Forum:In-universe website page names

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www.levenshulmepride.org.uk or just levenshulmepride.org.uk?

Simple topic here: how should we format the page titles for in-universe websites? Specifically, websites such as www.ratmonthly.com or www.levenshulmepride.org.uk. There seems to be some inconsistency in whether these page names keep or truncate the "www." at the start of the URL. I don't think we should keep the "www.", which A) isn't really part of the site's name per se, and B) is often not included when websited are promoted - for example, when referring to this site by URL, I'd only need to say "tardis.wiki", not "www.tardis.wiki" or "https://[...]".

Although this is a fairly niche topic, it's probably best that this is debated formally, especially as some may disagree with my (admittedly not overly strong) stance. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 20:29, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

Just a quick note: in the real world, at the time that many of these references were made, "www." was considered an important part of the URL, and was also oft-repeated in conversations and advertisements alike.

This was the convention in the early web, and I do believe it's technically a subdomain for webhosting. Nowadays, it's considered unnecessary, and while it is usually maintained as a redirect, isn't part of the "canonical" URL of most websites. But we shouldn't necessarily confuse that with the situation in the 2000s.
× SOTO (💬/📈/↯) 20:52, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The above note is helpful, thank you. I absolutely do think whatever's decided, we should do redirects for the other way. Cookieboy 2005 ☎ 20:55, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Everything that SOTO says is true. www is a subdomain like any other, just one with a very common usage. The URL https://www.tardis.wiki is, on the technical level, no different from https://status.tardis.wiki. That is to say, I could setup the www subdomain to be a completely different website to https://tardis.wiki. It would be a confusing and not particularly sensible move, but it's completely possible. Also note that having a www subdomain redirect to the main URL is entirely optional and not in any way inherent to the way that the internet works: on Tardis, it has been specifically configured to redirect to the main URL but it doesn't have to. In a similar way, it's entirely up to each individual website which URL to use as their primary, canonical one. At Tardis, that's https://tardis.wiki, not https://www.tardis.wiki. This is entirely something that the domain's owner can control, and hence it is a conscious choice whether or not to include it in the URL. Hence, I think that our pages should include it if the actual site includes it in their primary, canonical domain name and exclude it otherwise. Bongo50 ☎ 23:56, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm with SOTO and Bongo. If we see www, we should include www. Najawin ☎ 01:12, 1 December 2024 (UTC)