in reply to www.perlmonks.org vs. perlmonks.org

We have multiple working hostnames, eg. http://www.perlmonks.org, http://perlmonks.org, http://www.perlmonks.com, http://perlmonks.com, http://www.perlmonks.net. Like ikegami said above, all of those resolve to the same set of ip addresses. They are the same, but there's still some advantage to having multiple of them. One advantage is that this way one can have different login cookies for the different domains. The other is that this way we can make people use relative links when they link to a writeup from another, eg. use one of [id://149675] or [href://?node=149675] or <a href="?node=149675">text</a> but not one of [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node=149675] or <a href="http://perlmonks.com/?node=149675">text</a>. This will be very useful for people using alternate interfaces to perlmonks, so internal links keep them on the same interface, though such interfaces aren't used much today. The way perlmonks has lots of xml feeds means that not only gods, but even ordinary users could write alternate interfaces to perlmonks, such as the now defunct http://prlmnks.org. (There are some technical problems, eg. you aren't allowed to vote, and you can't currently ask about the approved and front-paged information of nodes using the xml interface, but these are just details.)

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Re^2: www.perlmonks.org vs. perlmonks.org
by tinita (Parson) on Nov 02, 2010 at 15:28 UTC
    You mention two advantages:
    One advantage is that this way one can have different login cookies for the different domains.
    Well, that only makes sense if you have two accounts or want to test something. for the majority of the users and guests this is of no use. I'd rather have one single subdomain testing.perlmonks.org for things like that than 5 different domains that all look like live domains.
    The other is that this way we can make people use relative links when they link to a writeup from another
    I don't understand that. You are saying that because there are 5 different (sub)domains, we can have relative links? That would imply that once we only have one working domain we couldn't have relative links any more?
    I think you rather mean: "The different domains are no problem because we have relative links" instead of "We can have relative links because we have different domains".
    So, this is no reason to have several domains.
    And if you link to perlmonks from outside (from other sites, from IRC etc.) then you regularly get a link to the domain you are not logged in at the moment. To read the article in your favourite theme and to vote on nodes you have to repair the link to use "your" domain (the one you already have a session cookie).
    I can see no good reason to use all those domains. I would add an apache rewrite rule to www.perlmonks.org depending on the host. And if really necessary, add a "testing" subdomain for using two different accounts at the same time.
[reply]

      I'm not "logged in" to any of those 6 host names. I like the reduced risk of somebody tricking my browser into submitting to PerlMonks in a way that my identity will be misused.

      Instead, I have several "secret" host names in /etc/hosts on each system where I log in to PerlMonks more than temporarily.

      The 6 host names are an artifact of history. But there are people using multiples of them. And any registered monk can have use for more than one host name because it can be useful to conveniently see how Anonymous Monk sees something.

      And just perlmonks.org vs. www.perlmonks.org (or even testing.perlmonks.org) makes it somewhat difficult to have multiple login states since cookies get shared in one direction in such a case (but not in the other direction).

      So, it would be possible to add more than one *.perlmonks.org host name and turn the other 5 existing host names into redirects to www.perlmonks.org, but that would require several people to make adjustments and so should include a plan w/ announcements and a schedule and such. And that could well happen one day. There are advantages, as noted already.

      (Also, I don't have access to make adjustments to perlmonks.* DNS configuration nor does any active member of gods, that I am aware of. I've been meaning to try to change that, though.)

      But it isn't like it is a big priority to do this. PerlMonks' SEO is just fine, thankyouverymuch. And we had already told Google that www.perlmonks.org was the official host name for the 6 different host names. But Google was still indexing the same page more than once so this notification isn't perfect (and doesn't cover the non-Google search engines).

      Higher priority tasks would include: Block robots from the "comment on" and "reply" links and provide "canonical URL" information for most pages. And there are a bunch of other search-engine-related improvements of rather low priority that I'd still put above deprecating host names (and don't look like they are going to happen any time soon).

      - tye        

[reply]
        And just perlmonks.org vs. www.perlmonks.org (or even testing.perlmonks.org) makes it somewhat difficult to have multiple login states since cookies get shared in one direction in such a case (but not in the other direction).
        If you have "www." and "testing." no cookies will be shared between those two (if the cookie domain is not set to "perlmonks.org" explicitly, of course).
[reply]

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