Re: Access forum from multiple URLs
Reply #2 –
Hi,
first to your questions:
1) yes, i am not the owner of the domain.
The owner is the founder of that forum which exists for more than 10 years.
2) the domain is still active. According to WHOIS it has been updated in August for one other year.
Which should mean that the domain should be usable until forthcoming August, shouldn't it?
Anyway, i am skeptical on what might happen in the future. No trust in the processes anymore - the internet has changed radically to solely commercial interest (and almost everything else appears to be blocked by the search engines).
3) the owner of the domain has offered me the transfer free of charge. He did already send me the AUTH code. I started the transfer process on Sep 18, so it will expire on Oct, 18.
As it is a .com domain, the owner must confirm to my transfer request by main, right? And that's one of the possible points of failure...
In the meantime, 2 (!) apparently independent domain brokers offer me the domain. I don't know if any of the two can interfere into the transfer process, so i try to keep them nagging. But if course i am not willing to pay a cent to some 3rd party guy.
4) yes i am aware. my impression is that it is not very relevant to the search engines any more, especially as a through out any google ad and other spyware stuff a while ago, still on SMF 1.1.16.
Anyway - changing an old domain name well established within a community is a critical step which more or less requires the use of both domains for some time. And maybe to advice the search robots not to access one of the two. in order to avoid duplicate content.
Backing up the site and upgrading it is an important step for the near future; i've been a bit lazy over last summer.
BTW: using nginx there is actually a way to access an Elk or SMF forum under a different domain: set up a reverse proxy with content rewriting for the 2nd domain. The latter set up to rewrite all references to the old domain into the new domain. Not too elegant, but feasible as long as the traffic is not too large. Meanwhile i have this up and running, except for the certificates. But a solution within Elk would be more elegant.