Why are the Factorio forums on a different domain?

[Zequez]

Wouldn't it make more sense for them to be under a subdomain? Or even a subdirectory? I mean, you are already nesting the forums on factorioforums.com/forum. So what's the point of getting another domain for that?

[DaveMcW]

Forums are notorious for getting hacked. You don't want them to take over your main server when that happens.

[ssilk]

Technically it is no problem to have one domain (factorio.com) and several sub domains (forum.factorio.com, wiki.factorio.com, whatever.factorio.com) either on one host or on many different. The non-sub domain "factorio.com" can be a own "sub domain" in this logic.

Security wise it makes of course sense to split the hosts into different security, especially the forum and wiki.

Today a host for the whole factorio infrastructure can be put on one machine which has 2-8 virtual machines running, which do the different jobs (main site, forum, wiki, database ...). This scales very well, cause later with rising load they can be put on own machines.

[sfrazer]

One common reason not to put things under the main domain is to avoid cross-site scripting attacks (XSS)

If an XSS vulnerability were found in the forum software under the factorio.com domain, your login to the main site and your purchases could be compromised easier than it can be if the two pieces of software don't share a common domain.