Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications

[Matt]

Invision Community 4.7.19 will be released in November and contains many updates along with the report center improvements.

While Invision Community 5 moves through the beta process, I wanted to let you know about all the updates coming in Invision Community 4.

I've already spoken about the Report Center updates, which bring more professionalism and compliance to that area, and this blog will outline a few other highlights for the forthcoming release.

Dormant Account Login Notification
Keeping member accounts secure is a top priority for all community teams, and with data breaches containing usernames and passwords regularly shared on the dark web, it makes sense to be vigilant to a potential account takeover.

Your members will now receive an email if a successful login occurs six months or more since the last log in to ensure the account is still in the right hands. If the account owner is not responsible for logging in, they can contact the community team to ensure the account is returned to the owner.

Prepare for Invision Community 5
We have added a new information dashboard to the AdminCP so you can review the impact of the upgrade and ensure the PHP and MySQL versions are suitable. Of course, our Invision Community Cloud customers need not worry about this as we take care of it for you.

You can also see impacting items you may want to know, such as deprecated and removed features that your community currently has enabled. This dashboard is a great starting point for evaluating your upgrade when the time comes.

SEO Improvements
We regularly review SEO best practices to ensure that your community presents itself in the best way to search engine bots and spiders.

This update comes in two parts; the first is a new crawler setting to reduce links on the page for guests and search engine bots. This new feature removes hyperlinks around dates in comment feeds and removes the sharer menu item that shows the sharing box. These links dominate the crawl budget for little value, leaving little time for crawlers to work their way deeper into your content. 

The second SEO-focused feature is the permalinks to specific comments throughout the community. Currently, the permalinks point to a content handler (do=findComment&comment=123) that locates the correct page number and then issues a 301 redirect to the correct page (topics/1-topic-title/page/2/#comment-123).

While 301 redirects are not a problem for search engines, and it's been a long time since a 301 redirect incurred any SEO penalty, the permalink is in a different format to the actual comment URL, which is handled via a fragment.

Putting aside search engine optimization for a moment, working to eliminate a lot of redirects positively impacts performance.

The new permalink is simply the actual link using a fragment to locate the post in the browser's viewport. This removes the need for a 301 redirect and reduces any search engine confusion over the permalinks canonical URL. Of course, the page number may change if topics are merged or many posts deleted, and we have some client scripting magic to handle that eventuality.

It's an exciting time here at Invision Community with a brand new version in development and several new features for our stable product line.

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments.

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[CheersnGears]

3 hours ago, Matt said:

The second SEO-focused feature is the permalinks to specific comments throughout the community. Currently, the permalinks point to a content handler (do=findComment&comment=123) that locates the correct page number and then issues a 301 redirect to the correct page (topics/1-topic-title/page/2/#comment-123).

Will you 301 redirect incoming links that contain the do=findComment for those of us with forums that date back to the stone age?

[Andreas Grace]

Quote

Your members will now receive an email if a successful login occurs six months or more since the last log in to ensure the account is still in the right hands. If the account owner is not responsible for logging in, they can contact the community team to ensure the account is returned to the owner.

Is there a preference to enable/disable this?

[Stuart Silvester]

20 hours ago, CheersnGears said:

Will you 301 redirect incoming links that contain the do=findComment for those of us with forums that date back to the stone age?

These links will continue to work, they're still used in some situations.

4 hours ago, Andreas Grace said:

Is there a preference to enable/disable this?

Yes, it's enabled by default but there is a new setting to disable it.

[kalin]

Will we have to translate version 5 again or will there be some possibility of translation migration?

[Joel R]

I want to say that the overall level of communication and transparency (with the dashboard guide in the ACP) is a huge step forward.  I appreciate how IPS continues to evolve and push the ACP experience.  

I had one of those realizations several years ago that I candidly spend more time on the ModCP and the ACP than the front end.  That's where the troubleshooting, the reports, and the moderation occurs - which are all of the areas of first level triage for community management.  

Other thoughts on the dashboard Prepare: 

- Tagging.  This is going to be one of those unexpected surprises for current community owners if we can't retain or migrate our tagging.

