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You'd rather a robot hit your frontpage— and by association, your application- than hit your 404 static page? Instead of generating errors from 404s (a lot of

You'd rather a robot hit your frontpage— and by association, your application- than hit your 404 static page? Instead of generating errors from 404s (a lot of noise), try generating errors from the same repeated 404s.

pilif 14y ago
The robot will very likely hit my frontpage anyways, so I'd rather have them look (and not find) for a meta tag there than to produce an additional 404 error which will, depending on the content of said page, waste a considerable amount of bandwidth. Besides, my frontpage is either heavily fragment- or just page-cached anyways - especially for anonymous user - so it can be served directly from RAM for all intents and purposes, so a hit to the frontpage is really, really cheap.
- egypturnash 14y ago
  > an additional 404 error which will, depending on the content of said page, waste a considerable amount of bandwidth. Because your 404 should be one of the heaviest pages on your site, full of graphics and surprises. Why not make a full-featured game specifically for your 404s?
  - wedtm 14y ago
    thebest404pageever.com
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Crawlers don't (usually) download graphics, much less from 404 pages. They aren't regular browsers.
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  Cheaper than a hit to a static text file? It's cached in RAM too.
jewel 14y ago
We reduce the noise by only looking at 404s with referrers.
- alttag 14y ago
  That will cause you to miss some behavior if internal URLs ever change that users bookmarked or remember. As an example, a TV station site I follow had a /fullepisodes/ basename page which wasn't updating in sync with their show pages, apparently pulling from a different data store. After about six months of declining updates to that page, they eventually re-vamped it with a more-correct data source. I like to think it happened because I and others kept browsing directly to the easily memorable URL

pilif 14y ago

The robot will very likely hit my frontpage anyways, so I'd rather have them look (and not find) for a meta tag there than to produce an additional 404 error which will, depending on the content of said page, waste a considerable amount of bandwidth. Besides, my frontpage is either heavily fragment- or just page-cached anyways - especially for anonymous user - so it can be served directly from RAM for all intents and purposes, so a hit to the frontpage is really, really cheap.

egypturnash 14y ago
> an additional 404 error which will, depending on the content of said page, waste a considerable amount of bandwidth. Because your 404 should be one of the heaviest pages on your site, full of graphics and surprises. Why not make a full-featured game specifically for your 404s?
- wedtm 14y ago
  thebest404pageever.com
- icebraining 14y ago
  Crawlers don't (usually) download graphics, much less from 404 pages. They aren't regular browsers.
ricardobeat 14y ago
Cheaper than a hit to a static text file? It's cached in RAM too.

jewel 14y ago

We reduce the noise by only looking at 404s with referrers.

alttag 14y ago
That will cause you to miss some behavior if internal URLs ever change that users bookmarked or remember. As an example, a TV station site I follow had a /fullepisodes/ basename page which wasn't updating in sync with their show pages, apparently pulling from a different data store. After about six months of declining updates to that page, they eventually re-vamped it with a more-correct data source. I like to think it happened because I and others kept browsing directly to the easily memorable URL