I see this question was also asked here: Configure Nginx global error page but there wasn't a suitable answer.

I am currently allowing only certain IPs to some of my sites and would like Nginx to drop connections from the rest of the IPs instead of returning a 403. Ideally, I would like to do this without configuring each site separately.

I have this in the http section:

error_page 403 =444;

But, now, it tries to serve up the page =444 instead of returning a 444.