I did in fact have a CNAME record to redirect the www. to just example.com. Do I not need that when using nginx? So just A records?
Before I deleted them, I had them routed to the correct droplet. I emptied my cache and hard reloaded on chrome and all is good. I deleted the DNS records, www now works, and without it took a few minutes but is now working. I’m still confused why it was redirecting www to the forum subdomain though.