Found my content (and others) on loverbuns.com- found out its owned by Nocturnal Theory, LLC
so I assume its just a redirect to this store and everyone is getting credited for the DLs- can MM or someone verify this? Are there other sites UMD DL store content will appear on currently or plans for them in the future? It would be good to announce this sort of thing before randomly stumbling upon it. It looks pirated when unknowingly finding your content on another site.


loverbuns.com

 

Hey, that site is actually UMD (from my other domain name). It's basically UMD's same content, but with different colors, so your profile is there. It is staging for the sister site that I am launching (and not yet publicized), but if any sales had come from there, you would get the credit because it is the same account. An official announcement will come next week, but meanwhile I am buttoning down profiles to only show here.

Messmaster

 

tell me why always with the http:// root domain, what is wrong with using the www prefix like everyone else, lol

 

You mean "like everyone else who's still partying like it's 1999?"

WWW + domain is NOT a proper URL. It is, in fact, an antique naming convention left over from the early days of computing when processors were so slow that several different physical machines were required to perform all the tasks normally associated with an internet domain. WWW is a "host name" associated with a web server. www.example.com was a physical machine. mail.example.com was a completely different machine. nntp.example.com (a.k.a. Usenet) was another physical machine, etc.

Today, most people's cell phones are several orders of magnitude more powerful than the original computers that ran the internet. On a modern configuration of most small business domains, www, mail, nntp are relics of the past that are nothing more than aliases for a single machine running dozens of different applications, usually with power to spare.

www.example.com

has never been a legitimate URL. All web browsers and most email clients since the early days of the internet automatically reconfigure any string that remotely looks like it might be an internet address into the proper format for the default service (port 80 - the web server), which is:

http://example.com/

http is the protocol identifier so the server knows what language to speak. Note the trailing slash. That's a mandatory part of a valid URL. It's been auto-corrected by web browsers for so long, the vast majority of people aren't even aware that it's a requirement.

The main reason for including the protocol identifier is that there are thousands of services running on the internet. http is just one of them. there's also https for secure sites, mms for multimedia streams, ftp for File Transfer Protocol servers, sftp and scp for secure file transfers, etc. I could go on for about a week rattling off all of them.

www *can* be included in a URL, but for the last decade or so, the web service has been the automatic default when no protocol or port number is specified, so it's completely vestigial, like the human appendix. It generally doesn't matter whether it's there or not except on a very small number of domains that haven't been reconfigured since the '90s. Most web servers will still add it to the URL string purely for legacy reasons, so those handful of old sites still work properly. Adobe.com was one of those crusty old domains for a long time. I think they eventually modernized their DNS records, but as late as 2005, the site wouldn't appear if you didn't include it.

 

True, but I'm talking human nature here, most everyday people asociate a website with the www. prefix

 

Soundguy may well be right about some webservers being configured to automatically redirect www.domain to just domain, but it's certainly not a default standard, and if done incorrectly (serving the same content on both versions) can have a serious negative impact on things like pagerank at Google. The vast majority of ISP hosting systems will still tend to assume that the website will be on www, though the better ones will either offer or auto-configure the bare-host as a redirect. One notable exception is cPanel, which does serve the same pages on both www and bare domain. Major search engines regard that (same content on 2 URLs) as spamming, so TBH I'm surprised that cPanel does this. As long as people only use the one version of the URL and the other is effectively "hidden" it doesn't matter, but let both get into Google's index (say by someone linking to a site and sticking the www version on by default when the site itself usually promotes by the bare one), and watch the pagerank go straight through the floor.

The world's most popular webserver by a very long way is Apache, and a default install of that won't auto redirect anything to anything else unless you tell it to. Same with IIS (Microsoft's server) which I think is the No2.

Browsers will auto-add the http:// on the front (and have done since about IE2 I think - so yeah, the dim and distant past indeed by net standards! ), but the / on the end is only mandatory if you are giving a URL to a directory (which most URLs are, with the web server then serving whatever is the default index page configured for the site, usually index.html for HTML hosting (lots of variations are possible, aspx for asp.net servers, index.php for PHP sites, etc)). But if you give a URL to an actual filename, then there should be no / on the end. http://wench.gungemaster.com/samples/gm-2w41/i2.html for example, is a URL to a file.

