LAC's web server has been downgraded

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The cost of running our servers has been going up. Every year our web hosting provider has been raising prices, and every year we've vigorously negotiated those prices back down again. This time, after 17 years hosting the AskMisterWizard.com web site, the well-known "PowWeb" hosting service refused to negotiate their prices down to competitive levels.

Accordingly, we moved our hosting provider to a low-cost "Droplet" hosted at DigitalOcean.com. This has kept us VERY busy for the past couple of weeks as we moved all of our online content from PowWeb.com to DigitalOcean.com and as we tested everything. For awhile, we had both sites up in parallel.

We've been running from that new, lower-cost "droplet" exclusively for a couple of days now. Everything seems to be running more-or-less as we had hoped. However, we have not implemented https-compatible security yet. Accordingly, if you attempt to access any of our AskMisterWizard.com web pages with an "https://AskMisterWizard.com" request, most browsers will refuse to deliver any of our content. You must change those https requests to the older "http" style.

We hope to find some cost-free means of enhancing our new web server for compatibility with today's "https" protocols within the next few days.

This downgrade from https to http has also complicated our "LacMenuLauncher", since versions up through 11 have hard-coded https references to all of the AskMisterWizard.com web pages relating to LAC. As an interim measure, we have just published new version 12 of the LacMenuLauncher for beta testing. It changes all of those hard-coded "https" references into "http" references and restores the easy access to online documentation that was previously available. It also introduces a new command that allows users to launch mumble from its main menu.

On a related subject, we've also created a new forum, named "LacMenuLauncher Forum", for related discussions. You can always learn the latest details of our LacMenuLauncher from interactive postings and threads there. Here's a direct link:

https://sourceforge.net/p/linuxaircombat/discussion/lacmenulauncher/

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Update 18Dec2023: We have succesfuly upgraded the AskMisterWizard.com web site for https access. Any little problems that resulted from the previously mentioned downgrade from https to http should now be resolved.