Encrypting the web

In terms of your stance with encrypting the site, I'm not sure it is entirely necessary but things like the alleycat races and some discussions could be used against the site and cycling in general if journo's or busybodys got hold of them. However, would that restrict access to newbies who are searching for fixed info?

It wouldn't stop the site being discovered, indexed by Google, searchable, etc... it would just prevent anyone between my server and your browser from viewing what you were doing. That is all. The site won't go underground, it would just make it so that no middle-man could view what was happening.

There's another view: Advertising. A lot of ISPs signed up last year to investigate the use of technology to analyse web pages being served, discover white space on those pages and to inject adverts into those areas. Encrypting the traffic means this would be impossible, as the ISP is a middle-man too and they wouldn't be able to see through the SSL encryption.