Not sure this is technically a bug, because it works, but the UI threw me off. I just entered the subdomain I wanted and it worked fine, but I don’t think this hardcoded WWW is needed.
It’s probably not necessary for you. However, the reason it is there is because we have had a lot of people enter the www in there and then wonder why the non-www version didn’t work or their email boxes were all user@www.domain.tld instead of user@domain.tld.
For those who are more knowledgeable, this can be safely ignored as you’ve discovered. For those who are not as familiar with webhosting/website management, this helps them enter the domain without the www which is almost always what they want.
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That’s interesting. It’s gotten better for me over time, but I do run into clients here and there that always do WWW even when I’m telling them to go to a subdomain. I say go to sub.domain. com and they will do www.sub.domain. com.
Not sure if this just makes it too complex (as a power user can just figure it out like you said), but maybe if the WWW / subdomain portion was a dropdown of options.
WWW
N/A(empty)
Custom
Then you pick Custom and it let’s you just type it in a subdomain. Then the main box is just the main domain. I guess there is no great way to do this until people realize they don’t need WWW anymore.
It’s the same reason we set www.{entereddomain} as an automatic ServerAlias when someone adds a domain. It’s just way too confusing for non-hosting savvy people to understand that there isn’t really anything special about www and that it is NOT exactly the same thing as the non-www domain.
It absolutely is getting better as younger people who started using the internet after www sort of fell out of favor get older, but I’ve seen people younger than me not understand the difference or get them confused.
As you said, it’s tough. If we have it there, some power users get thrown off by it’s presence. If we don’t have it there, some end users get thrown off. Ultimately, I think the decision was that power users are much more likely to have the tools and knowledge to understand the difference where as leaving the end users to fend for themselves is probably going to end up as a headache, not just for us, but to the people using our product to provide services.
InterWorx has never been the product reaching for the “lowest common denominator” type setup, but this is one place we are intentially casting a wide net.
Yeah, you will never be able to please everyone 100%, seems like a fair trade off. Thank you for the candid explanation.