Note: This may not be very developer related. I think it's purely configuration. But Support told me this was out of scope and I need developer support, which I am not eligible for, and pointed me here. My apologies if this doesn't quite fit, but I need help.

A domain I have in salesforce - mysightlife.force.com - would automatically redirect to mysightlife.force.com/surgeonportal. It is a redirect that is set up to do so, and points to the Community site.

I wanted to investigate how to make a custom domain for this Site, and found out you cannot do so in Test Environments. So, I figured I could make a *separate* community in Test (which shouldn't affect the current URL redirects at all) and use this to test out a custom domain for this other site.

WELL, When I created mysightlife.force.com/nataliescommunity , all of a sudden, just by creating it, mysightlife.force.com automatically stopped redirecting to /surgeonportal, stayed the root domain, but displayed an error page that stated nataliescommunity is down for maintenance. This was customer facing! There were no redirects to nataliescommunity set up. and the URL at the top was NOT mysightlife.force.com/nataliescommunity -- it was simply the root, and showing this page. In my other Site, redirects were still active to direct root to /surgeonportal.

I ended up going into this new Site and adding the URL redirect from root / to /surgeonportal, which worked, but I need an understanding of

1 - what happened? Why did the domain automatically associate with this new community?
2 - how to undo this so there is NO association with this new community
3 - why was the community inactive, but the site active? How do I delete this?