
A More Useful 404 - naish
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/amoreuseful404
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josefresco
The best 404 page I ever created had a large button in the middle of the
(branded) screen that said "report". Which dispatched an email to me with
relevant information (referring url etc.)

I know this could have been done automatically with some scripting, but having
it manual meant only 'real' users would be reporting 404's (not bots etc.) and
I found users reported the 404's rather than just moving on.

You don't want your 404 to be too helpful, it's something that should be fixed
(if at all possible)

~~~
jwilliams
> You don't want your 404 to be too helpful, it's something that should be
> fixed (if at all possible)

Sure you do - It's not just a bad link that could cause a 404. Could be an old
bookmark, a bad link from another site, a bad cut'n'paste, a link to deleted
content, or whole bunch of other things.

A useful 404 would do things things like (1) search for content based on your
url and give suggesttions and (2) allow you to conduct a search... and (3)
well, probably all the other things in the article.

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jfarmer
Although this isn't 404-specific, I thought Twitter would get less crap if
their Fail Whale page included a flash game.

Then when they came back up everyone would brag about their scores.

~~~
josefresco
Thousands of people playing your 404 Flash game (and using server resources)
isn't what you want when you can barely keep your core service alive. Also, it
would provide yet _another_ thing for Twitter users to complain about.

~~~
jfarmer
Why would flash games use "server resources?" It's just bandwidth, which has
never been Twitter's problem.

Besides, you can embed it from an external site or CDN.

~~~
alabut
While on the side topic of maintenance (rather than 404) pages, digg's got the
most useful one I've ever seen:

<http://flickr.com/photos/alabut/2947148797/>

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frankus
The article is a bit naïve in that most popular sites will get slammed by
exploit-seeking bots. At my previous employer I had a setup to silently log
known exploit URLs that reached the 404 handler, and blacklist the IP if more
than a few showed up from any one IP address.

Also, a 301 redirect from the old location of a page to a new one goes a long
way towards fixing stale SERs and bookmarks.

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lallysingh
Homestarrunner.com has a pretty good 404 page: <http://homestarrunner.com/404>

Not helpful in any way suggested by the article, but a reasonable laugh for
the site.

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grouchyOldGuy
There's nothing lamer than getting a generic 404 page. At the very least,
there should be a link to a site map or the home page. This is nicely thought-
out. Well done.

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run4yourlives
Someone should just set this up as a web service.

