404 page for private objects is confusing

Not sure if we should fix this. Currently, Launchpad's general policy with private stuff that you cannot see is to pretend that it doesn't exist.

We could perhaps note in the 404 page if someone isn't logged in that some things are not visible unless you have permission to see them.

I agree that in this example, the user does have permission when the user logs in. The same might be true with 403 where the user needs to login or login using a different Launchpad profile.

Both launchpad-forbidden.pt and launchpad-notfound.pt should state:
    You may need to login as a different to access this URL.

The 404 page might also need to state that:
    The page may have been removed.
for cases where the object was made private after it had been public. Do not state that the reason the page was removed was because it was private.

Fixed in stable r13927 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/13927>.

I don't think this is really fixreleased: the warning is very small, and is dwarfed by the "Lost something?" heading. This regularly does still confuse people; it just happened to a Bazaar contributor today.

See also bug 888662.

I dare say the most common cause of people seeing a 404 against Launchpad is a private object, so the message ought to at least make that equally prominent. People do not "lose things."