I have reached a point in my web application where we are ready to go live and the thought occurred to me to put in some way of catching application errors users hit and forwarding them on to the appropriate support.
At the moment the site currently catches any errors and redirects to an error page. It also catches all the data a support person should need to fix the bug. What we want it to do is provide functionality for the user to send the error details for to a support person somehow.
Ways that we have thought of so far include:
- Simply printing the error on the page as text for the user to copy.
- Providing a button to copy the error onto a clipboard for them to paste into an email.
- Providing a help form for the user to fill in which will send the error on.
- Providing a ‘send error’ button that simply forwards the error onto an configured or user-entered email address.
- Storing the error details in a database table on page load for a support person to then view.
None of these stand out to me as super clean or intuitive. Has anyone come up with a unique and clean way to handle this kind of situation?
NB: I am looking for a solution to handle reporting generated errors in the system, not a solution for user feedback.
If you’re displaying all the information the user needs, why not just log it in a database or send an email to support? That way you don’t have to worry the user with the fact that you have bugs. Send them to your “Sorry, but please try that again later” page…