Google Cloud move

8164 Views 104 Replies 25 Participants Last post by JasonB, Oct 17, 2018

vs-Admin

Discussion Starter · May 1, 2018

Hello all,

We are reaching out to let our communities know that we will be moving the site off of our current hosting platform to Google Cloud this week.

If you notice any issues, please report them in the Community to Team section and we will get them addressed ASAP.

Thanks in advance,

Your Community Management Team

81 - 100 of 105 Posts

MSM

· #81 · Jul 24, 2018

The Google cloud move has had another unintended consequence.

As Google love to boss and control web users they've decided that this site is now accessed via httpS not http. (Were we consulted? Of course not.) This means that everything on the site has to be accessed via SSL.

SSL is the protocol needed to ensure banks etc can conduct financial operations online safely. It is farcical overkill to apply bank level security to an open and freely accessible public knowledge base.

And the 'unintended' consequence?

Images stored on external servers that don't serve via SSL are deemed 'unsafe' and are blanked out. eg The images on my thread Club Racing at Home are no longer visible. Though I say so myself, some of these images were very useful, as they are the clearest I've seen on how to wire up a track. Still, Google reckon you need to be protected from their lax online security protocol. This is nonsense.

One of our helpful moderators has suggested I repost the images here so Google can look after my images for me. That will never happen.

Michael

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stoooo

· #82 · Jul 24, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

I welcome the change to https. As far as I'm concerned, we should be encrypting everything as a matter of course, not just what we think is important. Encrypting everything helps to hide the important stuff amongst the background noise. If we only encrypt what we think is important, anything that is seen to be encrypted (and it's easy to spot) will attract attention.

You can now get a free SSL/TLS certificate for your website from here - https://letsencrypt.org/. Perhaps if you added one to your site, the images on here would magically reappear, as they would then be served via https. In fact, if you would be willing to be a guinea pig for that process, I'm sure many of us would like to hear how it works for you. Documenting it for the mods to pin would also be an incredibly useful post. And I'm sure we would all like to be able to seamlessly view your pictures again. The Great Photobucket Debacle of 2017 showed us how important images are to historical threads.

Dopamine

· #83 · Jul 24, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

stoooo said:
You can now get a free SSL/TLS certificate for your website from here - https://letsencrypt.org/. Perhaps if you added one to your site, the images on here would magically reappear, as they would then be served via https. In fact, if you would be willing to be a guinea pig for that process, I'm sure many of us would like to hear how it works for you. Documenting it for the mods to pin would also be an incredibly useful post.

I'll give that a try when I have a bit of time to experiment with it, although changing the url from http to https may well break existing links. My site at tenamp.com is currently http, not https, so would benefit from the upgrade. It's hosted by GoDaddy though (used them for years. Not the cheapest, but always excellent service and 100% up-time) so potentially they may not allow me to use a third party SSL/TLS certificate.

CMOTD

· #84 · Jul 24, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

MSM said:
The Google cloud move has had another unintended consequence.

As Google love to boss and control web users they've decided that this site is now accessed via httpS not http. (Were we consulted? Of course not.) This means that everything on the site has to be accessed via SSL.

SSL is the protocol needed to ensure banks etc can conduct financial operations online safely. It is farcical overkill to apply bank level security to an open and freely accessible public knowledge base.

And the 'unintended' consequence?

Images stored on external servers that don't serve via SSL are deemed 'unsafe' and are blanked out. eg The images on my thread Club Racing at Home are no longer visible. Though I say so myself, some of these images were very useful, as they are the clearest I've seen on how to wire up a track. Still, Google reckon you need to be protected from their lax online security protocol. This is nonsense.

One of our helpful moderators has suggested I repost the images here so Google can look after my images for me. That will never happen.

Michael

Although the change to https has created a multitude of problems for this forum (mainly due to the total incompetence of our commercial owners) it is not entirely fair to blame only Google for it. It is just the way the internet is going with everybody under governmental pressure to improve security. Before long the http method will disappear completely and https will be the standard.

