[OSM-talk] Different HOT Domains without redirect...

[Tom Hughes]

On 28/04/15 19:14, Andreas Goss wrote:
>> Not going to happen. We don't add random www. prefixes to any of our
>> other sites, other than the main site. Arguably we should drop it there.
>
> Why is that random? Try any other larger website and you will find that
> they all have redirects for all subdomains and all go to the domain with
> or without www.

I don't think of these as subdomains. I think of them as sites within 
the domain.

> So you think it's okay that http://www.hot.openstreetmap.org/ or
> http://www.wiki.openstreetmap.org/ are just dead links?

Yes, I think that's fine.

> I mean I never done it myself, but isn't it like just 1-3 short lines in
> the .htaccess file?

Sure. Multiplied by several dozen variants of our root domain.

> And how many used xxx.opesntreetmap.org pages do we actually have? blog,
> forum and help are the only ones I can think of

Dozens.

>> I believe hotosm.org is the canonical domain anyway, we just provide
>> hot.openstreetmap.org as an alias for convenience.
>
> I can't find any canonical links and they should be in the source code,
> right?

No idea. I have nothing to do with HOT other than pointing the 
hot.osm.org name at their IP address as requested. Note that we only 
point that one name, we don't delegate a subdomain.

> And while it might be convenient, it's really bad for search engines. I
> mean wouldn't it be kinda nice if people when looking for "earthquake
> map nepal" or whatever might get a HOT page listed as a top result?

How on earth does this help with that? I can understand that having all 
the working names redirect to one canonical name might help, but I don't 
see why it should matter which name is chosen as the canonical one.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/