• @ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    At my job, we have an error code that is similar to this. On the frontend, it’s just like error 123.

    But in our internal error logs, it’s because the user submitted their credit card, didnt fully confirm, press back, removed all the items out of their cart, removed their credit card, then found their way back to the submit button through the browser history and attempted to submit without a card or a cart. Nothing would submit and no error was shown, but it was UI error.

    It’s super convoluted. And we absolutely wanted to shoot the tester who gave us this use case.

  • @CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world
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    1463 months ago

    What the user was doing is that they don’t trust that the system truly deleted the account, and they worry it was just deactivated (while claiming it was “deleted”). So they tried to do a password recovery which often reactivates a falsely “deleted” account.

    I’ve done this before and had to message the company and have them confirm the account is entirely deleted.

    • @x00z@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Many services have a grace period. Mostly it’s 30-90 days where they keep your data, just in case somebody else decided to delete your account or you were drunk or something. But it could also be for legal reasons, like websites where you can post stuff for everybody to see, in case you post something highly illegal and the authorities need to find you. Another example is where a webshop is required to keep a copy of your data for their bookkeeping.

      • @CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world
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        143 months ago

        But it could also be for legal reasons, like websites where you can post stuff for everybody to see, in case you post something highly illegal and the authorities need to find you. Another example is where a webshop is required to keep a copy of your data for their bookkeeping.

        None of these require your account to “exist”. There could simply be an acknowledgement stating those reasons with “after X days the data will be deleted, and xyz will be archived for legal reasons”.

        Mostly it’s 30-90 days where they keep your data, just in case somebody else decided to delete your account or you were drunk or something

        This is the only valid reason. But even then this could be stated so that the user is fully aware. Then an email one week and another one day before deletion as a reminder, and a final confirmation after the fact. I’ve used services before that do this. It’s done well and appreciated.

        This pseudo-deletion shadow account stuff is annoying.

        • @x00z@lemmy.world
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          33 months ago

          None of these require your account to “exist”.

          It’s actually much more technical than theoretical. When you delete an account on a website, that is being kept for a little while longer, it merely has field in the database that gets updated. (often with a removal date as well for the automatic removal after x amount of days). This field needs to be checked everywhere the account is used. And account recovery is mostly a part where this is forgotten, or possibly not even wanted.

          And to claim this as fact, I just realized that the website I work on allows recovering of banned accounts. (Removed accounts are completely removed though because we don’t need to retain any data).

          This is the only valid reason. But even then this could be stated so that the user is fully aware.

          Keeping the records for a little while longer is actually implied to be known. It’s in their privacy policy, and is legal.

          Whether or not services should make this easier to know exactly what is happening I definitely agree. Personally I think post history without user identifiable data should also be removed, but this is even less common practice (and is why tools exist to delete all your reddit posts for example).

          • @dan@upvote.au
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            3 months ago

            This field needs to be checked everywhere the account is used.

            Usually something like this would be enforced once in a centralized location (in the data layer / domain model), rather than at every call site.

            for the automatic removal after x amount of days

            This gets tricky because in many jurisdictions, you need to ensure that you don’t just delete the user, but also any data associated with the user (data they created, data collected about them, data provided by third-parties, etc). The fan-out logic can get pretty complex :)

            • @x00z@lemmy.world
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              23 months ago

              Usually something like this would be enforced once in a centralized location (in the data layer / domain model), rather than at every call site.

              True. Although not every endpoint is the same, nor is every website or service.

              This gets tricky because in many jurisdictions, you need to ensure that you don’t just delete the user, but also any data associated with the user

              GDPR specifically mentions user identifiable data. I don’t know about others.

  • nifty
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    623 months ago

    When you’re the reason error log messages are created…

  • CEbbinghaus
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    563 months ago

    Hoh man what a journey. And I love that this incredibly complex situation is the only reason that status would return. What a fun time debugging that would have been

      • @zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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        373 months ago

        It’s quite simple actually: The user wanted to delete their account, but forgot their password so they requested a password reset. Before the password reset email was delivered, the user remembered their password and deleted their account. The password reset email is finally delivered and apparently some email clients open all the links in the background for whatever reason, so it wasn’t actually the user who clicked the password reset link.

          • TedvdB
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            353 months ago

            Yes, e.g. outlook replaces links in mails so they can scan the site first. Also some virusscanners offer nail protection, checking the site that’s linked to first, before allowing the mail to end up in the user’s mail client.

            Thats why you never take actions on a GET request, but require a form with button for the user to do a POST.

            • TrumpetX
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              113 months ago

              It can be worse, we had to add a captcha for those link scanners cause they’d submit the forms and invalidate tokens too:(

            • @dan@upvote.au
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              23 months ago

              e.g. outlook replaces links in mails so they can scan the site first. Also some virusscanners offer nail protection, checking the site that’s linked to first, before allowing the mail to end up in the user’s mail client.

              Proofpoint does this too, but AFAIK they all just change the link rather than go to it. The link is checked when the user actually clicks on it. Makes sense to do it on-demand because the contents of the link can change between when the email is received and when the user actually clicks it.

          • @Malix@sopuli.xyz
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            3 months ago

            Yep. Apparently outlook does this and afaik because some kind of link sniffing/scam detection/whatever, but it does it by changing the first characters of each query argument around.

            We spent amazingly long time figuring that one out. “Who the hell has gotten Microsoft service querying our app with malformed query args and why”

    • lazynooblet
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      163 months ago

      Not really the only reason. It would be better to just return “token invalid”.

      It could occur by someone messing with the URL from the reset password email, like accidently adding an extra character before pressing enter

      Or a poor email client that wraps the URL and doesn’t send the complete one when clicked.

      Or someone attempting to find a weakness in the reset password system and sending junk as the token.

      • @zurohki@aussie.zone
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        3 months ago

        Or an email client where you double click the link text to select it and press copy, and somehow this puts the link plus a trailing space in the clipboard to be pasted into a browser.

  • TedvdB
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    313 months ago

    Now the dev doesn’t need to comment this part of the code, saves him time.

  • @CanadaPlus
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    283 months ago

    Man, actually seeing this in a wild log would make my day.

  • katy ✨
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    113 months ago

    whats wild is that all the returned values were the same this is only for a log value that probably zero people check

    • @wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      163 months ago

      I believe rule of thumb is to track/log at least one level deeper than what you show to the end user, to ease with troubleshooting and debugging.

      Beyond that, logs are only useless until they aren’t, and then if you don’t have them you’re in for a universe of pain.

    • @Affidavit@lemm.ee
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      163 months ago

      Don’t be silly; it’s obvious that there are different error messages for each gender expression. Error logs need to be detailed and specific in order to be useful.

    • @acetanilide@lemmy.world
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      23 months ago

      They were talking about me. They got my pronouns wrong. It’s ok though, because they will have many more opportunities to get it right.