From May 7 Conquer Club will be moving to "security by default", by redirecting all requests using the http protocol to the https protocol.
In general this will not have any noticeable impact for users, but there are some areas where there could be an impact, specifically:
Avatars
Signatures
Background: For some time now the Internet has been moving from (unencrypted) http to (encrypted) https. Http was developed with an innocent vision of a world where the only goal was information exchange; the array of security threats present on the modern Internet was not foreseen. Https was developed 25 years later to allow Internet users a higher level of security. A great many websites already use only https, and the companies that make browsers are pushing the rest to switch. Almost all browsers either mark http sites as "insecure" already, or plan to do so at some point in the near future. Chrome, for instance, will mark any http site as "insecure" starting in July.
Conquer Club has been hosted in https for years. However, we have continued to allow links in that are http-hosted. For a browser to deem a web page "secure", it requires every part of the page to be secure. Merely loading the page itself via https is not enough - all elements on the page must also be loaded by https. To facilitate this we will be steadily enforcing that any external third party content be hosted using HTTPS.
What this means for you: From May 7 all external urls in Avatars and Signatures will be automatically converted to HTTPS. If your external host supports HTTPS (all professional hosting should) then this will have no impact. If it does not support HTTPS (or, less likely, uses a different url format for it) then the content will break.
As an example, if you are using an avatar from http://mycontenthost.com/myavatar.jpg to test whether you will have a problem put the url https://mycontenthost.com/myavatar.jpg into a browser and check that it loads properly. If it does not you would need to contact your content host and ultimately attain a secured https url for the image.
All the major image-hosting services support https. The vast majority of our members will notice no change. This change should only have an impact on you if your avatar or signature is hosted on some small site that has not made the change. In that case, you may have to re-host your favourite image somewhere else.
What is https?
(correct would be: "used Hypertext Transfer Protocol for accessing the site" OR "used Hypertext Transfer Secure Protocol to access the site"). Hosting is one thing, protocols are something else 
