Worked Great

Nice idea, I’ll think about it. The problem I see is that the 404 template of the used theme maybe overrides this setting to force a 404. That’s just a possibility, I don’t know if any theme does so. I’ll test a few themes.

I havent looked at how your offering up the 404 but if your setting a header and returning a page then the browser should get the 410 even if the user sees the same 404 page. Its mainly a SEO thing. Random 404s for pages that existed look bad. 410 tells the SE why the content is not available and it gets immediately pulled from search crawls with no direct impact on rank.

I’m acquainted with the SEO thing. That’s not the issue. But crafting a plugin for WordPress you have to be aware of that there are thousands of themes and ten-thousands of plugins. If every plugin tries to set a header and to send a page your site would crash for sure. Doing it the WordPress way means to tell WP that it should send back a 420 when it starts to send data. But this could also be done by other plugins or by the theme… In that case a later setting would overwrite an earlier one. Testing is absolutely essential to ensure that a plugin works in as many variety of configurations as possible.

Peter

That is understandable, maybe take a look at yoasts redirect function, it is what I am using now to do the same thing, except I have to write Reg-expressions to get it working. Just a suggestion. The plugin works fine as is.