[ESIP-all] Federal sites : please don't use HTTP status 302

[Joe Hourcle]

(This qualifies as part of the 'orderly shutdown' stuff, I think, in asking other people not to break things)

GSA sent instructions to us HTTP status 302 to redirect to a shutdown notice ... please don't do it.

Instead, use HTTP status 503 (Service Unavailable), so the search engines know that it's just an interruption ... and any automated tasks don't think that your web service just sent them a response they're supposed to parse.



For info on how to do it, see:

Apache : http://stackoverflow.com/q/622466/143791
ISS : http://serverfault.com/q/483145/14119
Nginx : http://stackoverflow.com/q/5984270/143791

(and make sure that if you use that PNG they're sending around that you set appropriate alt text ... there's no reason to create a Section 508 violation over all of this)

-Joe