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Website root URL problem

Started by loblolly986, March 15, 2023, 07:44:00 PM

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loblolly986

One would think that http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/ would redirect to the forum index at http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/, but it just returns an empty page instead.

I was initially confused when I ran into this recently, and suspect others trying to view this site have been as well.

TelePlay

It's not a problem. Classic Rotary Phones was a blog under the Vintage Rotary Phones umbrella and Classic Rotary Phones / Forum was under Classic Rotary Phones.

The Classic Rotary Phones blog is not populated, it is "empty" and shows as a white screen - nothing to see there.

loblolly986

Ordinary Internet practice is for the root URL of a website to return something meaningful—at least a simple page along the lines of "this space reserved; if you're looking for X, go here", or an HTTP redirect to what the average visitor was probably looking for. The server here isn't even returning any HTML at all, just an empty file. Someone typing "classicrotaryphones.com" in their web browser will probably end up with that; they'd have to know to append "/forum" to get here.

Checking the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I see that the root URL did indeed lead to the Classic Rotary Phones blog as late as an April 9, 2022 snapshot. Starting with the next snapshot on July 8, it shows the empty page. I'm guessing this was unintentionally brought about when Dennis updated the forum software shortly after that April snapshot and it just went unnoticed.

TelePlay

You're right and I suggest you PM Dennis to discuss that and possibly offer any fixes for that issue, it's something only the Admin can deal with and the Admin is Dennis.

Contempra

Quote from: TelePlay on March 16, 2023, 02:31:59 AMYou're right and I suggest you PM Dennis to discuss that and possibly offer any fixes for that issue, it's something only the Admin can deal with and the Admin is Dennis.


Good idea because personally I really liked this blog. This is the first time I saw a site for old phones :)

SUnset2

I see that this has never been fixed.  If you go to http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/, you get nothing.  There is not any page source visible, so I assume the index.html file is missing or is empty.  Unless you know the url to get to the forum, new people will give up when they don't get a home page.  Something needs to be there to direct people to the forum.

segaloco

Couple ways to solve this:

index.html that runs "window.location.href = 'url-to-forums'"

Granted this is an ugly way and doesn't work if someone has JS off.

If the intent is for that URL route to *eventually* be used for something else, then there's probably a rewrite module on the server software that can be made to provide a 302 Found response that redirects users to the forum for now, as opposed to a 301 Permanently Moved that you'd instead use if you were preparing to move the forum to the root routing.  Apache has mod_rewrite, IIS has Application Request Routing and URL Rewrite modules, nginx has ngx_nttp_rewrite_module.  This could be done at either the server host or any proxies that might be in between, further up in a proxy is quicker response as it's closer to the client, but that's also further from the actual materials being hosted necessitating the rule so easy to forget about if hosting changes.  Dunno what your networking architecture is but hopefully that helps.

There's also just the prospect of a landing page proper, something that perhaps has a link to the forum and then some other links to things like TCI.  I'm more backend but if that's something in need I'd happily pop out some HTML scaffolding if it'd help the cause.