I came across this in another thread. Big white letters on a blue screen.
I’ve searched around but all I could get was geek gobbledygoop that didn’t explain much at all.
Are the Internet police going to come and get me for trying to enter the “Forbidden City?”
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the set of rules by which web browsers and web servers communicate.
The protocol defines a long list of error codes that the web server may return to the web browser if something goes wrong. You’re probably familiar with Error 404, which means something you tried to access was not found.
Web servers, like file systems, have a system of permissions that say who is allowed to access what stuff. All Error 403 means is you tried to access something you didn’t have the proper permissions for, either because you weren’t logged in, were logged in but not as the correct person, or because the administrator had simply configured something incorrectly. The latter is the usual case.
By default, all errors (including 404s and 403s) are logged by the server. Whether anybody looks at the particular logs in question for the particular site concerned is anybody’s guess.
Remember, when you surf the web, you are asking a series of servers to send files (aka pages) to your browser, which will then render them for you nicely.
The file your browser is asking for has security settings (all files have these, even if the setting is that it allows anyone to do anything with it. A 403 error means you’ve asked for a file that you don’t have permission to view, so it’s not giving it to you.
Sites can customize what your browser will show when it encounters a 403 error, or any other error. For example, check out http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/errors/404.html.
HAH! Muttrox that explains it very clearly! Thanks for making my day! 