Mastodawn

Ben Ramsey Feb 2, 2025

If you work in government and are asked to remove content from websites (as a result of executive orders), please use the HTTP status code 451 instead of 404.

451 is the correct status code to use for these cases, and you'll be doing the rest of the country a service by using it.

Addendum: you should also include a Link header with the link relation "blocked-by" that "Identifies the entity that blocks access to a resource following receipt of a legal demand."

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7725.html

RFC 7725: An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles

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JRaccoon Feb 2, 2025

@ramsey This is mostly unnecessary hairsplitting, but I think it could be argued that semantically 451 is the correct code when the content is not removed but is blocked for YOU but not necessarily for everybody else (using geolocation or something else). I think that's why it's a 4xx client error.

So, if the pages are made unavailable for everybody (in other words, removed), I would say 404 is the correct code. Do I actually care? Absolutely not xD

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Ben Ramsey

@jakeRaccoon I'm hairsplitting for subversive purposes, like when your administration forces you to take down scientific data sets and remove whole repositories of information because they don't like it.