Why did a link within my site return a certificate error message?
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I have a custom domain through WordPress: joyofyaoi.com
I’ve been using it for a month without problem, making numerous links between posts and pages. However, on one of my most recent posts (http://joyofyaoi.com/2014/08/19/be-yaoi-fluent/), two links I’d inserted to one of my pages (http://joyofyaoi.com/the-jargon-of-yaoi/) gave people a certificate error. This is a copy one of my readers sent to me:
joyofyaoi.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.wordpress.com, wordpress.com (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)
When I checked the link on a browser (Chrome), I got the same message that suggested that the site I was linking to was untrustworthy and probably had malware (I use WOT).
Wanting to fix it as soon as possible, I went into the page edit and got the shortlink for the page (figuring that would remove the “wordpress” piece of the error) and replaced my two original links with the shortlink. Now they are working fine.
However, this is a page I will be linking to fairly often, and I’ve already had at least one other blogger link to it (http://araka13.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/top-3-anime/). I want to understand why there was a problem in the first place, so that there won’t be a problem again when I or someone else creates a link to the page. Other people will be unlikely to use the shortlink, and I don’t want to always have to remember that that’s the page I have to shorlink to. I also don’t want to have this problem occur with another page on my site.
Unfortunately, since I’ve already changed the links, I’m guessing it’s impossible to be sure what happened. I have read on your support site that it can be a problem when people use https://, but to my knowledge I’ve never opened any of my pages in that form, so I don’t know how I could have ended up with that in the original link — I was just copy/pasting the address from the open page in the browser.
I also want to know if there’s any way to test future links to find out if they’re going to give a malware warning. Once I clicked through the warning message WOT sent me the first time, it stopped warning me, so I don’t think I can use just clicking on a link to test in the future — now it treats that page as a trusted page.
Thank you!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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At the bottom of the “be yaoi fluent” post, I have inserted a paragraph with a direct link (not shortlink) to the jargon page. As far as I can tell, it is working without a problem — which doesn’t help me figure out why the same link caused a problem the first time (again, assuming that by some freak chance I hadn’t ended up with https in those original links).
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I think one of your users is using a browser extension like HTTPS Everywhere, which inserts HTTPS links (instead of HTTP links) everywhere.
At the moment, the error they saw is correct, since your site is joyofyaoi.com and even the shortlink is wp.me, but our SSL certificate is of course for wordpress.com.
We are working on improving the situation, but for now anyone forcing HTTPS on links which aren’t HTTPS may see this.
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Hmmm… If that’s the case, then why did my own browser give me that message the first time I clicked on those links? I’m not using an HTTPS browser extension, and I haven’t had that problem with any of the other links on my site…
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I’m not entire surely, all I see are HTTP links there, so I’m not able to reproduce the problem.
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You know, I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner, but I went back to the post and looked at the “revisions” record for it (never tried that before). I found that I had, some-freaking-how, originally had an https prefix on the links. I even found them on a number of other links on the site (http://joyofyaoi.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/deletes2.jpg — not yet published).
I’m just glad to know for sure what happened. And, in the future, if someone like me has already changed things, you might want to ask them to look at the revisions history to get the answer (like I did).
Thanks!
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