs.

Yeah, just like there is a high fraction of people who can't see 3D movies there are a lot of people who can't cut and paste.

Just use both. A globally unique but static "error code" to google plus a serial number of that distinct instance of the failure.

This is really important if you have multilingual software. It lets users find help in all the languages they understand, not just their OS language.

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