Steemit Suggestion: Human Readable Error Messages!

Hi everyone! I've been on Steemit for some time now, and as all frequent users have seen, Steemit has never been without a few error messages popping up from time to time. For example, last week I attempted to publish a post I wrote, and was met with these lovely messages:

However, I have no idea what exactly this means, as the error message is very vague and not so human-readable either. The worst part is that I can say with good certainty that this is the single most seen/popular error message on Steemit (yet nobody knows exactly what it means).

Prevent Double Posting

When most people (or at least myself) see this message they try to publish the post once more (by pressing the "Post" or "Update" button). I did this myself a couple times, resulting in a duplicate post.

Because the error message was so vague and not well-documented, I didn't know that my first post actually did go through even though I got the error.

However, most of the time it does not go through, leading to inconsistency and uncertainty, and a lot of duplicate posts. These bugs happen all the time, even to large and popular users like @kingscrown (see here).

Need for Human Readability

While some errors are easy to understand, such as the You may only comment every 20 seconds one, others are completely garbled:

SyntaxError: Unexpected Token < in JSON at position 0
The above is a real error I received a week ago, though I forgot to take a screenshot. I didn't know exactly what it meant because I don't code in JavaScript or use JSON, but I thought it had something to do with there being a < as the first character in my post or in my title.

Spoiler: There wasn't an < sign anywhere in my post, or my title. I Googled the error, leading to this page which didn't help that much anyways. I had to reload the page and try again.

Suggestion: Explain and/or Document Errors!

I would be happy with one of two solutions, or a merge of both.

Solution 1: Detailed Messages

The first one is to have human readable and detailed error messages that tell the user exactly what to do to circumvent the error, and what the error means. To this day, I'm not sure what Transaction Broadcast Error means, but if it meant what I think it means, Steemit could try posting this message:

Transaction Broadcast Error!
Steemit had an unknown bug right now, and your post could not be published. Please reload the page and try again!

In my opinion this error message is much more useful, so users know what's going on and so they don't get the wrong idea.

Solution 2: Documentation

The second solution is to have good documentation for errors, perhaps on the new Developer Portal Steemit announced. Whenever an error occurs, Steemit could show the overall error code such as Transaction Broadcast Error if they wanted to, but at the end there could be a link that says "Read More".

That link would take you to the documentation for that specific error, where Steemit could explain what exactly happened, and what to do about it. This solution frees up space on Steemit.com's website, yet allows for even larger and more detailed summaries of the error on the documentation website.

Thanks for reading my post, and hopefully Steemit can see this soon enough! I'm adding this as a contribution to steemit/condenser which is Steemit's repository for their website's web interface (where the error messages are compiled).

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Thanks for reading,
— @mooncryption

note: Though I don't have a witness myself, @reggaemuffin does a lot to help minnows and users, so I strongly encourage you to vote for his witness or set @mooncryption as your proxy :)

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Open Source Contribution posted via Utopian.io

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