It’s pretty frustrating to click on a link, only to be redirected to a 404 error page because the link is broken. But there’s a new initiative in cybertown called the NotFound Project that has come up with a better way to handle these pages. Instead of displaying the usual 404 error when a page can’t be found, participating sites that have installed the module from the project will display a missing child alert instead. The alerts are cycled so a different one is shown for every error, with the profiles for the missing children pulled from a constantly-updated database.
The NotFound Project was set up by Missing Children Europe in collaboration with Child Focus. It only profiles kids who’ve gone missing in the European Union for now, but it would be interesting (not to mention beneficial for the whole world) if they turned this into a global endeavor.
