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I have noticed that we get questions related to 500 errors and the White Screen of Death.

I think we need a tag for both of these so people can locate questions easier, and that we should potentially make the tags synonyms (since a WSOD is nearly always a 500 error).

I went ahead and added to a few questions, and stubbed out the tag wiki.

There really isn't a consensus on the SE sites about what tag to use for 500 errors. SO uses "http-status-code-500", and SF uses "500-error". Personally, I think the SO one is better, and it does autocomplete if you start typing "500".

I also think we should make an effort to edit questions to add as appropriate.

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  • I edited the question to make clear it is also a call for action to add wsod to the questions requiring it. – kiamlaluno♦ Jan 18 '13 at 18:35
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If I have to choose a synonym, I would go with . is too long, and it is necessary on Stack Overflow to avoid it gets confused with a compiler error code.

Right now, I would set as synonym, just in case there are questions using that tag that are migrated to Drupal Answers, and wait to set any other synonym to see which tags users use instead of .

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I would go ahead and close any such questions, pointing the user to http://drupal.org/node/158043 so that they can enable error reporting and find the actual error, allowing it to be debugged.

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  • 1
    What would the reason to close those questions be? There isn't actually a closing reason that is "answer already exists in an external site." There are then questions for which that page doesn't have an answer. – kiamlaluno♦ Jan 5 '13 at 21:17
  • @kiamlaluno I'm not sure I agree with you. If the question is so vague that it's like "Aaaaaaah! I did something and now I have WSOD! Troubleshoot plz!", learning how to enable error reporting should be a first step akin to doing a Google search (Is how to do that in the FAQ somewhere? It should be...). On the other hand, there's the possibility the WSOD is from something done while writing new Drupal code, at which point there's the possibility of the question becoming too localized. Granted, most people writing code know how to turn on error handling anyway... – aendrew Jan 21 '13 at 16:44
  • That is not what this answer is saying. The answer is proposing a "let's close them, and point the users to drupal.org/node/158043 " blanket to cover all the wsod questions. The "too localized" closing reason is for questions about code with a typo, not for questions where the problem is the OP not calling a function/method with the right parameters. Again, "too localized" is not a blanket for all the wsod questions. – kiamlaluno♦ Jan 21 '13 at 16:59

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