Twitter's Mid-Life Crisis and the IPS Promotions Feature

[Dreadknux]

So with Twitter going a bit insane with all its API stuff lately, I have noticed that a lot of functionality on my IPS Suite no longer works (such as the ability for users to sign up/log in using their Twitter accounts). So I decided to deactivate the Twitter option from the 'Login and Registration' page on the Admin panel.

I don't know if it was the above action that caused the following to happen (or if the Twitter API stuff in general just caused this), but... I noticed that I now cannot de-couple Twitter from the 'Social Media Promotion' section of the Admin panel. And yet, Twitter fields and icons still appear in the Promote button/dialog which is functionally useless.

First, going to Social Media Promotion > Twitter shows that it's "not set up", which is odd because...

... the Twitter icon still appears on the Promote button...

... and an option for Twitter still exists. If it doesn't work (thanks Twitter), I don't want the option on here anymore, but obviously I can't remove it because IPSAdmin thinks the application is not set up. 

The problem is, as I suspected, I can't actually "re-set up" the Twitter application because going to 'Login & Registration' > 'Twitter' > 'Enable' and filling in the Settings results in constant errors. Obviously the problem with this is Twitter, not IPS, but that's the entire reason why I want to just get shot of the Twitter integration. But something's happened here where IPS thinks it's not connected to Promotions, even when it functionally is (despite it likely not working).

Not sure if it's just something on my setup because I pressed a button wrong somewhere and Twitter's API changes caused a lock on my Suite, but it'd be nice to have a hotfix for this issue in case it can be replicated on other communities.

[Marc]

If its disabled it shouldn't be showing. I have created a ticket so we can get that looked into for you.

[Matt]

We've removed the promotion tools in v5. With Meta increasing the barrier to get approved and Twitter falling apart, it doesn't make sense to keep it. There are various low-cost promotion tools such as Buffer (free tier) to manually post to social media, or you can connect via Zapier to post to social media.

 

[Dreadknux]

9 minutes ago, Matt said:

We've removed the promotion tools in v5. With Meta increasing the barrier to get approved and Twitter falling apart, it doesn't make sense to keep it. There are various low-cost promotion tools such as Buffer (free tier) to manually post to social media, or you can connect via Zapier to post to social media.

 

Thanks Matt, that's understandable. What would happen to the Our Picks feature, will that be going as a result of this as well in V5? Will there be some similar feature being introduced?

[Matt]

40 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

Thanks Matt, that's understandable. What would happen to the Our Picks feature, will that be going as a result of this as well in V5? Will there be some similar feature being introduced?

We're keeping that as you can still use the 'internal' method but we'll be reviewing all our promotion tools to make sense of them as we have a few ways now (pinned, featured, promoted, etc).

[Dreadknux]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

We're keeping that as you can still use the 'internal' method but we'll be reviewing all our promotion tools to make sense of them as we have a few ways now (pinned, featured, promoted, etc).

Yeah I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys may re-organise these as there's a lot going on there now. Although I've gotten used to using them for different things (Pinned and Featured on a news database to feature in a home page highlights box, Featured on Forums to highlight user-contributed topics that we have turned into news stories, Promoted as a capture of all-site content - it would be good to be able to organise that/call results in IPS code by content type for this too).

Anyway, all this has made me wish death to all social media platform connectivity. Might just sunset the whole lot and ask users to straight-up register an account on my suite. No risk of anyone forgetting their credentials/emails then (he said... 🤣)

[opentype]

5 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

Might just sunset the whole lot and ask users to straight-up register an account on my suite.

Been doing that for quite a while across all my communities. 

[Dean_]

13 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

Yeah I'm looking forward to seeing how you guys may re-organise these as there's a lot going on there now. Although I've gotten used to using them for different things (Pinned and Featured on a news database to feature in a home page highlights box, Featured on Forums to highlight user-contributed topics that we have turned into news stories, Promoted as a capture of all-site content - it would be good to be able to organise that/call results in IPS code by content type for this too).

Anyway, all this has made me wish death to all social media platform connectivity. Might just sunset the whole lot and ask users to straight-up register an account on my suite. No risk of anyone forgetting their credentials/emails then (he said... 🤣)

 

4 minutes ago, opentype said:

Been doing that for quite a while across all my communities. 

Exactly the same, gave up a long time ago. It caused nothing but problems. At least with a local account, we and the user keeps full control.

[Matt]

I think you're relatively safe with Google and Apple. I rarely see FB and Twitter sign-in buttons anymore.

[Dreadknux]

Actually, that's a good point - @opentype and @Dean_ since you've done this before, is there anything I need to know / inform my users upon this change? If they no longer will be able to use FB/TW to sign into their account, does anything lock out for them? Any housekeeping they need to do that I need to warn them about (i.e. remember email address, change password, that sort of thing)?

Appreciate any help!

[opentype]

26 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

If they no longer will be able to use FB/TW to sign into their account, does anything lock out for them?

Users would need to use the Forgot Password function to set a password and would need to know the email address they used with the linked login method. So you could or should explain that somewhere and inform your users before making the switch. 

[Markus Jung]

Is there any way to filter all users who logged in/registered via social networks? Or at least see statistics how many there are? 

If I turn this functionality off, I would like to send them a newsletter before I do this. 

[Nathan Explosion]

4 hours ago, Markus Jung said:

Is there any way to filter all users who logged in/registered via social networks?

(NE) Box of Tricks (added in v1.6.0)

 

 

Edited August 27, 2023 by Nathan Explosion

[marklcfc]

On 7/13/2023 at 4:01 PM, Matt said:

I think you're relatively safe with Google and Apple. I rarely see FB and Twitter sign-in buttons anymore.

How to get Apple sign in button?

Edited August 27, 2023 by marklcfc

[Matt]

https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/members-and-groups/social-sign-in/apple-r355/

[SJ77]

is anyone still able to promote to X (Twitter) using IPS feature?

[Marc]

On 9/1/2023 at 6:24 PM, SJ77 said:

is anyone still able to promote to X (Twitter) using IPS feature?

Yes, and no. Depends on when you set it up, if you have the old API available, and if they have decided its working on any given day. Unfortunately, its very inconsistent at the moment

[SJ77]

We have the old 1.1 API but it's not worked 1 time for us since June 😞