Redirecting incoming queries to non-existent subpages (due to Godaddy behavior on some external WikiJournal sites)
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	Thomas_Shafee
	Jan 3 2019, 11:56 PM

Description

WikiJournals maintain several domains that redirect to Wikiversity pages:

http://www.wikijmed.org → WikiJournal_of_Medicine
http://www.wikijsci.org → WikiJournal_of_Science
http://www.wikijhum.org → WikiJournal_of_Humanities

However, the registrar (godaddy) has an issue where a random 5-character string is added as a subpage (on approx 1% of attempts). Obviously on a wiki, this just goes to a non-existent subpage.

Is there any way to create an extension to redirect incoming links of a particular type to non-existent subpages of a specific page? I don't know much about the back end of mediawiki, but here's an example of someone else's PHP fix here. Any ideas or suggestions welcomed!

Event Timeline

Thomas_Shafee created this task.Jan 3 2019, 11:56 PM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptJan 3 2019, 11:56 PM

I don't think writing a PHP/MW extension to do this would be the best way

It seems to make more sense to point the domains straight at Wikimedia servers in DNS (or get Wikimedia to take over hosting of DNS too)

Dzahn added a project: Domains.Jan 4 2019, 12:14 AM

Restricted Application added a project: Traffic. · View Herald TranscriptJan 4 2019, 12:14 AM

@Thomas_Shafee Is it an option to stop using GoDaddy? It seems pretty bad to me that they are adding "random strings", maybe another registrar would be the best solution?

Restricted Application added a project: SRE. · View Herald TranscriptJan 4 2019, 12:15 AM

https://www.godaddy.com/community/Managing-Domains/subdomain-forwarding-is-adding-extra-random-characters-to-the/td-p/61774

many users affected, no official fix from GoDaddy .. though definitely their problem

• ema triaged this task as Medium priority.Jan 4 2019, 1:30 PM

• ema moved this task from Backlog to Domain name registration on the Traffic board.

We're currently looking at moving off godaddy. Eventually we hope to have the Wikimedia take over hosting of the domain name (meta:WikiJournal).

I'm not very familiar how to point straight at Wikimedia servers but will look into how feasible that would be as a quick fix for moment - thanks!

• MZMcBride subscribed.Jan 7 2019, 3:23 AM

• Phabricator_maintenance moved this task from Backlog to Acknowledged on the SRE board.Jan 26 2019, 10:58 PM

Aklapper renamed this task from Redirecting incoming queries to non-existent subpages to Redirecting incoming queries to non-existent subpages (due to Godaddy behavior on some external WikiJournal sites).Mar 2 2019, 5:07 PM

The swap of Traffic for Traffic-Icebox in this ticket's set of tags was based on a bulk action for all such tickets that haven't been updated in 6 months or more. This does not imply any human judgement about the validity or importance of the task, and is simply the first step in a larger task cleanup effort. Further manual triage and/or requests for updates will happen this month for all such tickets. For more detail, have a look at the extended explanation on the main page of Traffic-Icebox . Thank you!

It looks like they've managed to escape the talons of godaddy and are now using Google as their registrar.

Redirecting incoming queries to non-existent subpages (due to Godaddy behavior on some external WikiJournal sites)Closed, ResolvedPublicActions

Description

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Redirecting incoming queries to non-existent subpages (due to Godaddy behavior on some external WikiJournal sites)
Closed, ResolvedPublic
Actions