I was asked to design a 404 page but do we actually need to say 404? Even though most people understand what 404 means, do we need to explicitly tell users its a 404?   Why cant it just be an error page?     examples like these are really cool error pages. But they can get away without having the 404 in there. The context made it clear already. Why do websites still have it? When is it ok to break this rule?
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I've been working on a 404 page recently and have been confronted with the issue of whether we need to explicitly write the numbers '404' on the 404 page.   My team's opinion on this issue is split. I don't think that the average user knows or cares what 404 means (our average user is fairly non-technical).   Does anyone know of any studies or have a strong opinion about this?
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hey all! i have an odd problem with URL routing. when i request a URL that doesn't exist, e.g. , wordpress correctly returns a 404. however, if that URL is a prefix of a post or page name, it instead returns a 301 redirect to the post or page.  for example, if i have a post on 10/1/2010 named Food Post, it will return a 301 with Location:  (my permalink structure). likewise, if i have a page named Food Page, it will return a 301 with Location: .  you can see this in action on my live site,  . e.g.  redirects to  .  turning off permalinks (ie switching to "default") fixes it, for both posts and pages, but naturally i don't really want to do that.  i see this on three different installations, all wordpress 3.0.1 and apache 2.2, two ubuntu lucid/mysql 5.1 and one freebsd 7.3/mysql 5.0. i've deactivated all plugins and removed everything from my .htaccess except the lines for wordpress below, verbatim, but no luck.  RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^wordpress/index\.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]   thanks in advance...
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During today's maintenance I've noticed an annoying side effect to certain error pages. I happened to end up on  when trying to navigate to The Workplace. An interesting side effect of that error scheme is that if you refresh that page, even after the error no longer occurs, you'll continue getting the error page, as if the site was still down. It's because the error redirects you to a URL that will always show you the error.  Since it's an aspx error not a "normal" error like the 404 pages I'm not sure it can be changed, but ideally if you hit an error page you shouldn't be "stuck" on that error page. The error was fleeting, but the error URL scheme isn't.
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I awoke this morning to a spam flag on a site I moderate, and noticed this when I went to read the post.    Notice answered&lt;/a&gt;, which I imagine isn't meant to have the &lt;/a&gt; there.  I also confirmed that this displays asked&lt;/a&gt; for other types of flags (namely, closed without comment).   I looked around for a duplicate of this but can't seem to find it, so maybe it's a recent change?
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I'm configuring nginx's handling of some error pages and other "default" media files (such as favicon.ico and robots.txt) at the moment and I ran into a minor problem getting things to work the way I want for certain error pages.  Basically, what I'm trying to do is serve certain files for a server under the root for that server, e.g. /var/www/someserver.com/robots.txt. If that file does not exist, I want nginx to go to the "default", i.e. /var/www/default/robots.txt. This is the basic gist of how I have that (successfully) configured:  server {     ...     root /var/www/someserver.com;      location ~* ^/(robots\.txt)$ {         error_page 404 = @default;     }      location @default {         root /var/www/default;     } }   That works great.  I'm trying to do the same for error pages, and I'm not able to make that happen though:  server {     ...     root /var/www/someserver.com;      error_page 404   /404.html;      location ~* ^/(404\.html)$ {         error_page 404 = @default;     }      location @default {         root /var/www/default;     } }   Note that this "works" in the sense that if you visit someserver.com/404.html, it will first try to load /var/www/someserver.com/404.html and then fall back to /var/www/default/404.html if that's not found. However, if you visit someserver.com/blahblah, it only shows the 404 page if it's set in /var/www/someserver.com/. It does not fall back to the default directory if that file doesn't exist.  Anyhow, you can probably what I was trying to accomplish (that's why I included the first working example).  Any ideas?  Edit:  Based on Martin F's answer, this is what I ended up putting together:  # Doesn't work when error page is returned on a POST request server {     ...     root /var/www/someserver.com;      error_page  404         = @notfound;     error_page  500 502 504 = @server_error;     error_page  503         = @maintenance;      location @notfound {         try_files /404.html /../default/404.html =404;     }      location @server_error {         try_files /500.html /../default/500.html =500;     }      location @maintenance {         try_files /503.html /../default/503.html =503;     } }   This works awesome. The actual block of error_pages and locations above is in a server_defaults.conf file that gets included with every virtual host, which is why I didn't hard code the path into each location and used a relative path for the defaults.  Edit 2:  This approach has a problem. If you POST to a URL that returns an error, the POST request method gets sent with the try_files attempts. This (for me) results in a 405 Not Allowed error, because nginx is essentially trying to POST to e.g. /default/500.html instead of just getting that page.  Edit 3:  I posted a solution that works that's a lot closer to my original idea.
