Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications By Matt Monday at 02:04 PM
PokemonMillennium Posted February 4, 2021 Posted February 4, 2021 Hi everyone, multiple members of our community have been reporting their Online Status to change from Anonymous to Visible on its own and we really can't figure out why. Do you have any ideas? Thanks
CoffeeCake Posted February 4, 2021 Posted February 4, 2021 What version of IPS are you using, and if 4.5, how long ago did you upgrade? This behavior changed from 4.4 to 4.5 from what used to be a per-login setting to an account level setting.
Dean_ Posted February 4, 2021 Posted February 4, 2021 As above, and the settings can be found in your profile. 🙂
PokemonMillennium Posted February 4, 2021 Author Posted February 4, 2021 (edited) We're currently on the latest release, we upgraded to 4.5 in mid November and we were aware of this change in location from the beginning, as were our members. First reports of the problem started coming in about a month ago and although our members would specifically change the online status to anonymous from their account settings, it would still change to Visible for whatever reason. We also couldn't figure out a pattern for which this change would happen. Today we got multiple reports about this, and one of our members told us it even happened twice just this afternoon Edited February 4, 2021 by PokemonMillennium
CoffeeCake Posted February 4, 2021 Posted February 4, 2021 3 minutes ago, PokemonMillennium said: First reports of the problem started coming in about a month ago and although our members would specifically change the online status to anonymous from their account settings, it would still change to Visible for whatever reason. I'd log a support ticket, though, in the interim--some questions someone is bound to ask: How do you know this is happening? Have you seen the setting in its anonymous and visible status states when looking at a member's record in the ACP before and after the change? How do members know this is happening? Where are you storing sessions? Redis? Database?
PokemonMillennium Posted February 4, 2021 Author Posted February 4, 2021 2 minutes ago, Paul E. said: I'd log a support ticket, though, in the interim--some questions someone is bound to ask: How do you know this is happening? Have you seen the setting in its anonymous and visible status states when looking at a member's record in the ACP before and after the change? How do members know this is happening? Where are you storing sessions? Redis? Database? So far just because of the reports. Could you explain me how to check status states in a member's record in the ACP? I thought I could only look at these When anonymous, a crossed out eye is shown near their username in the Who's Online list or in their profile. They notice the eye is missing when this happens. We use MySQL Database!
CoffeeCake Posted February 4, 2021 Posted February 4, 2021 20 minutes ago, PokemonMillennium said: Could you explain me how to check status states in a member's record in the ACP? I thought I could only look at these Well, shoot. I dunno. I thought it was there, but can't find it either. What's up with that IPS?
Ryan Ashbrook Posted February 4, 2021 Posted February 4, 2021 Switching online visibility isn't logged to the member history. If you look at the devices used by the user, though, it will show you which ones are logged in anonymously.
PokemonMillennium Posted February 5, 2021 Author Posted February 5, 2021 1 hour ago, Ryan Ashbrook said: Switching online visibility isn't logged to the member history. If you look at the devices used by the user, though, it will show you which ones are logged in anonymously. Just out of curiosity, if automatic login is not enabled, will the Online Status reset at every login? I'm asking even though this isn't my case as I just checked one of my member's devices and he's logged anonymously with each one of them, yet he still has this problem.
CoffeeCake Posted February 5, 2021 Posted February 5, 2021 I had separately noticed an issue where a member in a user group that forces anonymous login is in fact not logging in invisibly. alexxis 1
PokemonMillennium Posted February 5, 2021 Author Posted February 5, 2021 One of my members just reported the problem again and he pointed out that although he's still not visibile in the Who's Online list, other members can still see his Online Status by visiting his profile. The crossed out eye also disappeared. I checked and I can confirm what he's saying. I also looked at his devices and all his recent ones have anonymous login enabled. I think this might be a bug, I think I'll open a ticket.
CoffeeCake Posted February 5, 2021 Posted February 5, 2021 5 minutes ago, PokemonMillennium said: I think this might be a bug, I think I'll open a ticket. It seems very possible. Do you have any third party plugins or applications installed?
