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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I return 418 in some cases where somehow someone ended up somewhere in the code that I otherwise thought impossible. It works pretty well as far as letting folks know that something particularly unusual has happened / this isn't your ordinary error.

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A less humorous unusual status code is 451. Unfortunately, it probably should be used more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451

I think that would get attention, although I wouldn't want there to be panic ;)

I come from a country with rather _interesting_ views on what should be allowed online. 451 is used often enough that I've seen it in the wild more than once (and consider yourself lucky if you haven't encountered it...).

I get those every so often from US websites that doesn't want to deal with the GDPR.

That suggests that there are websites anywhere that do want to deal with GDPR, which seems rather unlikely.

Of course there's a lot of people who would prefer to ignore laws. That doesn't make GDPR an especially bad one.

Except a 4xx error should not be issued for internal errors.

I do hope this is a humorous comment

Why? The codes mean things, 418 specifically is a joke, but the entire 4xx range are client errors, i.e. a differently formed request would've succeeded.

A perhaps-reasonable suggestion could be to use a 5xx range code that isn't specified. E.g. 555, or 567.

(But I'm not sure how it would ever not simply be a 500 - server thought it couldn't happen, it could and did, that's just a plain and simple error isn't it?)

I think the idea behind 418, as much as there was an idea beyond a joke, was to indicate you sent your request to a teapot instead of a server. So yeah, client error for why it's not 518 instead.

But it works in this example for "client did something weird I don't understand", so still client error - something akin to a 404, "client tried to go somewhere I don't understand".

Yes, exactly, I wasn't excluding 418 in saying all 4xx are errors in the client's request.

But 'client did something weird I don't understand' is a 400, 405, something; not the same as 'this cannot happen' at all.

But it's the clients fault for trying to communicate with a teapot. There's nothing wrong inside the teapot. You just tried to communicate with a teapot. That's silly. Here's a 418 for you.

Again, yes, I am not saying 418 is wrong to be 4xx, I am including it in 'the entire 4xx range are client errors'.

I would be extremely disappointed if a 555 error didn't have something to do with bad timing.

400 series codes are for client errors. 500 series codes are for server errors.

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