manchester birding forum security update

Some visitors of the Manchester Birding Forum may receive a security alert message from your internet search engine when trying to connect to the forum, informing you that basically the site may be being impersonated (having been hacked). I can confirm that this is NOT the case and the forum is working perfectly normally, in fact, better than ever!

On other 28th September  the forum hosting company automatically enabled SSL secure encryption on the forum, which will be much more secure for anyone using it, although the forum never has and never will hold personal data on any of its users anyway. When now using older (cached) pages of the forum, search engines recognise that they are not the newly existing SSL versions and believe them to be possible imitations which is giving rise to the security messages. For me (I initially got the security message too!), just connecting to the new site has cleared any problems but perhaps clearing your cache may be an option too.

Details of the upgrade from the hosting company are below:
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In continuation with our push towards an increasingly secure ActiveBoard environment, we're now planning to enable TLS/SSL encryption (HTTPS) on all forums on September 28th, 2018.

HTTPS ensures that transmitted data is private, and protects against eavesdropping attacks. It also helps prevent tampering with requests, and injection of malicious advertisements or code into the pages you view. Additionally, HTTPS enabled forums should also see an small increase in Google search rankings, as they have indicated that HTTPS sites will be favoured over HTTP sites.