Hi Folks!
Apologies for the 24-hour glitch during which our two Forums were temporarily relegated to a more minimalist very old-school look and feel, even though they apparently were marginally still usable for most of you readers.
This was all due to the culmination of a (for me) challenging nine-day journey through the rather inscrutable world of SSL Certificates needed to properly secure modern websites. The new website was built using a new Content Management System called Tilda that the vast majority of our new site was designed with.
The trick has been to ensure that the Tilda built sections of the overall site remained compatible with the design of our two Forums with their older-school tools of HTML and CSS. We achieved this compatibility by including sections of the new website as 'sub-domains' ... (and no, you do not need to know what those are! :-).
What turned out, thankfully, to have been a temporary sort of catch-22 was in trying to get a special form of SSL certificate called a 'Wildcard SSL Certificate' to play nice with both half's of the new website, that is, both the Tilda side and the older side as found in the Afibbers and General Health Forums.
This Friday afternoon our trusty web designer, Naomie, was able to work out the kinks that had limited our use of the two Forums these past 24 hours, and now they should be pretty much up to speed and fully usable again by now. If any of you still notice any issues please PM either me or Carey.
Those of you who are more familiar with URLs at the top of each webpage may have noticed that both our new Afibbers.org domain name and the Afibbers Forum domain name, are now fully secure and sport the HTTS:// designation that indicates a secure site!
The final step Naomie is addressing over this weekend is in making sure the HTTPS security, courtesy of the Wildcard SSL Certificate we now own, is seamlessly ported over to our four sub-domains such as database.afibbers.org, learn.afibbers.org, research.afibbers.org, and finally contact.afibbers.org.
Once you see that these four sub-domains also sporting the HTTPS, plus the small icon of a lock, you will know that the security of the entire website has been achieved.
In the meantime, there should be little to no difference in how these four sub-domain sections of the new site look or operate, so it should make essentially no noticeable difference to all of our readers.
Again apologies for the glitch, and I hope you all are able to resume posting at will on the forums!
Cheers!
Shannon
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/05/2021 08:53PM by Shannon.