Hump Day: Achievements Improvements

[Jordan Miller]

 

HAPPY Hump Day! 

A lot has gone down in the last week or two. In case you need a little refresher, we recently soft-launched Achievements. It'll be available for all in the coming weeks, but for now you can get a taste of it here in our own community. 

The response has been insanely epic 👏 

The feedback even more so 🤯 

I personally took notes of all the feedback provided. We've already started implementing some key changes (shout-out to our super talented development team!! Show them some love in the comments), including:

• Explanation for how you earned a badge
• Current position / max number of ranks shown so you know how far you have to go
• Added tooltips on rank badges
• Added lazy loading
• Optimized rebuild routine
• Fixed a bunch of bugs

I know that only scratches the surface, but keep in mind we'll continue better Achievements over time! 🤠

Lots to absorb here. Now that you've had some time to digest Achievements, how are you feeling about it? Sound off in the replies below! 🥳

PS - here's a short-list of some of the 4.6 fixes we worked on in the last week:

 

- Added a confirmation pop-up when mass approving account withdrawals.
- Added an option to limit Withdrawal requests to one per currency at any time. 
- Fixed an issue where the AdminCP livesearch results link to categories instead of blogs.
- Removed Aggregate rating from JSON-LD structured data
- Worked around a bug in MySQL when viewing statistics in the AdminCP.

 

Related:

 

[abobader]

Well done!

Do we start to give some suggestion or that too late now?

[Jordan Miller]

7 minutes ago, abobader said:

Well done!

Do we start to give some suggestion or that too late now?

Never too late! 

[abobader]

At the moment I am thinking to how reputation (like/vote) can be linked to this, in another word, if starter of a topic get more liked votes, or a user helped other and he start to get solved the topic.

Right now, the way I read about it and see it, reputations will not get any benefit from all this.

We run support forums for our media server / clients and we have "feature request" forum section, the more vote it get the more dev's of the software will get to it.

 

[CoffeeCake]

1 hour ago, Jordan Invision said:

It'll be available for all in the coming weeks, but for now you can get a taste of it here in our own community. 

If the bug tracker is any indication, you need client testing before it will be ready for production.

What's the plan for releasing alpha/beta releases for testing purposes to self-hosted clients?

We're not particularly interested in achievements and will likely not activate them in our community, however speaking from a 4.6 release as a whole the changes look like they would benefit from testing code revisions and third-party integrations.

[abobader]

22 minutes ago, CoffeeCake said:

What's the plan for releasing alpha/beta releases for testing purposes to self-hosted clients?

+1

I start to wonder why as we usually IPS do, release a beta so we can test and give feedback.

[Charles]

31 minutes ago, CoffeeCake said:

If the bug tracker is any indication, you need client testing before it will be ready for production.

What's the plan for releasing alpha/beta releases for testing purposes to self-hosted clients?

We're not particularly interested in achievements and will likely not activate them in our community, however speaking from a 4.6 release as a whole the changes look like they would benefit from testing code revisions and third-party integrations.

We always release betas for big releases. Have been doing so for years 🙂 

[CoffeeCake]

11 minutes ago, Charles said:

We always release betas for big releases. Have been doing so for years 🙂 

Things look a bit different this time around. With 4.5, there was the "alpha" domain hosted site, then there was a series of beta releases, followed by full releases that may as well have been beta releases. It didn't go as smoothly as maybe would be ideal.

So I'm wondering if we take our lessons learned, and have adjusted things perhaps, what the plan this time is for 4.6.

[Charles]

Just now, CoffeeCake said:

Things look a bit different this time around. With 4.5, there was the "alpha" domain hosted site, then there was a series of beta releases, followed by full releases that may as well have been beta releases. It didn't go as smoothly as maybe would be ideal.

So I'm wondering if we take our lessons learned, and have adjusted things perhaps, what the plan this time is for 4.6.

The process will be the same this time other than we did not do an alpha site and instead are doing the alpha on this site. We release several betas until we are no longer receiving any bug reports then do the full release. It is perfectly normal that the full release is quickly followed by maintenance updates. I cannot think of a single bit of software I use that is not followed by maintenance releases soon after the full release.

I encourage you to participate in the beta releases.

[Linux-Is-Best]

I want to take the opportunity to thank the development team here at Invision.  I know bug fixing is not always exciting. But the actual test of any development team is taking the challenge head-on, striving to better a product before a release. Thank you for all the hard work you are putting in, and thank you for your time, consideration, and patience. 🤩

I also want to thank everyone here, yes, YOU too (reader), who helped test the latest release here on Invision's support site and submitted a detailed bug report.  You, too, are part of the process, and your diligence in paying close attention to detail while taking the time to point out what you noticed, really can and does make a difference.  Thank you for your time, consideration, and patience. 😎

I am excitingly looking forward to the first alpha or beta I can download, install, and test. 🙂

[Jordan Miller]

16 minutes ago, Linux-Is-Best said:

I want to take the opportunity to thank the development team here at Invision.  I know bug fixing is not always exciting. But the actual test of any development team is taking the challenge head-on, striving to better a product before a release. Thank you for all the hard work you are putting in, and thank you for your time, consideration, and patience. 🤩

I also want to thank everyone here, yes, YOU too (reader), who helped test the latest release here on Invision's support site and submitted a detailed bug report.  You, too, are part of the process, and your diligence in paying close attention to detail while taking the time to point out what you noticed, really can and does make a difference.  Thank you for your time, consideration, and patience. 😎

I am excitingly looking forward to the first alpha or beta I can download, install, and test. 🙂

Love this reply 😭 🙏 

[Charles]

1 hour ago, Linux-Is-Best said:

I am excitingly looking forward to the first alpha or beta I can download, install, and test. 🙂

Thanks... we support our beta releases so please do use them as you can submit support requests with issues. Just be sure to have backups and a willingness to work around issues as they are still betas!

