First Impressions - IPS 4 Suite (extensive)

[esquire]

Blah.... fix xer dot com.

[hmikko]

 

Text Editor - LOVE this idea. Great job. But it's missing a number of buttons, such as "edit source" of the box so you can see the tags and edit accordingly. I've never seen this not offered, especially to correct formatting errors. One button conspicuously absent here - how to you insert an image?

​

 

[Charles]

Editing the raw source in the editor is a setting you can enable for trusted members.

[esquire]

​

 

OK... so let's try "insert other media" which seems to imply it is inserting media in the attachment area other than the actual text.

OK. You are correct. If so then I'd rename that button "Insert media in post" because otherwise it makes little sense to have the button that is next to the "attachments" area and seems to imply you can insert media, other than images, as an attachment.

In addition, I'd have that as a little image icon in the toolbar since that is obviously the first place that people will look.  

[esquire]

Editing the raw source in the editor is a setting you can enable for trusted members.

So when you say "trusted" members I'm assuming this means any member or member group. So if I wanted all registered members to have access, I could.

Does limiting the ability to edit the source and tags have to do with the way you've set up permissions? Thanks for the explanation!

[esquire]

​

 

So this is a "two-step" process just to insert an image. You have to (a) first attach it, and then (b) go to the insert button and insert it into a post.  Why not have the ability to do a one-step and choose the image which the software attaches and then inserts exactly where you want? There should be an image button on the editor tabs that allows you to do this in one shot:

• select an image from your hard drive
• insert a URL of an image
• insert an existing attachment that pops up the second window showing attachments

The action of selecting an image from your hard drive should (i) automatically create an attachment; and (ii) insert the image where you put the cursor. The current implementation seems  awkward, difficult to understand and not conducive to easily uploading images in the manner that most users are accustomed.

[Marcher Technologies]

So when you say "trusted" members I'm assuming this means any member or member group. So if I wanted all registered members to have access, I could

Source mode is direct unmitigated control of the HTML..... I wouldn't give that to the average end user, personally. At best, they wouldn't know what to do with it. At worst, they could likely do something malicious with that...

[esquire]

Source mode is direct unmitigated control of the HTML..... I wouldn't give that to the average end user, personally. At best, they wouldn't know what to do with it. At worst, they could likely do something malicious with that...

​Great point and what I was guessing was meant. But when I referred to "source" it was only access to the source bbcode so you can manually arrange items, e.g. like the quote box above. When I have used other forums I can easily copy and paste the quote tags around what I want to quote. If something gets formatted improperly I can correct it easily.

Just a few final thoughts and bug reports: (And here is the link to my webmaster community test site, since the prior didn't work)

• 3 column blocks are missing the header background that widgets have. I'm not sure if this is intentional but it doesn't look good the way it is and the title gets lost in the page. Look at the "Latest Articles" title on the home page. There is no border, same as the gallery on the bottom.
  • I would love a way to remove the title from the top widget "Latest Articles" since that doesn't belong on a home page. This would be best placed in the "edit block settings" when you click the edit button and have a toggle for "show title". While a custom title would be nice too, I guess that could probably be set in the language settings to change the default text (although it might have other consequences so I'd prefer the addition.)
• Calendar is mega cool. I really love this App. Looks great in the sidebar: http://fixxer.com/calendar/1-community-calendar/events/2015/04/ But if I look at the actual event item, it shows the top of the image and cuts off the entire bottom. The image size is 1980px across so it doesn't resize, it just seems to lop off the rest of the photo. You can see it better on this photo of a mohawk violinist - haircut only. http://fixxer.com/calendar/event/1-seo-sunday/
• Editor is inconsistent. I I click "insert" for hyperlinks and nothing happens. I'm using Chrome. This has occurred with the bold button.
• Block Manager is GREAT!!! But it is not obvious. In the back end I would place it somewhere, perhaps even a ? for a popup to explain that the little arrow you may not see on the front end if you're logged in as admin is a block manager.
• SIT!! TEXT BOX BORDER, SIT!!! The bottom bar in the text editor will occasionally jump up and down as I'm typing in the box. Can drive you crazy.
• Heading Tags - While I like being able to set font size, can there be an ability to offer H tags, at least for authors in the Pages module?
• Third Party Services... Some were chosen and not others. What happened to Skimlinks? They are pretty large.
• Advertisements -- Great Addition!! Suggestion about HTML block Takes a lot of the hassle out of the placement. Brilliant stuff inserting them within forum areas, really nice! One thing -- I tried to place an ad on the sidebar. I notice that the ads does not integrate with the blocks manager. So let's say I have 3 ads that I want to place in different areas between sidebar blocks. I don't see any way that you can do that. It seems to place the HTML block right on the top of the area controlled by the blocks manager. I would suggest making the Ad blocks into "widgets" that can be moved around just like any other.
• Announcements - where are they? So I created an announcements block. But... where is the area to create forum announcements? I searched the ACP and found nothing listed for announce or announcements?

 

[Charles]

Announcements are in the ModeratorCP.

[Vikestart]

Announcements - where are they? So I created an announcements block. But... where is the area to create forum announcements? I searched the ACP and found nothing listed for announce or announcements?

​In the Moderator Control Panel

[esquire]

​In the Moderator Control Panel

​The what? I'm logged in as an administrator. I'm missing something here... 

Oh - the front end moderation area. You should put this into the documentation in searching the Admin CP. I'm surprised that announcements isn't something I can see in the Admin CP. I always thought of front end moderation being about that but I guess it's fine there although it's not really "moderating" and it's something that I might not want moderators to access. Global announcements are what I would want admins to control.

[Charles]

Admins are also moderators and you can control access to Announcements in permissions.

