Google Domains, Jcink, SSL Error

[Amondrask]

My domain is: wonder-comics.net

My hosting provider, if applicable, is: Google Domains

I can login to a root shell on my machine (yes or no, or I don’t know): No

I’m using a control panel to manage my site (no, or provide the name and version of the control panel): Yes? Google Domains or Jcink Admin Control Panel.

The version of my client is (e.g. output of certbot --version or certbot-auto --version if you’re using Certbot): No idea.

Hey, all!

So, to preface this, I have the software and coding capacity of your average banana. I don’t really know what I’m doing, so please try to keep things as simple as you can, or I likely won’t have a clue what you’re saying. Sorry!

Long story short, I have a forum, which I made using Jcink.
I have a custom domain with Google Domains.
The issue is that the site comes up with a security error sometimes, due to not having an SSL certificate. As far as I can tell, this is because the SSL cert is for jcink, and not for my custom domain.

I’ve been reading as much into this as my peanut brain can handle, and from what I can figure out, jcink simply doesn’t support https for custom domains. I’ve tried looking into getting an SSL for the site via Let’s Ecrypt, but Google Domains doesn’t seem to have any support for it whatsoever, so I haven’t the faintest idea how to get that started.

Any ideas?

[_az]

At the end of the day, Jcink needs to support SSL for custom domains. That part is not negotiable because they're the ones who need to install it on their servers.

You could get an SSL certificate for your custom domain, right now, no problem. But it would be useless because Jcink won't install it on their servers.

There is a somewhat convoluted workaround to enable SSL for your domain name, and that's to use a CDN/proxy like Cloudflare for your custom domain, with SSL enabled in "Flexible" mode. There's a diagram of how that would work in their documentation:

The Flexible SSL option allows a secure HTTPS connection between your visitor and Cloudflare, but forces Cloudflare to connect to your origin web server over unencrypted HTTP. An SSL certificate is not required on your origin web server and your visitors will still see the site as being HTTPS enabled.

It's possible to do this entirely for free, and visitors would see SSL for your Jcink forum using its custom domain. However, it will be up to you to figure out how to sign up to Cloudflare, add your domain, and turn on SSL. It's not extremely difficult by any means, but it can be daunting for a total beginner.

Otherwise, all you can really do is wait for Jcink to support SSL for custom domains.

[Amondrask]

Thank you very much for clearing this up for me! Hopefully jcink gets their act together soon.