Ooookay, but how do I fix this? My site has been up and running for two decades with no trouble, and I can type the full URL, just not the forwarded URL. Is there something I can have my host or GoDaddy do to just say "it's okay to forward it there"?
Oh, and the other two forums I run (not MyBB) have the same forwarding (with different URLs) and I've never had an issue with them. Is this secure stuff new? (I mean in the last couple of years, since I last had my two sites up)? I guess I can check with my host and ask them to solve this, somehow.
SSL certificates have been around for decades so definitely not something new. They're standard to have on sites these days and have been for several years now. Your host should be able to help generate a certificate for this domain with a service like Let's Encrypt which is free (assuming that works on Windows systems, it may not). If they can't generate a free SSL certificate and you don't want to pay for one, they'll need to stop the redirect using https://, but that's not really recommended these days as browsers will show the site as not secure. Going to
http://www.kelleytown.com/forum works so however this redirect is set up just needs to not redirect using https:// if you can't get a certificate installed.
Yeah, I think I need to contact GoDaddy and not have them redirect using Https:// because my host said (in essence) "Not our problem".
I'm certainly not going to pay for something that's literally just a service I've been asked to provide for grandparents (I've already done WAY too much for these guys :>).
Okay, GoDaddy did forward it using Http and now all is (mostly) well.
However (and I realize this isn't a MyBB question but you guys are pretty knowledgeable about a lot): the forward URL still shows instead of the URL being forwarded. Well, that may not be the proper way to put it, but I have a URL:
www.LegacyOfLeesburgForum.com
and it's going to:
www.kelleytown.com/forum
but when they go there it says the latter. IOW, I'd rather it remain the first one in their browser. Is that impossible? IOW, does a forward just always show where it got forwarded to? Or is there something else I can change to keep it what it was when they typed it in?
The way it's set up currently is it's just a redirect, so it'll send you to the other URL. To serve the site from that domain, the DNS would need to be pointed to the same server as the kelleytown.com domain is, and then the server would need to be configured to serve the site when requesting that domain. I think from a previous thread your file structure is something like /var/www/kelleytown.com, which probably means the server is set up to route requests to kelleytown.com to that folder. If you pointed another domain (LegacyOfLeesburgForum.com) to the server, it'd need to be configured to serve files from that folder too (or the files on the server may have to be moved to somewhere like /var/www/LegacyOfLeesburgForum.com). Usually hosting control panels like cPanel allow you to set up domain aliases, which would be the easier way of doing it if your host can help with that if they have a similar control panel.
If that does all get set up, you'd need to change the MyBB Board URL and Cookie Domain settings to match the new domain, but we can cross that bridge when the domain is set up.
Thanks for the fast reply.
In my control panel I see a couple of options that might help (but also have that bridge we'd need to cross, I think :>).
First of all, it says I can add a new website to my subscription (without paying more - yay!). But that is just a subdomain so I'm kind of doubting that's what I need.
What it does have that looks promising is something called virtual directories, which show the path from wwwroot along with a directory name and a "destination url for redirect" which definitely confuses me. Is this anything we could use? It SOUNDS like I could give the directory name to be
www.legacyofleesburg.com but maybe that won't be allowed?
Okay, here is what I have:
Domain: legacyofleesburgforums.com
Name servers: ns2.hmsns.com, ns1.hmsns.com, ns3.hmsns.com
Web hosting type
Frame Forwarding
Frame Forwarding Parameters
Forwarding URL:
http://kelleytown.com/forum
Does that look correct? It seems kind of back-assward, like I'm trying to forward my Kelleytown site to the LLF, but perhaps that's the way it's expressed? Remember, the LLF redirects now to the kelleytown.com/forum subfolder, but I want it to say LLF in the URL. I don't want to do this unless it's right, as I don't want to screw my website up.
(There are other choices in the domain setup but I don't understand any of them).
We can't really tell from that what it would be doing, but you definitely don't want frame forwarding if that means the forum would be in an iframe, as you'd never be able to share any URLs to pages on the forum.
The best way of doing it is what I outlined above, change the DNS of the new domain to point to the server, and then it'll need configuring to look at your existing web root for files. Any sort of forwarding like this is not going to work.
You're not really trying to forward the domain as it's meant to be the domain being used, which isn't how a forward would work. The domain has no awareness of the website at the other end, it's just redirecting domain A to domain B. The server is never going to load the site currently configured at kelleytown.com/forum when you go legacyofleesburgforums.com unless it is configured to do so.
Okay, then I'm confused. My options are:
Register a new domain (can't, cost $$$)
Transfer Existing Domain (I assume the same as above)
Add Existing Domain registered elsewhere (This is what I chose)
Add New SubDomain (have no idea what this is)
When I added the existing domain registered elsewhere the options it gave me were:
Parking
Single Page Website
Frame Forwarding
Standard Forwarding
Website Alias
I thought the last one was what I wanted, but it only allowed an alias on my main website (so that kelleytown.com would become LLF.com, which is NOT what I want. There was no option to go to a subfolder, unlike Frame Forwarding).
So - any clues as to how I should procede?