Moving to a secure SSL connection

In the coming week or so we'll be switching Casino Listings over to a secure all-SSL connection. What does that mean? All your connections with our server will be encrypted and safe from any bad guys, hackers, or even nosy ISPs or governments. Major sites across the internet have been moving towards requiring a secure connection over the past year or so, and we intend to follow suit as it is best practice for online safety and security.

The move should in theory be seamless, but we have had to make a couple of minor changes to the way the site works in order to keep running with maximum security:

1. Any image that you want to post will have to be uploaded to our server using the "File Attachments" box when you are posting. That means no more images that are linked or hosted on third party servers. We do this for a couple of reasons. Firstly because if the image you reference is not itself hosted on a secure site your browser may pop up a warning saying something like "this page is not fully secure" and/or simply not show the image at all. And secondly, third party image hosting sites which have been used in the past have a nasty habit of deleting images or disappearing altogether, leaving missing image tags on your posts.

We have gone through and updated all old referenced images that were posted by users and where possible have uploaded them to our site as per point 1. However some were posted using image hosting services that have put up paywalls and deleted images (such as ImageShack) or disappeared altogether, so those images have been lost. They were lost anyway regardless of whether we made this change, but its a lesson learned.

2. A small proportion of our free games will be disabled if they are not available over a secure connection, for the same reason of browser warnings and/or blockages that I explained in relation to uploaded images. We have been working on getting these moved to working SSL sources over the past few weeks. However there are currently 143 games (out of around 900 total) that so far cannot be moved over, with the bulk of them being supplied by RTG and Playtech. If we cannot find an SSL source we will disable the affected games until we can.

3. For regular members who visit often and are automatically logged in, once we switch over you will most likely have to log in again.

I will post any updates in this thread, along with an announcement of the time we are planning to switch over.