Wasn’t sure where to report this. Perhaps it was planned this way, but if so it would be unusual.
www.grin-forum.org resolves to an IP address through the nameserver associated with the domain, however grin-forum.org (no www) does not resolve. So usually an A record is supposed to be there, and a CNAME record for the “www” subdomain (technically it’s a subdomain). Below is a screenshot of nslookup. I used CloudFlare and Google’s DNS servers to confirm it was not just a DNS issue.
Allowing root domains to resolve to the web server is merely a convention, not any requirement. All websites in the 90’s used to be configured this way, where you need to type www. I mean, what if you wanted access to the Gopher or FTP server not WWW?
Right, but nearly all domains now will either resolve or redirect to the web server. And of course if you wanted to access Gopher or FTP you would specify a port number instead of 80 or 443 which is implied
