Proboards website security

[mariannemarlow]

Forum URL: budgerigarsforum.proboards.com

Dear Proboards

I have had a message from one of my members to say that our forum is not secure. Can you please address these concerns?

Thank you

Marianne

The message says "this forum is not using secure sockets for the web pages. This means that all information including these messages is liable to be hacked and read by anyone in the know.To see for yourself just click on the circle with a 'i' inside it on the address bar of your browser.

Take note of the warning message that you will see. I have always know that things could be hacked and rean on the internet but this is not supposed to be this easy if the web pages were delivered by a secure socket. That is why Proboards are using the HTTPS protocol rater than the plain HTTP.

I just thought you would like to know."

[D]

Hi mariannemarlow ,

I'm slightly confused by your member's message - it seems to contradict itself.

When your they refer to "secure sockets" what they mean is a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) which encrypts data between your web browser and the ProBoards servers. Pages with SSL have https:// before the forum address instead of the standard http://. In fact the pages which transmit sensitive data (registration, login, purchase pages) are encrypted on ProBoards. It's true that other pages are not encrypted and indeed there are plans in the works to make all pages https://.

I hope this sheds some light on ProBoards's website security. Let us know if you have any follow-up questions.

[Scott]

mariannemarlow,

Just confirming what D stated above: login, registration, and purchases are https (secure), while regular forum pages are not (http). We are working to bring https to all ProBoards forums in the not too distant future.

Please note that for the longest time all regular web pages were on http and not considered "secure", which just means they were not encrypted. There has been a push recently to make all web pages encrypted and as such web browsers are now using words "not secure" to indicate the page is http and not https. While this new indicator is serving the purpose of getting users' attention, it is also causing some unnecessary concern as some think that web pages they've been using all along have now suddenly become 'not secure'.

Let us know if you have any further questions regarding this.