You can now access Ready To Go via an encrypted link from your browser (https) as well as the default (http) access. In a few weeks time this will become the default method for accessing both the main site and the forums and any attempts to access via http will automatically be redirected.
If you have any problems accessing the site via the secure route please let us know.
What are the potential disadvantages?
Very few really – if you are accessing the site with a very old browser which doesn’t support the modern secure protocols you will lose access (but all modern browsers will work)
Some browsers will occasionally give you “mixed content” warnings, particularly on the forums where someone has linked to pictures/media hosted on other websites that are not secure or insecure advert banners are displayed – this is a warning that the content on the other website is insecure and not a warning about RTG itself. You may safely ignore the warning. If you choose not to display “mixed content” you will not see the image/media from the other site. This should diminish over time as more and more websites support https.
So why are we changing this?
We have always endeavoured to keep our servers as secure as possible and passwords are securely encrypted there. However there has always been a weak link, particularly for those of you using unsecured wifi connections as your user-id/password at logon is currently sent to us from your device in an unencrypted form which can be intercepted. Logging on securely removes this issue.
Secondly, and the main driving force behind the change – new protocols are now available for many mobile device browsers to speed up the loading of pages, however these are only available across secure connections so to support them we must be running those. The majority of you are now accessing the website via mobile devices and we will be supporting the new protocols early next year – to sum up, RTG should load faster.