Skip to content

www. Infront stops website access?

Solved Configure
10 2 2.4k 1
  • Strange thing today, thought my pals nodebb.com site was down, as browser prevented access.
    It gave the your connection is not private security warning (like when theres no SSL)
    But Ive been told issue was that i was using
    www.sitename.nodebb.com
    And should just use sitename.nodebb.com
    !
    Have I missed something, since when did www. stop websites accessing properly?

  • Strange thing today, thought my pals nodebb.com site was down, as browser prevented access.
    It gave the your connection is not private security warning (like when theres no SSL)
    But Ive been told issue was that i was using
    www.sitename.nodebb.com
    And should just use sitename.nodebb.com
    !
    Have I missed something, since when did www. stop websites accessing properly?

    @Panda www these days is typically an alias record in DNS, and isn’t a requirement for the site to function. Most websites (including this one 🙂 ) drop the www part as it’s less for people to type (but it will accept those requests, then strip it back to the actual URL). Only those who have a legacy reason to include www in their website addresses these days do so.

    It’s considered unnecessary in today’s internet landscape. However, if the site presents an SSL certificate mismatch or warning, then this will actually not only harm your SEO (Google penalises against this), but it also means that if you proceed, every transaction on the site will be in plain text - not good at all.

    Furthermore, those sites (like NodeBB) that require a specific URL to operate against won’t work properly because of the mismatch, and that site should then be forcing all non-https traffic to https to ensure that this does not happen.

    Essentially, not doing so isn’t just bad etiquette, it’s bad for overall security. Depending on the host in use (either Apache or NGINX), there are a variety of ways to accomplish this. One of the easiest ways if you use Cloudflare is to do it with a page rule - failing that, a few simple lines of config is all it takes to resolve it.

    A bit more on the whole www part here

    https://dropwww.com/why

  • phenomlabundefined phenomlab has marked this topic as solved on
  • @Panda www these days is typically an alias record in DNS, and isn’t a requirement for the site to function. Most websites (including this one 🙂 ) drop the www part as it’s less for people to type (but it will accept those requests, then strip it back to the actual URL). Only those who have a legacy reason to include www in their website addresses these days do so.

    It’s considered unnecessary in today’s internet landscape. However, if the site presents an SSL certificate mismatch or warning, then this will actually not only harm your SEO (Google penalises against this), but it also means that if you proceed, every transaction on the site will be in plain text - not good at all.

    Furthermore, those sites (like NodeBB) that require a specific URL to operate against won’t work properly because of the mismatch, and that site should then be forcing all non-https traffic to https to ensure that this does not happen.

    Essentially, not doing so isn’t just bad etiquette, it’s bad for overall security. Depending on the host in use (either Apache or NGINX), there are a variety of ways to accomplish this. One of the easiest ways if you use Cloudflare is to do it with a page rule - failing that, a few simple lines of config is all it takes to resolve it.

    A bit more on the whole www part here

    https://dropwww.com/why

    @phenomlab the only problem is that some places require the www to know its a website.
    E.g. if I write,
    aignite.nodebb.com
    (This page does recognise its a link. But some chat / media pages dont)
    Or if I write
    www.aignite.nodebb.com

    From what you wrote above, do you say its ok for nodebb to have it set up such that the www one doesnt work?
    Many people not so technical may write www., out of habit.

    Further thought, how does this site know which of the following are links?
    test
    test.one
    test.com
    test.test2.org

  • @phenomlab the only problem is that some places require the www to know its a website.
    E.g. if I write,
    aignite.nodebb.com
    (This page does recognise its a link. But some chat / media pages dont)
    Or if I write
    www.aignite.nodebb.com

    From what you wrote above, do you say its ok for nodebb to have it set up such that the www one doesnt work?
    Many people not so technical may write www., out of habit.

    Further thought, how does this site know which of the following are links?
    test
    test.one
    test.com
    test.test2.org

    @Panda said in www. Infront stops website access?:

    the only problem is that some places require the www to know its a website

    This isn’t the case at all. All websites even without the www part will still begin with either http or https even if entered directly into the address bar as (for example) mysite.mydomain.com - the browser will first try http then https and ideally, if the request is received as http it should then by issued a 301 permanent redirect to https

  • @phenomlab the only problem is that some places require the www to know its a website.
    E.g. if I write,
    aignite.nodebb.com
    (This page does recognise its a link. But some chat / media pages dont)
    Or if I write
    www.aignite.nodebb.com

    From what you wrote above, do you say its ok for nodebb to have it set up such that the www one doesnt work?
    Many people not so technical may write www., out of habit.

    Further thought, how does this site know which of the following are links?
    test
    test.one
    test.com
    test.test2.org

    @Panda said in www. Infront stops website access?:

    From what you wrote above, do you say its ok for nodebb to have it set up such that the www one doesnt work?
    Many people not so technical may write www., out of habit.

    100%, yes, as it’s the industry standard. If anyone does write www that should auto redirect to the correct convention. Try accessing this site as www and see what happens.

