Post

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

If you use the string “try again later” in an error message you should go straight to jail. It should be a standard rule in all linters.

Greg Strange
@iplayoddball.bsky.social

I'd be curious to know what your standard solution has been to handle that scenario; everybody seems to have a slightly different approach. My general approach is to give them a message saying that an unknown error occurred and a link in the notif to an incident page, pre-filled with details.

Greg Strange
@iplayoddball.bsky.social

I don't know about others but for me, generally it's an integration point with a 3rd party API of some kind. It might not give a meaningful response header or it might itself be broken somehow.

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

I’m being a little bit facetious but you _always_ know something. If this is because you made some API call and got a 503 or whatever you know that you can’t currently talk to the backend and you should hopefully be able to link the user to more information (status page, support email, etc)

Greg Strange
@iplayoddball.bsky.social

I agree from a technical standpoint. But from a non-technical user perspective, referring them to more technical information is rarely helpful to them. Even if the status is 'not available; that doesn't help them know when the problem is resolved or even how serious it is. 1/4

Sam Rose
@samwho.dev

If you don’t have a status page, or you don’t have any way to communicate with your users when you have an outage, that’s a separate problem you need to fix.