h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hitting a perfectly blue link displaying A13735596 in A87767130 I was whisked to the Oops page, to be told

"Unable to find your page

Well, I'm stumped.
I'm not sure what you've done to get this page.

You could have just typed utter rubbish in to see what happened,
or you could actually have broken the site.

We really hope it's the first one."

You know the one, I'm sure. Now as a seasoned hootooist I can read this as a cheery wave in my general direction, but looking at it with the eyes of a newbie I would be seriously put off.

The person has done nothing remotely dodgy, or even imaginative, merely clicked on a link. They are being (facetiously) accused of tampering with the works. It is a classic case of blaming the victim; the facetious tone, please take this in, only aggravates it.

Please, please, replace immediately with a suitably apologetic statement. I suggest:

"Apologies.

This address has not worked for you.

We are aware of some glitches and are working on them."

I agree that the tone may need to be 'toned down'. However, many of my friends who play about on h2g2, and my wife, find the more humanistic error pages far more fun than the generic, 'we're sorry theer's a problem we'll fix it soon' type of answer that they get everywhere else.

A happy middle ground needs to be found in the message I think, or we lose the unique voice of h2g2.

I agree. There's no need to sacrifice the fun to improve this one. Maybe we could add a third option to the two listed?

Hello everyone.

Yes, we have talked about the error pages amongst some of the volunteers, and agree that what we thought might be rather funny, might not always be so. Especially since we still have a lot of problems with links inside the system (logged, being considered) which work in one platform but not the other, and so on. So, the error pages come up a lot more than we expected.

And yes, I'll nudge the people who can change these pages to actually do so.

However, the link you mentioned (In the entry in PR, leading to the Raspberry Pi entry) works for me. Are you in Pliny or Ripley?

Thanks for your comment Recumbentman, I can confirm, as Milla said, that this has been discussed. I'm very sorry but altering the text of the Oops page is beyond the powers of anyone here in Editorial. It is a technical matter. But rest assured, we do take your point.



ps Please visit the sub-editors' Trello board for ways that the volunteers can assist us.

I think it could be worded a little better but I wouldn't want to see the message changed too much. It's a bit of fun.

Are there really impressionable newbies who have to be protected and treated with kid gloves on the web any more?

Not kid gloves, but not fun accusations either. Also, the mention of hampsters is fun to us oldies, but another small setback for newbies.

As it is newbies who will be directed to the oops page most, arrivers there need to be treated with common decency: no digs, no in-jokes. Shouldn't be hard to achieve.

How about

"Eek. We've misdirected you. This isn't where you thought you were going.

We are still curing various glitches; please don't give up.

In the meantime, you could go back to where you were, and try finding another route to where you want to be."

Or:

"Oops. You have just experienced the effects of the Infinite Improbability Drive, and have arrived at a place you did not choose. Apologies."

Even if it is the visitor's fault, it is more magnanimous to accept responsibility for the misdirection. Mostly it will not be the visitor's fault.

I know the offending link works in Pliny, but until the functionality of that skin comes together, I remain in Brunel. My browser is Chrome.

I'm rather in favour of the more quirky error pages. It's quite possible to be quirky without causing offence. For example the Err500 page with something like:

"Ooh, I thought I'd turned the key in that door. I'm afraid you've caught me doing some under the bonnet stuff on this page. I won't be too long, so if you wouldn't mind popping back later, I should have finished by then."

I can't see that offending anyone - not something you can say very often these days.

I like the second suggestion.

I agree with you on the matter of in-jokes. Those can be really tedious and cliquey, and even though Infinite Improbability is sort of an-joke, it's Hitchhikers Guide in-joke, and that's what this place is about so it's appropriate. Hamsters and badgers though, not so much.

As far as newbies are concerned, our policy of fluffiness towards them was mostly based on the fact that the interwebz was still relatively new and people coming to an online community like this might have been doing so for the first time, but that's unlikely to be the case now, what with almost a billion people being active on Facebook and kids posting obnoxious comments on YouTube from the smartphone they got ten years before they hit puberty. Online forums and comments sections are pretty much a way of life now for just about everyone who is connected. Be welcoming and friendly to newbs by all means, but I think we can start treating people in the same manner we would if we met them face-to-face instead of assuming they're going to be unfamiliar with how a community like ours works because they probably aren't.

In public speaking we are taught to address the eager eight-year-old who doesn't want to miss a thing. And online there will always be newbies.

*follows the crumbs and the thread of string*

Of course there will always be newbies. Who else am I supposed to look after?


*drags her Matt along*



lil x

Yeees, the Oops page. It's actually four different pages for four different overall error types that you can get.

There's the Who? page for a researcher who doesn't exists which is also known as the Scary Clown page. Then there's the Missing Entry page with it's relaxing text and calming imagery. There's also the Whoops, Server's Gone Wrong page with Noel Edmunds getting a massage, and last but not least the Stumped Rubbish page that gets displayed if the error isn't caught by any of the "normal" error catches.

The problem is, in normal surfing you shouldn't see any of the error pages, and if you do the rubbish bin page should very, very rarely come up.

What I've done for now though is pushed all error types into the calming imagery page Hopefully soothing away all feelings of stress and anxiety whilst I go off to train the hampsters a bit better in our new filing system

Why not work in a link to the Infinite Improbability Drive in the error message? They may be intrigued by the message and want to start exploring the site.

What a wonderfully good idea.

There's a link to the IID on every page in Pliny, on the right hand side.

Let's see about putting something more prominent in...

How's that look?

Seems fine in Pliny. Do you have a link to the page in Alabaster?

Icy! you are so bad!