handling a GET error properly
- by Andrew Heath
I have a website that takes two primary get strings:
?type=GAME&id=SomeGameID
?type=SCENARIO&id=SomeScenarioID
for reasons unknown, I have recently begun receiving requests for erroneous get strings from both Yandex and Baidu. They are always in the form of:
?type=GAME&id=SomeScenarioID
None of my users are triggering these errors, so I am (sort of) confident that this is not due to an HTML template error somewhere on my part. There is also no HTTP_REFER showing up in the $_SERVER array, so I'm guessing these are direct requests from bad dbase data on their part.
I see two options for dealing with these bad requests, and would like to know which is recommended... or if there are other, better options I have not thought of:
simply 404 the request, since it is incorrect
redirect the request to ?type=SCENARIO&id=SomeScenarioID because the scenario IDs are always valid, the breakage is due to asking for the wrong type.