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Comment by toast76 | Hacker News Reader

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 nothing to do with shifting blame, it's about keeping your users informed. Information makes people happy.

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Yes, information does make people happy. And my point is that a message that says "this site is hosted at Heroku" gives absolutely zero information to the vast majority of internet users. Most people simply don't know what that phrase means. It's no different than if someone suggested a new feature that is only visible for Opera users. It's just a waste of time and effort to do something that caters to such a small sliver of the market.

Also, a Heroku-specific error page would give zero help to the problem you describe above. Anecdotal evidence in this thread suggests Heroku sometimes goes down briefly for small chunks of its users. So if you see the Heroku error, it could be for just you. Or it could be system-wide outage. It wouldn't even solve that problem!

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"

You say "pass the buck" I say "tell the truth." Heroku's current message says it's an "application error" even when it is not an application error. It is incorrect. And I suggested one simple way to correct it. They could word the message as they see fit, but platform_problem != application_error. What percent of customer grok/care about the difference is irrelevant... an incorrect error message should be corrected.

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