I've asked this question on the Dutch support forum as well, but since it's taking over a week to answer me I might open a topic here too and see if more people experience this problem.

We've been having trouble with our Dutch RPG forum (http://warriorcatsnl.com). All our images were hosted on Imgur (we didn't know it was against their policy to host images there) since we didn't like using Forumotions uploader because it decreased the quality of these images too much.
For the last few months or so, members are complaining about disappearing images. We've since then replaced all images and all was well.

Until users of Chrome, Firefox and Safari are getting "locked out" with big warnings about the forum begin unsafe and not a good website to use. This is all due to us not having a SSL certificate. I really don't understand why Forumotion makes us pay for a package with a SSL certificate in them, while these things are free to get. We are now faced with users who are unable to enter the forum because of this or have to jump trough several hoops to enter.
Is it possible that Forumotion will offer this service for free really soon? SSL is becoming more important to secure your website and browsers will now punish you if you don't have one. Let'sEncrypt offers free SSL certificates, so why can't Forumotion?

Hope to have answers soon!

- Kiki and the Warrior Cats NL team!

hello

Is it possible that Forumotion will offer this service for free really soon?

unfortunately no,  in order to have the "S" on the http, it requires either Advanced or Premium package


Your forum is secure with both http and https ( the details are making the difference)
the ..not secure.. warning does not indicate that your computer or the forum you are visiting is affected by malware...
it only serves to alert you that you do not have a secure connection with that page

having https means that the data your users send to the forum are encrypted and cant be read or modified
having http means that the data are unencrypted and maybe someone can try to read or modify them 

and yes without an SSL google and other browsers will mark your forum as unsafe
you can bypass certificate errors in Chrome if you like but i don't recommend to you

Sadly skouliki is right we would not offer the SSL for free it dose cost us money to add the ssl to your forums address and if you was to go to godaddy they put the price in with the domain name as most forums are free and don't pay for a domain name all the addresses would be HTTP.

Sadly time are hard and we just can't give away a SSL to everyone.

As for your members getting the warning it's not safe that is 100% normal but you have nothing to worry about and nor dose your members, Your site is still safe and so is your data held by us.

I am not 100% sure why your members would have a problem logging in as this has nothing at all to do with the Address log in problems would not happen because of the address not having a HTTPS address.

To help us understand your members log in problem can you please ask your members that are facing this problem to take a screen shot of the page they get when they go on your forum and after they try and log in. we will also need the name of the browser they are using.

Please note that Google Chrome sometimes has problems and i would advise your members not to use it if they can help it.

The images hosted in Imgur do not violate any Forumotion policy, on the contrary it is a recommended image manager along with Servimg.
As for the SSL certificate if you do not have a purchase page where users should leave their most sensitive data such as phone addresses, banking data etc.. You really do not need, but yes, Google if you do not have it, will treat you worse when indexing your forum in search engines.

@Kiekie , we are working on it in the Dutch support forum. See your PM on the dutch support forum.

As @Joost is dealing with this on the Dutch support I will close this thread.

Topic locked