Singing Potatoes
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Friday, 8 March 2002
A Learning Experience

So this morning, my Web site started notifying me of 404 errors from one user trying desperately to find this page. He or she was trying every possible spelling variation except the right one. Over and over again, thirty-five times in all, often trying the same invalid filenames (possibly under the belief that the system was just hiding it on them).

Being the helpful sort of person that I am, I added a special case to my error page, so that if another 404 error came in from this particular IP address, it would display a custom message providing them with a link to the page they were trying to reach, and indicating the correct spelling of the page's URL.

And they did in fact see this custom error message. FOUR TIMES. Rather than simply clicking on the link, they tried typing it in again, misspelling it three more times before they apparently hit on the right spelling (or just gave up and clicked on the link).

Ironically, the whois information on their IP address claimed that they were connecting from the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System. (I'd hate to see the result of Indiana's lower education!)

Posted by godfrey (link)
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