Description
KOZ 404 Guard & URL Intelligence is an independent WordPress plugin developed and maintained by Tony Kozyriev. It grew from production tooling used on the UA FREE charitable foundation website.
Part of the KOZ Suite
This plugin is one focused module of the broader KOZ Suite, a family of independent WordPress plugins that share a common KOZ administration experience and visual identity.
Each KOZ plugin remains independently installable, so site owners can use only the modules they need or combine several modules into one toolkit.
Current public KOZ plugins:
- KOZ SEO Core — technical SEO, schema, sitemaps, AI discovery and OpenAI Vision image ALT.
- KOZ Copy Actions — accessible copy-to-clipboard actions for selected WordPress content.
- KOZ URL-Only Comment Spam — privacy-first local moderation for URL-only comment spam.
- KOZ Static Translate — AI-powered multilingual translation with Microsoft Azure AI Translator and static language routes.
- KOZ Translate Diagnostics — read-only diagnostics and privacy-safe reports for KOZ Static Translate.
- KOZ 404 Guard & URL Intelligence — privacy-safe 404/410 diagnostics, controlled same-site redirects and URL intelligence.
Features:
- administrator-started, ten-minute sampled 404/410 diagnostics without IP addresses, raw paths, query names, query values, raw User-Agent strings or raw referrers;
- salted path, query-key and external-referrer fingerprints;
- fixed 1-in-128 request sampling and a global maximum of one grouped log write every 30 seconds;
- optional lightweight bot 404 pages;
- exact same-origin redirects with duplicate-source and full cycle detection;
- boundary-aware 410 path-prefix rules and strict query-rule parsing;
- KOZ Suite status and navigation;
- quick environment inventory without content scanning;
- explicit nonce-protected internal-link deep scan with byte and link budgets;
- privacy-safe JSON export;
- explicit legacy-log sanitization;
- no direct external requests or telemetry.
Existing UA FREE 404 Guard settings, rules and logs are preserved during migration. No redirect or 410 rule is created automatically. Uninstalling the plugin does not delete data.
Installation
- Deactivate the legacy UA FREE 404 Guard plugin, but keep it installed until verification is complete.
- Upload and activate the KOZ plugin ZIP.
- Open KOZ Suite > 404 Guard.
- Verify settings, redirect rules, 410 rules and the privacy-safe export.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“KOZ 404 Guard & URL Intelligence” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “KOZ 404 Guard & URL Intelligence” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
2.1.4
- WordPress.org review remediation: enqueue frontend JS/CSS, preserve user control over legacy plugin activation, and fix settings sanitization callback.
- Requested WordPress.org permalink:
koz-404-guard, matching the existing plugin text domain. - Updated WordPress compatibility metadata for WordPress 7.1.
- No functional changes.
2.1.3
- Prevents WordPress canonical guessing from dropping a language-like namespace on 404 requests.
- Keeps stale translated routes as real 404 responses unless an explicit KOZ redirect rule exists.
- Preserves same-namespace canonical fixes.
2.1.2
- Separates Cloudflare/system-route 404s from real content misses.
- Classifies legacy ?attachment_id= 404s without storing the attachment ID.
- Shows the privacy-safe source classification in the grouped diagnostics table and export.
- Keeps system routes protected from redirect and 410 rules.
2.1.1
- Rebranded as KOZ 404 Guard & URL Intelligence.
- Added KOZ Suite integration and multilingual runtime administration.
- Preserved legacy settings, redirects, 410 rules and privacy-safe log data.
- Replaced the legacy support footer with the shared KOZ support panel.
- Kept the production safety and privacy contracts unchanged.