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Add support to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in IPB Forum


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  • 1 month later...
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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

I love IP products and I've been using them for about 12 years, but boy it's tough when you see other platforms implementing must have features (AMP is just the latest) and IP falling behind. 

I hope we see AMP support for pages and board real soon. 

P

Posted
2 hours ago, opentype said:

How is this a must-have feature? Please elaborate. 

I know from your experience that you already are well aware of the answer to this, so why are you asking facetious questions? 

http://adage.com/article/digital/google-amp-launch-looms-search-engine-scores-follow/302599/

Articles that are displayed on AMP-ready sites are going to receive a boost in Google News searches. AMP has existed since 2015 and it is already used by many sites to reduce load times and gain a special status in Google searches. 

I, and anyone using Pages as their front end, is essentially running a News site.  The vast majority of our IPS sites live and die by search engine visibility. Sure there are private, invite only sites out there, but they are a small minority.  Mobile browsing is already more than 50% of web traffic. As publishers, we must accommodate our customers while also using every advantage, like AMP, to gain new ones.  If AMP puts me next to Car & Driver in a google search about a car reveal at the Detroit Auto Show, then it is not only must-have, but critical to the success of a site like mine.   For me, forums are becoming secondary, if not tertiary to my primary search hits (we get a lot of image search hits due to our extensive photo gallery). 

I don't really mind if AMP is not enabled for the forums app, but it is critical to the pages app.

Posted
19 minutes ago, CheersnGears said:

 so why are you asking facetious questions? 

I didn’t. I am very serious about questioning the “must have” phrase. 
(Note, that “questioning” here both means “unconvinced so far” as well as “open to be convinced otherwise”. But people just claiming it to be a “must-have thing” isn’t enough.)

And one quote from the links you posted: “… it is only one signal. AMP doesn't mean adopt AMP and get a massive boost in search ranking. That is not the case.” 
Just saying …

Posted
9 minutes ago, opentype said:

I didn’t. I am very serious about questioning the “must have” phrase. 
(Note, that “questioning” here both means “unconvinced so far” as well as “open to be convinced otherwise”. But people just claiming it to be a “must-have thing” isn’t enough.)

And one quote from the links you posted: “… it is only one signal. AMP doesn't mean adopt AMP and get a massive boost in search ranking. That is not the case.” 
Just saying …

What google publicly claims about its search engine ranking methods are famously obtuse at best to downright dishonest at worst.  I am already seeing AMP becoming a much stronger signal in ranking than google claims it to be when browsing on a mobile device. When on a normal computer, AMP doesn't seem to matter.   But when more than 50% of traffic is coming from mobile devices, that means that AMP is a significant ranking factor for more than 50% of one's traffic. 

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Posted

I can see value in this for Pages. To be clear though, this is intended for news sites in which the content is largely static (again, there are some use-cases in Pages.) It's very, very limiting for dynamic applications in which extensive CSS and Javascript are required and the content changes on virtually every page load. 

So, you will likely not see it across the suite anytime in the foreseeable future. I'm not sure about the feasibility about deploying within Pages and suspect it would require a great deal of work, however, it's something I'll mark for internal review at some point. 

Posted

I agree with @Lindy that the need for AMP outside of the Pages app is dubious at best. 

We do need to have some third party developer com in and add support for the Google news sitemap XML format as well.... Having the two, AMP and a Google news sitemap, together is a sum greater than it's parts.

Posted
15 minutes ago, CheersnGears said:

I agree with @Lindy that the need for AMP outside of the Pages app is dubious at best. 

We do need to have some third party developer com in and add support for the Google news sitemap XML format as well.... Having the two, AMP and a Google news sitemap, together is a sum greater than it's parts.

That's a good call out. I would say an images sitemap for gallery and image attachments as well. Helps drive traffic.

Posted
36 minutes ago, AlexWebsites said:

That's a good call out. I would say an images sitemap for gallery and image attachments as well. Helps drive traffic.

Those are already there in the stock IPS software. Google news format is different than the normal sitemap

Posted
5 hours ago, Lindy said:

I can see value in this for Pages. To be clear though, this is intended for news sites in which the content is largely static (again, there are some use-cases in Pages.) It's very, very limiting for dynamic applications in which extensive CSS and Javascript are required and the content changes on virtually every page load. 

So, you will likely not see it across the suite anytime in the foreseeable future. I'm not sure about the feasibility about deploying within Pages and suspect it would require a great deal of work, however, it's something I'll mark for internal review at some point. 

 

this sounds similar to invisions approach to rss feeds - re-invent the wheel

surely all you would need in pages to deliver amp  content is a template that takes the already existing article content and then delivers it via a page in this format

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/get_started/create/basic_markup

yep?

