[EDIT: I’d only read up to: “So why aren’t these errors better? “Password is incorrect, try again.” or, “No account exists for this email.” Is that so hard?” — then I bailed, my bad, I should have kept reading. So my response below isn’t fair]
This ignores the security risks from being too verbose and/or specific with error messages, especially if they’re coming from a server. You’ll usually fail security/pen-test audit.
I agree that doing a better job of helping the user is laudable, but you need to know which battles to fight.
Giving a unique error number that can be referenced by a support team (who could look up the event, look at stack traces, etc.) is the best way to deal with truly exceptional events. Otherwise, if it comes to authentication or authorisation, you have to extremely careful what information you share.
This ignores the security risks from being too verbose and/or specific with error messages, especially if they’re coming from a server. You’ll usually fail security/pen-test audit.
I agree that doing a better job of helping the user is laudable, but you need to know which battles to fight.
Giving a unique error number that can be referenced by a support team (who could look up the event, look at stack traces, etc.) is the best way to deal with truly exceptional events. Otherwise, if it comes to authentication or authorisation, you have to extremely careful what information you share.