TL;DR:
• If you get messages saying "the page you are using isn't secure" don't worry too much about it.
• We are trying to move to a new forum in the future, you may have to re-register.
• 8 years of forum content won't be integrated into the new forum, but we will provide links to it.
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Last summer we did a big update to NYSB moving the website to a responsive format, so that it works much better on mobile devices. That was half the job. The forum remains on an old, outdated and largely unsupported platform.
My goal was to find a way to migrate the forum database from the existing Nabble database to WordPress to preserve the existing content in a seamless way. This is not a simple task, which is why it has take so long. I really want(ed) to do this.
I learned last night that this is far more complicated than originally thought. The estimate I have now is 15-20k with no guarantee that the result will be success. Clearly that is not happening.
The only solution will be to go the new forum software without a migration, essentially starting over. It's likely that we will provide links to the old content, but you will not be able to post there. Not ideal but it is what it is.
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The other issue is the move to HTTPS.
In the "old days" URLs all looked like this:
http://example.com/When people started to buy things online a "secure" protocol was developed, URLs that were secure looked like this:
https://example.com/The "s" stands for secure. On https pages, data is encrypted before it is transmitted. This makes it much harder for someone to steal your credit card info. It was normal to build most of a site on HTTP, but credit card submit pages on HTTPS.
In the last few years, Google decided that EVERY page on every website should be encrypted/HTTPS. Google has a simple way of enforcing their will. They say that if you don't do what they want, they won't show your website in search results. That gets people to act.
More recently the BROWSERS (Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer) are getting on board. Now when you move from an try to move from an HTTPS page to an HTTP page you might get a message like "you are moving to a page that isn't secure."
You have been using HTTP pages for years so I wouldn't be too concerned about this. For example Alpine Zone is still on HTTP. (Never enter your credit card on an HTTP page).
We are going to move the website to HTTPS in the next few days. (We tried last night and failed, you might have noticed the site was down.) There are some problems with this. Some of our very best weather maps aren't HTTPS so we may lose them. But there really is no choice.
NABBLE (the forum) is on HTTP and they seem to have no interest in moving it to HTTPS. It seems that now is the time to bite the bullet.
Our plan is to start a new forum on WordPress and provide links to the old content. It is likely that when you access that old content you will get the "security warning."
It is my hope to get this done in the next 4 weeks. Not sure, but it may require those who want to continue to be members to sign up again. That remains to be determined.
"You just need to go at that shit wide open, hang on, and own it." —Camp