This is a community for designs specifically crafted to make the experience worse for the user. This can be due to greed, apathy, laziness or just downright scumbaggery.
I'm getting this error that says Error. I can't tell if I fat-fingered the community name in the URL, or it got removed, or it doesn't exist in the first place, or maybe there's a legitimate issue with the software, but I hope it's useful!
I need to clarify because some people apparently never encountered the error page: it used to show the actual error. It was later changed to not do that.
(apologies for the atrocious aspect ratio)
This is bad design and not intentionally deceiving.
!crappydesign@sh.itjust.works
This might actually be helpful. The fact that it's just the word "Error" in red could be just the clue the developer needs. You don't know.
ERROR: An ERROR has occurred. Please correct this ERROR.
It used to show the type of error, like couldnt_find_post. It was changed and now it returns Error for everything. How is that helpful?
Well, your original post lacked that context.
I assume this is in a browser. You might have more luck checking the network protocol. Press F12 (Windows/Linux and Firefox/Chrome; don’t know about Apple) to open the dev tools. Open the network tab, and retry your request. One of the new lines in the log should be red. Click that and check “Response”.
Better fit for /c/programmerhumor.
There is nothing maliscious about this. Tons of websites do their own error handling because if they just show 500: Internal Server Error, then they start getting emails from their clients telling them the website hacked their browser. Catching all errors and displaying a generic error message while staying on the same page and keeping the same styling is less scary to non-technical users.
And of course, since all code any developer has ever written is perfect, there is no need to create good error handling that explains the problem in a way that will make it easy to debug.