PokemonMillennium Posted February 5, 2021 Author Posted February 5, 2021 Just now, Paul E. said: It seems very possible. Do you have any third party plugins or applications installed? We do, we've had them for years but none of this ever happened
CoffeeCake Posted February 5, 2021 Posted February 5, 2021 (edited) 10 minutes ago, PokemonMillennium said: We do, we've had them for years but none of this ever happened The obvious answer from support will be to see if upon disabling all those applications and plugins, the issue is resolved. You may want to try that first, or list out the plugins and applications you have (and/or the hooks they are inserting into). If you've had something for years, and the handling of invisible users has changed recently, it's possible something that had no impact on versions prior to 4.5 is now having an impact. Edited February 5, 2021 by Paul E. PokemonMillennium 1
PokemonMillennium Posted February 5, 2021 Author Posted February 5, 2021 8 minutes ago, Paul E. said: The obvious answer from support will be to see if upon disabling all those applications and plugins, the issue is resolved. You may want to try that first, or list out the plugins and applications you have (and/or the hooks they are inserting into). Yeah, we have a couple of updates to do (Feedback and Basic Points), and disabling them will take some planning as all of them are very necessary to our community day by day. But thanks for the advice, we'll try that before opening a ticket
CoffeeCake Posted February 25, 2021 Posted February 25, 2021 Just an update. We had separately received a similar report and created a ticket here, and it is being investigated. There does appear to be something not working properly, though for our case it is manifesting itself in the forced invisible setting at the member group level. Some things to note though: On 2/5/2021 at 12:28 PM, PokemonMillennium said: One of my members just reported the problem again and he pointed out that although he's still not visibile in the Who's Online list, other members can still see his Online Status by visiting his profile. The crossed out eye also disappeared. I checked and I can confirm what he's saying. I also looked at his devices and all his recent ones have anonymous login enabled. We noticed that in the default theme, the crossed out eye has template logic in the profile to only show to the member whose profile it is. It will not show to administrators. I'm not sure if this is a bug or by design but my assumption was like yours that it would show for administrators too on the hovercard and profile. That's clearly not the case. There is logic in the application source code to reset the device anonymity setting at various points. If you edit a member and place them into a group with forced invisibility, as an example, or if the member adjusts their personal hidden/visible setting if they have access to that. This doesn't appear to happen in all conditions, yet my read of the logic that sets the session to anonymous should make this a non-issue. I'm not sure if somewhere else the device setting takes priority. For the members reporting the issue, they had a mix of anonymous and non anonymous known devices, which... if the logic is supposed to reset them all to match the setting doesn't make sense.
PokemonMillennium Posted March 4, 2021 Author Posted March 4, 2021 (edited) On 2/25/2021 at 2:59 PM, CoffeeCake said: Just an update. We had separately received a similar report and created a ticket here, and it is being investigated. There does appear to be something not working properly, though for our case it is manifesting itself in the forced invisible setting at the member group level. Some things to note though: We noticed that in the default theme, the crossed out eye has template logic in the profile to only show to the member whose profile it is. It will not show to administrators. I'm not sure if this is a bug or by design but my assumption was like yours that it would show for administrators too on the hovercard and profile. That's clearly not the case. There is logic in the application source code to reset the device anonymity setting at various points. If you edit a member and place them into a group with forced invisibility, as an example, or if the member adjusts their personal hidden/visible setting if they have access to that. This doesn't appear to happen in all conditions, yet my read of the logic that sets the session to anonymous should make this a non-issue. I'm not sure if somewhere else the device setting takes priority. For the members reporting the issue, they had a mix of anonymous and non anonymous known devices, which... if the logic is supposed to reset them all to match the setting doesn't make sense. As for your first point, I was aware that the eye wouldn't appear for administrators. When I said I checked, I meant that I logged in the members accounts and checked myself! As for the second point, we still couldn't figure out a logic as we don't have groups with forced invisibility nor we edited these members' groups. Some members would find their online status changed even if they browse our board with a single (invisible) device. We also couldn't open a ticket right now due to other commitments of our staff but I would appreciate it very much if you let me know how the official support will reach out to you. Edited March 4, 2021 by PokemonMillennium
CoffeeCake Posted March 4, 2021 Posted March 4, 2021 1 hour ago, PokemonMillennium said: We also couldn't open a ticket right now due to other commitments of our staff but I would appreciate it very much if you let me know how the official support will reach out to you. Support let us know that they are looking into it. Not sure when/how/if it will be addressed, yet we can reproduce the issue. Perhaps @Jordan Invision can keep us updated here.
PokemonMillennium Posted April 7, 2021 Author Posted April 7, 2021 (edited) Has anyone from the Invision Team been able to take a look at this? 🙂 Edited April 7, 2021 by PokemonMillennium
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