418 I'm a teapot

Yes. And write something to the logs, so you can find out there's a bug before users call your helpdesk. Arguably that's the most important part of any 5xx error.

It's a bit of a purist argument, but 4xx series means the client can fix something and get a better response.

Hmm, I don't think it's that purist. All my HTTP clients have the logic that 4xx is a non-retryable error, i.e. if I repeat the request I will always get the same response unless something is changed, whereas 5xx means that something is wrong on the backend and I should retry it later.

It is true I have often encountered inconsistencies in implementations but I do think that when that happens it really is a backend bug that should be fixed.

I thought it was handling fish under discuss m suspicious circumstances.

A 404 would mean that the client should not expect to find coffee there at all, which in this case would actually be better replaced by 418. However, if coffee can be found, just not right now, then it's the server's fault, so a 5xx code is in order, and 503 fits the bill best.

Many years ago, some person misconfigured their squid proxy and was hitting https://jsonip.com to the point my server at the time was turning green in the gills.

I started responding with 418 "You are a tea kettle" or something like that to those specific requests. The originating dev actually paid attention to their error messages and quickly resolved their config issue.

Fast forward to March this year. Some fucking numb nuts a-hole decided to add jsonip.com to an EXTREMELY widely used version of Dalvik/Android software that gets deployed to hundreds of thousands or millions of devices.

Overnight my traffic levels increased by 300%. I'm a solo dev offering a free service for 12 years. That kind of increase in traffic costs me money I've never had to plan for.

I ended up switching to Cloudeflare to handle the load with a WAF filter on the offending android tvs and other devices.

However Cloudflare doesn't properly route ipv4 address because "ipv6 is cool so we only do that" or something. Despite numerous support requests, that's still shmaybe an enterprise level feature.

I apologize to any long time users of the service. This was completely unexpected after more than a decade. I've been trying different "fixes" for 2 months and have not resolved a way to block this garbage traffic and still provide the original services.

Yea sorry I turned this funny old internet post about the mit coffee pot into a thing happening to me.

But if for some ungodly reason you're the dev or know who did it, REMOVE MY SERVICE ADDRESS FROM YOUR OUT OF DATE FROM TV/SMART DEVICE ANDROID code. You're literally fucking killing me. I've literally spend dozens of hours trying to find out if this was a contribution to a public source repo. Nothing.

Based on the Dalvik user agent, I only found a handful of references in Chinese repos. But google search is so terrible these days, even those are false flags.

So I have no idea who to contact about this. Some dipshit on your team(s) decided to abuse a free service as though there isn't a single human person behind it absorbing the costs and making sure it runs.