'He... had to delete 40 pages of emails': Boss insists web developer send him emails for every 404 error

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  • 01
    404 the page you were looking for doesn't seem to exist anymore Back to Unsplash MacBook Pro
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    We must be alerted every time a user sees a 404 error on our site!
  • 03
    Edit: to everyone saying I'm ungrateful to my boss etc. and that we should be monitoring 404s anyway, we had, gtm, yandex metrica and a bunch of other analytics software running on the site.
  • 04
    Had the boss not insisted on am EMAIL being sent then I would have simply crunched the logs for him, the point of this story is that it's malicious compliance, not "I purposely chose a course of action to wind my boss up". Anyway, on with the story:
  • 05
    This happened around this time last year: I'm a website developer and I used to work for the stupidest buffoon of a man who had no clue about web development (he just ran the company, managed the accounts etc.) but he thought he did. He read articles on web development and forced us to implement the new
  • 06
    things he had spent five minutes reading up on almost weekly. One day, he was messing about on our company's site and because of some work I was doing, one of the pages he was trying to look at was temporarily unpublished resulting in a 404 error (This is just what the website tells you when a page can't be found at the URL you're visiting).
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    He went berserk and said lectured me on how this was completely unprofessional and if a customer ever saw it we'd lose them. I rolled my eyes and said it was only for a minute and it was fine.
  • 08
    He then told me we needed to be "alerted somehow" every time a user got a 404 error on the site. First of all, this is ridiculous, you don't need to be alerted every time this happens, second of all sites get hundreds and hundreds of 404 errors every day due to automated scripts trying random URLs to see if they can find anything good, or
  • 09
    spiders trying to look for pages that may have once existed but don't anymore. I explained this to him but he wasn't having any of it, "No, we need to be emailed every time this happens so we can fix it". I was crying with despair internally at this point, but I decided it'd be hilarious to prove my point anyway.
  • 10
    I set up a script on our 404 template that'd email him every time a 404 page was displayed and left it overnight. I came in the next day to find him sitting there scrolling through pages of his webmail trying to delete the 4000 or so emails that had arrived overnight, the best part was you could search for the subject, but at most only 100 were
  • 11
    displayed at a time so he would have had to delete 40 pages of emails :D I also made sure to take my sweet time disabling it so he probably got a couple hundred more before I got round to doing it
  • 12
    thatnerdynerd What was his response
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    lord_kelly OP. He told me to write something in so each URL only got emailed once, and he set up some filter on his email so they wouldn't go to his main inbox. I left shortly after so they're probably still going :D
  • 14
    Newbosterone. For maximum malicious compliance, include the URL in the body of the email. Then, he'll get the email, click on the link, and generate another email.
  • 15
    transitfanatic. This reminds me of the customer who asked me to supply him with a list of all the URLs on his site that returned a 404...
  • 16
    Zargawi I don't know, doesn't seem unreasonable to expect your pages to not go missing suddenly. I'm a web developer, I know happens sometimes but it's not okay because it was just a minute, these things should be avoided.
  • 17
    [deleted] I mean, he did have a point, a customer browsing your page and getting a 404 is unprofessional, and it looks bad, it could make them go "Jeez these guys can't even set up a web page properly", and it should be avoided at all costs.
  • 18
    But the correct solution to that would be "try to schedule the website's downtime around when we have the least amount of traffic", not "email me every time we register a 404"
  • 19
    [deleted] I use to be a web dev and I would have been fired if I took a page down without redirecting traffic first. A 404 does in fact lose you customers.

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