Why was I redirected from www to ww8.?

[J_D_]

I was trying to get to a website, keyed it in and got redirected to a page that wanted me to turn off my adblock. I keyed in www. but got sent to ww8. . I did not disable the adblock. I did find a direct link to the site I was seeking. Is this adware or malware infecting my Pale Moon ?

[Mike Walsh]

@ J_D_:-

Very doubtful it's adware or malware.....at least, not at your end. It's more likely that the actual website has been compromised. An all-too common occurrence, these days....

I know there are workarounds to 'sidestep' this kinda thing, but me no expert, I'm afraid..!


Mike.

[Burn_IT]

If I see this, I immediately blacklist the site and find an alternative that does NOT want to infect my machine.

I have always had the setting to allow reasonable non intrusive ads, but if the advertisers cannot live with that then they do not deserve to be allowed to advertise on my machine.

Web sites that tell you they have no control over the contents of the ads or pages they serve are lying or do not deserve to have the traffic.

Is there not a setting in your browser options that actually should prevent redirection??

[J_D_]

I will have to look at my Pale Moon preferences. This is the first time Ive seen the ww8. come up. I am pretty careful about what web sites I go to. I was sure someone here would know what it was. Not a big problem but when i see something new like that I like to know what is going on.

[J_D_]

The site I was going to must have been compromised. They also must have done something about it. I just went there, no problem.

[jafadmin]

There is nothing special or unique about the "www" part of a url. It is simply used by tradition to infer "world wide web". It is a subdomain (or server) on the "whatever.com" website.

Typically, load balanced web servers in a domain will be designated www, ww2, ww3, etc. The point is that they all resolve to the same organization.

How often have you seen urls like, "pop.gmail.com"?

The import part is the "domainname.tld" part. If that renames, you might want to find out why.

tl;dr: No big deal. It's normal. Happens all the time, you just don't notice it.

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[J_D_]

Thats the results I got when I googled it. I knew it was not a normal thing when it would not show the requested page and it wanted me to turn off my adblock. That aint going to happen. Also it was not www8, which the google search results referred to, just ww8.

[jafadmin]

Also it was not www8, which the google search results referred to, just ww8.

J_D_, that is not relevant. There is no programmatic relevance to the name of that sub-domain. It could just as easily have been named "foo1.whatever.com", "foo2.whatever.com", etc ..

It is just a DNS entry in their zone record. Consider:

"www.puppy.com", "ftp.puppy.com" "email.puppy.com" "vpn.puppy.com", etc.

These are all just DNS entries that would point to an ip address. They are made up by the domain admin of that domain and resolve to various servers within that domain.

Think of it like chapters in a book:
Chapter 1: "Puppy Rises"
Chapter 2: "Puppy Demands Nourishment"
Chapter 3: "In Which Puppy "Waters" the Lawn"

The chapter number is the IP address, and the chapter name is the DNS entry for the chapter. You can change the name of a chapter to whatever you want, but it still means that same chapter number, and it still means that same book.

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[J_D_]

Ok, just a new thing for me. Its been a long time since I have been redirected. Never know whats going on out there in the www.