Alpha60
Taxiarches
For the next week, we will be doing some heavy lifting to improve security, prepare the forum for a software upgrade later in the year, and possibly, God willing, improve the graphics art. We have a frontend developer and artist we are in talks with now about volunteering, but if anyone else would like to step up and join the team, you are also welcome. Mr. Hudson and I would be thrilled if we had an entire User Experience and Artwork Department, with multiple volunteers, so that we can make these forums absolutely beautiful.
If you enjoy graphics design and know CSS and html (and perhaps Javascript), we are looking for a frontend graphics artist and interface designer. Please send a PM to the Tech Support account, or Alpha60 if you are interested.
Most of the planned work will be primarily non-disruptive; if there are service interruptions, they might last 15-20 minutes or so. We will be doing some longer maintenance, but as always, most of it will happen on late Saturday night and Sunday morning, when traffic is at its weekly low thanks to the piety of OCNet members. I will make every effort to provide at least a two hour warning before any work where we may need to go offline for more than 20 minutes.
We intend to change the URL of the forum, but it will still be at the domain name OrthodoxChristianity.net, and when we do this change, all links will be corrected, forwarding will be in place, and the most users might need to do is update bookmarks they might have to specific threads, although we will try to negate that. This URL change will allow us to deploy SSL, so that connections to the forum are secure and encrypted. As you may know, the URLs of SSL websites start with “https”, whereas ordinary websites start with “http”. The “https://“ preface tells your browser to connect to our server on port 443 rather than port 80, and to set up an encrypted connection.
We might, if any users request it, keep an unencrypted HTTP access to the site online, in the event any users have proxied Internet connections that block https. If this is you, please let us know.
If you enjoy graphics design and know CSS and html (and perhaps Javascript), we are looking for a frontend graphics artist and interface designer. Please send a PM to the Tech Support account, or Alpha60 if you are interested.
Most of the planned work will be primarily non-disruptive; if there are service interruptions, they might last 15-20 minutes or so. We will be doing some longer maintenance, but as always, most of it will happen on late Saturday night and Sunday morning, when traffic is at its weekly low thanks to the piety of OCNet members. I will make every effort to provide at least a two hour warning before any work where we may need to go offline for more than 20 minutes.
We intend to change the URL of the forum, but it will still be at the domain name OrthodoxChristianity.net, and when we do this change, all links will be corrected, forwarding will be in place, and the most users might need to do is update bookmarks they might have to specific threads, although we will try to negate that. This URL change will allow us to deploy SSL, so that connections to the forum are secure and encrypted. As you may know, the URLs of SSL websites start with “https”, whereas ordinary websites start with “http”. The “https://“ preface tells your browser to connect to our server on port 443 rather than port 80, and to set up an encrypted connection.
We might, if any users request it, keep an unencrypted HTTP access to the site online, in the event any users have proxied Internet connections that block https. If this is you, please let us know.
