Mixed Content Warning for Forum Design <p>I'm currently designing a social network on my local host, that also has a forum aspect involved. There are three things that a user can do on the site that is causing me some concern. </p> <ol> <li>Log in to their profile via the header from any page on the site.</li> <li>Post things on their wall that include links to external sites.</li> <li>Post in the forum a variety of different things including links to external sites, and images on external sites.</li> </ol> <p>Because of #1 I made the entire site https. So no matter where a user was on the site, they could log in and their entire session would be encrypted. This functionality is working great but I am afraid of <code>Mixed Content Warnings</code>.</p> <p>Right now I'm thinking twice about making the full site secure b/c if I keep it this way will mixed content warnings appear for every page that has a link to an external site, or an image from an external site? Unfortunately I have never seen this warning b/c none of the browsers I use seem to show it to me. And I searched for some kind of list of browsers that show this warning but there is no finite list that I can find. So this is awkward b/c I'm worrying and trying to avoid a thing that I've never seen. But I have thought of one solution.</p> <p>My current idea on how to fix the image problem is to take images from users when they post a forum and write them to my disk, and provide the new image link. I am pretty sure this is exactly how google images stays https while showing millions of images from http sites. I think they write them all to their own server. Example: </p> <p><a href="https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTj_52I-TSX79mQFJRLTDNGahtGbsh_BpYDp0H3hbzJDWK2qxPZ" rel="nofollow">https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTj_52I-TSX79mQFJRLTDNGahtGbsh_BpYDp0H3hbzJDWK2qxPZ</a></p> <p>So I think I have found a solution to the image problem but what about external links? Because when a user posts a link on their wall to <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/">http://stackoverflow.com/</a> for example I read the post and surround it with an anchor tag so technically to a browser wouldn't that be none secure content? Wouldn't that throw a warning? </p> <p>How could I fix this and not annoy my users? And do you have a better solution to my image problem? Thank you all for reading through my confusion.</p>