Announcements CoolSciFi.com is now SSL enabled!

Kevin

Kevin

Code Monkey
Staff member
As part of our site maintenance tonight we have enabled SSL here at Cool Sci-Fi! :cool:

That means instead of going to http://coolscifi.com all of your requests will now be redirected to https://coolscifi.com which provides a more secure connection between your browser and our server. There is nothing you need to do for this change. All requests for "http:" will be automatically redirected to "https:" instead.

In your browser you can tell if you are connected via SSL by taking a look at the URL area. With the current versions of Chrome, FireFox, and Microsoft Internet Explorer you will see a padlock icon. Other browsers may display something different.

Chrome - green padlock left of the URL
cool_scifi-ssl-chrome.png


FireFox - grey padlock left of the URL
cool_scifi-ssl-firefox.png


Internet Explorer - grey padlock to the right of the URL
cool_scifi-ssl-ie.png
 
Thats the same thing youtube did isnt it.
I guess it gives a better connection too.
Does it affect the bot traffic?
 
Tom said:
Thats the same thing youtube did isnt it.
I guess it gives a better connection too.
Click to expand...
Yep, most, if not all, of the big sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so on use SSL by default these days.

Think of it you calling your financial bank from your home phone system with your phone being your browser and the bank being our server. When you call the bank on your phone you might be talking about sensitive information with the customer service rep on the other end. Now most phone lines today aren't like the old 'party lines' back years ago where multiple people could listen in on the phone call but it is still pretty easy for somebody to listen to your phone call with the bank. Live in a building with the phone lines coming into a grey box on the side and then from there the wires are ran to your phone jacks? Open up the box and you'll see that anybody can plug a phone in to use your line. Between the house and the bank all of those connections are unsecured and your conversation is wide open; if somebody finds a connection they can hear what you are saying.

If you were to apply an SSL connection to your phone call like your browse now does for Cool Sci-Fi, then anybody listening in on your call would now hear a scrambled message. Your phone handset (the browser) can interpret the scrambled call (connection) so it seems normal to you and the bank (our server) can interpret the scrambled call (the page request) but anybody else would have a hard time figuring it out. It wouldn't be impossible for them, just difficult and would take a long time.

Tom said:
Does it affect the bot traffic?
Click to expand...
For the most part, no. Most spam bots are automated scripts that are looking for web sites with the default account creation options left in place so that they can create an account and then post spam from that new account. The SSL connection doesn't alleviate that problem since, using the phone call to the bank analogy above, they can still call the bank. We haven't had much of a spam problem lately here though since we've tightened our account registration spam checks and, even post account registration, we use services like Akismet to check content that is being posted from newly created accounts.
 
But are some bots welcome?
Isn't it the bots that put CoolScifi higher on the search lists?
Will this change affect the traffic and influx of new members here at CoolScifi?
The Bank anology was very clarifying. Good Job!
 
Tom said:
But are some bots welcome?
Isn't it the bots that put CoolScifi higher on the search lists?
Click to expand...
Yes, absolutely some bots are good! GoogleBot, for example, is Google's way of going through and indexing the content of a site for its search index. Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, and other services all have "bots" that might be visiting a site any given time. If you visit the Members tab here you can see some of the bots that are visiting. The good bots won't be affected and will actually be happier with us using SSL.
Tom said:
Will this change affect the traffic and influx of new members here at CoolScifi?
Click to expand...
Not directly. Some potential members might be happy to see that we take security into consideration with our community and join for that reason. Google is now also starting to use security items such as using SSL in their ranking so in some case a site that is using SSL might be ranked slightly higher in their search index versus a site that isn't using it. Higher ranked sites, of course, tend to be used more as the sites on the first & second page of Google are visited much higher than a site that is buried on page 20 of the search results. So it is something that will make somebody join for no other reason? No. But it is something that will help with the peace of mind of our community members while at the same time making services like Google like us a bit more versus other sites.
 
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