Over the last few weeks some changes have been made to The Strictly Spoiler website in order to improve the experience and make it more secure for all users
Many of you may have previously seen alerts in your address bar when visiting this site warning that the connection was “not secure” especially if you use browsers like Google Chrome although others also include this warning these days. I’ve also had a few of you express concerns about this warning on Facebook or Twitter especially with the site asking for donations in recent times to help fund the hosting it needs.
Firstly for the vast majority of you these warnings were nothing to worry about when using this site. I’d actually go as far as to say that the only person who needed to worry about the site being insecure is me because I am the only person who can log into the website and previously my login wouldn’t be securely encrypted. Those of you who donated didn’t need to worry as donations are handled offsite by paypal who use secure connections to their servers although I do know from conversations on Twitter that the browser warnings did put some people off using the donation button last series
However the internet is rapidly moving towards a more secure internet especially with browsers pointing out when connections are not secure and an increasing number of websites are switching from http to https and a few weeks ago this site too made the switch and now anyone visiting this site will be routed to a secure connection and you will notice that the “not secure” warnings are now replaced by a padlock or similar depending on the browser you use indicating that the connection between your browser and my web servers is now encrypted.
What does this mean for most of you? Well not much. The site is still up it’s just had a very minor change of address from http://www.strictlyspoiler.com to https://www.strictlyspoiler.com and any new links for posts should be updated and if you happen to come to the site using the old links you will be automatically redirected to the new address. You are welcome to update your bookmarks if you want but there’s really no need!
There’s also been a few other minor under the hood changes most noticeably concerning the comments system. For the last few years the site has been using the Disqus system for its comments which is a 3rd party system that a lot of websites offering interactive comments use. Disqus offers a few more features when compared to the comments system included in the WordPress backend that this site uses. Unfortunately with Disqus being a 3rd party GDPR has hit in a way that made administering the competition I regularly run throughout the series an absolute nightmare as I would no longer receive information like email addresses of people commenting so I could contact prize winners directly which meant I had to contact winners through the Disqus system itself and hope they spotted my comment.
For this reason I have now removed the Disqus comments system and reverted to the comments system included in wordpress and if you comment now you may notice the system is different and you may have to register again to comment rather than using your Disqus account. This also means that now if you comment I am processing any personal data you provide as part of that comment and you have a right to request the data I hold as well as a right to have that data removed. The website’s privacy policy has now been updated to reflect this and a dedicated email address has been set up to handle any GDPR requests (not that I expect to get any as I really don’t process much in the way of personal data especially for most site users who just read the spoiler and then go away) in due course
Ok that’s pretty much it for a rather long winded post that hopefully explains the changes that have been made to the site
And whilst we may be in the off season as you can see I’m still hard at work behind the scenes on this website and I still incur hosting costs all year round. If you want to help me out with these costs or just want to buy me a beer you can do so using THIS LINK or the button below