Deprecation of the www. subdomains

We’re deprecating www.derpibooru.org and www.trixiebooru.org (but not the top-level derpibooru.org and trixiebooru.org). These subdomains will start redirecting to their non-www counterparts starting March 1, 2024.

The reason for this deprecation is rather simple, we don’t want to keep too many subdomains around due to caching issues, traffic separation and SEO issues. We kept www. subdomains around because in certain countries they used to bypass country-specific bans/blocks of Derpibooru. However, we’ve learned that the countries in question recently started being able to access the normal site (without www.) without a VPN or a proxy, so there’s literally no reason to keep them around anymore.

If you’re using the www. subdomains for any reason, please make sure to replace them with the main domain like so: www.derpibooru.org/images/0 -> derpibooru.org/images/0

I understand that some people use the www. subdomain for the purposes of maintaining multiple accounts. For these users, I suggest simply using trixiebooru.org instead. In the future, we’ll implement proper multi-account support though.

I’ve never used the “www” part in years.

ok this is useless

No need for a announcement!

@Background Pony #1457
It’s mainly intended for API clients which for some reason use the www subdomain.

Searching for “www.derpibooru.org” in comments returns over 1200 results. There are 748 forum posts containing it. If only people used the proper embed syntax…

(I’m serious. We have users who have been here since 2012 and they still don’t know how to link to images. They hotlink every time.)

@Background Pony #1457
Some people may still use the www domain either for blocked reasons and didn’t switch back, or to use it for a separate account, rather than log in and out of the main site over and over.

It was always annoying to have someone link the www version of the site and not be logged in when I went to it (since the cookies didn’t apply to the subdomain or whatever), so this will be nice for minimizing that sort of annoyance too.

@Princess Celestia
Finally

@LemonDrop
Since Markdown migration, all the hard links are replaced with relative links in everything that goes through the markdown parser. But this change will complete this by also redirecting something linked off-site too, I suppose.

You know, whenever someone shows me a link to Derpi WITHOUT the www in the URL, Firefox (the browser that I use on my laptop) thinks that it’s some kind of “Potential Security Issue”…but when I add the www, it instantly opens.

@Mango Island
Next time it happens, make sure to post it in the bug report thread, we’ll be very interested to see it and see if we can either help you or fix it.

@Princess Celestia
I already had this situation looked into on Discord, a few months ago.

I hope this won’t effect the accounts we have with this change?

@Background Pony #9409
The accounts aren’t affected at all.

Thank goodness, I was just about to ask that before he did I was almost worrying then

i’m scared

@miky94c
Lmao.

@miky94c
It will happen

Huh. I thought “www” was still technically required in url addresses to publicly-available websites. Turns out it never was.

Guess that was more marketing than anything else.

@Fair Use (Optimistic Neighsayer)
It’s just a subdomain, it was common long ago because it indicated something was part of the World Wide Web rather than other things, but it’s pretty much tradition at this point and most sites are getting rid of it since it just makes the URL longer for no reason.

So… nothing to worry about, right? This is a good thing?

@Joshua
Nothing will happen, yes.

@Background Pony #091B
Oh, okay. Just wondering.

Oh sweet. Derpibooru W