Forums Back Fully

Well, I’m back online.

As has been noticed the last few weeks, there’s been an issue with Google Chrome (and some other browsers) flagging my site has “possibly hacked”, “with malware”, or just simply “Dangerous”. Here’s the deal.

Awhile back Google started putting priority on pages using SSL, they wanted to push security. Which is not a bad thing. I recognize the importance of that, but since I had no commerce or anything “secure”, I kind of pushed off the warnings. Until this month, when the newest versions of Google Chrome would put up messages such as this..

If you went through, the taskbar at the top that would normally say “Secure” would say “Dangerous”.    This was not good.  As time passed, that expanded to other browsers – I was seeing it Safari on my Mac, too.   It was also now starting to affect my page ranking in Google – I generally dont’ care about that stuff too much, but I didn’t want to totally disappear off Google.

So yesterday, I took a training course (from Nathan Ingram over at iThemes) on implementing SSL on websites, as honestly – I had no idea how to do it.  I sorta knew, but none of the details were new to me.

So yesterday afternoon was a whirlwhind of training, and server configuring, and some time late yesterday afternoon, I succeeded.  I got my Black Sabbath site up and running on SSL, so it has the nice green “Secure” checkbox.

A word about all this…

1. I was never hacked.
2. I wasn’t serving malware
3. This was on the forums only.

It turns out the entire reason I got flagged was because I was using http instead of https for the forums.  Got that up and running yesterday afternoon.  After checking around the forums a bit, I submitted a formal request to Google to review my case.  Overnight last night they cleared me, and the “bad” flag was removed, so we’re all up and running again.

This was most definitely a learning experience, as I had no idea how to do any of this before yesterday.

Anyway, sorry for all the trouble…

Joe

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Finally, a reminder..

I don’t charge for use of the website. Never have, never will, and that’s been going on for 22 years now. However, I have noticed that my Google Adsense revenue has gone way down of late. Now that’s for any number of reasons, but things cost money.  Just spent some money on an SSL cert, there’s the montly hosting, etc…

It would be helpful if you didn’t block the ads on my site – and hell, even click on a few from time to time. It helps more than you think.