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Some of you may remember Reuben announcing the secure site beta last year. This preference sets whether wikiHow uses a HTTPS connection for you when you’re logged in. This kind of security setting isn’t as huge a concern on wikiHow as it is on, say, a site that handles payments or banking info or anything like that, but it’s still a good step for us to take in the long run. Now, our engineers are moving closer to turning this on permanently for all logged-in users to help create a uniform, secure experience. However, we know that there might be a few lingering bugs out there on the secure connection (for example, @Byankno1 found one with Drafts on Guided Editor - we have that filed and will get it sorted out before this change!). So Reuben wanted to me to ask folks who are willing to turn on their secure connection and keep an eye out for any funky bugs, so he and the team can tackle those before making any permanent switch. If you’re game to help:

  1. Go to https://www.wikihow.com/Special:Preferences

  2. Scroll down to where it says “Always use a secure connection when logged in” and make sure that box is checked. Then Save if needed.

  3. Log out and back into wikiHow. You should then see the URLs of your pages say “https”, and a little lock/secure icon appear in the URL bar (depending on your browser).

  4. Let us know if anything breaks! Reuben et al will be working on this over the next few days and weeks, so if you do spot any high-priority issues that affect important functions and end up being related to the secure connection, now is a good time to let us know. Any and all help would be appreciated:slight_smile:

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I’m using HTTPS and haven’t run into any issues yet!

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Not seen any either and I too am using HTTPS.

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Oh that’s great @Joel.Miles925 and @McDonalds1 ! I wasn’t sure how many folks out there used this feature already. I do, and other than the Guided Editor Drafts bug, I don’t think I’ve seen much go wrong either, so hopefully there won’t be too much pain in swapping over to using this for everyone all the time. Def let us know if you do see anything weird but fingers crossed things will be smooth sailing:slight_smile:

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I’ve been using it since it was enabled during beta phase last year and no issues at all.:slight_smile:

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I’ve been using it since I came back to wikiHow last Summer.  I think it’s great so far, but it doesn’t work on the forums (subdomain of wikihow.com ).:frowning:

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Ick! I just realized that too @Batreeqah ! Glad you brought that up! On my end Chrome is saying this forum page along with all other forum pages aren’t being accessed through a private connection.

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Cool - thanks for the updates! Yeah, the secure connection doesn’t carry to the forums just yet, and chances are that it won’t in this coming update either. I asked Reuben, and he said he hopes to get the secure connection sorted for the forums down the line, as well, but there are technical reasons why that wouldn’t be included in this coming update. The long-term end goal is to get a secure connection working everywhere though, not just on the main site, so at some future stage, hopefully we’ll be seeing that https everywhere:slight_smile:

Glad there aren’t a whole lot of big glaring bugs for y’all, though - thanks for letting me know you’ve been using the settings already. Makes us rest a little easier about the switcheroo! 

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Is the beta testing over now?  It’s missing from the preferences.

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Yep, it’s been on all the time for logged in users for a few weeks now, so they took the preference out to avoid confusion:slight_smile: