>Probably yes. And when they see that error and have more questions about it, many will Google "Zarro Boogs" and find StackOverflow links and various other sources.
The point of a help resource is that you avoid, where at all possible, making the user need other help resources.
>If the text is changed or made invisible, that search pathway becomes obscured.
That's not how text search works.
>As inconvenient as it is for making changes to published UI, unique and identifiable strings serve as a sort of "soft URL" in this era of ubiquitous search engines.
So do you think maybe there's a lesson in here about building a culture around being opaque to outsiders? Or do you take it as an indicator to be more opaque, lest we alienate those who like scaring off the users that the project exists to help?
Sorry, I don't understand. If the user can't see "zarro boogs" on the page, why would they Google "zarro boogs?" And if they don't, how are they going to find the legacy of comments on StackOverflow, for example, that would tell them that message means no bugs were found but can be caused by a misconfigured backing store?
> So do you think maybe there's a lesson in here about building a culture around being opaque to outsiders?
In an era where global text search utilities can clear up any confusion within 5 seconds, I don't think that error message teaches us a lesson one way or the other on the question of opacity. It's not a choice I would make for my own project to maximize adoption, but I've never gotten the sense it hurts bugzilla's adoption (the biggest competition I've seen for bugzilla these days are options like Jira that don't require self-hosting the installation, which is a far more significant feature axis than whether the error message is funny).
The point of a help resource is that you avoid, where at all possible, making the user need other help resources.
>If the text is changed or made invisible, that search pathway becomes obscured.
That's not how text search works.
>As inconvenient as it is for making changes to published UI, unique and identifiable strings serve as a sort of "soft URL" in this era of ubiquitous search engines.
So do you think maybe there's a lesson in here about building a culture around being opaque to outsiders? Or do you take it as an indicator to be more opaque, lest we alienate those who like scaring off the users that the project exists to help?