Dreadknux

18 hours ago, Omri Amos said:

at "some point"? so we won't get V5 together with the cloud users?

I think Matt is simply saying that all users invited into the testing stage will only have a cloud version of V5 to try out. It's not about cloud customers versus classic customers.

The following option is configurable under Profile Settings, and users can override if they like, but it appears to apply to all content types across the IPS Suite, which is not ideal.

It makes sense to have users default to "Take me to the latest comment" for Forums, but I cannot set it like this right now because I have a 'News' Pages database and having this option set will also apply there, which is annoying to users who wish to read news articles (their priority is loading the page from the start, not reading the comments). So it would make sense for me to be able to set "Latest Comment" for Forum content links, and "Beginning" for Pages DB content.

3 hours ago, Matt said:

We're aiming to have this alpha demo system ready next week, so if you want to help alpha test, drop a comment below. I want to keep the first round (1-2 weeks) fairly small or it becomes overwhelming sifting through the feedback and bugs but please do register your interest.

Looking forward to the next stage!

4 hours ago, Matt said:

If you have a reason to use source code beyond fixing CKEditor issues, please let us know and please be as specific as you can which will really help, for example "Embed other sites" is less helpful than "I have a separate website, and I want to bring blog articles into my posts at around 600px high with a scrollbar".

I tend to use the Source button these days simply to debug HTML that kind of goes wonky in custom CKEditor buttons I make. But if IPS adds an 'inline gallery' button in the new editor that allows me to insert groups of images in rows (the same way I can on a Wordpress blog), I won't really have a need to even do that.

I think there's merit to having more advanced functions in the editor that allows for adding custom CSS classes to headers etc so admins/power users can really customise their content, but that's going outside of the realm of "common user" stuff. Just something I think would be great to add as the new editor evolves.

7 hours ago, David N. said:

The discussion on common users was related to the functionality to add a new line below a quote block. 

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No one made that argument. You're mixing up two different discussions. 

If you do not want the solution as presented, because it is apparently "not usable for the common user", what is the alternative? The 'white space' suggestion is not workable, and the only other option is to keep people using the Source button and dig into the HTML, which is even less accessible for the common user. So the two discussions aren't really galaxies apart.

All I'm saying is wait and try it in V5 before declaring things aren't usable by a broad range of users. The users themselves will inform you in a live environment if that is or isn't really the case.

1 hour ago, David N. said:

I agree that the arrow buttons are confusing (I first encountered similar arrow buttons on a forum powered by Kunena, and at first I couldn't make any sense of them myself, despite my years of experience running a forum). The idea of a clickable interactive area by @13. is a much more intuitive solution. 

It's really not, to be honest. Seriously, this weird "unmarked white space that exists but doesn't really unless you click it" idea is a nonsense - both in usability terms and in WYSIWYG standards. If your community members can't discern what a 'Title' field is, they're definitely not going to figure out whatever esoteric suggestion this is. 🙂

And I dare say that, if you know that your community mostly consists of people who are unable to operate forums, a small change to the post editor is really not going to move the needle for you one way or the other. I also don't know why you would decline to offer email support to people asking for help, but that is probably doing more harm to your cause than a blue arrow button ever could.

48 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

Most of this thread is about needing more buttons to do things...  edit source code, play with styles/headers, fix messed up code, etc.  

I can say with a very high level of confidence these sorts of things are not needed by "common users".  The things being talked about here are things power users want/need.  The vast majority of actual end users will never need more than the default styling options.  

Agreed. It's a pretty bizarre argument; "these contextual buttons that add lines above and below a quote box are simply too complicated for the common user! What they really need is a Source button to click on so they can dig into the HTML code, scroll to the line they need on their tiny mobile screen and add extra p tags and div containers!" 😂

1 hour ago, Matt Finger said:

Not to contradict Marc, but there will be a global Table of Contents widget for which you can apply anchors to headings and box titles (stay tuned for more page builder updates 🙂)

Whaaaaaat Matt F coming in with the clutch MVP post of the thread!? That's awesome news, thanks for sharing/teasing!

On 5/20/2024 at 1:36 PM, 13. said:

@Matt Finger, again, we're talking only about one region below the entire content (not "every block"), so everything you've mentioned is not relevant to the suggestion.

The implementation of the interactive area exactly as it was described in the suggestion will only improve UX and won't affect anything else in any way.

Respectfully, I do not think your suggestion would really solve anything and in fact would make UX worse. Having extra space above/below the box area that is clickable-to-enable-text-input but is otherwise redundant will be super confusing to users, and would make the post editor not WYSIWYG compliant. Users need to see that what they're typing in the editor (and especially how it is presented in the editor) will be 100% accurate to how the post will appear on publish.

