## Abstract

[RFC2324] was an April 1 RFC that lampooned the various ways HTTP was abused; one such abuse was the definition of the application-specific 418 (I’m a Teapot) status code.

In the intervening years, this status code has been widely implemented as an “easter egg”, and therefore is effectively consumed by this use.

This document changes 418 to the status of “Reserved” in the IANA HTTP Status Code registry to reflect that.

## Note to Readers

RFC EDITOR: please remove this section before publication

The issues list for this draft can be found at https://github.com/mnot/I-D/labels/thanks-larry.

The most recent (often, unpublished) draft is at https://mnot.github.io/I-D/thanks-larry/.

Recent changes are listed at https://github.com/mnot/I-D/commits/gh-pages/thanks-larry.

See also the draft’s current status in the IETF datatracker, at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-nottingham-thanks-larry/.

## Status of this Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as “work in progress”.

This Internet-Draft will expire on March 26, 2018.

## Copyright Notice

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This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

## 1. Introduction

[RFC2324] was an April 1 RFC that lampooned the various ways HTTP was abused; one such abuse was the definition of the application-specific 418 (I’m a Teapot) status code.

In the intervening years, this status code has been widely implemented as an “Easter Egg”, and therefore is effectively consumed by this use.

This document changes 418 to the status of “Reserved” in the IANA HTTP Status Code registry to reflect that.

This indicates that the status code cannot be assigned to other applications currently. If future circumstances require its use (e.g., exhaustion of all other 4NN status codes), it can be re-assigned to another use.

Implementations are encouraged to avoid “squatting” on status codes in this manner; while there are a number of unassigned status codes in each range currently, unofficial, uncoordinated use makes the definition of new status codes more difficult over the lifetime of HTTP, which (hopefully) is a potentially very long period of time.

## 2. IANA Considerations

This document updates the following entry in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Status Code Registry:

- Value: 418
- Description: Reserved
- Reference: [this document]

IANA should also typographically distinguish “Unassigned” and “Reserved” in the registry descriptions, to prevent confusion.

## 3. Security Considerations

This document has no security content.

## 4. Informative References

[RFC2324]
  Masinter, L., “Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)”, RFC 2324, DOI 10.17487/RFC2324, April 1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2324>.

## Author's Address