Unique Error Phrases
asana.com
asana.com
http://www.xkcd.com/936/
Having the user remember a date seems more reasonable than some phrase they have to copy and paste from somewhere.
Would the user rather see this list: Crash Incidents:
Section: Dashboard, Date: 08-20-2011 5:30amPST, Count: 2
Section: Report Page 1, Date: 08-22-2011 9:30amPST, Count: 1
or Crash Incidents:
12 old crickets buzz happily
9 young monkeys smoke slowly
Asana makes weird decisions sometimes.
Don't forget that the error phrase is not seen in a total vacuum. It is prepended with the sentence "If you contact us about this error, here is your unique error phrase", which even un-savvy users will recognise as a password (in the children's "what's the password?" sense), that they need to remember exactly and that doesn't itself directly carry information.
On the other hand, if you print out the date/time as part of the error message, the user is just going to glance at it, say, yup that's the current time, and then totally fail to record it (because there's no new information there, right?) or even worse, try to remember it and end up guessing at the time or even the date, making it almost worse than nothing.
"Hello Bob, I see you have 4 incidents today that we've logged, are you calling about the issue with the Dashboard page?"
If you've managed to log the error and displayed a payment page, you are in a good enough state to automatically send an email and/or file a ticket. You can refer to the ticket since that is the actionable object.
Any feedback on that from your users?
However, it does remind me of something pgp did, where a bit string (a key hash, I think) was converted into a sequence of words pulled out of a phonetically-distinct dictionary.
npm install greg
Are they happy because they made the program crash?
It's pretty good about not losing data, so the several-times-a-day crashes are more of an annoyance than anything else, and their UI is the nicest I've used, but they still need to work on being more stable than Windows 95.