which is a good thing.
but it expires December 3rd?
It's a very good thing having SSL cert (DV) for this forum, even if the cert has limited function.
TL,DR: the forum's certificate is just fine and had been verified by a certificate authority...
There are three different types of SSL certificates:
- Domain Validation (DV)
- Organization Validation (OV)
- Extensive Validation (EV)
All three certificate types offer the same level of encryption; how they differ from one another is tied to how the owner’s identity is defined.
This relates to the information requested from the owner. For the DV cert, the webmaster can certify the ownership of the domain and no other validation needed. For the OV cert, the organization existence is validated by the authorized employee who will provide legal documentation for the purpose. For the EV cert, the organization validated the same as in OV and in addition the certificate issuer will verify the organization provided documentation by third-parties. In theory, higher the requirement for the owner identity results in higher level of trust.
Before I get carried away, let's go back to the forum's cert...
By now, you should know that mac-forums.com has a DV SSL certificate and you could actually view its details just by clicking on the green padlock in the browser's address bar:
The image shows all of the information for the cert, like the purpose, issued to and from, the creation/expiration dates, etc. From this information, we can state that the cert had been auto-generated by cPanel Inc. Certificate Authority. The date the cert generated is 9/3/218 and it'll expire on 12/3/2018.
cPanel is a software solution for hosting companies, that provides an interface for their customers to manage their domain hosting. By default he plugin for auto-generating certs for this software uses the date of requesting the certificate as start date and the hosting service renewal date as the expiration date. If and when the customer renews the hosting service for an additional year, the SSL certificate is automatically renewed for the year as well.
If you're interested, you could also view this site's certificate path:
As Nick has stated, pretty much everything has an expiration date. Most of the time the SSL certs are generated for a year, due to the uncertainty surrounding the existence of the websites. They tend to come and go, ownership changes, etc., and that's perfectly normal...