== My take on permanent versus temporary HTTP redirects in general When I started digging into the HTTP world (which was around the time I started writing DWiki), the major practical difference between permanent and temporary HTTP redirects was that browsers aggressively cached permanent redirects. This meant that permanent redirects were somewhat of a footgun; if you got something wrong about the redirect or changed your mind later, you had a problem (and [[other people could create problems for you RespectingRedirectsDownside]]). While there are ways to clear permanent redirects in browsers, they're generally so intricate that you can't count on visitors to do them ([[here's one way to do it in Firefox FirefoxClearRedirectsHSTS]]). (Since permanent redirects fix both that the source URL is being redirected and what the target URL is, they provide not one but two ways for what you thought was permanent and fixed to need to change. In a world where [[cool URLs change CoolUrlsChange]], permanence is a dangerous assumption.) Also, back then in theory syndication feed readers, web search engines, and other things that care about the canonical URLs of things would use a permanent redirect as a sign to update what that was. This worked some of the time in some syndication feed readers for updating feed URLs, but definitely not always; software authors had to go out of their way to do this, and there were things that could go wrong ([[cf RespectingRedirectsDownside]]). Even back in the days I don't know if web search engines paid much attention to it as a signal. All of this got me to use temporary redirections almost all of the time, even in situations where I thought that the redirection was probably permanent. That Apache and other things made temporary redirections the default also meant that it was somewhat easier to set up my redirects as temporary instead of permanent. Using temporary redirects potentially meant somewhat more requests and a somewhat longer delay before some people with some URLs got the content, but I didn't really care, not when set against the downsides of getting a permanent redirect wrong or needing to change it after all. In the modern world, I'm not sure how many people will have permanent HTTP redirects cached in their browsers any more. Many people browse in more constrained environments where browsers are throwing things out on a regular basis (ie phones and tablets), browsers have probably gotten at least a bit tired of people complaining about 'this redirect is stuck', and I'm sure that some people have abused that long term cache of permanent redirects to fingerprint their site visitors. On the one hand, this makes the drawback of permanent redirects less important, but on the other hand this makes their advantages smaller. Today I still use temporary redirects most of the time, even for theoretically permanent things, but I'm not really systematic about it. Now that I've written this out, maybe I will start to be, and just say it's temporary for me for now onward unless there's a compelling reason to use a permanent redirect. (One reason to use a permanent redirect would be if the old URL has to go away entirely at some point. Then I'd want as a strong as signal as possible that the content really has migrated, even if only some things will notice. Some is better than none, after all.)