This forum was briefly giving security warnings about its “certificate”, the technical code it uses to work over “https” rather than “http” and show a secured lock icon in your web browser.
Just a quick note to everyone to say everything’s fine. There’s no security risk to your forum posts or your computers from this.
I thought I had this figured out, so nobody would see an error ever again, but unfortunately it happened. And the reminder I’d set to double check it didn’t help, since I’d forgot to consider time zone differences when deciding which day to remind myself on.
The short version of the story is that in order to stay secure and show the lock icon, the forum needs a certificate. We get the certificate from a project called Let’s Encrypt. However, each certificate expires after a few months, and has to be renewed. That can happen automatically. But the software for doing it has been acting up.