[CoffeeCake]

2 hours ago, Charles said:

I encourage you to participate in the beta releases.

We absolutely will! I'd encourage anyone here to install 4.6 on their test sites and doing a high degree of testing prior to upgrading their community when 4.6 is eventually released.

2 hours ago, Charles said:

We release several betas until we are no longer receiving any bug reports then do the full release. It is perfectly normal that the full release is quickly followed by maintenance updates. I cannot think of a single bit of software I use that is not followed by maintenance releases soon after the full release.

This is to be expected and natural. What are the blockers for releasing a beta? The sooner we start to be involved in testing, the earlier feedback your team gets, and the sooner those who won't test (despite all my warnings to the contrary) get a release.

[Charles]

1 minute ago, CoffeeCake said:

What are the blockers for releasing a beta?

We always have a long internal list. Right now we want to review our new cache rules. They will greatly improve performance but, if not done right, could cause lots of odd behaviors. There is also going to be a bulletin going out to all AdminCPs soon to remind people about features deprecated in 4.5 that will actually be removed in 4.6. We announced those over a year ago but just need to remind people.

But right now the big thing is refining Achievements. Since this is only the second site that has any real content using it, we are working on both bug fixes and general improvements. That is coming together nicely now.

[Linux-Is-Best]

9 minutes ago, Charles said:

Thanks... we support our beta releases so please do use them as you can submit support requests with issues. Just be sure to have backups and a willingness to work around issues as they are still betas!

That's awesome to know. Thank you kindly for that information.  Although at the moment, I plan to further focus on testing everything on my test VPS (virtual private server) and get better acquainted with Invision before considering moving anything into production.  I have a whole site where I 'play around' with software (domaintaken.org).  Of course, this naturally means I will need to purchase another license once I move into production, as I plan to keep my test site public. 😉

Edited April 21, 2021 by Linux-Is-Best
domain

[abobader]

I do not see any 4.6 beta yet to test if I understand the above posts correctly.

I always test beta on my beta server.

[Afrodude]

14 minutes ago, abobader said:

I do not see any 4.6 beta yet to test if I understand the above posts correctly.

I always test beta on my beta server.

They still on 4.6.0 CA3, so we will have to wait until they are sure it's ready to be beta to test. 

Edited April 21, 2021 by Afrodude

[abobader]

6 minutes ago, Afrodude said:

They still on 4.6.0 CA3, so we will have to wait until they are sure it's ready to be beta to test. 

Thanks buddy.

[Myr]

I'm excited for the new release.  I think achievements will help my site so long as we can get our third party app integrated easily. It sounds like it shouldn't be too crazy to do that.

[Afrodude]

33 minutes ago, Myr said:

I'm excited for the new release.  I think achievements will help my site so long as we can get our third party app integrated easily. It sounds like it shouldn't be too crazy to do that.

I will be more excited whenever I see version 5.0. This is will be game changing. 

[Morrigan]

Is there a page that explains ranks?  Because I’m 13 of 13 and all I can tell is it’s because I have a million billion posts like the old post rank system. Makes me sad if that’s all I’m rank 13 for.

[Afrodude]

3 hours ago, Morrigan said:

Is there a page that explains ranks?  Because I’m 13 of 13 and all I can tell is it’s because I have a million billion posts like the old post rank system. Makes me sad if that’s all I’m rank 13 for.

Maybe @Jordan Invision would announce it later next week. It would be nice to have some explanation with details about it.   

[Meddysong]

4 hours ago, Morrigan said:

Is there a page that explains ranks?  Because I’m 13 of 13 and all I can tell is it’s because I have a million billion posts like the old post rank system. Makes me sad if that’s all I’m rank 13 for.

I'm 13 having just broken through 2000 posts. I noticed the other day that somebody only just on the other side of that marker was 12, so I suspect you've got a few weeks of deleting posts if you aspire to drop down a level 🙂 

Edit: No, I've been relegated down a level over the past couple of days!

Edited April 22, 2021 by Meddysong

[Matt]

5 hours ago, Morrigan said:

Is there a page that explains ranks?  Because I’m 13 of 13 and all I can tell is it’s because I have a million billion posts like the old post rank system. Makes me sad if that’s all I’m rank 13 for.

You earn points for posting new topics and replies, reacting to content, following items/nodes/members and for visiting daily.

On our site we chose to rebuild all content, so it now acts as if we'd had achievements since the launch of this forum 20 years ago, so longer term members have accelerated through the ranks that would have taken months to earn.

If we did not rebuild content and started off with everyone on 0 points, then you would see rank progression for more than just having a lot of posts.

[Matt]

There is now a separate page to show rank progression and badges earned.