[Ivoos]

I was wondering about the reasoning behind the 303 redirect? I thought it was supposed to be a 301. I have a forum where topic titles change quite frequently and I don't want to lose any backlinks each time that happens.

[esquire]

I was wondering about the reasoning behind the 303 redirect? I thought it was supposed to be a 301. I have a forum where topic titles change quite frequently and I don't want to lose any backlinks each time that happens.

​I just received a 404 for the forum name change that shows up as a 200. I'm guessing that this is the same treatment as described above by the server. This should generate a 404 and not a 303 (or 200). I'm not sure since I see what may be a soft 404 on this page:

http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/491-ips-community-suite-40/

 

[Charles]

The example link there should be a 404. It was deleted not renamed.

[esquire]

The example link there should be a 404. It was deleted not renamed.

​Thanks - but we can't confirm based upon your server setup. 

Should - but it isn't. I tested this on my site - I get a 403 response / status code and some cryptic error code. Might also want to take a look at the other Topic created about SEO and the Pages module. Not as critical as this stuff but also important, IMHO.

[Charles]

​Thanks - but we can't confirm based upon your server setup. 

Should - but it isn't. I tested this on my site - I get a 403 response / status code and some cryptic error code. Might also want to take a look at the other Topic created about SEO and the Pages module. Not as critical as this stuff but also important, IMHO.

​I'm not sure what you mean. When I go to http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/491-ips-community-suite-40/ I get a 404.

[esquire]

​I'm not sure what you mean. When I go to http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/491-ips-community-suite-40/ I get a 404.

​How are you determining that the IPS server here is responding with a 404 status code? 

If I substitute my site to try to generate this URL above, I generate the same error and "IPS Error Code" as the above forum page not found -- I get a 403 generated. See below:

Error code: 2F173/1

GET /topic/408407-first-impressions-ips-4-suite-extensive/?page=2 HTTP/1.1[CRLF]
Host: MY SITE HERE.com[CRLF]
Connection: close[CRLF]
User-Agent: Web-sniffer/1.1.0 (+http://web-sniffer.net/)[CRLF]
Accept-Encoding: gzip[CRLF]
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,UTF-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7[CRLF]
Cache-Control: no-cache[CRLF]
Accept-Language: de,en;q=0.7,en-us;q=0.3[CRLF]
Referer: http://web-sniffer.net/[CRLF]
[CRLF]
HTTP Response Header

Name	Value	Delim
Status: HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date:	Wed, 11 Mar 2015 01:21:00 GMT

 

[Charles]

Just used web inspector on Safari.

[esquire]

Just used web inspector on Safari.

​

I don't know if you're behind or in front of the firewall. Since I'm in front, I can't reliably see what's coming from your site, only on mine. That's why what Lindy said about server response codes on the IPS server is unreliable for me. I always see a 200 status code.

Now here is an interesting result. I replace the same URL with another person's test IPS4 site and I generate the 403 - perhaps because it's trying to hit a forum topic that doesn't exist and I'm getting forbidden - 403 status code. I tried it at 2 other status code checkers and same result.

Try both the URLs out yourself. You'll see that on two independent servers, you'll get a 403.Now here's an interesting observation on my site, using my domain with these 2 bogus URLs:

 

/forum/491-ips-community-suite-40/ = 404 with Error code: 2F176/1

/topic/408407-first-impressions-ips-4-suite-extensive/?page=2#comment-2531315 = 403 with Error code: 2F173/1

http://fixxer.com/tadaafsd234234 = 404 with Error code: 2T187/2

 

So each different unfound page generates different IPS Codes which I can't decipher and two produce 404 status codes and one a 403. And considering I'm hitting two different IPS sites and generating the same thing, I'm going to assume that what I'm seeing is legitimately what customers will see using stock LAMP setup without the fancy stuff you've got going on.

 

[Charles]

Topics will return a 403 rather than a 404 for various permission and security reasons.

[esquire]

Topics will return a 403 rather than a 404 for various permission and security reasons.

First - thanks for the very quick responses, much appreciated. ​So if you remove a topic, the server will generate a 403 and not a 404...  I'm not sure of the reasoning behind this. But that said, has anyone investigated whether the use of a 403 rather than a 404 might affect the manner in which search engines will treat remove indexed topics that have been removed but appear forbidden? 

[Charles]

To my knowledge both tell the search engine the same thing: no content here for you.

[Lindy]

First - thanks for the very quick responses, much appreciated. ​So if you remove a topic, the server will generate a 403 and not a 404...  I'm not sure of the reasoning behind this. But that said, has anyone investigated whether the use of a 403 rather than a 404 might affect the manner in which search engines will treat remove indexed topics that have been removed but appear forbidden? 

There's no real difference as far as Google is concerned. Google will look at both 403 and 404 and first consider it to be temporary and check back within 24 hours. If it's still the same status code, it will be removed. We could accomplish immediate removal on crawling by setting a 410 which tells Google, "nope - not an accident, it's really gone and we meant to do that" - but if you're an admin that's toying with permissions when Google happens to hit your site, you wouldn't appreciate that. 

 

[esquire]

To my knowledge both tell the search engine the same thing: no content here for you.

​They are actually different. A 404 says "the URL is gone, not sure whether it's coming back." A 403 says "what you're trying to access is now forbidden to be accessed" although it doesn't imply whether the resource is permanently gone. A 410 can be used in place of a 404 which says "URL gone permanently." I have seen various opinions as to how the 403 may get treated across different search engines. But unanimously the opinions are that the 404/410 response is the correct one and provides no mistake as to the status of the URL. I'm more worried about the 301 being treated as a 303 than this but it's still a consideration if it hasn't been discussed internally, thanks.