Comments on: Useful 404 page

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:05:36 +0000

You may need to remind people that a reply address needs to be either in the module or specified.

re: bots, I get them filling out forms all the time until I set up gbutton turning test.

btw, Open Source Days produced a potentially interested customer for yakity chat… weee!

By: Pontus

Pontus — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:47:49 +0000

You have a good point there Martin. We haven’t had any (major) problems with badly behaving bots. Actually I found one search engine spider that treated text/css in a rel attribute as an URL. I notified them about this and they seem to have fixed that issue.

In the next iteration of our web site I will try to put some effort into the 404 pages

By: Martin B

Martin B — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:25:06 +0000

You should be a little bit careful when sending e-mails for every each invalid access. Badly behaving bots may potentially generate lot of emails flooding your e-mail account; therefore you should use some way to ban requests from repeatedly recurring IP-addresses. Besides that, this is a good idea. I have used it for years and it has proven to be an efficient part of my workflow.

A nice feature to throw into a customized 404 page, is a link to search the site for the words from the bad URL. This will help the user to find the right place easier.

By: Pontus

Pontus — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:28:42 +0000

Thanks Matt!

The small e-mail snippet has fixed alot of headaches when a restructure has been necessary. It’s easy to miss a few internal links here and there. But that will hopefully be solved with the new Link Manager in Roxen 5. Haven’t had time to upgrade on any production server yet but Roxen 5 is a real improvement I think.

Good luck with the Open Source Days!

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:38:04 +0000

This is a very good thing tip.