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Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

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Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#121

Post by E14n »

toast76 wrote: post #104
balloot wrote: post #62

This is misguided. Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku". And a good chunk of that other 1% isn't even going to bother reading the error text accompanying the whitescreen. In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down. That is just as much your fault as a typo in the code. If you had a setup wi…

This is BS. Your users DO care. When our service is down for some reason, the ONLY question we get (like this one we got today) is - "Has the service been down recently? If so, no worries - it happens, just wanted to report and see if this is temporary or if it is just me." Having a "holy shit our entire service is down" message means your users dont' have to ask "is it just me?". That's a big difference. It has noth…

Showing enough information for your users to sensibly understand what they should do is important, but thats not what the article was about[1], it was about the application developer wanting to pass-the-buck when there application failed because of a Heroku error.

This is really lame because, you chose to host on Heroku not your customers, so it is your fault. You can play pass-the-buck but as far as your customers are concerned it is your fault.

1. "..Quit blaming all of us"

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#122

Post by [deleted] »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #94
_delirium wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's true with Heroku, but gets less true as providers get bigger. If you tell a user that your service is temporarily down "because Google is down", even a lot of regular people will know what that means, and not really blame you for it.

>"and not really blame you for it" Delusional. If it's down, it's done, and unless your product is a developer tool, >99% of people won't care why.

[deleted]

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#123

Post by _delirium »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #94
_delirium wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's true with Heroku, but gets less true as providers get bigger. If you tell a user that your service is temporarily down "because Google is down", even a lot of regular people will know what that means, and not really blame you for it.

>"and not really blame you for it" Delusional. If it's down, it's done, and unless your product is a developer tool, >99% of people won't care why.

So far my evidence suggests that that's incorrect. I suspect it's because a lot of people think "Google" is synonymous with "the Internet", though.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#124

Post by edanm »

JohnsonB wrote: post #89
balloot wrote: post #62

This is misguided. Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku". And a good chunk of that other 1% isn't even going to bother reading the error text accompanying the whitescreen. In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down. That is just as much your fault as a typo in the code. If you had a setup wi…

I don't think anyone should take it upon themselves to say "Nobody cares" about the relevant details of an error. It's not just an issue of blame, but what the end customer can do with the information. The information that it is the platform that failed temporarily is useful for the end customers because they don't have to lose too much confidence in the software vendor because their code is failing. It lets the cust…

"The information that it is the platform that failed temporarily is useful for the end customers because they don't have to lose too much confidence in the software vendor because their code is failing."

You're failing to understand that the overwhelming, vast majority of people have no idea what half the words in your sentence meant, have no idea what idea you're trying to convey, and even if they understood the idea, wouldn't be able to get it from your sentence.

Nobody cares whether it's a bug in your code or your host going down, because 99% of people don't know the difference.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#125

Post by durbin »

balloot wrote: post #62

This is misguided. Nobody cares why your site is down, and for most sites 99% of your users will have no clue what is meant by "This site is hosted by Heroku". And a good chunk of that other 1% isn't even going to bother reading the error text accompanying the whitescreen. In the end, you chose to host your site on a platform that went down. That is just as much your fault as a typo in the code. If you had a setup wi…

This is exactly the same stance that allowed Netscape to win the browsers wars initially by being more user friendly. Arrogant and 'misguided' technical people wanting to see developers shamed for not conforming with strict HTML standards. They instead took it out on the end user.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#126

Post by legutierr »

edanm wrote: post #124
JohnsonB wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone should take it upon themselves to say "Nobody cares" about the relevant details of an error. It's not just an issue of blame, but what the end customer can do with the information. The information that it is the platform that failed temporarily is useful for the end customers because they don't have to lose too much confidence in the software vendor because their code is failing. It lets the cust…

"The information that it is the platform that failed temporarily is useful for the end customers because they don't have to lose too much confidence in the software vendor because their code is failing." You're failing to understand that the overwhelming, vast majority of people have no idea what half the words in your sentence meant, have no idea what idea you're trying to convey, and even if they understood the ide…

I think that business customers do care quite a bit, actually. If, for instance, your business customer experiences significant downtime, but loves you otherwise, a verifiable explanation as to the source of that downtime can be the difference between keeping that customer or loosing that customer.

If the customer attributes the downtime to your host rather than you, then your customer might tell you to switch hosts rather than fire you. If you have a good relationship, the added transparency can be the difference between keeping the customer and loosing the customer.

Of course, this line of thinking is no incentive for heroku to change its practices.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#127

Post by Goladus »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #94
_delirium wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's true with Heroku, but gets less true as providers get bigger. If you tell a user that your service is temporarily down "because Google is down", even a lot of regular people will know what that means, and not really blame you for it.

>"and not really blame you for it" Delusional. If it's down, it's done, and unless your product is a developer tool, >99% of people won't care why.

Not necessarily true, especially if your customers are management types looking to lay on the blame as thick as possible wherever they find it, and will terminate a relationship if they believe the service-provider is incompetent.

For those kinds of customers, they may understand what Heroku is and why their vendor is using it and will definitely make at least some distinction about outage fault.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#128

Post by slurgfest »

ams6110 wrote: post #68
famousactress wrote: post #18

Bullshit. It's your fault. I'm your user, you took my money. We're done here. Everything is your fault.

When you go to a restaurant to get lunch, and they are closed due to a power failure, do you blame them?

If they put up a sign which says "temporarily closed due to power failure" then I do not blame them.

I go someplace outside of the power failure

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#129

Post by slurgfest »

halayli wrote: post #39

Isn't it your fault to have picked Heroku in this case?

Yes, it is your fault for trusting what Heroku says about its availability. But it would be classy for Heroku to take responsibility. It is not classy for Heroku to say "it's your fault because you trusted us" in front of the users, which seems to be the principal defense of Heroku in these comments.

Re: Dear Heroku: Quit blaming all of us when you fail. Do this instead…

#130

Post by slurgfest »

pearkes wrote: post #100

You can customize your error pages to be whatever you want. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/error-pages#customize_...

So the solution is for you to run a script which monitors Heroku for outages and changes the error page?

If you are doing that, you might as well write an app against another platform.

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