[AlexJ]

14 hours ago, Stuart Silvester said:

Yes, it's enabled by default but there is a new setting to disable it.

Where I can tweak the email format i.e. I want to remove verbiage of Account deletion. Thanks

[Marc]

4 hours ago, AlexJ said:

Where I can tweak the email format i.e. I want to remove verbiage of Account deletion. Thanks

Emails are edited in Customisations>Emails in your admin Cp

[Matt]

6 hours ago, AlexJ said:

Where I can tweak the email format i.e. I want to remove verbiage of Account deletion. Thanks

We do not mention account deletion, just to clarify.

[David N.]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

We do not mention account deletion, just to clarify.

At the bottom of the Dormant Account Login Notification email it says

If you no longer require an account at Invision Community, you can request account deletion. 

[Stuart Silvester]

It's worth noting, that will only appear if you have the request deletion feature enabled.

[STLAR]

Is InnoDB required or can we continue as we are? We are a very small, low usage site.

[Matt]

15 minutes ago, STLAR said:

Is InnoDB required or can we continue as we are? We are a very small, low usage site.

We really require InnoDB for v5 as it's a vast improvement on MyISAM. As we develop new functionality, we want to make use of foreign keys which MyISAM doesn't support.

[Adriano Faria]

1 minute ago, Matt said:

We really require InnoDB for v5 as it's a vast improvement on MyISAM. As we develop new functionality, we want to make use of foreign keys which MyISAM doesn't support.

I was able to upgrade my online board from 4.7.18 to B4 and there were some tables MyISAM. I converted later but got no notice or something. 

[David N.]

1 hour ago, Stuart Silvester said:

It's worth noting, that will only appear if you have the request deletion feature enabled.

I had a look in my ACP but couldn't find it, where do you turn that feature on or off? Thanks!

Whoops, found it: ACP –> Members —> PII & Deletion Requests —> click Settings button at the top right. 

Edited November 13 by David N.

[Marc]

14 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

I was able to upgrade my online board from 4.7.18 to B4 and there were some tables MyISAM. I converted later but got no notice or something. 

And this  was not showing within the support area as being an issue?

 

[Adriano Faria]

Sure. I meant, the word “require” would prevent me from upgrading the board.

[TSP]

A long time ago I think I remember it being mentioned, when you first said display name logins would be removed, that you would have some system in place before that to ensure that people were aware of their registered email address, and be sure to keep it updated. 

Will something like that come to the 4.x line? 

[PPlanet]

To upgrade to 4.7.19 can I still run database 5.7 and still have mixed tables InnoDB/MyISAM? Will I get a simple warning about V5 or will this upgrade already force me to change something?

(I'm not planning to upgrade to version 5 for quite a while yet, so I don't want to be changing anything just yet)

Edited November 13 by PPlanet

[Matt]

15 hours ago, PPlanet said:

To upgrade to 4.7.19 can I still run database 5.7 and still have mixed tables InnoDB/MyISAM? Will I get a simple warning about V5 or will this upgrade already force me to change something?

(I'm not planning to upgrade to version 5 for quite a while yet, so I don't want to be changing anything just yet)

v4.* you can keep using MyISAM. It's only version 5 that enforces InnoDB.

[Arthmoor]

On 11/13/2024 at 2:18 AM, Marc said:

Emails are edited in Customisations>Emails in your admin Cp

Where would this menu be found? I cannot see it in my ACP anywhere, and searching for "dormant" doesn't turn up anything other than the setting to enable or disable it.

[AlexJ]

On 11/13/2024 at 8:09 AM, Stuart Silvester said:

It's worth noting, that will only appear if you have the request deletion feature enabled.

Super - Much appreciated and saved the hassle. Thank you.

[Andreas Grace]

Settings --> Login and Registration --> bottom setting

For me it does appear when searching for dormant. Are you on the latest version?

[yxleif]

I just updated to 4.7.19 but the redirected links are the same. Is this a setting I need to change in order to fix this issue?

[Matt]

We still retain the findComment method for areas which we have no idea about page numbers (widgets, etc) but you should see the new links when sharing links from posts.