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More than infrequently, opening posts on SO are not questions at all, in the very grammatical sense: They're just statements or vague musings (for instance ), and it's not clear what exactly is being asked (since nothing is technically being asked).  I always feel that it shouldn't be our job to construct a question from someone's undirected ramblings, and so this is usually a NARQ candidate for me.  I was wondering if we could add a very simple check that would count the number of literal question marks in a post and refuse to accept it if there are none. This could be accompanied by a small note on what a question should look like.  What do you think? Should we add this feature?  Update: Since people seem to get hung up on the details, I'd like to clarify that an entirely satisfactory alternative would be to pop up an overridable notice with a warning, like "Hello, you appear to be writing a question. Would you like help?", with a "No thanks" button to dismiss it and submit the post regardless.  Update 2: If you disagree that absence of a question mark is a strong signal that the question is poor, could you please provide examples of good, useful and appropriate questions that do not contain question marks? I've provided several additional examples of when the signal works in the comments, and more come up regularly, so I would appreciate to see some evidence of the contrary.
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If Community ♦ flags something for low quality or because of consecutive closed questions or whatever, I always have to click that the flag was helpful (or declined):      To my understanding, it doesn't make a difference. So, why ask in the first place?
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Alternative and much more boring title: Should a 404 result reveal the post title?  I ran across some odd behaviour today. When manually entering a Stack&nbsp;Exchange URL into the address bar1, if you pick a post number that has been deleted then you still see the old post title along with the 404.  For example, I entered:   http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/34 and the resolved address came back as http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/34/what-is-the-best-empire-avenue-stock-to-buy And http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3 came back as http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1/where-oh-where-did-the-joel-data-go/3#32   Note, I'm obviously not a 10k+ user on either of those sites, which is why they 404'd  It's not that big of a deal, but it seems like this leaks information about the site(s) that we may not want exposed.  And since a picture is worth N words:   Stuff I probably shouldn't be able to see is highlighted.  1And why was I manually entering posts like that? Because I was trying to find a benign 404 example from  that I could share with others because I think their 404 image is hilarious.  2And where did this fabled Joel data go?  Inquiring minds want to know!
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I have a substantial number of rewrite rules in place for a variety of reasons such as:  disallow indexes, set custom error pages, force non-www, https, strip trailing slash, redirect index.html or.php to root, pretty URLs (hides file extensions &amp; queries), 404 any URL with Additional Path Info   I was having trouble with nonsense URLs (URLs with Additional Path Info) invoking broken pages &amp; 500 errors that were being indexed as duplicates by search engines.  Sample: example.com/index.php/somefolder/another/file/query...   I set up rules to redirect to a default page rather than rendering broken pages or 500 errors. I then modified that same block to send such nonsense URLs to 404 instead so they would not be indexed.  MrWhite educated me on the proper use of AcceptPathInfo Off but unfortunately this had no effect.  The current solution (full array shown below) requires additional .htaccess files inside any sub-directories containing accessible pages but it worked like a charm.   This is the full array of rules currently in place. Everything is now working perfectly. I'm currently working to eliminate the need for the additional htaccess files in the subdirectories.  AcceptPathInfo Off     Options -Indexes  Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /  ## 404 ANY URL WITH ADDITIONAL PATH INFO ## RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} /([^.]+)\.php/? [NC]  RewriteRule ^ /%1 [NC,R=404,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/?$ /$1.php [L,NC]  ## SET CUSTOM ERROR PAGES ## ErrorDocument 400 /error/error_400.php ErrorDocument 401 /error/error_401.php ErrorDocument 403 /error/error_403.php ErrorDocument 404 /error/error_404.php ErrorDocument 500 /error/error_500.php  ## FORCE HTTPS &amp; NON-WWW ## ## RewriteEngine On  RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://dev.example.com/$1 [R=301,L,NE]  ## STRIP TRAILING SLASH ## RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]  ## REDIRECT INDEX TO ROOT ## RewriteRule ^index\.php$ / [R=301,L] RewriteRule ^index\.htm$ / [R=301,L]  ## PRETTY URLS FOR DYNAMIC FILES ## RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^items/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ item.php?item=$1 [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^items/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)/$ item.php?item=$1 [L]  ## PRETTY URL FOR ANY STATIC FILE ## RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ $1.php [L,QSA]   The block labeled "404 ANY URL WITH ADDITIONAL PATH INFO" would be unnecessary if the "AdditionalPathInfo off" directive would work. This setting can also be controlled in the httpd-conf file on the server. Editing httpd-conf requires command-line, ssh access and can be dangerous. Consult your hosting company or server admin if that sounds scary.   Currently using feedback I've received here to clean this up. Updates to come.
