401 Traffic - What To Put On The Redirect Page?

401? I presume it's a paysite, don't you want to try to get them to sign up?

Give them a popunder, and then redirect to a free gallery.

Good post Lee, going through the same thing myself. Would like to hear strategies for 400, 401, 404, etc.

I must have missed my happy pills for today, or else you guys are smokin' something. If it's a 401 that means that the surfer has failed authentication. Some of the situations might be...

* An active member that has mistyped their password
* An expired member who attempts to login (and of course fails)
* A confused guest who might think that the "members" link is a how-to-join tour or the actual join page

Why on earth would you want to push these people away?? Looks like you mistyped your pass, here's a popunder and some free galleries!

Your 401 page should have at the minimum a link to the members area (to try again), the join page (to rejoin) and the tour.

rowen:

Your not 'pushing' them away, you've outlined maybe half the senerio's.

often times 401 are also people looking to see if the members area in not protected or uses a simple password protection to break (or brute force).

The point of handling 401 traffic is to send the real failed user to a page that gives them a lost password look up. But more often then not the person hitting the page isn't a member (hell half the time isn't even human).

stragies I've seen/used:
log it, count it, cookie it (if a cookie can't be set then redirect).
send it to a standard error page (normally with a popunder)
if the count for a paticular IP/username exceeds X attempts redirect to an in niche gallery
if ip/username exceeds Y attempts get it the off the server, send it to a top list or feed trades or raw no ratio affilate (yea you may get banned or kicked out of the program)

I actually had a nightly report of logins/attempts I counted the usernames, it was easy to see shared passwords etc without the need for any of the fancy applications out there and I made $$ off the traffic by redirecting usernames I knew were bad/shared/etc