 

 

  • 5 weeks later...
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  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

We have released a new version of our site that completely revolves around IPB. We share articles posted on the forum, on Facebook. For all those visitors who do not have an account, it would be really beneficial to be able to offer them an AMP visualization.

  • 6 months later...
  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

For me,  our website has 88% organic traffic, and 65% percent mobile use.  We are not running pages, we would need it in the forum. 

We are running MANY plugins, that run ads, make language appear the way we want it, and all that is crucial.. 

So 1) if we would go amp, we would still get good traffic but wont be able to monetize it so well, and maybe should change our model.

2) if we dont go amp, traffic will worsen, but monetizing still will be the same

As someone else noted, the web is a forever changing platform.

I d rather be  preparing for change from now on, than wait until everyone else has moved forward .

we would be interested for amp

  • on the Forum and NOT only for guests

For us it would be all right if the user gets a message that shows him, maybe the first 5 posts of the thread in amp, as a teaser 

and if he wants to read more, then him seeing this text/having to press on a button:  

  "this version of our site is read only, so that you can enjoy faster use.  if you want to read more answers, send pm, comment, search, visit our non-amp site so that you can benefit from all "

would that be possible?

its something that should be tested....! ..

@opentype i find your approach very interesting, is it depending on those percentages i am mentioning in the beginning? does something change with that or you think not? do you have any recommendations (discussions) specific to invision forum, about the  fastness/loading time of the website for all of us who try to optimize more  in the shadow of the amp fastness ?:-) . anything will be appreciated!

 

  

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

After the latest Facebook fiasco and similar coming from Google. I think we should be a lot less willing to bow to the pressures of what these companies want us to do. Yes we want to be searchable and usable on mobile, but not to Google's benefit and our expense.

Posted

I agree, although it makes me dryly smile that people were and are still so endlessly naive as to keep blindly selling their digital privacy souls by continuing using Facebook (aka The Devil's Liege), despite continued revelations coming to light, year after year. Did they really think all those server farms were free, so they troll their favoured celebrities and ex-partners for free?

Interesting to see so many companies now discretely backing away to distance themselves from Facebook, after promoting intergration for years.

LinkedIn is probably another classic waiting to happen, and also surely the first stop for Identity Theft wannabes after Facebook; between those two sites, anyone engaging in criminality could probably work out, with all the personal information revealed combined with CV information, anyone's 3 secret security question answers in less than 2 days, or fake their identity enough to unlock other necessary account credentials.

Many of these companies are now so huge and rich, they literally can do what they want with impunity, and ignore and bypass the laws and polite invitations to explain their company's actions that they find inconvenient, and that the rest of us have to follow because any fine to them is a drop in the proverbial ocean.

I'm waiting for the theories about Cambridge Analytica being a front for the CIA and NSA to start!

Easy, tiger! 

So, back on track...

As much as I enjoy Google's awesome products, it does annoy the hell out of me when they come up with the latest "do as we say" because we're holding all the cards, and your search ranking is at risk if you don't.

So, you then fearfully spend months optimising the hell out of your site and server, only to find you'll never really hit the heady heights of 100% A Page Speed or GT Metrix scores because Google (or for that matter 3rd party widget and ad providers like Pinterest, Amazon Affiliates, Twitter, Pinterest etc) point blank refuse to follow their own strict guidelines with their own products like Analytics, and you're therefore effectively stuck at a big fat F forever on a lot of the Page Speed/GT Metrix scoring criteria due having to use their fairly essential products and resources, that you will never have any control over, such as them not:

  • Leveraging Browser Caching,
  • being Served From A Consistant URL,
  • dont have Keep-Alive configured,
  • have Failed to Specify A Cache Validator,
  • havent minimised their Request Size to fit within 1 packet,
  • havent Enabled Gzip,
  • failed to Specify a Vary-Accept Encoding,
  • failed to Remove URL Query Strings and put them inside their URLs,
  • oh, and er, failed to minimised at all their damn JS and CSS!

So when you read Google are going to destroy your search ranking, because they are now starting penalising less Mobile Friendly sites and pages unless they comply, or if in the current world of pretty fast 3G/4G connections you don't provide duplicate content in the mobile friendly format of almost plain text versions of your site in AMP, by their cut off date.

I think AMP should have been done through the W3C, rather than Google insisting we all use a proprietary technology that they created.

Will IPS bring back Lo-Fi and rename it AMP!? Will there be a resurgence of WAP sites? Hopefully not! 

One thing Google insisted on and pulled off a blinder for the benefit of mankind, is promoting SSL encrypted sites in search results.

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