Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Dear all,

There are some discussion on shortening the host name of the forum host.

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbo ... .idv.tw%3E

I think this is a good chance to shorten our host name and the URL of the discussion threads. Actually, user.services.openoffice.org only serves the forums. So I suppose it is OK to shorten it to forum.openoffice.org. user.services.openoffice.org will be redirected to our new host name forum.openoffice.org.

After we decided our host name, we may purchase the host SSL certificate and start using HTTPS for better security.

Any ideas? ^_*'

I know nothing about how such things work, but my only concern would be the breaking of the many links to existing posts. Can a redirect be established and would the change to https complicate the redirect?

FJCC wrote:I know nothing about how such things work, but my only concern would be the breaking of the many links to existing posts. Can a redirect be established and would the change to https complicate the redirect?

Sorry I forgot to say this in the beginning.

There wil be redirection from http://user.services.openoffice.org to http://forum.openoffice.org .

But, https://user.services.openoffice.org will not work, due to the constraint of the SSL certificate. Only https://forum.openoffice.org works.

When is https:// used exactly?
Why mentioning it?

Hagar Delest wrote:When is https:// used exactly?
Why mentioning it?

Actually, this discussion starts here:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbo ... ail.com%3E

Kay is asking about having SSL certificate. Then I asked the Apache Infrastructure team about buying SSL certificates for Wiki host, and then someone answered about people talking about shortening the host names (wiki.services.openoffice.org and user.serices.openoffice.org), and whether we want to shorten our host names. So I brought this issue back to ooo-dev:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbo ... .idv.tw%3E

I think we can have wiki.services.openoffice.org CNAME to wiki.openoffice.org, and user.services.openoffice.org CNAME to forum.openoffice.org. If we do it this way, people will notice no difference since both host names points to the same location. The old URLs are still usable. However, since a canonical full host name is attached to an SSL certificate, https:// will only work on only one host name, be that either user.services.openoffice.org or forum.openoffice.org .

Benefit? I think the benefit of SSL is "security", reducing ricks of stolen passwords through plain text network traffic.

FYI for historic reasons, french forum use URL rewriting with a specific .htaccess.
Example:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/fr/forum/forum1.html
is equivalent to
http://user.services.openoffice.org/fr/forum/viewforum.php?f=1

Thanks to think about it.

I suppose this thread view would be more clear:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbo ... x/thread?7

Look for the thread "[wiki] login not secure... "

Bidouille wrote:FYI for historic reasons, french forum use URL rewriting with a specific .htaccess.
Example:
http://user.services.openoffice.org/fr/forum/forum1.html
is equivalent to
http://user.services.openoffice.org/fr/forum/viewforum.php?f=1

Thanks to think about it.

Thanks for your information. ^_*' Terry is really doing a fantastic job.

Imacat, sorry for the delayed response here.

• Changing the main forum domain is simply one of phpBB configuration -- or a simple MySQL update to all forums follows by a cache purge
• At a minimum we should implement a simple 301 redirector for usooo references using Apache mod_rewrite to avoid breaking any exist internet links.
• If we are going to change the primary address, then it does make sense to do a bulk substitution of internal forum references to usooo -- again a SQL batch script.

There is a wider issue of consensus and agreement on the change is a separate discussion.

HTTPS is also a related but different discussion. It is fully supported by phpBB. The Linux config would need changing and there are all sorts of annoyances with internal URI toggling between HTTP and HTTPS, but if we are defaulting to HTTPS we should again consider adding rewrite rules to redirect HTTPS and update any internal links in the forum content.

However, given that the forum content is public and open document content, then my personal vote is that HTTPS is sugar without any real value, except as an option for admins and moderators to use. So I would suggest leaving the default access as plain old HTTP.

I hope that you are aware that the oooforum.org is loaded with links to this forum, and that you probably can't bulk replace those?

Yup. Only the ones internal to usooo. That's why we need a redirector. We already do this for the french NL forum.