Empty tag archives on make / design (and elsewhere) should return 404 behaviour

[jonoaldersonwp]

E.g., ​https://make.wordpress.org/design/tag/23282d/

[dd32]

As 23282d is an actual tag on the site, is there an upstream ticket on core.trac.wordpress.org to reference for this behaviour (and/or to fix the behaviour?)

[jonoaldersonwp]

There are some scenarios where an empty tag should still return a valid response (e.g., when it has 'content', purpose, etc).

IMO, the default should be to 404 these, but there are people who're using them in the wild.

A core fix, therefore, becomes rather complicated.

Let's fix here in the meantime?

[dd32]

Just noting that this behaviour is intentional in WordPress as of ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/8761

and an upstream ticket for this is ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44848

[dd32]

I'm going to close this as reported-upstream based on ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44848. Changing the behaviour here can be fixed in core, and isn't going to be changed on WordPress.org.

In the meantime, I've removed the hex-colour-tags on design that were unused.

[jonoaldersonwp]

As I mentioned above, there are valid scenarios on other websites where an empty archive should return a 200 status (e.g., when the theme outputs a description and/or template content). As such, a sweeping 'fix' isn't suitable - as ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44848 discusses.

In our case, however, we know that an empty archive should always return a 404. Given the simplicity and low surface area of the issue, we should fix it locally.

[ocean90]

In this case it seems to be easier to just delete the tags without posts as Dion already did.