reduce error details shown to user

[rahulbot]

Right now if there is a low level error we show the potentially giant thing with lots of internal details to the user. I think (a) the server paths should probably be hidden and (b) the details shouldn't be shown. The only reason I can think of to show details is to help us debug the error; not useful for the user.

A few ideas to consider:

• in the legacy tools we used to show a generic "something went wrong" and include a "details" link that would open the small print of the error (up to 1000 chars) like an accordion
• we could put the details in a JS console error log
• we could hide the details completely and use the on-server dokku log to see more info

Showing this kind of nonsense to a user sure feels to me like a bug:

[philbudne]

I agree. I've thought it was a bug that Emily reports seeing anything with "angwin" in it!

I'm a big fan of log files, but less so of docker's log keeping, so both rss-fetcher and story-indexer write their own log files, kept on a docker volume, so they survive container lifetimes. Since the mcweb back end runs multiple (16) containers this might require a log file per container.

If going the log file route, I STRONGLY recommend reporting an id (could be a timestamp) to the user that they can report, that is also logged with the full event info, making it easier to match them up.

It's possible Sentry may subsume this comepletely...