Ketogenicforums.com broken without www

(Dan) #1

title says it all:
https://ketogenicforums.com/ does not work
https://www.ketogenicforums.com/ does

typing to someone in a chat where it autolinks and saying “just go to ketogenicforums.com” will get them a dead page.

(Ethan) #2

It’s a DNS configuration error (could be by design i guess). There is no A or CNAME record for ketogenicforums.com. Adding it may also require a configuration change on the web server to serve content to the site without the www though, too.

(Dan) #3

I’m guessing that since www.ketogenicforums.com is a cname for ketogenicforums.hosted-by-discourse.com that in a world of CDN’s and load balancers it isn’t very easy to do root domain (apex) pointing since it requires an A record. That means they would have to point to specific ip addresses that probably change over time.

The solution would be to put the root/apex to an IP and have that ip simply return a 301 redirect to https://www.ketogenicforums.com which is a service offered by namecheap/godaddy etc so no infrastructure required to be managed by the keto dudes. Looks like the domain is registered via enom so i’m not sure if their DNS settings give them that option but that is all that needs to be done to fix this.

(Ethan) #4

Or it’s more simple to do a cname and point it to the same record—as long as the discourse provider can handle the redirect or make it the same virtual server record

(Dan) #5

Downside of setting a root/apex domain record to a CNAME is it breaks MX records and TXT records and everything else.

(Ethan) #6

I guess no spf then…not sure if they are using it for mail.