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I found a user that have only . Trying to open main profile via  on the meta profile page gives 404 error. I don't think this is normal.  is currently banned in chat for 189 days:    Parent user link refers to already mentioned 404 page.
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I entered a URL with a very long parameter on Stack Exchange.  I have type this url    It shows a blank screen , does not shown any messages.    We need to show a “Page Not Found” message, same as what you did on other Stack Exchange pages.
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We run an ecommerce site that was setup by a third party ecommerce software provider, basic shop with product pages, basket and checkout.  The third party vendor set up the htaccess file so that if a non-existent URL is enetered it redirects to the homepage instead of a 404 error being generated.  This results in google webmaster reporting duplicate titles and descriptions for pages that no longer exist.  I think that it would be better for a dedicated 404 error page to be displayed rather than redirecting back to the homepage  So is it better to have a website redirect a 404 to the homepage than have a dedicated 404 page instead?
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This is a  about Apache's mod_rewrite.   Changing a request URL or redirecting users to a different URL than the one they originally requested is done using mod_rewrite. This includes such things as:   Changing HTTP to HTTPS (or the other way around) Changing a request to a page which no longer exist to a new replacement. Modifying a URL format (such as ?id=3433 to /id/3433 ) Presenting a different page based on the browser, based on the referrer, based on anything possible under the moon and sun. Anything you want to mess around with URL   Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Mod_Rewrite Rules but Were Afraid to Ask!  How can I become an expert at writing mod_rewrite rules?   What is the fundamental format and structure of mod_rewrite rules? What form/flavor of regular expressions do I need to have a solid grasp of? What are the most common mistakes/pitfalls when writing rewrite rules? What is a good method for testing and verifying mod_rewrite rules? Are there SEO or performance implications of mod_rewrite rules I should be aware of? Are there common situations where mod_rewrite might seem like the right tool for the job but isn't? What are some common examples?   A place to test your rules  The  web site is a great place to play around with your rules and test them. It even shows the debug output so you can see what matched and what did not.
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There is a extra slash added to the chat room URLs in the side bar. This is not causing any redirection issue or 404 not found error. Just observed it and want to notify to the development team about this. Seems it is not a bug, but that can . Currently the following URLs are binded against the chat rooms in the side bar.  Tavern on the Meta https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com//rooms/89  The Fire Department https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com//rooms/1181   GIF for the reference:
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Why not make it mandatory to leave a reason or at least a remark of some sort whenever down voting?  You see more and more often questions being down voted while many times they are simply perfectly legitimate, as questions/as people being unable to achieve some desirable result. I am not talking about "Hey, please do this and that for me, thanks :D " posts.  I would like to know what reasons there are for not making it mandatory to leave a reason for a down vote.
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I came across  today. In reading the answer and the comments it turns out that the issue was just a simple typo that the OP made. So that being the case I decided that this question probably needs to be closed since this will not be helpful to any future vistors. However, in looking at the flag reasons (I don't have the close ability yet), I don't see a flag that would be appropriate.   I know some of these options might still be influx because of the . However, until a different off-topic flag description is created, how should this be flagged? Or should this not be flagged at all and just allowed to live on or wait for a user with close votes to use a custom off-topic close option?
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What happened to the close vote option for posts that describe an error or unexpected result but don't include the relevant code or any code!? This is on of the two most popular I use.. What am I supposed to do about questions like  now!?  I just also noticed "must show minimal understanding" is missing as well. After reading over the new option again, I am supposing that the intention is to use "not likely to be helpful for future viewers" for both of these?