Shifting the IF Archive to https-always, dropping FTP

As part of the IF Archive transfer, we are considering two privacy/security upgrades:

(1) Turning off anonymous FTP access. While the Archive’s FTP support has a venerable history (dating back to when it was “ftp.gmd.de”), it’s insecure and spammers occasionally drop a load of junk into it.

A few sites (IFDB, IFWiki, and this forum) do automated backups by FTP upload. We will contact those users separately about switching to ssh/scp uploads.

(2) Setting the ifarchive.org server to redirect all web URLs to https. Classic http URLs would still work, they’d just silently change to https. (You can see that ifcomp.org/ already works this way.)

I know there are automated tools which do web fetches from the Archive. iplayif.com is the most prominent. I think they should all keep working with this change; web-fetch libraries understand redirects and https. But if anybody knows of a potential problem, please let us know.