Detailed Error Messages

At my job, we have an error code that is similar to this. On the frontend, it's just like error 123.
But in our internal error logs, it's because the user submitted their credit card, didnt fully confirm, press back, removed all the items out of their cart, removed their credit card, then found their way back to the submit button through the browser history and attempted to submit without a card or a cart. Nothing would submit and no error was shown, but it was UI error.
It's super convoluted. And we absolutely wanted to shoot the tester who gave us this use case.
- Better the tester than a user.
  
  Whats the difference?
- And we absolutely wanted to shoot the tester who gave us this use case.
  Why? Because he tested well and broke the software? A user changing their mind during a guided activity absolutely is a valid use case.
  
  I think they meant shoot in like a friendly way. You know, happiness bullets!
  
  It's likely a difference of emotion compared to logic. Emotionally they'd think "Damn it, now we need to check for such a weird specific edge-case, this is so annoying" while logically knowing it's better the tester caught it.
- Give that tester a raise bro
- This makes want to become a tester. It scratches my evil itch just the way I like it.
  
  there's three qualifications to being a testor:
  Finding stupid ways to break shit, Being able to accurately explain how you broke shit, and being likeable enough that breaking their shit doesn't make the devs angry.
- Don’t shoot the tester shoot whoever wrote the code (or the framework / library) that got you into this situation in the first place.
- If that broke the software it sounds like you have a very good tester.
- What about the test case where I’m using the browser’s dev tools to re-send http requests in random orders?

What the user was doing is that they don't trust that the system truly deleted the account, and they worry it was just deactivated (while claiming it was "deleted"). So they tried to do a password recovery which often reactivates a falsely "deleted" account.
I've done this before and had to message the company and have them confirm the account is entirely deleted.
- Many services have a grace period. Mostly it's 30-90 days where they keep your data, just in case somebody else decided to delete your account or you were drunk or something. But it could also be for legal reasons, like websites where you can post stuff for everybody to see, in case you post something highly illegal and the authorities need to find you. Another example is where a webshop is required to keep a copy of your data for their bookkeeping.
  
  But it could also be for legal reasons, like websites where you can post stuff for everybody to see, in case you post something highly illegal and the authorities need to find you. Another example is where a webshop is required to keep a copy of your data for their bookkeeping.
  None of these require your account to "exist". There could simply be an acknowledgement stating those reasons with "after X days the data will be deleted, and xyz will be archived for legal reasons".
  Mostly it's 30-90 days where they keep your data, just in case somebody else decided to delete your account or you were drunk or something
  This is the only valid reason. But even then this could be stated so that the user is fully aware. Then an email one week and another one day before deletion as a reminder, and a final confirmation after the fact. I've used services before that do this. It's done well and appreciated.
  This pseudo-deletion shadow account stuff is annoying.

When you’re the reason error log messages are created…

Hoh man what a journey. And I love that this incredibly complex situation is the only reason that status would return. What a fun time debugging that would have been
- The type of error where you have to give up trying to understand the user.
  
  It's quite simple actually: The user wanted to delete their account, but forgot their password so they requested a password reset. Before the password reset email was delivered, the user remembered their password and deleted their account. The password reset email is finally delivered and apparently some email clients open all the links in the background for whatever reason, so it wasn't actually the user who clicked the password reset link.
- Not really the only reason. It would be better to just return "token invalid".
  It could occur by someone messing with the URL from the reset password email, like accidently adding an extra character before pressing enter
  Or a poor email client that wraps the URL and doesn't send the complete one when clicked.
  Or someone attempting to find a weakness in the reset password system and sending junk as the token.
  
  Or an email client where you double click the link text to select it and press copy, and somehow this puts the link plus a trailing space in the clipboard to be pasted into a browser.
- Yeah that error status code seems like an odd way to reflect such a scenario.

Trying this every time I need to delete an account
- Immediately sue them for ~~DSGVO~~ GDPR
  
  (DSGVO is the German version of GDPR)

I might be the one hitting that link just to see what happens.
- "Let's see how good their testers are."

Now the dev doesn't need to comment this part of the code, saves him time.

Day 492 of predicting edge cases…
- You mean odor?
  
  Sorry typo

Man, actually seeing this in a wild log would make my day.

I can tell by the error msg this wasn't an error before and was the cause of much grief

whats wild is that all the returned values were the same this is only for a log value that probably zero people check
- I believe rule of thumb is to track/log at least one level deeper than what you show to the end user, to ease with troubleshooting and debugging.
  Beyond that, logs are only useless until they aren't, and then if you don't have them you're in for a universe of pain.

How’d they know it was a he
- Maybe there's a specific person who keeps doing this and they wrote this error specifically for him.
  
  Come on Dave sort yourself out.
  You know this is a porn site then! 😂
  
  You bitwise OR into the higher end bits the user id, in which you have already encoded the user’s gender. (For which you have a util method to extract. )
- Don't be silly; it's obvious that there are different error messages for each gender expression. Error logs need to be detailed and specific in order to be useful.
- In case you're serious, not everyone is a native speaker.
- I like seeing instances where people have used "she" as the generic pronoun.
- They were talking about me. They got my pronouns wrong. It's ok though, because they will have many more opportunities to get it right.

Is that python? If it's, thank you, finally learned how to format text in a way that can be read on the script and in the execution.
- As the other comments have already said it's not Python. Not sure what you mean with text formatting, do you mean that it's multiple strings that are concatenated using +? You don't need the + in Python, you can do
  python
  
  some_function( "part one of really long string" " part two of really long string" )
  Which is identical to
  python
  
  some_function("part one of really long string part two of really long string")
- It isn't, there are curly braces. It's TypeScript.
  
  Python also have curly bracers, om dictionaries.
- Looks like TypeScript to me
- No, but you can do the same in python
  
  I was thinking on trying it. Need to see how it works with f formatting.

PEBKAC.
definitely a case of the PEBKAC