Right now it’s a victim of DNS (Domain Name Service) spoofing. This means that a malicious party is trying to steal traffic from FFn by purchasing a very similar domain.
So if you want to read fanfiction and not see leaves, you have have to type out “www.fanfiction.net”.
Please share so people stop panicking.
Its not this either. the web server that fanfiction.net is pointed at is just misconfigured.
if you look the DNS resolution chain points correctly to the nameservers in the whois info:
[Whois info showing that the nameservers for fanfction.net point to: NS11.CONSTELLIX.COM NS21.CONSTELLIX.COM NS31.CONSTELLIX.COM NS41.CONSTELLIX.NET NS51.CONSTELLIX.NET NS61.CONSTELLIX.NET]
This is perfectly normal in cloudflare enterprise. The issue is the hosting company didn’t set up a redirect from fanfiction.net to www.fanfiction.net
This is NOT DNS spoofing. There is NO malicious party. It’s just a simple misconfiguration.
Hanlion’s razor at work.
[Image ID: a comment on this post from ‘justhere4coffee’ which reads: “That’s not spoofing, nor malicious; www.fanfiction.net and fanfiction.net are not separate URLs. It’s a misconfiguration in the DNS server which means that the un-prefixed URL is not being sent to the correct entry point on the hosting server. Don’t go saying this is someone else, as people may be tempted to take retaliatory action and they’ll be taking it at the people you’re trying to help!” /End of ID.]
So it’s not a DNS misconfiguration per-se: www.fanfiction.net is being hosted by way of cloudflare, and connections are being routed to cloudflare by that CNAME (Canonical Name) record I mention above.
This isn’t a valid method to directtraffic to fanfiction.net into cloudflare, as you can’t have a CNAME at the apex of a domain (the point where it is delegated to you) because you can’t have a CNAME and other data; and in order to host a DNS zone like fanfiction.net the SOA (Start of Authority) and NS (name server) records for that name are mandatory.
To fix this, you can do things that are SUPER sketchy from a DNS hosting PoV, (like host an imitation copy of the .COM TLD on your authoritative DNS server and then put your CNAMEs in there.)
Or you can just set up the web server to redirect.
If you’re ever in this situation, my professional opinion is to do the second one.
