[Adam]

I'm happy to announce that as of last night, we've transitioned the entire forum and homepage to the secure HTTPS protocol. HTTPS protects you while browsing by encrypting the connection between your browser and our server. This greatly reduces the risk of password theft, eavesdropping, etc. Even through PF doesn't directly handle sensitive data, the extra layer of security never hurts— and it's something the whole industry is now encouraging.

Previously, only parts of our site (such as the login system) were run via HTTPS.



What does this mean for you?

The extra layer of security is seamless; no further action is needed by you to enable it. All old HTTP forum links will automatically redirect to their secure counterparts.

If you experience broken functionality or see formatting errors on forum pages, perform a hard refresh (usually control+F5) and/or clear your browser cache. The login box on the homepage may not work until you do so. Tapatalk users may need to clear their app cache.

Important: Posting off-site photos on the forum

Some externally-hosted photos that our members post (using IMG tags) are not hosted on secure servers. Currently, these photos will still be displayed on the forum, but this is subject to change. Also, such photos may trigger a message/icon stating that the page is "not fully secure", such as in the screenshot below:



We have created a new account option that allows you to completely disable the loading of insecure (HTTP) external photos if you so choose. When this option is set to "no", insecure photos will be replaced by a clickable link, and you will thus always seen the green lock icon when browsing. The option currently defaults to "yes".



Most big photo hosting sites do support HTTPS, so users of those won't need to take any action (i.e. flickr, smugmug, imgur, google+, facebook). However, other hosts such as photobucket do not. We recommend that you transition to secure image hosts over the course of the coming year. Alternatively, you can make use of forum attachments, albums, and galleries, as these are all secure.

Starting in 2018, the security option above will default to "no", so insecure photos will no longer show up in threads, posts, and signatures. These photos will instead be replaced by a clickable link. This will ensure a fully secure browsing experience for members and guests.

How can you tell which links are secure?

Secure links to web pages and photos start with https:// whereas standard (insecure) links start with http://. You may be able to add the 's' to certain standard links to make them secure, but not all servers support this.

Broken Pages and Security Errors

If you still run in to errors after a hard refresh, or don't see the lock icon on a page without user images or ads, please post the URL in this thread for us to investigate.

PF is committed to adhering to security best practices to defend our systems against hackers and ensuring our users' privacy. The community's tremendous support has helped make this possible!

Adam
PentaxForums.com Webmaster (Site Usage Guide | Site Help | My Photography)



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[automorphism]

Great!

[Joe2]

Thank you.

[carloshyr]

Fantastic!!!

[chuck_c]

Good news! Thank you!

[MightyMike]

So i have to figure out how to convert my own personal web space to secure or migrate over 20K photos in maybe as many as 700 galleries to a third party host or my photos will only show up as a link?

EDIT ADD: Follow-up question, lets say I figure out how to convert my own personal web space to https, does that mean all previous links over the past decade won't connect if not updated?

[reeftool]

So i have to figure out how to convert my own personal web space to secure or migrate over 20K photos in maybe as many as 700 galleries to a third party host or my photos will only show up as a link?

EDIT ADD: Follow-up question, lets say I figure out how to convert my own personal web space to https, does that mean all previous links over the past decade won't connect if not updated?

I don't that is going to be an issue for you. All reputable sites will be doing it soon. Chrome and Firefox announced this week that they will be flagging http sites with a warning that the site is insecure.Firefox, Chrome start calling HTTP connections insecure | Ars Technica

Hosting sites will be doing this automatically, just as Adam has done with the Forum. It's really the browsers that are driving this.

[mee]

Now those eavesdropping hackers cannot so easily discover our fondness for the K mount system and bacon.

[goatsNdonkey]

As a reader of many an archived forum discussion, this sounds like many of those old threads--full of encyclopedic photography information-- will soon lose there illustrative photos. Already enough of them lose pictures because the poster moved his or her picture hosting account to somewhere else forgetting it would turn links in their old discussions dead for the rest of us.

I myself have had to search, and search, and search to find free image hosting that seemed to work reasonably consistently. If the hosting service I now use turns out to not meet security standards, it will greatly hamper my participation here.

[UncleVanya]

I don't that is going to be an issue for you. All reputable sites will be doing it soon. Chrome and Firefox announced this week that they will be flagging http sites with a warning that the site is insecure.Firefox, Chrome start calling HTTP connections insecure | Ars Technica

Hosting sites will be doing this automatically, just as Adam has done with the Forum. It's really the browsers that are driving this.

He runs his own site for hosting as far as I could understand from his post. That means the onus is on him to convert his site.

---------- Post added 01-29-17 at 11:24 AM ----------

As a reader of many an archived forum discussion, this sounds like many of those old threads--full of encyclopedic photography information-- will soon lose there illustrative photos. Already enough of them lose pictures because the poster moved his or her picture hosting account to somewhere else forgetting it would turn links in their old discussions dead for the rest of us.

I myself have had to search, and search, and search to find free image hosting that seemed to work reasonably consistently. If the hosting service I now use turns out to not meet security standards, it will greatly hamper my participation here.

If I read Adam correctly the inline display will be turned off but the links will still be inserted and clickable. Even in the future. Unless I'm parsing Adam wrong.

---------- Post added 01-29-17 at 11:28 AM ----------

So i have to figure out how to convert my own personal web space to secure or migrate over 20K photos in maybe as many as 700 galleries to a third party host or my photos will only show up as a link?

EDIT ADD: Follow-up question, lets say I figure out how to convert my own personal web space to https, does that mean all previous links over the past decade won't connect if not updated?

You can add a global site redirect from http to https. I think it would be a 301 redirect.

302 Redirect vs. 301 Redirect: Which is Better? - Hochman Consultants

[csa]

I for one, want to thank Adam for going the extra mile in order to help protect the members here!

[MightyMike]

You can add a global site redirect from http to https. I think it would be a 301 redirect.

302 Redirect vs. 301 Redirect: Which is Better? - Hochman Consultants

I suppose I'll have to look into my back-end, or contact my host 1and1.com to see what is needed and how much this will change things for my personal gallery hosting

[stevebrot]

He runs his own site for hosting as far as I could understand from his post. That means the onus is on him to convert his site.

That is the easy part. The hard part is finding and converting the URLs for all the linked images.


Steve

[barefootdesigns]

Now those eavesdropping hackers cannot so easily discover our fondness for the K mount system and bacon.

mee, my thoughts exactly.

[UncleVanya]

That is the easy part. The hard part is finding and converting the URLs for all the linked images.


Steve

Steve the global redirect will handle it over and over. The inline viewing may be broken but clicking the link will resolve to the corrected link.