Here at Social Strata, the security of our customers and their visitors is paramount.

Last October we published a blog post about our offer of free Let's Encrypt certificates so that our customers can add TLS (previously known as SSL) to their Hoop.la communities, as there are several security advantages in doing so.

The response was amazing, with a significant amount of customers taking that offer. Now, starting June 5th, we are proactively moving all Hoop.la communities to HTTPS in order to protect the integrity of all Hoop.la communities.

This will have not only all the benefits mentioned before but also protect the Hoop.la communities we host from having Google's Chrome browser (and eventually all other browsers) display a "not secure" warning when visitors access them. Google announced recently that their browser will, from July 2018, start displaying the warning on all non-https sites:

This is the example provided on Google's announcement
on how the address box will now look like

From Google’s announcement:

"Chrome’s new interface will help users understand that all HTTP sites are not secure, and continue to move the web towards a secure HTTPS web by default. HTTPS is easier and cheaper than ever before, and it unlocks both performance improvements and powerful new features that are too sensitive for HTTP."

If you already have your Hoop.la community serving your visitors in a secure manner, we congratulate you! If not, this will be a reality soon. All internal Hoop.la links will be converted to HTTPS automatically, but if your community includes resources that are not secure (this does not apply to external links) browsers might still display some type of warning. You will need to manually update these resource links to use HTTPS, which could include images, CSS, JavaScript, and other embeds such as iframes and video players.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.  You can visit the FAQ section on our previous blog post or submit a request via support topic to [email protected] or https://hey.crowdstack.com/support.

Photo Credit: HTTPS browser Flickr photo by Yuri Samoilov shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license