500 error at old URL for numeric tag (Google crawl fail)

My forum has a tag which happens to be a 4 digit number, 6309. It’s been around for a while. It displays OK on posts, and the URL in that case is /tag/210-tag/210

But rather than a pretty 404 page, a url like /tag/6309 is returning a server error:

Oops

The software powering this discussion forum encountered an unexpected problem. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I’m guessing that some time previously that was a valid way to refer to the tag. Because it’s a server error, google’s crawler is complaining to me about it.

Tag page looks like this:

I think 404 would be correct.

2 Likes

Yeah, that’s not pretty:

ActionView::Template::Error (No route matches {action: "tag_feed", controller: "tags", tag_id: "9999"})
  app/views/list/list.erb:136
  app/views/list/list.erb:134
  lib/topic_list_responder.rb:16:in 'block (2 levels) in TopicListResponder#respond_with_list'
  lib/topic_list_responder.rb:7:in 'TopicListResponder#respond_with_list'
  app/controllers/tags_controller.rb:223:in 'block (2 levels) in <class:TagsController>'
  app/controllers/tags_controller.rb:229:in 'TagsController#show'
  app/controllers/application_controller.rb:447:in 'block in ApplicationController#with_resolved_locale'
  app/controllers/application_controller.rb:447:in 'ApplicationController#with_resolved_locale'
  app/controllers/application_controller.rb:1098:in 'ApplicationController#ensure_dont_cache_page'
  lib/middleware/omniauth_bypass_middleware.rb:35:in 'Middleware::OmniauthBypassMiddleware#call'
  …

We should fix that error; we also might be able to fallback to looking for an all-numeric tag name if the tag id isn’t found.

Wayback first noticed that tag appearing on 2025-05-13 and its url was https://retrocomputingforum.com/tag/6309 which worked at the time and up until 2025-12-16.

1 Like

Ah, well-spotted. Perhaps some sort of 3xx redirection response would be right, even better than 404, in case the tag is valid?