Making WordPress.org

Opened 3 years ago

Closed 3 years ago

#6221 closed defect (bug) (worksforme)

Use `410 Gone` response on permanently closed plugin pages.

Reported by: peterwilsoncc's profile peterwilsoncc Owned by:
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: Plugin Directory Keywords:
Cc:

Description (last modified by dd32)

Plugin pages for permanently closed plugins currently emit a HTTP 200 OK response. For these pages a 410 Gone response makes more sense.

I suggest this for both developer initiated (such as this plugin for app.net) and plugin team initiated closures.

For temporary closures, I think it's best if the response code remain 200 OK.

Change History (3)

#1 @dd32
3 years ago

  • Description modified (diff)
  • Summary changed from Use `401 Gone` response on permanently closed plugin pages. to Use `410 Gone` response on permanently closed plugin pages.

401/403 are permission-related statuses, which do not make sense to be used in this context IMHO.

Updated to reflect 410 Gone rather than 401.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 410 Gone client error response code indicates that access to the target resource is no longer available at the origin server and that this condition is likely to be permanent.

There's three statuses we can use here:

  • 200 (Current)
  • 404 (Temporarily not here)
  • 410 (Permanently gone, no longer exists).

When a plugin is closed, we currently return a robots noindex tag for closed plugins but keep 200 as the status code.

I don't think we should return 404 for plugins that exist, but are no longer available.

410 Makes the most sense to me.

Last edited 3 years ago by dd32 (previous) (diff)

#2 follow-up: @jonoaldersonwp
3 years ago

It's an important distinction that whilst the plugin has been removed, the page has not. Whilst it still contains links to related resources (e.g., support forums), we should maintain the 200 status (in addition to the noindex directive).

A 410 here is a dangerous option; it'll permanently 'kill' those URLs, and prevent them from ever being indexed by search engines in the future.

#3 in reply to: ↑ 2 @dd32
3 years ago

  • Resolution set to worksforme
  • Status changed from new to closed

Replying to jonoaldersonwp:

It's an important distinction that whilst the plugin has been removed, the page has not.

Works for me. Closing as such.

410 still seems reasonable for never-opening-again (ie. closed for 6+months), and although I don't think search engines would kill indexing forever, by that point they'll have already ceased showing it in results through the noindex, so changing the status makes little difference here.

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