"If the error persists, please report an issue on Phabricator." links to the Phab frontpage. That would be unhelpful; it's like "See the wiki!" without a link or context.

Please provide a direct link (such as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/?projects=WS_Export) and please also link to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help for folks who have never heard of or used that "Phabricator" thingy and might feel intimidated. Thanks a lot. :)

@ifried Should we also display the full exception that occurred? This probably won't be any use to the user, but if they do file a ticket and include the error message that can help us debug the issue. Some of the exceptions are pretty long and ugly though.

Of course, we already receive an email whenever these errors occur, so I suppose if we need the full error we can look in our emails.

@dom_walden Thanks for asking about this. Yeah, that message is pretty ugly. If we kept it, I worry it may create a more negative experience, since it appears a bit overwhelming. I'm inclined to think we should hide that information and just provide it to engineers in the emails, rather than exposing it to the user. But I am curious to hear other opinions. Pinging @nayoub to see what he thinks. Thanks!

In T278189#6937229, @dom_walden wrote:

Should we also display the full exception that occurred?

That giant ugly error message will be hidden, yes. There's actually no way around that with the way things are set up currently (unless you want to stay with the status quo).

Draft PR at https://github.com/wikimedia/ws-export/pull/352 that may need more discussion. What I've done is only capture errors from ebook-convert and certain MySQL errors. This should account for almost all errors we see. Right now the way it works is you either get a pretty error message with the "Learn more" tips and no email, or you get an ugly error message and an email. With the new PR, the types of errors we're capturing are not indicative of bugs (things we can fix) but rather some intermittent issue that can be solved by re-trying / disabling credits / etc., so I think it's okay that we're suppressing the emails. It is still possible for some other 500-level error to occur, and you will get an ugly error, but in those cases we do want emails, and saying "Try again" may not be good advice.

Hopefully that makes sense. I did also hide the "Learn more" link for 404 errors.

Please provide a direct link (such as https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/?projects=WS_Export)

That is what we're using, actually https://github.com/wikimedia/ws-export/blob/ead45e83f6f942e17b6ed34a3510e5867ed65835/templates/bundles/TwigBundle/Exception/error.html.twig#L23

PR https://github.com/wikimedia/ws-export/pull/352

We now see the Please try these steps... error when the export times out.

We no longer see it when the book is invalid (404 error).

I think everything else is the same.

Timeout error (without an email):

404/invalid book error:

Invalid format error:

500 error (with an email):

Test environment: https://ws-export-test.wmcloud.org version 2.5.0-7-g5ba7d68.