Dashboard should display "message" field from db rather than always "Could not capture snapshot"

[jerclarke]

Found this while writing up #44 but it's its own issue IMHO

When a post fails the Notes column on the dashboard always seems to say "Could not capture snapshot", even if the message field in the amber_check table of the database has a much more useful message.

What's up with that? Why wouldn't I want to see the extra info?

In my case, both Twitter (#44) and Facebook (#45) URLs are regularly broken because Amber is obeying the robots.txt files of those domains. Separate from that being annoying, is that I had to look in the database directly to find that Amber knew exactly why they were broken (message: "Blocked by robots.txt") but the Amber Dashboard didn't share that info with me.

This is excruciatingly useful info for someone debugging a Down state in the Dashboard, and it's actually useful to the user, unlike "Could not capture snapshot", which it turns out is the exact same information as the Down/Up info in the Status column.

So to me it seems obvious: Dashboard should list the message value from the database if there is one, and only resort to the redundant "Could not capture snapshot" if for some reason the URL is Down but message has no info.

Thanks for your attention and help

[jlicht]

@jerclarke Thanks for this, and your other recent suggestions. We don't have a specific timeline for the next release, but will certainly take these into account.

[jerclarke]

@jlicht Thank you for your reply. I know I came late to Amber, after initial development energy has died down. I'm hoping we can work together on this now that Global Voices (also a Berkman baby) is finally in a good place to work on our implementation (we were in the midst of major server revisions when Amber first came out).