500 Customed page

Good practice?

[FrenchGuy]

Is it a good practice to create a 500 customized page?

[edited by: FrenchGuy at 9:05 am (utc) on Jan. 16, 2003]

[jeremy goodrich]

Dunno. Usually, it's customized with the email addy of the appropriate tech person, something like 'webmaster' at 'some site' dot com.

But - are you expecting people to routinely get the 500 / server error page that you should need such customization?

Perhaps the time would be better spent in researching more robust / sound methods of building the applications so that customers didn't get the 500 error whilst perusing the site...just my humble opinion.

[Visit Thailand]

I think it is always nice and a good idea to have custom error pages.

While what jg says is absolutely correct errors can occur, and customizing the error page allows you to at least try and control where the guest moves from there.

So I think it is a good idea, and does not take that much time after all.

[Krapulator]

Error 500 = Lazy Programming.

You should be writing your code to deal with unexpected situations and act accordingly. Especially if your dealing with user-entered form data.

[FrenchGuy]

Thank all of you for the answers... Of course the goal is to fix the bugs, but I have no influence on the code myself and in the meantime, I try to keep the situation as clean as possible...

[txbakers]

I didn't see a spot to create a custom 500 error page. I'm using W2K and IIS. Is there a place to do this? All the 400's are customizable, but the 500 wasn't.

Error 500 = Lazy Programming.

Not always true.

I've been hit with this several times when I've coded to insure against all sorts of user oddities. There is always something that sneaks through. That's why there's a 500 error.

My error message would probably admit a goof, and show the email address. "Oops, something went wrong, please contact us so we can fix it"

Customers like it when you admit mistakes.

[FrenchGuy]

txbakers - "Oops, something went wrong, please contact us so we can fix it - Customers like it when you admit mistakes" -> true!

We implemented the 500 customized page today... We have put a back button on it (JavaScript history-1) + an Email address for the case it happens again. We became the first Email -> itīs a big help to try to understand why itīs happening.

[txbakers]

Are you using IIS or Apache? I can't figure out where to put my custom 500 page.

[FrenchGuy]

IIS 5

[txbakers]

I'm sorry - I never bothered to check if I could override the default message. Since the others were files, I assumed....... silly of me.

Thanks.

[gsx]

I have used this in the past (for 404 errors and 503). It gave the customer a nice error page and also emailed me all the environment variables so I can track the errors.