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I have a Chrome search engine of the form https://%s.stackexchange.com/ that I use to quickly move between various SE sites (I find this more efficient than bumbling my way through the multicollider).

It would be nice if we could get aliases (like e.g. https://so.stackexchange.com/ or https://stackoverflow.stackexchange.com/ as a redirect to https://stackoverflow.com/) for all the sites that have their own domain names. I believe that's just the Trilogy (SO, pt/ja/ru.SO, SU, SF) and Stack Apps (plus corresponding metas where they exist, plus Meta MathOverflow).

Note that Ubuntu already has https://ubuntu.stackexchange.com/ redirecting to https://askubuntu.com/.

EDIT: Either I forgot to check MathOverflow when I originally posted this, or it's been added since then - https://mathoverflow.stackexchange.com/ redirects to https://mathoverflow.net/ now. However, https://mathoverflow.meta.stackexchange.com/ does not go anywhere.

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  • 8
    FWIW you could hack this for yourself at the DNS level.
    – djechlin
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 3:33
  • 1
    @djechlin By modifying the HOSTS file, right? I guess that's a reasonable workaround that I hadn't thought of, thanks.
    – senshin
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 3:46
  • 12
    I don't think you could just get around this with just DNS/HOSTS changes; you'd need to configure a server to serve the redirect. The Stack Exchange servers just throw up an error page for unknown domains of any sort. Stack Overflow doesn't have a unique IP you could point to. (edit: example config and result)
    – Jeremy
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 4:23
  • 9
    Mmmm, careful hacking the hosts file for this, we do have multiple data centers - so you probably want to avoid using the IPs directly.
    – user50049
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 6:11
  • I can't fix this with a userscript, should I learn NodeJS? Oh wait, I can fix this with a userscript. In any case, however, client-side fixes won't help Google serve from domains that are outside the real SE domain. Oh wait, maybe I can tell Google to.
    – John Dvorak
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 6:41
  • 6
    That's true, SO does error out on unknown domains. You can't even get a valid response from http://www.stackoverflow.com./.
    – user215040
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:01
  • 1
    @snailplane I think that's just because you put a period after the .com. http://www.stackoverflow.com/ works fine.
    – senshin
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:23
  • 9
    @senshin Yes, that was my point :-)
    – user215040
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:28
  • 7
    @snailplane Oh, right, . is the global root domain name, isn't it? My bad, carry on. :P
    – senshin
    Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:32
  • possible duplicate of Should Stack Exchanges sites with top-level domains have *.stackexchange.com redirects?
    – tchrist
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 23:14
  • @tchrist I just voted to close in the other direction since I think my writeup here is better than the other question.
    – senshin
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 23:16
  • You’re right, it is. It doesn’t have their answer though.
    – tchrist
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 23:19
  • shouldn't the meta.mathoverflow missing dns entry not be a seperate bug instead of hidden in this feature request? Seeing the answers on the other question I don't expect it gets fixed but it separates the different cases more clearly.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Jul 29, 2015 at 7:16
  • To add to the list of sites: arqade.com redirects to gaming.stackexchange.com
    – Robotnik
    Commented Oct 1, 2015 at 1:09
  • 3
    @Robotnik True, but that's not quite germane here - this post is mainly interested with redirects from SE domains to non-SE domains (since it's only in cases where those redirects are absent that http://%s.stackexchange.com/ fails). There are a number of other instances of non-SE domains redirecting to SE domains, including seasonedadvice.com, askdifferent.com, miyodeya.com, and so forth.
    – senshin
    Commented Oct 1, 2015 at 1:11

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