Why is finescale.com not a "Secure Site?"

Pure speculation here, but for the site to become secure they're usually required to get a dedicated IP address and they'd have to pay for an SSL certificate. Since this site itself doesn't sell anything (the magazine sales go through the publisher website) its probably just the cheaper option for them.

The most you're risking is the password you use for this site being exposed. Hopefully, you use a different password for every site.

What they're giving up is worse though. Google actually penalizes their search results because the site isn't secure, and we all get a warning from our web browsers when we navigate to the site initially...which can make a lot of people back out of using it. 

There's no reason the forum needs to be a secure site, nothing is bought on it. The  pages that have things to purchase are secure. 

I'm not a moderator, but I do believe that they both have good points. To really be secure you are indeed talking a dedicated IP, Servers with secure socket connections, Multi-Tier Firewalls, a robust encryption system, Network Intrusion Protection System, Host Intrusion Protective System, and antiviral software, a team to maintain it, etc. After all, anything less than this is not that secure really.....

With the forum being a hobby model building site one would have to ask why? More specifically, the company most likely performed a risk/benefit analysis early on and made a decision concerning the risk versus cost to make it secure. My bet is the risk does not warrant the cost for the various supports.

I don't want to play down the question though as I know that a good hacker with cutting malware can bring any web site down or steal information if that is the intention of the adversary. I've posted many photos here and my profile information isn't anything that can't really be retrieved or purchased from many other mediums (credit card companies, loan agreements, cell phone contracts, any other site we access and agree to thier terms and agreements, any chat site like twitter / facebook, common public information, etc.). 

My question would be, is there really anything within this forum that warrants the need for a true secure site (Privacy Act, Financial, HIPPA, PII)?

Would FSM be able to afford the cost of making this truely a secure site and stay profitable?

And if so, how much would they charge us by subscription to use the site?

You know what? I just noticed it's only the subdomain "cs.finescale.com" that is insecure. "finescale.com" is secure. It seems to be either a misconfiguration of the "cs" subdomain, or the forum software itself doesn't work with SSL the way it's been setup, or at all.