# Correct way to reduce useless information

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/correct-way-to-reduce-useless-information/20909>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [March 17, 2016, 8:46pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/correct-way-to-reduce-useless-information/20909 "2016-03-17T20:46:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Dejay\_Clayton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/6de8d8/32.png) [@Dejay\_Clayton](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Dejay_Clayton)\
**Post date:** [March 17, 2016, 8:46pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/correct-way-to-reduce-useless-information/20909/1 "2016-03-17T20:46:34Z")

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Hi,

I’m wondering if the latest version of Ansible allows developers to reduce the amount of useless information that is displayed while running playbooks.

For example, a _reasonable_ way to code the “fail” module is to not display a bunch of useless “TASK [fail] skipping” output for tasks that succeed. It’s just stupid to display a bunch of text that essentially states, “I’m going to skip failing this task because everything worked properly.” Especially for reasonably complex operations that require multiple “fail” sanity checks.

Now, judging by the fact that approximately one million people upvoted the following request to selectively suppress the output of certain tasks, it’s likely that I’ll just have to keep accepting this stupid behavior from Ansible: [https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/3324](https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/3324)

I mean, that product decision is probably not _quite_ as stupid as replacing “fail” with “fail\_when”, which doesn’t even let developers specify custom error messages, amirite?