Cookie/duplicate site content issue

[Boosty]

I wanted to warn you of the following (common) site problem:

It appears that your main domain is jthink.net(/jaikozforum/…) without ‘www.’ in front. Through Google and through different links on the site or on the forum, a visitor may end up on www.jthink.net. This happened to me today.

This situation will lead to the visitor suddenly being/appearing logged out from the forum, because the login cookie was set for only the domain without www. in front.

This configuration may also lead to some search engine optimization issues, Google thinking you have two sites instead of one. It can filter out most of the situations but sometimes it cannot.

The solution usually is easy and I’m not aware of any cons:
http://support.tigertech.net/redirect-www (option 3)

Perhaps this is also an option for your site to make sure no problems occur

[paultaylor]

Thankyou I’ll look into it, but which should redirect to which Im unsure whther the norm these days would be

www.jthink.net

or jthink.net

[Boosty]

To my knowledge there’s no norm, at least not technically. The use of www. is the result of an accident. Nowadays I would consider it a subject of taste. My personal taste is without www. in front. It’s shorter and cleaner. In my language we are used to skipped the www in speech anyway.

From the www-wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Www

The use of ‘www’ as a subdomain name is not required by any technical or policy standard and many web sites do not use it; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch.[33] According to Paolo Palazzi,[34] who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of ‘www’ subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page, however the dns records were never switched, and the practice of prepending ‘www’ to an institution’s website domain name was subsequently copied.

The redirects will carry their ‘search engine value’ without problems so if other sites link to your www.jthink.net URL while others link to your non-www site, that shouldn’t be a problem.

[edit]
I apologize for the large avatar. I thought it was going to be cut down to 130x130 I’ll fix it.