Error with system depending on domain usage

CodebyRay

There should be no difference between www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com. However, if you installed Flarum using mydomain.com you WILL NOT be able to register/login by visiting www.mydomain.com, plus images will be broken.

You can see this error by visiting http://www.motorcycledealerforums.com/, images will be broken and login will not work. Now if you visit http://motorcycledealerforums.com/, images are not broken and you can register and login.

I think this is a bug in the system itself. Flarum should work the same on both www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com to avoid issues with site visitor.

Regards
Ray

luceos

CodebyRay use a redirect in htaccess or your vhost configuration to solve this issue.

Pollux

CodebyRay Flarum should work the same on both www.mydomain.com and mydomain.com to avoid issues with site visitor.

I agree, that the www-version should work even if your website is meant to be without www and vice versa. But it shouldn't work the way you probably think of, i.e. both versions shouldn't show your forum and thus the same content. One reason for that is the simple fact that search engines don't like duplicate content. While the search engines might be satisfied with a canonical link element, this is not the preferred option.

CodebyRay I did, however I think this should be fixed on the system level with Flarum.

I disagree. This has nothing to do with a forum, it affects every website and should be handled separately. As luceos pointed out, websites may have very different requirements for their redirects and automating one part of it may negatively affect other use cases.

At some point people installing Flarum will have no clue about doing a redirect to solve the issue and may just remove Flarum and move on to the next forum before giving it a chance.

I would suggest giving relevant hints in the installation instruction. One might even include a sample .htaccess file for apaches and directives for other server softwares to the same effect. But in the end it's the site owner who should get at least a basic understanding about the things going on.

There is, however, one thing that might be changed in the core software, which doesn't solve the problem of duplicate content but remedies the broken links in the www-version of your original post. My suggestion: Replace the domain including link for the stylesheet, in your case:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://motorcycledealerforums.com/assets/forum-920ce024.css">

with one without the domain:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/forum-920ce024.css">

In this case, the observed trouble with the FontAwesome font should disappear.

Are there any side effects stemming from this approach?

CodebyRay

luceos I did, however I think this should be fixed on the system level with Flarum. At some point people installing Flarum will have no clue about doing a redirect to solve the issue and may just remove Flarum and move on to the next forum before giving it a chance.

I don't know, maybe it's just me but I believe, build it so a novice can install it and make it run. Maybe this issue will solve itself once Flarum is out of beta. Just my two cents.

Regards,
Ray

luceos

CodebyRay if we would auto redirect to the configured URL we would make it very hard on implementations that use multiple domains to serve the site, just like freeflarum.com or people who use "url" => array_get($_SERVER, 'HTTP_HOST', "http://example.com"), for their url.

I understand, I'm just not too sure whether we should oblige. This was discussed before and back then we concluded the same.

CodebyRay

luceos I understand what your saying. I get the advanced usage using multiple domains, subdomains and so on. I'm just thinking the normal Joe will have no clue Flarum will be broken one the URL not used to install with. It is common practice to access a site using either www.mydomain.com or mydomain.com just standard I guess.

I mean I'm not a regex expert by any means, but if you're already testing that the url matches say http://mydomain.com maybe this can be changed to match mydomain.com from the url no matter what the subdomain is?

Little snippet I found to test just that:

$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
preg_match("/[^\.\/]+\.[^\.\/]+$/", $host, $matches);
echo "domain name is: {$matches[0]}\n";

I could be way off base but I can't see how this implementation would break anything and not solve a future issue that I am sure will come up multiple times.

Regards,
Ray

luceos

CodebyRay your suggestion is not going to work, however we might need to revisit the problem.

As to your suggestion, some TLD's have multiple dots: co.uk to name one ? Also, with subdomains configured as url (forum.example.com) a prefixed www. might not even be configured in DNS.

CodebyRay

luceos Like I said i'm far from a regex expert. But the expression I added apparently will check against anything before the .mydomain.com even www.forum.mydomain.com (Example here: https://regex101.com/r/vjf2XP/1). But you are correct it will not match properly .co.uk domains names.

However, that's not what I am saying. I am saying the system should work on www.example.com, example.com without having to add a redirect in an htaccess file.

While this may not be a viable option, having a system works as http://mydomain.com and not http://www.mydomain.com does not seem like a viable option either in my opinion.

On a different note. I do like Flarum overall and I am sure it will only get better with time. Keep up the good work!

Regards,
Ray

CodebyRay

Pollux I have a redirect setup for www. version of the domain. I removed it to show the issue for this thread.

Pollux I would suggest giving relevant hints in the installation instruction. One might even include a sample .htaccess file for apaches and directives for other server softwares to the same effect. But in the end it's the site owner who should get at least a basic understanding about the things going on.

I agree, something letting someone installing know they need to setup a redirect for handling the domain with or without www.

I'm trying to look at this issue from a non-programmers perspective. I mean when we're creating a product shouldn't we be thinking about that (I need to remind myself of this sometimes)? What may be obvious to one may not be obvious to another person installing and/or setting up Flarum.

Regards,
Ray

lorem

Considering it's already 2018, search engines should be smart enough to take both www and no www as one and the same...they aren't unfortunately. So I think it's a good thing that flarum, for whatever reason, forces you to make sure you take your http and www redirects seriously. ?

clarkwinkelmann

Same goes for http:// and https:// version of your website. They really are two different websites from a search engine or browser perspective. Flarum also doesn't do anything to redirect to the correct protocol.

That's also something that the webmaster should usually configure at the same time as the www stuff.

All of this could really be fixed by adding an option to always redirect to the canonical url from config.php, just like CMS like Wordpress or Concrete5 do. Then it's up to the webmaster to enable that feature once they correctly configured their hostnames.

lorem

Let's all just put a good face on it..for the time being. ?

Pollux

CodebyRay I'm trying to look at this issue from a non-programmers perspective. I mean when we're creating a product shouldn't we be thinking about that (I need to remind myself of this sometimes)? What may be obvious to one may not be obvious to another person installing and/or setting up Flarum.

Personally, I think that a site owner should always have at least some basic IT (you might call it programming) skills. They can outsource parts of their responsibilities by e.g. using shared hosting so they don't have to run the server themselves, but if someone sets up the forum software themselves, I expect the skills needed to implement redirects.

For those who wish to run a forum with no more than a handful of clicks, offerings like FreeFlarum are the better solution.

But that's just my personal opinion.