fixes #8549 - Fixes subscription error messages for act key, BZ 1154619

Here's Jim Weirich:

> An aside, because I use exceptions to indicate failures, I almost always use the “fail” keyword rather than the “raise” keyword in Ruby. Fail and raise are synonyms so there is no difference except that “fail” more clearly communicates that the method has failed. The only time I use “raise” is when I am catching an exception and re-raising it, because here I’m *not* failing, but explicitly and purposefully raising an exception. This is a stylistic issue I follow, but I doubt many other people do.