Want obscure error messages? - Look no further!

"bX-ob6b7r" Sometimes the error messages are not useless just because designers didn't bother to put any useful information in them, but because the error message is obscured or coded in such a way that it is more or less useless for the user when the error happens. To get an example of such an obscured error message we need not to look any further than the very Blogger itself. To reiterate from last post, a good error message should tell the user: A) what happened, B) why it happened, C) how the user can safely recover from this error situation and D) how to prevent such errors from happening in the future. This obscured error message fails in all those accounts.

Internal debugging error codes might be very useful for the designers but are quite useless for the users as a source of information about what is going on. By trial and error I was able to find out that this particular bX-error is related to changing the layout of the blog. So why couldn't the error message tell me that in plain user-friendly terminology in the first place and instead forced me to jump the hoops trying to find if somebody out there in the forums or in the whole internet has some vague idea what is going on while trying to avoid red herrings, wild speculations and temporary try-at-your-own-risk workarounds.

So how about changing this obscure "bX-ob6b7r" error message into something more useful for the users, like "It seems that we cannot update your blog template at the moment for some reason, but your blog is still up and running. Please tell us about this problem directly through this convenient link. We will tell you when you can update your template again."?