TW5 Red Screen of Death suggestions

[tejjyid]

I feel I have particular expertise in the matter of the RSOD. I have some suggestions that would ease my pain, improve my productivity and I feel sure generalize to others:

1.) A cancel button on the top of the ?modal box? so that I can get rid of it without changing my screen size / scrolling
2.) Do we need the whole error message? All I personally need is the line number of my most recent JS f-up, and if the rest of this message (which seems also to be in the console log) is meant to be of use to anyone else, it's not clear to whom and in what context. If the message were shorter, than maybe the necessity for 1.) is reduced
3.) Change the wording - for years Firefox used to waste seconds of my life by crapping out on reloading my tabs at restart, and issuing this fake apology about which they did absolutely nothing. The words "This is embarrassing" were a feature. This annoyed me. If someone is embarrassed - do something about it, I say. Don't just keep uttering meaningless apologies.  

But I can't work out who @ TW is embarrassed about my mistakes? Don't be - it's my problem. The faster I can click Cancel/refresh/edit the better. Put that Cancel button where I can get to it quickly.

Maybe someone feels that this is the right way to handle an occasional TW core failure. But there's no contact procedure, no advice about what to usefully do to help resolve the "embarrassment" - so there's a kind of incoherence about the whole RSOD experience.

1.) would be a big, big winner. I doubt I would've noticed 2.0 and 3.) if I hadn't had to go looking for the "Close" button.

Cheers, Andrew

[PMario]

Hi Andrew,

In normal cases TW fails silently. So if there are wikitext problems, the "offending" text is ignored, or if possible there is some info. eg: messages about list filter problems.

If RSOD pops up, there is a real js problem, which may cause data loss, if you could cancel and go on. So the only way to get rid of that message is, to refresh the browser window.

So imo if this message would be less scary, we would have much more trouble with users loosing data, because they would click it away and go on with a probably broken system. The next save may cause much bigger problems.

How do you create your code?  Within TW or a node js dev setup?

just some thoughts.

mario

[Thomas Elmiger]

Hi folks

I would support what Andrew says. In my experience (I develop in a single page wiki) it is often possible to click the RSOD away – especially when the message is short – and go on working without reload.

So make it as scary as possible, but give us the possibility to easily get rid of it (button at the top or scrollable hints) so that I don’ have to use the browser zoom to find the button if the message is larger than my screen.

Just my 5 cents.
Thomas

[tejjyid]

Scary is a different question, Mario. Maybe it needs to be scary, maybe not. Personally I believe in trusting users to act well with good information. However:

"This is embarassing" is not scary. It's annoying. If the problem is as serious as you say, then the error message needs to warn people of the true problem. "You are standing on the edge of a cliff" might get people's attention. (I would still opt for information rather than emotion, though). And if the error only ever bubbled up from somewhere deep in TW, and was serious enough to threaten data loss, then the message should ask people to notify TW support and, presumably, provide the error message, which I guess constitutes some kind of trace. But the error message doesn't do that. It's not constructive. It's not useful. It's just red.

The purpose of the message and the message itself are not coherent, that's the problem.

Now, my issues may be idiosyncratic, I admit. I do my coding in the browser. I don't want to be forced into learning yet another tool, installing yet another piece of software on my PC, and once again being tied to my PC for software development. TW should support some sort of meaningful and practical coding experience in the browser. I think the product has become too driven by coders and not enough by users. I understand most of the issues (roughly) behind the re-architecting, which is why I'm putting myself through the pain of upgrading, but reducing the portability of the code by making it so unpleasant to develop in the browser is a mistake. I don't believe offhand that this is a question of architecture; I think this is a question of people who like Node forgetting that there are a lot of people who don't need it, know it, or want it. 

For me, I see the RSOD 100 times a day when I'm writing code; that's how bad a coder I am. I don't care how bad I am, because I'm good enough to get done what I want to do, mainly. The problems I have to post about 99% turn out to be TW issues, not JS issues. TW is such a useful tool, despite this pain, that I will keep on using it. I'm going to try to start working on documentation of it, as a payback. At the end of all that though, the RSOD is not well thought through. I take your point that there may be some sort of thinking behind it - but it's still not good quality thinking as it stands.

Now I have just finished editing bootstrap CSS & JS to alleviate my problems. I've changed the error message to something less idiotic, I've muted the colours, and I've put the button on top. Much to my surprise, that all worked OK, 1st time (taht's a real tribute to the designers, BTW). That will reduce my pain. It doesn't deal with the deeper issues, but I don't really expect to persuade anybody to do that.

I'm interested to keep discussing it, though, if people want to.

Thanks for your response.

[PMario]

Good arguments ;)
I'll create a PR.
-m

[tejjyid]

You can move the button fairly easily, I found. In boot.js, find this line:

form = dm("form",{children: [heading,prompt,message,button], "class": "tc-error-form"});

		document.body.insertBefore(form,document.body.firstChild); 

  and move the button higher in the list.

If you want to play with the colours, then "tc-error-form" is the CSS motivator.

Cheers

[PMario]

On Tuesday, March 7, 2017 at 9:28:05 PM UTC+1, tejjyid wrote:

You can move the button fairly easily, I found. In boot.js, find this line:

form = dm("form",{children: [heading,prompt,message,button], "class": "tc-error-form"});

		document.body.insertBefore(form,document.body.firstChild); 

I know. 

 

If you want to play with the colours, then "tc-error-form" is the CSS motivator.

I did change the CSS a bit, so the error-message text gets scroll bars, if needed and the whole box is max 80% high. So it will never be bigger than the browser window.
We will see, if Jeremy merges it.

-m

[PMario]

PR: https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/pull/2799
+1 vote for it, if you want to push it.

-m

[tejjyid]

That was for Thomas, Mario. I know you know :-)

Thanks

[tejjyid]

Will do.

[Thomas Elmiger]

Thanks to all of you!

Mario, how can I vote on github? I could not find a button for that and neither Bing or Google was able to help …

+1 vote for it, if you want to push it.

-m

Cheers, Thomas

[PMario]

On Thursday, March 9, 2017 at 1:52:40 PM UTC+1, Thomas Elmiger wrote:

Mario, how can I vote on github? I could not find a button for that and neither Bing or Google was able to help …

+1 vote for it, if you want to push it.

You need to be logged in to github. Then you have a "thumb up" button at the issue.
-m