 |
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
| About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: User interfaces in new cars | Main | Next: Restaurant website
February 21, 2005 12:13 AM
Broken: Page-not-found error
Carina Zona writes:
This has to be the worst page-not-found error ever. First, it's a news site which has already expired an article that's only 5 days old. It doesn't even offer the option of registering or paying to see the article. Instead of display a standard error message or a user-friendly explanation, it spits out this startling request to "restart site".
Closer inspection of the page only yields another baffling clue: the title "HTML/OS Restart Page" implies that not only the web server will be restarted but a whole operating system! Bizarre.
A major failing in the behaviour of many web based systems is the direction of error messages as output. For the most part, the person using a web page has no ability to really do anything with an error. These types of errors ought to be directed to a standard error output log. Aside from "Page Not Found" errors, I've seen many VBscript failures, and database failures sent back as response pages. Completely inappropriate for most circumstances.
Just curious, was the "Restart Site" a link that you could click on? If so, did it "restart site"? What a fun way to mess with the organization! Just randomly restart their site whenever you feel like it...cool!
If you click on the linked word "This" above you will go directly to the error page. Clicking the link goes to the page's homepage; it does not appear to actually restart the server (though that would be fun).
Basically, though, this is very poor customer service. There's little reason for them to make articles completely unavailable after just 5 days.
I have restarted the site, so you may want to wait a few minutes for it to come back up. ;D
Broken, oh soooooo broken.
Maybe we should give them a call and tell them we just restarted their website. I'd like to see what kind of reaction I'd get.
Then they press the power button on their server to turn their website back on and end up turning it off.
The article is probably available after 5 days. The page is not available anymore, because of the number in the url: that is a session number, which is expired. Like the first poster said, it's made with HTML/OS, and there is an easy way to fix things like this.... (and yes, I'm an HTML/OS programmer).. so that you can read that article again, even when the link has been expired...
They fixed it. Now it says:
We're sorry, but the page you requested is no longer available.
Please use the site search or archive search to locate the article.
Return to previous page
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: User interfaces in new cars | Main | Next: Restaurant website
Well, the "HTML/OS" bit comes because the product that's serving up that page is called "Aestiva HTML/OS" - http://www.aestiva.com/pages/htmlos/211059.2.1961007404758632072 .
But it is an odd error page, yeah. :D
Posted by: Ciaran at February 21, 2005 05:18 AM