Virtually every browser is now restricting access to non-https sites in some way with the notable exception of the totally obsolete Internet Explorer which continues to show your pictures Michael.

stoooo

· #85 · Jul 24, 2018

Dopamine said:
I'll give that a try when I have a bit of time to experiment with it, although changing the url from http to https may well break existing links. My site at tenamp.com is currently http, not https, so would benefit from the upgrade. It's hosted by GoDaddy though (used them for years. Not the cheapest, but always excellent service and 100% up-time) so potentially they may not allow me to use a third party SSL/TLS certificate.

Rumour has it this video gives some clarification on the GoDaddy issue...

I have read elsewhere that the process has to be followed every three months as GoDaddy doesn't support the autorenewal mechanism. But it doesn't sound like a lengthy process. Also, redirecting from http to https can be done automatically as a function of the web server (Apache, nginx etc.), so don't fret over that.

MM8154

· #86 · Jul 25, 2018

Thanks for moving to a more safe and secure environment to protect us all. Good to know that that the moderators and team behind the forum are doing what's right.

injectorman

· #87 · Jul 26, 2018

Additional protection wasnt and isnt needed. And any https website can still be hacked regardless.

MSM

· #88 · Jul 26, 2018

MM8154 said:
Thanks for moving to a more safe and secure environment to protect us all. Good to know that that the moderators and team behind the forum are doing what's right.

Protect us? From what?
This is an open, public depository of freely donated ideas and assistance. There is no possible justification for encrypting it and making people jump through hoops to read it.

chris99

· #89 · Jul 26, 2018

At least we don't have this 5 second delay (yet) which I find very irritating on other sites

View attachment 155341

stoooo

· #90 · Jul 26, 2018

injectorman said:
Additional protection wasnt and isnt needed. And any https website can still be hacked regardless.

That's a bold and sweeping statement. I'm a fan of having my user ID and password combination encrypted as they pass across the wire. HTTPS does nothing to prevent a site from being hacked; it exists to help secure the data in transit as it moves between the web server and web browser. Other defence mechanisms help to protect the server itself. Any decent website will also be storing your password in a hashed format, so even if it is breached, an attacker will not get your plaintext password, only the hash of it. Admittedly, those hashes can be brute forced, or potentially looked up in rainbow tables, but the likelihood of successfully deriving your password from the hash depends very much upon the quality of your password. Longer passwords (start thinking 'passphrase', folks) take significantly more time to crack.

You may not see the need to use encryption on this specific site. But applying encryption across the web as a whole significantly raises the overall level of security for all. Considering what the black hats of the world are getting up to these days, that has to be a good thing.

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injectorman

· #91 · Jul 26, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

Carp whats in it for them? Im a hobbyist. Theres no money to be had. If they want access to my pics or post under my name they can have it mate. Theres more important things to worry about.

Rick

JasonB

· #92 · Aug 23, 2018

Dopamine said:
I've noticed the same and there are some posts where images don't show, but it's browser dependant and seems only to affect images where the original image url begins with http rather than https.

For example, Chickster25's post here doesn't display the images when viewed in Firefox and Chrome, but does in Internet Explorer. (it's not my machine that's the issue. I've tried it on several different machines and tablets from a variety of IP addresses).

This problem only started after the Google pop-up problem went away, so I suspect it's linked.

As an example, the first image posted below (a square with green stripes) has an http, not https url. Composing this post in Firefox allows me to add the image, but it displays as just the image name (34343.png), not the full image. Viewed in Internet Explorer, the image is visible.

The second image (green leaves) has an https url and is visible in all browsers.

MSM said:
The Google cloud move has had another unintended consequence.

As Google love to boss and control web users they've decided that this site is now accessed via httpS not http. (Were we consulted? Of course not.) This means that everything on the site has to be accessed via SSL.

SSL is the protocol needed to ensure banks etc can conduct financial operations online safely. It is farcical overkill to apply bank level security to an open and freely accessible public knowledge base.

