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One request in eighteen asks for a removed page

· Lukas Wojcik

On 30 August this server answered 345,299 requests. 19,570 of them got a 410: gone, deliberately, not found missing by accident. That is one request in eighteen.

requests answered with 410 on 30 August, by area of the old statistics page advanced/* 6,268 reports 2,672 everything else 2,630 speed 2,084 referrers 1,143 systems 1,066 users 1,050 browsers 898 screens 890 plugins 869 19,570 of 345,299 requests, one in eighteen, behind them 13,657 addresses 1,971 different people knocked on a closed door in a single day

What is behind them

All of it is the old statistics page. Stats4U 2 had a sub-page for everything — screen resolutions, plugins, browser versions, systems, users, an advanced section with its own sub-sections for logs and failures and more. The rebuild has seven areas instead of forty, and the addresses that are gone are answered with 410 rather than 404, because they are not missing: they were removed on purpose and are not coming back.

Behind those 19,570 requests are 13,657 distinct addresses, which is what a site looks like when it used to generate a page per counter per section per language.

The number that is not about crawlers

16,431 of the requests are crawlers working through an index they built years ago, and that part is unremarkable. They will stop when they stop.

3,139 are not. Behind them are 1,971 different addresses that are not crawlers, in a single day, arriving at a page that no longer exists. Those are bookmarks, and links from forum posts, and the address bar of somebody who typed what used to work.

A 410 tells a crawler to forget the address. It tells a person nothing except that they are in the wrong place.

What is not built yet

There is no redirect yet. A visitor who asks for the browser breakdown of counter 754337 could plausibly be sent to that counter's technology area, which is where that information lives now. Building that is a decision that needs a number behind it, and the number arrived this week: until then nobody had counted how many people were arriving.

Two thousand people a day is not a rounding error on a site this size. It is the largest single group of visitors that had never appeared in any of these measurements, and it is on the list now.

What generalizes

410 is the polite version of a closed door, and it is aimed at machines. It is the right status code and it does nothing for the person standing in front of it.

The status code and the reader are two separate questions, and answering the first one correctly makes it very easy to assume the second has been answered too. The log is where the difference shows up: crawlers show as volume, people show as distinct addresses, and only the second number says whether a redirect is worth building.

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