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)
> 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.
The best 404 page helps the user find what they were looking for. You can run a cron job on your server logs to analyze your log files for statistically significant problems (not just 404's); that script can report them all to you my email or SMS or whatever. Further, you can run cron jobs that crawl your site looking for broken links, and/or replay some of the previously-working GET requests; then you will find broken links even when nobody is using your site.
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.
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.
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.
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)