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populi.school.edu

Shane Flynn

June 15, 2010 02:34

Not planned

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It would be great to be able to "host" our school's populi on our own domain. I use the word "host" lightly as I know everything would still live on Populi's servers.

The reason I ask for this is to help build our school's brand and minimize confusion. Right now I have to explain to people that populiweb.com is a trustworthy domain. In the age of endless phishing attacks using domain obfuscation, the ability to put populi "under" our domain would help people trust the site easier. It would also help our students and staff feel like they were still at a school site instead of going off to someone else's.

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8 comments

• 0
  
  James June 21, 2010 23:55

  Hi Shane!

  We've talked about that off and on for a while, now, but so far haven't come up with a good solution.

  The problem is that to do that, we'd need to host your SSL certificate, as well, and then if you guys forget to renew it or something, suddenly everyone is locked out of the system (Firefox & co would give an "expired certificate" message and not let you through).

  So we'd need some way to do certificate management (you guys would have to buy an SSL cert, generate a .pem file, and upload it to Populi).

  That sort of change is pretty scary, though... one wrong move and you can lock everyone out for up to a day.  But someday it would definitely be nice to do, if we can make it simply and painless...

  Thanks!

  James

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  Shane Flynn June 22, 2010 00:15

  What about UCC Certificates? They allow for multiple domains to be secured by a single cert. That way it wouldn't have to be managed by users (which I agree would be a nightmare and potentially disastrous for most.)

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  James June 30, 2010 16:44

  Hi Shane,

  That's a great idea - I thought I had read that UCC Certificates from legitimate providers required that you actually own the domains in question (and obviously we don't own visible.edu), but apparently you just have to prove that you have a legal right to use them, so that might work!  I'm going to talk with a few providers this week and make sure this is a viable option...

  Thanks again!

  James

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  James July 07, 2010 16:39

  Hi Shane,

  Well, the good news is that I think UCC Certs would work - the bad news is that we'd need to have a more automated way to manage all the virtual hosts in our cluster before we could roll it out on our end... so I'll mark it "Not Planned" for now, but someday (after Library :) when we get bored, this would be a great idea to revisit.

  Thanks!

  James

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  Phuong Nguyen August 06, 2013 20:56

  Hi all,
  
  We would really like this feature as well.  It would definitely create less confusion for students and especially staff and faculty.  
  
  Thanks!

  Phuong

• 1
  
  Sam Horowitz March 15, 2017 15:05

  Just pinging this request… although I am sure that nobody's bored yet :)

  One thing that would make this a standout feature is if email notifications could also appear to come from our domain.

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  Permanently deleted user August 04, 2017 17:37

  Has this been resolved? We would like to find a way to make Populi more uniform/congruent design-wise with our site.

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  James August 05, 2017 00:20

  Hi Grace,

  This feature wouldn't actually let you change the look and feel of Populi, but would just let you change the domain name that appears in your browser... so you would be able to type populi.mycollege.edu and see that as your URL domain while using Populi.

  Unfortunately, we haven't figured out a way to make this work well so far - we buy several third-party tools and fonts that validate our right to use their products based on the domain (so they know that we're allowed to use their fonts for any requests that come from *.populiweb.com).  

  That becomes an issue if we allowed colleges to upload their SSL certs and use their own domains with Populi, since the fonts/charts/etc would no longer work (or would show an ugly "Trial Version" banner maybe).

  Sorry about that!
  James