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Admittedly, I pretty much tried to fit a square peg into a round hole, but I accidentally used the image upload button instead of the link button when trying to post a link to a question.

Current State

current invalid url upload error

Previous State

imgur invalid url upload error

This might bite someone who say, tried to use a imgur or other image upload site link they thought was a image but wasn't.

I feel like the error could be more descriptive than "unhandled web exception" - especially if the uploader assumed the link was an image file rather than a link

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5
  • I don't think "an error occurred" is any more descriptive than "unhandled web exception". In fact I think it's less descriptive. Both are clearly errors, but only one even hints at what kind of exception it is.
    – TylerH
    Commented Apr 29 at 19:02
  • 4
    @TylerH I think the edit showing previous state was just meant to illustrate that the change didn't necessarily make anything worse, just that both states are similarly unactionable.
    – Aaron Bertrand Staff
    Commented Apr 29 at 19:07
  • 2
    Yeah, @AaronBertrand deduced my intent which was at least to document old state since it's not easy for end users to see. Working on a quick fix that makes this better overall.
    – KyleMit StaffMod
    Commented Apr 29 at 20:12
  • 3
    I'd just like to say I appreciate the effort both in documenting the previous state (which i honestly had forgotten/never seen) and in looking into a solution to the issue. Well and how painless the move has been so far.
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Apr 30 at 4:27
  • If you try to upload an unsupported filetype, it tells you what filetypes you can upload. This looks like a slightly more useful option. And I didn't try to break it on purpose! tenor lies about file types
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:48

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
8

Okay, we now have some better error messaging in place. Depending on the URL, we may either tell you it didn't look enough like a valid image or just that we failed to download it all together

failed to download image from URL

not a valid file type

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3
  • 1
    Looks good to me
    – Journeyman Geek
    Commented May 1 at 14:12
  • 5
    While "download" is technically correct, I wonder if it would be confusing to people on non-technology-oriented sites. For example someone might see the error message and say "I don't want to download this image, I want to upload this image!". Maybe something like "Failed to fetch image from URL" would be better?
    – Cave Johnson
    Commented May 1 at 14:49
  • 3
    ... After I left my previous comment, I just noticed the error message about invalid image types actually uses the word "upload" (i.e. "Please upload a ...") so there is some inconsistency there too. Maybe the verb should instead be something like "use" or "enter" (e.g. "please enter a ...")
    – Cave Johnson
    Commented May 1 at 14:58
8

I can't check what the previous uploader used to show, so I checked on imgur itself and that's what they show:

error on imgur when trying to upload from URL which isn't a valid image

The text says:

Sorry, URL failed to upload.

Which is indeed more descriptive than a cryptic "unhandled web exception". Would be better if SE changed to such a message as well, or something along those words.

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