Apologies, I wasn’t sure if this was the optimal place to put this topic, so admins please feel free to move if you have a better alternative.
In those rare instances I have managed to engage somebody’s interest in AF and then shared the link for the site, some people have outright refused to open the link because of the site being under HTTP rather than HTTPS. I work in tech, so of course people from a technical background will have more strong opinions on this than other people out there.
In the modern era, people have been trained to fear and not risk going to any such site where an SSL certificate is not being used, even if there is no purchasing of products or personal information used on that site.
Has anybody ever discussed with Richard and whoever else under the trust that it would be better if their site had an SSL certificate?
People see it as meaning something dodgy, fake, inauthentic, ingenuine too. If I hadn’t already been introduce to AF in the days before SSL became the de facto standard, I wouldn’t have clicked on their site either. So unless I had heard about the forum or some other site first I would have never encountered AF.
I think the rise of ransomware, malware, trojan horses, phishing and the ever evolving practices of this that people are warier and more guarded and judgemental than ever. There is a lot more cynicism and varying subtle levels of proficiency in tech too now. Esp, in my stack in Microsoft with the rise of Low code/No code and citizen developers. I work with developers now, who have never actually ever coded which still tickles me. Pure low code/no code background.
Many people are judgemental and first impressions stick, as I am sure we all have also had people we recommended the site to turn away from the site and complain due to the design and style of the site too. (I know this has been brought up and discussed a few times so not trying to go down that road).
Sometimes rather than a prejudice it is more a fear. In the UK, if you work in sectors that required Security Clearance or in areas of known sensitive data, healthcare domains, social care etc then you are often given training and advice on other best practices for your online interactions both when using work devices and personal. Often they mention to avoid any sites that are HTTP, in the past they used to include as I mentioned that context as regards buying and selling, or any forms or capturing of data. Now I have noticed they don’t elaborate and just say avoid as a blanket approach, without context. So, people already have that irrational fear in them. In the same way they now push TLS1.2 or multi factor authentication, certain things become the norm and any deviation from that is just bad, bad, bad without any caveats.
Yes - and actualism is about undoing all the conditioning , not feeding into societal beliefs about what is what “without any caveats”, etc. i have to admit from where I stand, being able to overcome the site not having SSL is an extremely weak barrier to overcome.
Far bigger for me for example was reading about Richard writing that there’s no scientific knowledge of precisely how tobacco smoking causes lung cancer. I didn’t believe him at first - I thought he was nuts or anti-science or anti-evidence for going against the grain like that. But I looked into it too and indeed the causal link is not known. There’s correlations but the mechanism is unknown. That’s the fact of it!
And these both are relatively easy things to ascertain, about the exterior world. If someone can’t do that then someone really has no shot of parsing apart what’s what in the chimeric inner world.
I’ve been on the side of pandering to beliefs before, and to a degree I think it makes sense to package things in a more palatable way than not (AFT site is better than a giant word document lol), but the SSL thing seems so inconsequential to me. But that may just be because I never subscribed to this belief and grew up before SSL was the norm.
All that being said I think it’s relatively easy to set up and I don’t see why not .
Ok, step back a minute. Imagine I am just having a talk with somebody. They are not somebody who has explicitly wanted to explore Actualism, neither are they somebody on the spiritual path or dissatisfied with the religious upbringing they have. Like myself and many friends I have met they were happy and adjusted in the “normal world” as I was (at least before my accident).
For them other biases and conditioning will block them from doing the simple act of reading the words on the damn page. ‘I don’t trust this site.’…‘I don’t like the design of this site it is like something from the late 90s’…‘I don’t like how long Richard’s posts are.’ It is like the sort of excuses my kids give me when I ask them to do homework or help with house chores lol. I don’t want to just give up on the discussion with somebody because they have these excuses.
I grew up in a family of smoker’s and I always respected an individual’s choice to use whatever they want. I was so excited to try smoking and I really thought I was going to enjoy it like my parents and siblings but I didn’t at all. I was totally disappointed lol. I too explored the validity of what Richard states as well during my trying to attack Richard and AF phase. I watched this documentary a year or so ago and they were demonstrating growing organs in the lab for testing and I was wondering if such a method might eventually enable to test with more controlled parameters in the future.
There was so much I didn’t get at first. Some of the aspects of what my friend explained about the site and details. He didn’t give up on me in that regard though. He patiently sought the right way to help bridge my lack of understanding, the right analogy, description etc. If not for all his efforts I wouldn’t been having this conversation with you right now. I guess now I am at this comfortable point where I am not embarrassed anymore to try and engage with someone deeper about AF and patiently address concerns, misgivings and misunderstandings.
Yes, I grew up before SSL was the norm too. It is obviously a consequence of the fact for a decade or so now I have worked in areas of what is considered more private/sensitive/secure data. The belief is constantly forced on me. A lot of the younger people were not involved pre SSL and so it something that doesn’t make sense to them. Like some relic of the digital ways of old.
All this is very interesting but really is up to Richard & Vineeto… I do not know how they would react, they have their own particular views & reasons why they do things the way they like to do things.
Something they always emphasize about the design of the site is that aesthetic considerations are individual… there is not some ‘official standard’ out there of how things should look or be, and they set up the site according to the aesthetic considerations that they like. If someone can’t look past those aesthetic differences, that is sort of their problem… and the thing about aesthetics is, there is always someone that will have a problem with any sort of layout.
Some of those same considerations are relevant for matters of security as well. Personally I do not care one bit, and rarely think about it
Yes I understand, as I said I am not going to go down that road again as regards aesthetic, one can always copy and paste into some other tool they use. The words are more important than the style of the site. As my eyesight gets worse though and more sensitive to colour contrasts I am finding it harder to read so i do tend to copy.
Where technology recommendations and standards change I see no harm in suggesting optimisations. Google and Mozilla have started blocking navigation to any sites via HTTP, as well as things such as applying a lower search rank to HTTP sites.
It makes sense for websites to have SSL certificates - surely we don’t need to debate that . It is something I’ve mentioned to R&V - but they are obviously happy with how the website is and happy to look after it in their own way. I think that’s totally fine btw.
There are many things that one could improve about the website. For example, it barely ranks for any keywords. In fact, one the best chances someone has of stumbling across the website is googling “pacific heron”. We’re gonna bring in the bird enthusiasts!
Most of the traffic to the site is actually down to one single keyword which is pulling all the weight, which is (variations of) the quote “there are none so blind as those who will not see”.
Anyway, given R&V haven’t asked for consultation on this I have not given it a second thought.
I mean, why worry about the successful advertisement of a condition that one has not attained ? Like, seriously.
You may 
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? Like, seriously.