Re:Precision in Technical Discussions
by justin_oaks on Friday February 04, 2022 @02:48PM
(#30211985)
When someone reports to me "The website is down" I roll my eyes and immediately seek more information. I wrote up information below, imagining that one day I'd share it with someone reporting that "The website is down". Of course, I probably never will because I try not to be a dick. But I'll share it here:
Saying a website is "down" is WAY too vague to be useful. Heck, at my old job I was told "Our dev site is down" and I'd have to ask "Which dev site?!" because we had several sites. Ugh.
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This list of items is called debugging, and it's probably your job and not the non technical user who reported it to you ;)
Re:Precision in Technical Discussions
by justin_oaks on Friday February 04, 2022 @04:08PM
(#30213231)
I may have gone a bit into the weeds with the some possible causes, but nearly each point has a distinct difference that can be seen. Sure, the user may look at a website/browser error and not have any idea what it means, but it doesn't mean they can't relay the message.
For example, "The website is down" vs "When I go to the website, I see the message 'This site can't be reached. some-invalid-website.com's server IP address could not be found.'"