A polite note about my rollback of the edit on "Why is my subdomain not showing up?"

Question

On the question "Why is my subdomain not showing up?", my answer had an edit suggested and approved which removed the domain and subdomain I used and replaced it with example.com and sub.exampled.com.

I rolled back that edit. Since rollbacks don't offer the ability to include commentary, and feel a bit drastic, I like to make meta posts to make note of the rollback reasoning just for posterity's sake.

The original question included the specific domain and subdomain that I used in my answer. I waited and did not see an edit proposed to the original question that would changed the domain and subdomain to the generic example.com sample domain.

In the specific context of the Q/A, the OP had a specific problem with a specific domain, stated the question well, and had an answer that used real world tools and reasoning to discover the answer. I don't find genericizing the question or answers to be of value, since only good is done by the use of specific information, and only harm is done by replacing it with a generic domain. At least, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. =)

Aaaaand dismount. 🤸

Answer 1

In general we prefer to use example.com here. Most of the time, the specific site isn't needed to understand the question or the answers. And even when it is needed, that usually means that the post isn't clear enough. It is almost always better to include screen shots or more explanation rather than having to link to a site that has problems.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. Using an example domain discourages spam. People won't post here expecting to get a link if we routinely replace with an example domain.
2. The linked content will change over time. Especially in cases where a link demonstrates a problem, that problem should get fixed and visiting the link will no longer demonstrate the problem.

In addition to using an example domain, the edit to your post also fixed the "dubdomain" misspelling. My guess is that is the main reason that the edit was made to begin with. The example domain probably was done to be a big enough change to allow the edit to go through. The edit was done by an anonymous not-logged-in user, so we may never get to hear exactly why they edited.

I approved the edit from the review queue. It looked fine to me as it appeared in the queue without context. However, you are correct that that if your answer is edited to use the example domain, the question should be edited as well.

What I'd like to see happen:

1. The misspelling in your answer gets corrected again.
2. Both the question and your answer get edited to use the example domain.

Answer 2

The only "error" here that I see was not editing the question to exemplify the domain names in the same way.

I waited and did not see an edit proposed to the original question...

Why "wait"? If you noticed that the question had not been edited accordingly then... edit the question.

the OP had a specific problem with a specific domain

Careful with the "specific" here. If the question is considered too specific to a single site then it's possibly off-topic. But I don't think this question (or rather the resulting answer) is particularly "specific".

Whilst the original domain was required in order to solve the query initially (7+ years ago!), it is not relevant to future readers, and neither are the IP addresses. (Although, arguably, the reason the domain was required in the first place was that the relevant information was missing from the question to begin with.)

I don't find genericizing the question or answers to be of value...

But after 7+ years it's "lucky" that the domains even resolve. As it is, the two hostnames referenced in the question now point to a different (same) IP address. So we now need to read it in a more "general" way in order to make sense of it.

The relevant points to be taken away from the answer are that the subdomain should be resolving to the same server (IP address) as the main domain; it was not. I don't see how stating the specific domain or IP addresses actually helps?

(Although the OPs comment is a little confusing: "Someone else had redirected the URL to another directory" - that suggests something else entirely!?)