Comments on: An Informative 404 Page

By: Stinky82

Stinky82 — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 01:22:28 +0000

As is the case with medications. ,

By: angel

angel — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:17:02 +0000

I need more information

By: Jordan Payne

Jordan Payne — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 01:27:24 +0000

The mailing idea isn’t such a good one. If some moron attempts to attack your site, they may find that vulnerability – flooding your email inbox.

Instead i would advise using PHP’s error handling functions and write to an error file.

By: David Kindness

David Kindness — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:44:59 +0000

Yep for anything other than a simple site this method is just going to fill your inbox up, not to mention the possibility of being spammed to death.

As others suggested a combined approach of using your webstats and a log file would be more appropriate.

By: Daniel Lindén

Daniel Lindén — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:22:27 +0000

Well, instead of emailing admin a database or log-file would be better. By using error-codes you can keep track of which messages that already has been submited and make it without spam. My first application was much like that, but later on I started to work with log-files which to me is the best solution, it even looks cool.

By: Will

Will — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:58:34 +0000

I have them transferred to my inbox but i set a rule in outlook to automatically move them into my errors folder and i then sift through that folder weekly. Much better than receiving direct to inbox.

By: David Appleyard

David Appleyard — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:20:58 +0000

You have all raised some very good points. This is mainly useful as a (very) temporary measure. When you launch a new site design or restructure it, it does allow you to find out the very common problematic pages easily. Another solution could be to write each 404 error to a database, then show a summary of the most popular errors.

By: Erik Reagan

Erik Reagan — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:19:14 +0000

I also agree. On any higher traffic site this would bombard someone with emails if a user just typed junk in for some reason. If you REALLY want to go a custom route (and not use a statistics or analytics program readily available) I would suggest writing these results to a file instead. If you want to get ‘fancy’ you can also create a cron job to mail the results weekly or however often you prefer.

By: Josh Harbaugh

Josh Harbaugh — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:13:25 +0000

I agree. Unless you’re dealing with a smaller site that wouldn’t generate as many 404s I would be looking to site statistics or analytics for page display errors.

By: Virgil

Virgil — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:12:54 +0000

I can see the usefullness of knowing what errors people are getting but that should be handled by your statistic program. My inbox is full enough with spam and like Martin suggests there is the possibility of people expoiting it and overflowing your email, like they do not already have enough people expoiting contact forms etc. or email bots etc.

By: Martin

Martin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:01:25 +0000

Ooh, 404. *reloads*. Ooh, again. *reloads*. Hey, perhaps I can annoy the admin! *reloads 10 times*. I can do that better. *uses a script to call the page 2000 times*.

Not to mention the potential XSS issues. If you do a tutorial, please make sure the outcome is complete.

By: Amy

Amy — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:00:59 +0000

I use Drupal and I have a neat module installed called “search404″. When a user enters a URL that does not exist, the site actually performs a search on the last bit of the URL and brings you to a page of results.