I would recommend waiting for V5 to come out and trying out the icon. While every user's experience will of course be different and there will likely be room for improvement in the UI, in my view I really do not think any user (no matter their level of experience) will miss these two clear icons sitting in the box area:

If a user is so inexperienced that you think they will not know what those buttons do, I will imagine the first thing said user would do is experiment and click those buttons to see what function they served. And there, problem solved.

My only suggestion regarding this topic is that, perhaps the arrow buttons should be permanently visible on the box in the post editor (at present in the V5 alpha those blue icons only appear if you hover your mouse over the box - and that's a scenario where I do believe that inexperienced users may have difficulty, as they may not think to hover over the box in order to reveal a solution they're looking for).

Haha, I had meant to tag @Matt Finger but when I was typing my original post the mention function was going screwy! Thanks Matt (the other one)!

This is one of the more exciting features about IC5, and as a sort-of-power user the sticky toolbar and mobile considerations in particular are a godsend. Thanks for all your hard work, Matt!

I had a few questions about the new post editor;

1. Can we remove certain options from the post editor (for instance, I don't necessarily like the idea of my community's users being able to change the font size/style of their content, so being able to enable/disable certain toolbar buttons would be great for me)?

2. The boxes are great, but from a design perspective the box header area ("How to write JavaScript", for example) doesn't seem to stand out from the rest of the box content (and the padding seems a bit too much for my liking). Is there a chance of having a box header bgcolor implemented that's maybe a little darker/lighter than the box content background to make it pop (I can always use custom CSS to fix this myself but figured I'd ask if it was something that could be done out of the box)?

3. Will you be publishing a full FAQ/guide on what kind of markup code will be supported on this? One of the least desirable aspects of Invision V4 has been a lack of official documentation/glossaries regarding IPS template code and what is actually there for designers to use (making a custom theme has often been a matter of either accidentally finding out there is a 'native' CSS class for what I want a particular div to do, or creating new CSS classes myself and duplicating styles in ignorance), and it'd be a shame for me to ask end-users to guess what kind of markdown code works via trial and error. 😄

4. I like the idea that text colours change dynamically with light/dark theme - but is that only relating to the default IC5 theme, or will that also be the case for custom themes as well? I remember @Ehren's amazing walkthrough of the new theme editor a few months ago, and what seemed space-age to me was that changing a primary/secondary colour for a theme would also dynamically alter a container/button's text colour. Will post editor text colours work in the same way, or will I need to consider custom CSS classes to make a 'yellow' text colour readable on a similar-coloured post area background?

Thanks again!

16 hours ago, Jim M said:

Was the rule deleted? I am not seeing it present or have this user attributed to that rule.

No, it's still on file. It's listed in Admin CP > Members > Achievements > Rules and it's on the second page in the list. ID for the rule is 26. It should still be enabled as well.

It's also attributed to User 46952 in Admin CP, it's the second item in the list when viewing Admin CP > Members > Members > User 46952 > Manage Badges.

Sure - the example above was User ID 46952.

I have a Rule set in my community that hands out a particular Achievement Badge whenever a user receives a negative Reaction on their content:

I have the negative Reaction ("Bad Quality Post") listed here:

It is the only Reaction I have on my community that hands out a negative rep (all others are either positive or neutral).

However, some users have been receiving this 'Tough Crowd' badge incorrectly, for random Reactions:

Any idea what could be causing it?

I've suggested some improvements to Gallery in terms of usergroup posting access and connectivity with CMS Pages (and custom fields) before, but I wanted to add another one to the mix that I think would be really useful for communities that want to leverage Gallery as a media resource and avoid duplication of images/uploads.

Could we see an option to place an uploaded image into more than one Gallery album? For example, say I set up two gallery categories:

• "Character Artwork", and
• "Game Artwork" 

and I upload an image of a game character into an album called 'George' in "Character Artwork"... but I'd also like the image to be visible in another album called 'George and the Great Chase' in "Game Artwork" as it is related.

At present, my only option here is to upload the same image twice - once in Character Artwork > George and another time in Game Artwork > George and the Great Chase.

If we had the ability (at a usergroup permissions level) to place the uploaded image into multiple albums, (or edit existing images to place them in multiple albums after upload) that would be a great QOL feature for communities wanting to set up a shared media space.

We've just introduced Blogs to our community (about 4-5 months ago) and some members are taking to it quite well. But someone pointed out to me that the 'Views' metric that was visible at the top of their Blog seemed huge compared to the actual view metrics for the blog entries they had created.

