成人论坛

Last week 成人论坛 News launched three 成人论坛 News websites, with Tigrinya, Amharic and Afaan Oromoo becoming the 31st, 32nd and 33rd languages to join the World Service. Neil Doughty is the digital Executive Product Owner for the W2020 World Service expansion project, and explains some of the editorial and technical considerations behind the new websites.

The three launches are part of phase two of the World 2020 programme when it comes to digital launches, alongside 成人论坛 News in which launched on August 21st, and following the launch of 成人论坛 News in in November 2016.

Our full list of World 2020 languages is: Thai, Pidgin, Amharic, Tigrinya, Afaan Oromoo, Korean, Marathi, Telugu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Igbo, Yoruba.

The three new services will provide people in Ethiopia and Eritrea - often called the Horn of Africa - and diaspora from those countries with fair impartial news content. These sites are what the 成人论坛 World Service refers to as ‘services of need’ rather than ‘services of want’.

Access to news for people in the Horn of Africa is not easy, and when there is news available it’s hard to understand how much to trust it. These new services will help people in Ethiopia and Eritrea know more about what's going on inside their country, and the rest of the world.

I'm the Executive Product Owner for the digital part of the programme, which means making sure the sites are ready to launch on time is my responsibility.

In many ways the sites are similar to the existing (including Thai and Pidgin), but they do have some new features.

The new W2020 sites are the first from 成人论坛 News to be served over HTTPS by default, which we consider to be an important move for a number of reasons.

• It makes our users more secure, and as and are ranked in the bottom 30 (of 180) countries in the world by for press freedom, this is important.
• HTTPS means it’s much harder for anyone to know the specific pages a user is looking at; the hostname - www.bbc.com - can be detected, but not which specific World Service site or page within that site.
• HTTPS makes it harder for a attack to take place. When this happens entities can intercept and alter data being passed between two systems - often a user and the website they’re accessing. Serving our sites from HTTPS means users can be confident that the content they are consuming is what the 成人论坛 published and hasn’t been altered by anyone else before they accessed it.

Sites on HTTPS have the potential to be faster for users. Sites served over HTTPS can make use of something called which allows page content or assets to be delivered to user’s devices in a more efficient way. The 成人论坛 as an organisation is already doing work to implement HTTP/2, so launching sites over HTTPS means some of the resources needed to construct a web page are being served over HTTP/2.

Also, these new services are launching in the Horn of Africa, where a combination of poor connectivity and data costs can cause problems. HTTPS allows the 成人论坛 to start thinking about (PWAs) which may help mitigate some of these issues in future.

Google that sites which are served over HTTPS will gain a boost in its search algorithm, so as services for new users, that’s a no-brainer.

Later this year we expect the Chrome browser (the most-used among World Service audiences) to use the words Not Secure if a site allows a user to enter data (a search box) and is on HTTP. These services are new, and we want people to understand they can trust them.

So, if there all these great reasons around, why isn't all of 成人论坛 News and World Service jumping straight to HTTPS?

In short, existing sites, particularly in the UK, have a lot of dependencies outside of News, such as media players and legacy content formats and those are tough things to work through.

These new sites don't have all of those elements, and with no legacy content marooned on HTTP to concern ourselves with, launching on HTTPS is less complex.

That said, not all is rosy in the HTTPS garden…

When a site is served over HTTPS a single page within that site cannot be blocked. If a foreign government wants to block a single controversial page, they will not be able to block that page on its own - they will have to restrict access to the entire hostname. In this case that would be www.bbc.com.

Now, some people may argue that offering a site over http, which isn’t therefore blocked, is better for users as they have access to some content, but that raises the possibility that the content they are seeing has been altered in some way and they might be unaware this has happened.

Ultimately knowing that they can trust content from the 成人论坛 and knowing they can do so without anyone being able to find out which 成人论坛 pages they’ve been looking at is probably of more value.