Would it be possible for GAE to display user-friendly error pages to
users?

Right now, if a hosted app fails to execute (for whatever reason) GAE
sends out a HTTP 500 error. This error page consists of the following
words: "Server Error: The server encountered an error and could not
complete your request. If the problem persists, please report (http://
code.google.com/appengine/community.html) your problem and mention
this error message and the query that caused it."

While developers understand that message, it is not user-friendly, and
doesn't report the correct action for the user to take. If my
organization's app fails, I want the user to report the failure
directly to my organization, not to a general Google mailing list.

What I'd like to see is a more user-friendly error page; perhaps you
could write something along the lines of "We're sorry, but your
request has encountered a problem. Please email us (email address
here) to let us know." And then put the app owner's email address (or
Twitter/Facebook/etc account name) as a clickable link.

Or you could allow us to specify a static page to serve up whenever a
failure occurs. Amazon S3 does something similar, where you can
specify a static page for 404 errors. Or even just allow us to put in
a redirect url; if a 500 error occurs, GAE could reply with a Moved
Temporarily code and redirect to the redirect url.

While we all hope and aim to build web sites with no downtime, errors
do happen occasionally, and this would be a huge help in the UI/UX
department.

Thanks for your time.

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