Help find missing kids by putting them on your 404 page | Hacker News Reader

Help find missing kids by putting them on your 404 page

tech.bluesmoon.info

81 pointsbluesmoon33 comments

I really thought we were going to take some steps forward in the UI world after the whole Facebook/ReadWriteWeb fiasco. Am I the only one who thinks this a bad idea? Now users who have already managed to get lost on your site will be presented with irrelevant information rather than something that helps them find what they're looking for.

Yes,

It's also amazing how any foolish idea can justified by the call to "Save The Children".

We consider them children, but I got two 15-year-olds in a row, one male and one female. In modern America, you're still a child, but as far as Judaism and Christianity are concerned, you're already a few years into being an adult at that point.

Yet another thing that organized religion has gotten wrong.

At least the 404 pages don't have comments on them directly, so you don't get comments like "WHY DID YOU KIDNAP THESE KIDS" or myspace-profile-style memorials.

Hey,

THAT's what we'll do. EVERY 404 is will accuse the reader of being a pedophile and demand they surrender. After all, some of the readers will be pedophiles and making them surrender is more important than anything else. The people who object are obviously sympathizers...

And then every moved or broken resource will increase your site's PageRank for the word "pedophile." I'd say that's a bad thing, but I think it's in the spirit of http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI ;)

The comments over at boagworld suggest a compromise as well as reasons why you shouldn't do this. All good in my opinion.

http://boagworld.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5275...

Do "have you seen this child" pictures really work, anyway? A lot of children look pretty similar, so I wouldn't be confident enough to call the police even if I had a picture of the kid in front of me when I saw him.

I never understood them. Even if I had an ironclad memory of a kid's face from a poster, under what circumstances would I conceivably run into them? If they're trying to stay hidden, they're probably doing a good job of it, and if their disappearance was not voluntary, I hate to say it, but I don't think you're going to see them walking about in public.

This is a really cool idea, I would like to have a drop in, embeddable <script> widget type thing to add this to my 404 page. I just don't have time to spare to port this code to django/python, a simple script will work on any platform.

Anyone care to spend a little time on this? Possibly cleaning up the design to be more aesthetically pleasing and possibly multiple themes/color schemes?

Again, really cool, I like it. Does some good and is cute at the same time.

Scott Hanselman built a JS only version: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PutMissingKidsOnYour404PageEnt...

Anyone have a link that shows the result? I didn't see one in the article and I'd like to see how it looks. Did I miss a link or screenshot in the original article?

http://bluesmoon.info/foobar

404s are the new milk containers.

404 - Not Found. Also missing, this child: <img...

I imagine the browser/server conversation goes something like this:

B: Hey man, can I get /foobar.html, please?

S: Sorry bro, I can't seem to find that resource.

B: ...

S: Hey, speaking of things I can't find, here are some missing kids!

I think the intentions behind the idea - trying to do some societal good with your web site - are great. It's just seems odd to me that the way you handle not being able to find what the user wants is by showing them something unrelated that is guaranteed to be not what they were looking for. What is the attraction to doing this on a 404 page, vs say a banner ad (as suggested elsewhere in the thread)?

[edit formatting]

The only thing I disagree with is the authors appreciation of an XML return type :) this is really cool though!

haha :) XML is better than scraping HTML (though YQL lets me do that too). I prefer JSON, which is one of the reasons I pass the service through YQL and get JSON out the other end.

Alas, their 404 page is just Blogger's:

http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2010/02/missing-kids-on-your-none...

I understand where you're coming from but I don't think anyone expects that he change his blogging platform for this post (as far as I know Blogger doesn't allow you to create custom 404 responses).

As CoryMathews pointed out, his actual website has working implementation:

http://bluesmoon.info/foobar

The actual 404 page is on my website: http://bluesmoon.info/foobar-or-anything-you-want

You should add geolocation down to city level. Nice idea.

How about: help find missing kids by putting them in your banner ads?

Seems a lot more people see those than 404 pages.

The thing is, he is more correct on another issue. The 404 page will help but the REAL issue is location-based reporting.

The real problem why I can't find missing kids is because I don't know which ones are missing in my area. The down side is that I won't get to see kids missing in CA while I am in NY and the CA kid was taken to NY.

The idea is: we need a service where given a person's location we can generate the right set of missing children (those who are from the area, or might have gone to the area).

After that we just need to put this information everywhere where important information is not displayed (free areas) like 404 pages, or anything or "please wait while we process xyz data, o and look at these missing children vs this progress bar"

I'll update my implementation later today with a geoip lookup. It will only work in the US and Canada, but that's better than nothing.

Uh,

The authorities don't know which children are missing in your area either.

Most child kidnappers are clever enough to move locations and not tell people. There could be exceptions but it movement seems to be more the rule.

"The Database" if such a thing existed, should have a field for "probable state". This field could be filled in by the police detective in charge of the case.

Most "kidnappings" are just parents stealing their kid from the parent that got custody. While a formal accusation of that parent, sans evidence, is and should be, illegal, if the mom says, "I think my ex is working on a fishing boat in Alaska", putting AK in the probable field is a good bet.

Services like this could then geo-ip serve content based on state abducted, and state probable.

I'll add it to my site, kind of makes me conflicted... its a great cause but i really don't want my users to see a 404 error :)

if there's enough interest in this, I'll put the code on github and anyone can get it from there.

ok, github here: http://github.com/bluesmoon/404kids

Now this is a fantastic idea.

This is an interesting concept which may be picked up by online news organizations.

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