Purpose

This module adds a couple of admin reports to review the most common 404 errors on your site.

When a redirect module is available, these reports include the option of adding or updating a redirect for paths that have resulted in 404 errors in the past (thanks to benclark). For D6, this uses Path Redirect. For D7, this module was moved to Redirect.

Why?

By default, Drupal handles all requests coming into your website for files that don't exist on the disk. This means that Drupal runs every time someone tries to visit a page that doesn't exist, in order to show your custom 404 page.

More importantly, this also means that Drupal runs every time some other page or email tries to include a missing image, CSS, or other file from your site. And since it misses any caching you might be using, it can result in a high server load on popular sites. This tends to be a problem when moving an existing site into Drupal: it's not uncommon to overlook some directory of images that need to be migrated over because (for example) the existing mailing list templates use them.

There have been many discussions on drupal.org about how to better handle 404s, to prevent Drupal from processing when it doesn't need to. I am of the belief that it's better to let Drupal run, because if Drupal logs the 404s it processes, it is easier to identify the files that need to be migrated and other sites that need to be updated with new URLs. For example, some companies may have a departmental blog running elsewhere in WordPress that includes images from the main Drupal site. Without these logs from Drupal, you might not know that your failure to migrate images has broken someone else's site until they get pretty ticked about it.

That doesn't explain why you misspelled "referrer"

Shut up.

Upcoming Features

• Filtering. Date range filtering would be useful, as well as a path/referer filter.
• Additional reports. I'm not sure exactly what yet, but I'll add them when I think of things that will be useful.
• CSV export of report data.

Maintenance

As of December 23, 2012, I'm marking this module as seeking a co-maintainer, and getting maintenance fixes only. I don't have any clients using this module any more and no longer have time to keep working on it like I once did.

Sponsorship

Development of the 6.x version of module was sponsored by Jackson River. Our mission is to support and strengthen non-profits, socially responsible businesses, cause-based initiatives, and progressive foundations by enhancing the effectiveness of their mission, people, process, and technology.