Getting the the forum back up and running

Hi everyone,

As @JanAtheCPA mentioned in an earlier message, we are having some issues with the security certificate used to protect you on the site.

What does this all mean? Well, there is good news and bad news.

The good news is that I've replaced the old security certificate with a new one. This new one will encrypt your communications with the server. It means that your visit to tmswiki.org is as safe as it has always been.

The bad news is that this is only a temporary measure. Our software is out of date and to add the certificate, I had to generate one on our server. As a result, your browser may give you warnings.

The browser will give you warnings because they don't know our server. I could explain the technical details, but it would take pages of boring web tech and I think your eyes might glaze over. Instead, I'll just leave it that if your browser is complaining, it is because it doesn't know our server. However, if you recognize the people you've always seen - people like Jan, myself, @Cactusflower and others, you know that you are on the correct site. The TMS Wiki has been around since 2009, so you know that you are in the right place.

The more serious issue is what to do going forward. Unfortunately, this certificate issue makes it very clear that the time has come to update our software. If we do that, it will be a piece of cake to install a new certificate.

Therefore, that's what I'm working on. We'll probably continue to have certificate errors like we've been having for 4-10 more days. After that, they will all go away, and we will have a far stronger site than we had before, with updated software that will help take us to the end of our second decade.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to respond to this thread or to reach out to me at forest@tmswiki.org.

I'll provide more updates later in this thread in the upcoming days, so keep an eye out...

 

Thanks for this technical clarification about the security, @Forest! I know this is a big unexpected stressor as well as big unexpected pile of work, but it's a huge relief to know that we can all continue to use the forum without security concerns.

You mentioned yesterday that I could go ahead and post those links you gave me, so I might as well do so here.

Folks, if you'd like to take a look at the updated software, the developers, XenForo, have a community forum on their website just for users of the software (admins like Forest). You'll see that it has an updated look, with a lot of similarities to our Forum's layout: https://xenforo.com/community/ (XenForo community)

For an example of how customizable the new version is, you only need to go to the newer forum which discusses Alan's book, The Way Out, on the Pain Recovery Therapy site here: https://www.prtrecovery.org/ (All Topics)
which is also accessible from the main page at TMwiki.org. Which means that Forest is already very familiar with the new software version since of course he's the one who installed it for the PRT forum! PRT doesn't have any subforums, which makes the navigation and menu choices quite different.

I've already noticed a couple of things it might be nice for us to adopt!

 

Thank you, Jan.

I've come up with another idea for fixing the certificate, so I've been working on that. I hope it might work, but either way, this whole experience has made it clear to me that there's no choice but to update our software. We can't afford to have other problems like this.

On a more positive note, I was able to set up a new server and install the operating system (Debian 12) and web stack (Apache webserver, Mariadb, VirtualMin, and several other products for email, etc). There is still much more to do, but it feels good to have made a solid start.

 

O. M. G.
Where's an exploding head emoji when you need one?

 

It looks like it did work!