When you set up a domain, you have to decide what services you're going to have, where you are serving them from, and what URLs you want to use. Granted, it is nowadays standard, at least with those who know what they are doing, to arrange that both the bare domain and the www host will take a user to the same website, the correct way to do this is to set up both versions in DNS and then tell the webserver to serve the site on one of them, and serve a redirect to the site on the other. Which way round you do it is entirely up to the domain administrator, you can just as easily make the bare domain the redirect and the www version the actual web host - I recently did that for a customer after giving her the choice of which version she wanted. She chose to keep www as the primary because people are more used to it. So if you go to the bare domain version, the server issues a 301 redirect to www.domain and the browser instantly goes there.

In the case of Saturation Hall, the original plan was for an interactive text-based gunging game on the main domain, the photosets came later, which is why to this day, the actual canonical hostname for the site is wench.gungemaster.com, and gungemaster.com redirects to it - go there and you get instantly redirected to the wench version. This is done at server level though, not by the browser. The www version is also served but gives a "cover page" with no messy images on it, so someone who finds it by accident can back out if they want to.

 

The main issue is that rankings get split between the www and the base domain, not because it's considered "spam" the way parking domains is. That's why Google Webmaster tools provides the opportunity to specify which version you want to use as your default in the search results. Google knows its a problem and in fact they just recently won a patent (US Patent 8,055,626) that involves a method of identifying mirrored content on multiple host names. I can only assume they want to fix their braindead algorithms since loss of visitors means loss of ad revenue for them in some cases.

None of that is the issue though. The discussion was about why some people use http://example.com instead of www.example.com in forum postings and the point was that www.example.com is simply not a valid URL as it stands. It's merely a shortcut. The browser or internet-enabled application (email, word processor, etc) fills in the blanks to MAKE it a working URL, such as http://example.com or http://www.example.com. Only the last two actually work in a "dumb" application situation. (one that does not have the capabilities to flesh out the shortcut version) That's why you never see www.example.com used in a back-end system by itself. A smart programmer always provides the full path to everything instead of relying on shortcuts, "user friendly" features, or undocumented function behavior, otherwise a trivial platform update can break everything you wrote in the last 10 years (relative paths are the devil's handiwork)



The trailing slash is always mandatory for all web servers. It's what delineates the host from the rest of the path. That's why it's added by most software. I should have specified that it trails the DOMAIN, not anything else in the path.



The base domain is always an A-record, which points to an IP address. SOP in modern DNS is to set all host names (www, mail, ns, nntp, etc) as cnames pointing back at the base domain if that's where the services are located. You can make the base domain the redirect at the DNS level if you really want to, but your zone file is going to be an unholy crap sandwich that will get you laughed at by all the other sysadmins. They're a cruel and merciless lot

 

 

Interesting, thanks! All the SEO stuff I've looked at (and I've looked a lot - managed to get Saturation Hall to No1 in Google for several important search terms at points over the last few years) always said *never* serve the same content on two different URLs, and esp not on both www and bare-host.


Aha, sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying that "www.example.com" wasn't valid when "example.com" was, but you actually meant neither are actually valid without the http:// on the front. Yup, agree totally with that. And relative paths - hates them we does!


Oops - yep, agree with that.


TBH it's not actually necessary to have an A record at base domain level, though it's becoming more normal to do so. Also, the redirect I meant was an http redirect, my bad for saying "domain admin" instead of system admin. In the case of the customer I mentioned, both the domain-level A record and the www. version point to the same IP address. The Apache server at that IP is configured to serve her website on www. and a 301 redirect to www on the bare host version.

I believe there's actually a trans-Atlantic difference in how things are done, here in the UK we have relatively few, but relatively large, ISPs. So a specific customer's domain will, unles they actually have their own hardware, have the www record pointing to a large, centralised web hosting platform with thousands of sites hosted, and the MX will point to a different large mail cluster, etc. These are the kinds of systems I run in my day job. I believe in the US there are many more small ISPs who are more likely to have all the services for a given domain on the same host, cPanel style?

Agree completely about attempting to put a cname at the domain level - technically it could only be done within the RFCs if it was done at the level above (so in the actual .com domain for a .com gTLD), attempting to do it at delegated level would breach the "if there's a cname there can't be any other record types" rule rather spectacularly. I seem to remember someone in sales asking the techies of a major ISP, many years ago, if it was possible to persuade Nominet (the .uk registrar) to do that, and the response from the sysadmins basically involved pointing and laughing!



LOL!