Since I’ve built websites for large organizations with thousands of pages and millions of monthly site visitors for more than a decade, I’d say my grasp of web services is fine for this discussion. What’s your grasp look like?
No one said there should be legal action over 404 - Canon has a legal right to have their grant money properly stewarded. That is the issue. If you were the donor, you’d understand.
The point isn’t where we can dig to find info, the point is they had no right to pull down fully funded sites, cams, etc. under the false pretense of lack of funding.
As for what I’d rather see, 404 messages are rendered automatically and can contain any content the site owner chooses, therefore, should one be rendered, the 404 page should be informational with a link to doi.gov if that’s the ultimate place to go should there be a failure.
There was no reason to redirect a perfectly functioning site.
Oh, I see. Well since I’ve run the servers your sites are on at large organizations with 1000’s of users for longer I’d say you have a bit to learn.
The reason your sites have < .01% failure is because there is staff behind them replacing the disk drives that fail daily at a large site. Yes, daily. Let them accumulate and I guarantee you your failures would be > .01%. There is no staff there now. They were told to prep for an indeterminately long shutdown, so at the crudest level they put in top level redirects.
There’s a perfectly valid reason to put in such redirects. When/if a server fails (they always do) there will be something other than a timeout error. How many more resources would you have them expend to make the many different web sites match your idea of perfection? So the info is there for the clueful, and a failure is covered, but that’s not good enough for you.
The govt. is not running their sites on GoDaddy. And in the end it is only a web site, big deal. The content is out there 100 ways in other forms for anyone that is clueful and industrious enough to type a few words into a search engine. End of small issue. You are making a mountain from a molehill.