It appears to be the IP address that webdiplomacy.net resolves to.

Well, it appears to be this website! Check out the forum. Why would it exist, though?

95.211.128.12 is the Internet Protocol (IP) Address of the server that Webdiplomacy runs on. /webdiplomacy/ is the directory of the web server that the site runs from (a physical web server can host many websites). When you type in "http://webdiplomacy.net", a Domain Name System server translates that into the IP address (95.211.128.12) for you so your computer knows what server to ask for the website, then your browser sends a request to the web server to send the webpage. Normally the server knows what site on the server to send because your browser sends the URL ("http://webdiplomacy.net") in the request to the server, but if you access the server solely by IP (as in this example), you have to specify which website you want - which is why there's the "/webdiplomacy/" after the IP address in your URL.

I believe this address was used for a short time rather than the "webdiplomacy.net" domain, after kestas did an update to the webdip code. I can't remember what the problem was though.

Tolstoy: So every website can be reached that way, directly through the IP address?

@TBroadley, I had forgotten about that. When webdip was moved from the old host that had lots of timeout issues to the new host that has kicked ass, for a few days we had to access the new host via the IP address since the DNS servers take a bit to update.

5 mins! need 2 more!!!! gameID=94087

Alderian: When was that? After we were already WebDiplomacy instead of phpDiplomacy?

There is also www.webdiplomacy.net which is different from just webdiplomacy.net as when I access it I have to log in again and it doesn't happen in webdiplomacy.net.

The 95.211.128.12 came about when Kestas switched from a shared server, which was slow and screwed up live games, to the current server. Thank those with bronze, silver and gold badges for donating.

"Tolstoy: So every website can be reached that way, directly through the IP address?"

Kind of. A lot of web servers require the browser to send a header (the name of the site, like "webdiplomacy.net") in addition to the IP, because you may have 100 websites hosted on a server with only a single IP address, and the server has no way of knowing which site you're looking for if you ask for just the IP address.

@JECE, what The Czech said. Was about a year or so ago I think.

Alderian: That would explain it. I don't think I was around then. I wasn't active when the badges were introduced.

Tolstoy: I should try that out with a random website sometime.

Www.webdiplomacy.net resolves to through same physical address, but because it is a different URL, it can't read WebDiplomacy.net's cookies. That is why you have to login if you type that URL. It's a security thing.

Yes and no Draug. What you stated is accurate, yes. But it doesn't fully answer the underlying question.

Why doesn't webdiplomacy.net forward to www.webdiplomacy.net or vice versa as some/many websites do?

If you're interested in ip's for websites open the command prompt on your computer and type in "ping www.yahoo.com" or any site you want and it will give you an ip for the site. You can generally get to a site using the ip, though bigger sites like yahoo and google have many ip's. And yes, I know this is a simple explanation.

That's a matter of configuration. They have both DNS entries pointed to the same physical site instead of having one point to a redirector that forwards with address change. It's as easy as setting up a sub under the WebDiplomacy folder that is called Redir and having a default.html or index.html that has a simple redirection in it and pointing the one you want redirected to that subdirectory under the main directory. Kestas can do it/have it done.

So http://75.119.192.91/greatplay/ doesn't work because of a configuration issue, then?

Is it too late to answer Bob Ghengishkhan?

@JECE - So what site is at http://75.119.192.91? And I don't mean Bob GenghisKhan. I'm asking for real here.

greatplay.net

I'm just trying to do the same thing as http://95.211.128.12/webdiplomacy/ with another website.

OK, well, they may not have named the directory "greatplay". That is just what is called a virtual directory and may be a name totally different from the URL's name.

Here is how a website works...

Website is created as files (executables/scripts/etc) in a physical directory tree (like WebDiplomacy)
Then the web server creates a virtual directory to that physical one which may or may not have the same name as the physcial one. This is called the root of that website.

Then the DNS entry points to the IP address and virtual directory of the web server with what may be yet another name (i.e. www.webdiplomacy.net).

That is for a simple one. When you get into load balancing high volume and high visibility like Google or Bing, the DNS points to a load balancer that knows all the IPs and virtual directories of all the boxes hosting copies of that site and, in the case of something like Google or Amazon, those sites may point to another load balancer when they go to get the data from the database server. In the case of WebDip, we have one server does both (I don't think Kestas got a separate MySQL server for the price he paid) and we only have one instance of the web server the DNS entry points to directly.

I'm not sure whether I understood all that, but I seem to have learned something from Draugnar. I feel so ashamed.

What? Cause it's me you learned something from? Well fine. Go talk to an amateur instead of the expert. I may be a troll and hyper on occasion, but I do know what I do for a living. :-)