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I had an issue a little while ago where I was trying to get iOS's Shortcuts app to post to WordPress. I noticed that doing this seemed to crash every one of my

I had an issue a little while ago where I was trying to get iOS's Shortcuts app to post to WordPress. I noticed that doing this seemed to crash every one of my websites within seconds. It was like flicking a switch: I’d run the Shortcuts workflow and seconds later, all of my sites appeared to be offline. This lasted for precisely one hour, after which everything came back online. Didn't take long to figure out that the sites had actually been online the whole time for everyone else; they were only inaccessible from my local network. At that point, I contacted my host, and they explained that the WordPress component of the Shortcuts app was, for some reason, bombarding the server with a whole lot of requests for files that didn’t exist. The server thought it was under attack and blocked my whole network. Then it got interesting: the guy said that the server was throwing 418s. I thought he might be mistaken at first. I actually recognized 418, since I've known about the teapot thing for a little while. I asked the guy if it was really the case that the server was blocking my network because it thought my phone was making too many demands for coffee it wasn't capable of producing, and he said that, well, other than the coffee bit, DreamHost really does use 418 for that situation: https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215947927-How-do-I-enable-Extra-Web-Security-for-my-website- https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215947927-How-d... That is the only time I've encountered 418 in the wild. That decision seems to be pretty consistent with DreamHost's sense of humor. (They did, as usual, manage to fix my problem.)

Doctor_Fegg 6y ago
OpenStreetMap uses it too: http://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/1247863053976252416 http://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/1247863053976252416
jrockway 6y ago
This is kind of unfortunate because if they just returned a correct code (429 Too Many Requests), you could have immediately debugged the problem. (The standard suggests also including a Retry-After header, which would tell you when the rate limiting would be lifted so you could try again.) Basically, there was a machine-readable way to tell you to go away. But instead they told your user agent that they were unable to brew coffee because they are a teapot. What a waste of everyone's time.
- csilverman 6y ago
  Agreed, although the iOS Shortcuts app did not even bother to tell me the server's response; it simply failed, so even if the server had returned a coherent error message, I think I still would have had to contact support to find out what it said. I love Shortcuts—it's a great automation tool with some good ideas—but, as is the case with many Apple things, it prioritizes minimalism over functionality. Seems like an odd tradeoff to me, since I think the only people who even know Shortcuts is on their device are people like me who would vastly prefer full-featured complexity—and better documentation—to the smooth, almost toy-like UX.

Doctor_Fegg 6y ago

OpenStreetMap uses it too: http://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/1247863053976252416 http://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/1247863053976252416

jrockway 6y ago

This is kind of unfortunate because if they just returned a correct code (429 Too Many Requests), you could have immediately debugged the problem. (The standard suggests also including a Retry-After header, which would tell you when the rate limiting would be lifted so you could try again.) Basically, there was a machine-readable way to tell you to go away. But instead they told your user agent that they were unable to brew coffee because they are a teapot. What a waste of everyone's time.

csilverman 6y ago
Agreed, although the iOS Shortcuts app did not even bother to tell me the server's response; it simply failed, so even if the server had returned a coherent error message, I think I still would have had to contact support to find out what it said. I love Shortcuts—it's a great automation tool with some good ideas—but, as is the case with many Apple things, it prioritizes minimalism over functionality. Seems like an odd tradeoff to me, since I think the only people who even know Shortcuts is on their device are people like me who would vastly prefer full-featured complexity—and better documentation—to the smooth, almost toy-like UX.