jaspervalero
commented
11 years ago Yes, I'm all for a creative and fun 404 especially with a gaming related website. I agree we don't want to much info, but a few DB queries shouldn't be too bad. If crawlers are hitting a 404 a lot, that is another issue entirely and we should look into decreasing the frequency.
aaclayton
I think an attractive and helpful 404 page is useful for any site. This is particularly important on TF because the 404 template gets pulled more often than just on "page not found". A lot of areas (private groups, private forums, private posts, etc.. ) are not accessible unless the requesting user satisfies permissions, if this check fails, the user is often re-routed to 404 instead of a special 405 (forbidden) page.
I don't really have an issue with this, but I would like to check the following boxes with an improved 404:
1) Stylish - make it look good, if the 404 is cool, people won't be as frustrated at getting it instead of content.
2) Informative - give people some options of alternative content
3) Lightweight - we need to balance the above with avoiding too many database queries on a 404 page, if it's a lot of dynamic content our server runs the risk of getting crushed by site crawlers or other bots that wind up hitting the 404 a lot.