Securise Alizeeamerica.com with https
 

Hello.

"Alizeeamerica.com" is whell-know forum, but insecure. All password and information is uncrypted and can intercepted.
Please can you securise with tls certificates ("let's encrypt" is free). See "Alizée forum actif" who migrate to https recently.

Best regards.

This is a problem we've had for a while. Ben owns the server but he's not active here and we've expressed interest in buying the server from him but it's gotten no where so far.

Ah ok, thank you for information. It's sad.

The domain alizeeamerica.com comes up for renewal in July of this year. I believe Ben is the registrar, but it is not public information. Since there is a cost involved in the renewal, Ben might be willing to offer us the domain (and the site).

We recently lost a member because of the unsecured nature of this site. He bought a new computer and it is not letting him log in but can still reach the site. I believe his firewall is blocking him because AAm is unsecured. I sent him some info on this and needing to override, but it looks like he hasn't tried yet.

It would be interesting to find out what that renewal cost would be? Do you have a ballpark figure in mind?

It's pretty cheap, normally between $10-$20 a year. This domain was registered through GoDaddy, so yearly cost would start at the lower end of that range. There are ala-carte options you can add at additional cost. For example, you have to pay extra to keep the registration name private. So, Ben paid extra to keep his name off the public record. We are not talking about a lot of money, maybe an extra $5 a year.

Speaking of site security, this morning I got a message when accessing this site that my password had expired and needed to create a new one. The message said passwords expire after 180 days. I have been on this site for over 2 years and never seen this reset message before. Anybody else run into this?

I logged in just fine.

For what it's worth, you can use https for this site. https://alizeeamerica.com/ works, it just doesn't automatically redirect from http to https.

I'd love to contribute. I'm a web developer and I'd like to spend some time on long-overdue maintenance for this site:

• Proper HTTPS[1].
• Upgrading from vBulletin 3.8.4 to something[2] less than 11 years old.

It would be fantastic to have you on board for an update, hopefully we can get Ben on board for an update too.
Say hi to Radioactive Girl, I pray that she's well and stays strong :)

The urgent issue right now is that the alizeeamerica.com domain expires 7-1-2020. It is unknown whether registration is set to auto-renew. I'm assuming Ben is the registrant.

Not only does the site need to be secured, but a face lift is needed, starting with the landing page. We have discussed a site upgrade in a thread a year or so ago with some things we would like to see. It would be nice if Ben would allow some of the technical people here to gain access to the server and perform an upgrade. If he is too busy to maintain this site, there are members here that have expressed the willingness to do so, like yourself.

Now if Ben ever agrees to sell or give the site to us, there are a few options that already has been researched a little and talked over.

The option of starting over and building a modernized forum from scratch using a CMS tool like Drupal sounded good on the surface, but if that means losing the rich history contained in this site, it is not an option.

Next option looked at is migrating the site to a vBulletin host. vBulletin techs will migrate the data to their servers, they will perform all upgrades and maintenance as part of the monthly costs, which is very reasonable. However, adding 3rd party web parts to our site would not be allowed. So things like the chat box would go away. Not a lot of chatting goes on these days anyway, so perhaps we would get used to not having one pretty quick.

Final option is upgrading the current version of vBulletin and continue to host the site at GoDaddy or move to another host. This is the most hands on approach and we would be responsible for everything maintenance wise. We can also transform the site to whatever we want it to be. Obviously, this option would probably sound the best, especially for web developers ;) But when you look at the situation we are in right now, with a site owner who is no longer interested in supporting the site (or is too busy with other things), we are stuck and cannot move forward.