  • @phenomlab the only problem is that some places require the www to know its a website.
    E.g. if I write,
    aignite.nodebb.com
    (This page does recognise its a link. But some chat / media pages dont)
    Or if I write
    www.aignite.nodebb.com

    From what you wrote above, do you say its ok for nodebb to have it set up such that the www one doesnt work?
    Many people not so technical may write www., out of habit.

    Further thought, how does this site know which of the following are links?
    test
    test.one
    test.com
    test.test2.org

    @Panda said in www. Infront stops website access?:

    Further thought, how does this site know which of the following are links?
    test
    test.one
    test.com
    test.test2.org

    Because the a href anchor will only react to valid TLD (Top Level Domains), of which .one isn’t, and no suffix at all will obviously be ignored and treated as text.

  • @Panda said in www. Infront stops website access?:

    From what you wrote above, do you say its ok for nodebb to have it set up such that the www one doesnt work?
    Many people not so technical may write www., out of habit.

    100%, yes, as it’s the industry standard. If anyone does write www that should auto redirect to the correct convention. Try accessing this site as www and see what happens.

    @phenomlab
    Im not talking about entering in a browser, but writing in a post

    So on Discord I mesaged someone
    www.aignite.nodebb.com
    And it gave the SSL error when clicked
    Nodebb.org arent striping the www

  • @phenomlab
    Im not talking about entering in a browser, but writing in a post

    So on Discord I mesaged someone
    www.aignite.nodebb.com
    And it gave the SSL error when clicked
    Nodebb.org arent striping the www

    @Panda if I check that URL, it redirects to the NodeBB home page.

  • @Panda if I check that URL, it redirects to the NodeBB home page.

    @phenomlab said in www. Infront stops website access?:

    @Panda if I check that URL, it redirects to the NodeBB home page.

    Yes, but why?!

  • @phenomlab said in www. Infront stops website access?:

    @Panda if I check that URL, it redirects to the NodeBB home page.

    Yes, but why?!

    @Panda because there is no match for the DNS entry specified. The receiving web server parses the headers looking for a destination hostname to match, and anything the web server is unable to resolve will be sent back to the root.


Did this solution help you?
Did you find the suggested solution useful? Support 💗 Sudonix with a coffee
If your organisation needs deeper expertise around infrastructure, security, or technology leadership, learn more about Phenomlab Ltd. Many of the deeper technical guides behind Sudonix are published there.

Related Topics
  • Nodebb and emails

    Solved Configure nodebb
    27
    5 Votes
    27 Posts
    8k Views
    @Panda it will use SMTP. In all cases, I never use any plugin to send email. I’ll always send it raw.
  • Nodebb icon on google page

    Solved Customisation nodebb
    9
    1
    4 Votes
    9 Posts
    3k Views
    @Panda It’s been raised multiple times, but only for the open source version, and not hosted.
  • Following the API docs but its not clear ...

    Solved Customisation api nodebb
    8
    2 Votes
    8 Posts
    2k Views
    @Panda you’d be surprised. If you consider that you’d need to use the API to be able to populate a WordPress widget for example (which in turn would of course be PHP), taking this route is still immensely popular.
  • Interesting Widget code, but can't fetch API

    Solved Customisation nodebb
    26
    2 Votes
    26 Posts
    9k Views
    @Panda said in Interesting Widget code, but can’t fetch API: How did you drop that widget into the post there? I hadnt seen this BSgenerator anywhere on sudonix site, do you use it somewhere already? Yes, here https://sudonix.org/topic/414/corporate-bullshit-generator?_=1687774393044 It’s not a “post” or “topic” in the common sense. It is actually a page in it’s own right and leverages nodebb-plugin-custom-pages. This in turn creates a new “route” which behaves like a page, meaning it is then exposed for widgets. @Panda said in Interesting Widget code, but can’t fetch API: Also can you explain more what you mean by calling the code externally. In my API call example, how would I go about doing that? By this, I mean create all the required code in an external JS file that is reachable by the NodeBB instance - so, in “public” for example - or in my case /public/js. The widget then “calls” that file and because it runs outside of the scope of NodeBB, you just need to return the values to the widget. Hope this makes sense?
  • Smart Widgets

    Solved Configure nodebb
    9
    3 Votes
    9 Posts
    2k Views
    @Panda said in Smart Widgets: So why is that, or conversely why would the function to expose username ever be required, as it seems app.user is already an available global object? It is, yes, but not if you are using it outside of a widget. The function I wrote is also historical and comes from the 2.x train
  • creating topic specific widgets

    Solved Customisation nodebb
    16
    10 Votes
    16 Posts
    5k Views
    @crazycells said in creating topic specific widgets: Additionally if hide class exists, why are we re-defining it? We’re not 🤭 I misspelled it - it should be hidden
  • 5 Votes
    9 Posts
    3k Views
    is there any way to see whose reputation is changed by this plugin?
  • unable to upvote on forum

    Solved Performance
    10
    1
    3 Votes
    10 Posts
    3k Views
    @phenomlab yes, i can understand. it is working now