Forum 'view' links return a 200 status on a 404 template

[jonoaldersonwp]

The following URLs are linked to from within the wp.org ecosystem, and return a 404 template with a 200 HTTP status:

• ​https://wordpress.org/support/view/popular/
• ​https://wordpress.org/support/view/archived
• ​https://wordpress.org/support/view/spam/
• ​https://wordpress.org/support/view/taggedmodlook/
• ​https://wordpress.org/support/view/pending/

These should return a 404 HTTP status.

[Otto42]

The popular one is a not found, but the rest are legitimate and return content.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Not for me. Do you have special privs? Have you tested in incognito?

[Otto42]

Okay, yeah, these are legitimate pages for moderators basically. It's empty if you can't see hidden things like spam and archived posts and so forth.

404's make sense for 4 of those, but /taggedmodlook will have valid posts on it from time to time, between the time a post is flagged and the time a moderator looks at it. Also it has the permanent modlook post on it, so I'm not sure why it doesn't show up if you're not logged in.

[jonoaldersonwp]

Gotcha.
Well, if we're showing a 404 template we should return a 404 header, and, vice-versa - regardless of whether the page sometimes has content.

The elegant solution for those periodically populated pages would be to give them a proper template + placeholder content, and noindex them.

[dd32]

The URLs listed here all return HTTP 404's:

$ curl -Is https://wordpress.org/support/view/popular/ https://wordpress.org/support/view/archived https://wordpress.org/support/view/spam/ https://wordpress.org/support/view/taggedmodlook/ https://wordpress.org/support/view/pending/ | grep ^HTTP
HTTP/2 404
HTTP/2 404
HTTP/2 404
HTTP/2 404
HTTP/2 404

Logged in users may see a 200 response, as bbPress can't tell if there'll be any output until the page is rendered.