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Ah, but there's something to be said for the effectiveness of these weird error messages. Typically the conversation would go: "We got an error come fix it", wi
by nulagrithom 9y ago
Ah, but there's something to be said for the effectiveness of these weird error messages. Typically the conversation would go: "We got an error come fix it", with no further details. It can be really hard to track down from there.
I experienced something similar when troubleshooting some Chrome issues across a Citrix XenApp farm. It was so incredibly useful to be able to ask the users "Did you get a dinosaur or a He's Dead Jim?" One was a connection issue I could disregard, the other was the memory management problem I was trying to track down.
Sometimes I wonder if we should make all our cryptic, developer-only errors absurd and memorable. I've never had a user tell me anything like "java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space error". "The lemur jumped the shark again" gets their attention.
- ConceptJunkie 9y agoA unique error code would accomplish the same thing, but I get your point. This happens to me all the time with the software project I work on, which is enormous and has been around for a long, long time: the error messages usually aren't very useful. Neither is the log. In fact, the log is often little more than all the debug messages created during development.
- nulagrithom 9y agoA unique error code will accomplish little. It will serve mostly to bewilder and frustrate you after discovering many users can't (or won't) remember so much as two numbers. What I'm saying is take the unique error code and add an absurd/funny phrase to the number. It's easier for people to remember an odd mental image than it is ERROR CODE -42.
- anitil 9y agoI could see a use for an error code generator that would come up with memorable nonsense sentences sort of like imgur's urls. "Error : Green Exemplary Huemul" rather than "Error : -42"