I have set IIS' error handling for 404 to go to that page.

I am surprised that people don't have friendly 'page not found' pages. On your site, for example, if you go to this page:

http://www.callcenters24x7.com/pagedoesnotexist.asp

then it comes up with a fairly unhelpful page. (I'm not trying to be derogatory or critical of your site but trying to understand why people don't use this.)

But if you go this this page on a portal that I'm currently working on:

http://www.usaskiforum.com/pagedoesnotexist.asp

then there is a friendly "page not found" message with help to redirect the person around the site.

So if you re-arrange your site in any way and a SE is pointing to a now missing page on your site you're going to lose visitors right? But in my scenario they are more likely to stay.

BTW: Thanks for the examples of when people usually use hidden pages - that was insightful and helpful.

As an addendum to this post, this page:

http://www.usaskiforum.com/pagedoesnotexist.aspx

still does not give a friendly error because DNN is trying to handle it and I believe that I need to redirect to friendly Page Not Found page from web.config which I have not done yet.

Very pleased that we're on the same page :)

Now what I would like to do, is have that info, the page that they were trying to reach, appended to a log file with today's day somewhere on the system. Then, once a day, using the scheduling system built into DNN, a process takes a look to see if there is a log file from yesterday, if so, it emails that log file to the admin of the portal. That way, you are only alerted when people are trying to reach a page that is not there and you don't need to check the IIS log each day.

A lot of the structure for doing this is already built into DNN and before I go and write the missing bits I want to make sure that it isn't already available or that someone has not already written it. The reason that I suspect that it is out there already or already written is that it is such an obvious and useful maintenance utility.

I've done a bit of searching but haven't come up with anything yet.

I'm thinking along the lines of a custom Module that can be added to the Page-Not-Found page. I assume that if the module is hidden that the Page_Load event is still triggered and that in this event you would open the log file in append mode and get the HTTP_REFERRER value and write that to the file along with the date/time etc.

A second module would be required to attach to the scheduler which would check the log folder and email the previous day's file. Of course the configuration options of this module are unlimited. When does it clean-up the old log files? etc. The scheduled module would probably work on a portal wide basis while the PNF module would be per site.

Now we could also get really fancy (and I was discussing this elsewhere on this forum with someone) where we write the Page-Not-Found to a unique field in a table - but not before we checked that table to see if that page was already in there - of course. We then fire off an email stating that there is a new entry in the table. You click the link in the email and go to the admin of the table. This allows you to type in the page that should have come up instead of the Page-Not-Found. The next time that someone tries to surf to this page they land on our Page-Not-Found table but the pre-record insert finds that the record is already in the table with the correct matching page and automatically redirects them.

The project is now officially out-of-control :)