Show HN: A tool that alerts when 404s silently return 200)

2 pointsposted 2 days ago
by kurogai

3 Comments

bubblebeard

2 days ago

Interesting, this is a problem I have never considered. Regarding DOM changes though, wouldn’t it make more sense to monitor files for unexpected changes instead?

kurogai

2 days ago

That makes sense — if you’re monitoring from within the system and have access to files directly, that’s definitely a more robust way to detect changes.

But my use case is more external-facing.

So the only thing you can rely on is what the browser sees — HTML, DOM, JS. In that context, unexpected DOM changes (like a hidden login form reappearing, or a 403 turning into a 200) can be quite telling.

What do you think?

bubblebeard

2 days ago

Ah of course, that makes sense then. What about dynamic DOM content though? Like content produced by PHP or similar. Is that filtered somehow or does this analysis expect static content?