Somewhat personally funny story.<p>Some number of years ago I saw a huge traffic spike on <a href="https://jsonip.com" rel="nofollow">https://jsonip.com</a>. After investigating, I saw that someone who seemed to have a misconfigured squid proxy that wasn’t valid IP data was hitting the api hundreds of times a minute.<p>The scale of jsonip was a lot smaller back then and still just a personal project but the requests were significantly crushing the server in addition to regular traffic.<p>As a mild joke, I updated the code to return “418 You are a teapot” for the squid proxy briefly. Just long enough for the user to be “wth” and investigate so they’d update their configuration. I just targeted the obviously malformed requests.<p>Within a day or so the proxy either stopped making requests or got fixed.<p>I got a laugh out of it and removed that code. Hopefully the person on the other end also got the joke.
Ah yes, the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.<p><a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324" rel="nofollow">https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324</a><p>Back in the day I really wanted to build an ethernet ready and HTCPCP compliant coffee machine. Never got around to it, but in the days of Pi Zero and similar hardware it's not as of complicated anymore.
Honestly, this has been posted about so many times that the only way this shouldn't be flagged as a dupe is if you show us photographs of an actual teapot that implements this response.