Opened 3 years ago
#53574 new defect (bug)
404 redirect guessing should not apply on URLs with trailing slashes
Reported by: | markjaquith | Owned by: | |
---|---|---|---|
Milestone: | Awaiting Review | Priority: | normal |
Severity: | normal | Version: | |
Component: | Canonical | Keywords: | |
Focuses: | Cc: |
Description
The original intent of the 404 redirect guessing functionality was to resolve URLs that got split in half by e-mail clients and the like. Some of them would see a dash in a URL and assume they could wrap it to the next line like a multi-syllable word, so you'd have people clicking links like https://example.com/some-post-
because with-a-long-slug/
got wrapped to the next line in the e-mail.
But currently if you navigate to https://example.com/bad-slug/
where that doesn't exist, but https://example.com/bad-slug-exists/
does, you'll get redirected.
This doesn't make much sense. The trailing slash on https://example.com/bad-slug/
conclusively indicates that you didn't click a slug-truncated URL. In this case, it makes more sense to just let it be a 404.