There's a HTTP status code for pages which were deleted: 410 Gone. https://en.wi...

elliekelly · on July 20, 2020

Has anyone ever seen this in the wild? I didn’t even know it existed. Who knew there were so many different status codes.

LukeShu · on July 20, 2020

I'm sure I've seen 410 in the wild, but it's pretty uncommon. If you're keeping track of things well enough to know that there used to be a page there in order to serve a 410, you're probably keeping track of things well enough to be able to do something better, like redirect to an updated URL.

> Who knew there were so many different status codes.

As an HTTP nerd, the authoritative listing of the different codes is: https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes

Note: Everything with a reference that's not RFC 7231 is an extension; don't use that status code unless you actually implement that extension. For example, don't use 401 (Unauthorized) instead of 403 (Forbidden) unless you actually implement the RFC 7235 Authentication extension.

spc476 · on July 20, 2020

I use it to mark pages that I have taken down for good [1]. I have also used 418 ("I'm a teapot") response code on my gopher server to discourage web bots from attempting to index the site.

Edit--added note

[1] For all the good it does. I just checked my logs and I still see requests for pages I marked as "gone" 15 years ago.

tracker1 · on July 20, 2020

I use it for APIs when an item gets marked as deleted, vs actually deleted... depends on the underlying data though.

btrettel · on July 20, 2020

Seems that I edited my comment to add an example at the same time you posted yours.

irl_zebra · on July 20, 2020

GitLab does it for links to deleted repos!