The various blogs about this basically have correct information about the expiration of our secure certificate.
Not that anyone in the community wants to really know the nitty gritty details, but here are the basics of what occurred...
We saw the expiration coming awhile back and submitted for a renewal multiple times, but it wasn't going through for some reason.
As it turns out, the certification was registered under our server hosting service, not Humaniplex, LLC, so Thawte (the authorized secure certificate service) was not accepting our request.
We FINALLY got it worked out and everything is back to normal (after a whole lot of phone calls!)
Rest assured, your information was safe regardless, and any purchases via gift card or cryptocurrency were through 3rd party services that weren't affected. We do that intentionally via 3rd parties so that we never have your financial information under any circumstances.
So thank you again for your patience, and we hope everyone has a great and safe long holiday weekend! Happy Birthday, USA!
Apologies for the delay, we have been working hard to track this down.
First, to address some of the concerns that members of our community have expressed, we DO use SSL via a secure certificate directly issued by Thawte (do a Google search for Thawte if that is meaningless to you).
Second, we do NOT have any of your personal information. We don't even track or analyze browsing habits haha.
We obviously need to have your email address for recovery and alert purposes. But that is the extent of any information that we have about our users.
We believe is frank honesty, and to that end, we do not know what occurred. Nothing that we have seen during the course of investigation indicates that there is any sort of active security breach. It possibly looks like a very old breach from a few years ago, from what we are seeing.
None of your financial information has ever been in our possession, which is why we use third party processors that are much bigger operations with larger resources than we have.
We do encourage you to update your recovery email addresses (we suggest dedicated email addresses, they are free from basically any service on the planet) and updating your passwords just in case.
We will continue to investigate and report back. In the meantime, please enjoy the holidays!
Welcome to 2020 Unfortunately in this day and age, everyone is a target. Although we do not see any evidence of an actual data breach, based on feedback from the community, something has obviously happened and we are devoting all of our resources to resolving it ASAP. By design from the ground up from the beginning of this community over a decade ago, we intentionally do not house any of your personal or financial data.
We have multiple layers of security measures in play and even our own internal developers can't get into the system without being granted explicit access by us. But again, something has obviously occurred based in the community's feedback so we are looking at everything from the ground up and will report back ASAP.
Apologies for the inconvenience, and we are devoting all of our resources to tracking down the source of this.
Our host screwed up our certificate. But don't worry, we are working on get it working right now.
In the meantime, everything still working. You'll see some broken links here and there. We are working on a temporary solution while our hosting service fixes this.
If you get that error that the site is not secure, that is true. But since you are not sending sensitive our financial information, there's no much to worry about. This system was not using SSL (secure transfer) for a decade before we decided to go that route last year.
Gift Card Changes The Gift Card Company makes changes to the types of cards they accept and the $5 extra charge often.
They do NOT give us any advance notice or even tell us at all. We don't find out about the changes until we see a blog or get a ticket.
We just redid the page and stopped trying to show amounts and cards. When the gift card people change things, our payment page gets confusing.
The real key to it all is check the payment button BEFORE you go and buy a gift card. That way you know you are getting the correct card for the amount you wish to purchase. Check it every time! The card that worked last week might not work this week!
If you see anything on this page that needs corrections or additions or explained better please put in a support ticket.
Or use crypto! It really is fast and easy to do, and they don't charge the site 40% like the gift card people.