And the 'unintended' consequence?

Images stored on external servers that don't serve via SSL are deemed 'unsafe' and are blanked out. eg The images on my thread Club Racing at Home are no longer visible. Though I say so myself, some of these images were very useful, as they are the clearest I've seen on how to wire up a track. Still, Google reckon you need to be protected from their lax online security protocol. This is nonsense.

One of our helpful moderators has suggested I repost the images here so Google can look after my images for me. That will never happen.

Michael

We think http images are now working again. Certainly the ones I've been able to check are now working.

You may now see a warning in the address bar that parts of the site are insecure, but I believe this only relates to the images.

vs-Admin

Discussion Starter · #93 · Sep 10, 2018

Hello all,

I think we got all issues sorted, let us know if there is anything else not working.,

Jeff M

woodcote

· #94 · Sep 14, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

I've noticed for a couple of months that our YouTube videos were getting glitchy when embedded in a post - whether using the 'Special BBC' tool or manually entering the BB code. Originally (July this year?) the YouTube box came up with the video cover and the play button - but when you clicked the play button all you got was a fuzzy grey screen. Clicking the YouTube link (or the YouTube icon bottom left of the embedded YouTube box) successful navigated to the video on YouTube.

I noticed this week that there is now no YouTube box at all - just a black space where the box should be. This is for new videos and videos on old posts. For example, see here: https://www.slotforum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=184161#entry2184887

I'm getting this on several Windows machines using Firefox, Chrome, Opera and IE. And also on an iPad using Safari.

I did wonder if it might be a copyright issue (eg using music for the soundtrack), but I've checked and it is all our videos that are affected.

I've noticed other videos are showing (and playing) okay on other threads, such as this one: https://www.slotforum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=162490&p=2184945

Any ideas what might be going on?

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CMOTD

· #95 · Sep 14, 2018 (Edited by Moderator)

It looks like you are not following the forum instructions for embedding. LINK Other methods of doing it probably won't work since the switch to https.

I have looked at the workings of your post with the missing video and the link looks most peculiar.

woodcote

· #96 · Sep 14, 2018

Thanks Brian. That works.

So no need for using the BB code now? Maybe the three YouTube options should be removed from the 'Special BB Code' drop-down on the menu bar (just left of the font drop-down) if they don't work anymore. Are the other 'Special BB Code' options also obsolete?

I've been using the BB code (manually or via the drop-down) since 2010 - that's 12-25 videos a year across 15 pages of threads I'll have to go in and edit and add the full YouTube links... It's nice to have an archive here though - people do browse back through the years.

CMOTD

· #97 · Sep 14, 2018

I haven't a clue what BB code is or how to use it. I am not sure if it is within our power to remove it from the drop down - perhaps Jason will pop by and illuminate the issue.

It is always better to follow the published instructions for anything you want to do on the forum though. Comprehensive instructions for most things can be found under the' help' tab at the top of the page - the forum handbook gives a basic guide and the user guide goes into more detail.

woodcote

· #98 · Sep 14, 2018

Thanks Brian. I know there have been a lot of changes to the board recently and I'll have a look through the latest instructions to see if there's anything else I've missed.

The YouTube tags have always been important to get a decent embedded video and were included in the Special BB Code drop-down since I joined (2008). The upgrade a few years ago to the 'Big, HD and Wide' options on the drop-down was great as it gave the opportunity to share videos in their full-format beauty.

The latest change is certainly more user-friendly for new posts.

I'm lucky I can edit old posts on the WHO Racing subforum, but any videos elsewhere on Slot Forum have gone for ever - like all the videos on this thread: https://www.slotforum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=73705 which documents the evolution of the digital racing at our club.

CMOTD

· #99 · Sep 14, 2018

I can give you temporary editing powers over all your old posts in other forums if you wish.

woodcote

· #100 · Sep 14, 2018

That would be brilliant. Thanks Brian. Maybe over this weekend?

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