Young Writers Society

Hey all,

I'm going to be taking down WriterFeedPad briefly for maintenance on January 27 at 6pm GMT. In your local time, that's . The maintenance period will last for an indefinite period of time, but shouldn't take longer than two hours.

I'm taking it down to transition it from using http to https. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, but it's taken on added urgency given the latest updates to Firefox and Chrome, which display warnings against providing login info on unencrypted sites. Usually, doing this isn't all that difficult, but WriterFeedPad uses Etherpad, which uses Java, and I'm not altogether certain how to install SSL to work with Java. So, it could take me just five minutes, or it could take two hours.

By the way, the Young Writers Society has been using https since August 2014. Since all traffic is routed through Cloudflare, the SSL certificate displayed to browsers is a Cloudflare certificate, but there's a separate one for traffic between Cloudflare and the YWS server that is issued by StartSSL. Soon though, I'll be switching from StartSSL to Let's Encrypt as any new certificates issued by the former won't necessarily be accepted by browsers. WFP will be using Let's Encrypt from the get-go.

Tried... and failed.

I did manage to get SSL successfully working for the main writerfeedpad.com domain, but I was not able to do so for any of the user subdomains (e.g., nate.writerfeedpad.com). There were a few problems I ran into, but ultimately it was because Etherpad is only compatible with Java 6, and I need Java 8 to make the SSL work.

I'll keep looking into it. I have a few ideas for how to get around the issue, but they all require a lot of time and aren't guaranteed to work, which stinks.