On my community, Blog ID #16 has a View count of 114,879 on the top level, but when you add the Views of each individual blog entry within the Blog (entry IDs 86, 83, 78, 70 and 67) the total only comes to 1,167. Similar mis-matches in View counts are happening on every Blog on my community, but that particular Blog is where the problem is most obvious.

Is this expected behaviour? I am assuming that the top-level Views metric (114,879) includes views from each blog entry (1,167) + views on that blog top-level landing page (which means that there were 113,713 Views on just that landing page of the Blog)? I'm curious as to why so many people (or maybe, "people" - thanks crawler bots?) visited the front page of a community Blog without clicking through to just one of the blog entries? It doesn't seem correct to me.

Just a quick idea that popped into my head this morning - a lot of my community users rely on making new topics for everything. Whenever a new piece of news drops, or the release day of a particular product, that sort of thing. It tends to clutter my forum, and I'm thinking of ways of how to change the culture a little bit so people use the Calendar a lot more for release reminders (this was one of the reasons given when users are asked why they make potentially redundant topics; that they use the threads as a means to remind themselves that something has been released).

With that in mind, I think it would be useful if there was a functionality to assign one (or more) Events to a Topic (or Page), at the post editor level as a new field (it can work a little like database relationship, only you search for items within a different IPS app?). The resulting calendar entry could appear as an ipsBox widget above or below the first post content area, in a scrollable box similar to that of the Our Picks horizontal widget.

I think you could also do the same thing with other apps/nodes across the IPS suite (maybe have a widget listing galleries that a topic author might think is related to the subject they want to talk about? Or assign a database Page to a Topic in a forum designed for user collaboration over updates to that Page, like Wikipedia's 'talk' function?). But Calendar is what popped into my head, so Calendar is the ask. 🙂 The other apps would be cool too though.

I have a sticky mobile header and agree with this suggestion - clicking the hamburger icon always draws the user to the very top of the page they are viewing, and it's not a very good UX. It'd be good to have that deactivated.

Staff Messages could work as a short term solution, but it would be better to have a feature that:

1. Attaches a message like this on a per-post level rather than a per-topic level

2. Makes such a message visible only to staff and the member who made the post (not fully public, that doesn't make sense to me).

I think that would be a valid suggestion for a new addition to the moderation suite.

Thanks for the suggestion, but no that wouldn't really help. That solution is for adding public responses to existing/already public posts from users, which doesn't apply in my use case. It would also just cause clutter that would need deleting after the post-in-waiting was approved.

On my community, I use the post approval feature for new users so that we can screen their content for any spam/nefarious intent. Works quite well, but sometimes we get posts that are a little too short/low quality for our moderating team to approve... but we don't want to really keep deleting their posts without being able to inform them how they can improve and actually get their posts cleared.

We can of course DM these users, but in UX terms that involves several clicks off of the topic and into other areas of the site, and it can be quite inefficient (we'd need to link the topic post to the user, explain why you're writing to them etc etc). It would be great if there was an option for a Moderator to simply insert a note into the post in question, which can send an alert to the user inviting them to view and understand how to edit the post in order to make it through approval.

Thanks - I did see that but the topic title mentions 'Beta' there, and I'm using the final version as distributed by IPS, so figured it had been sorted by now... I'll disable this right away given the privacy concerns mentioned.

Just upgraded to 4.7.16, and the update appears to have broken the Combined Fluid View logic. I have two top-level forums in my community that have several sub-forums, that are both set with 'Combined Fluid View'. Instead of displaying topics from just the top-level + sub-forums, these forums now pull topics from every other forum across my community, including Club forums.

An image to illustrate:

Note that all four of the topics displayed on the left hand side, above, are from completely different forums outside of the 'Sonic News' forum.

Could we get a hotfix in to resolve this issue? Otherwise, my option would be to disable Combined Fluid View on these forums entirely.

Quick, let's try to find clues in Matt's emojis 👀

Thanks Marc - I can maybe offer the IDs of the offending users and maybe we can work from there?

First offending account: 49516
Second offending account: 49518

Appreciate any insight into how they managed to slip through the net. I did notice these users have a Timezone set to 'UTC' rather than Russian Federation/Moscow/etc, maybe the AdminCP is ignoring the location of the IP address in favour of Timezone data?

A user has just been caught attempting to spam my community (luckily I have approvals on new user posts so their work wasn't visible...), I flagged them as a spammer but they were able to quickly re-register a second account and start spamming again. I have blocked the IP address used (it was the same for both), but a search on that address in AdminCP states that the 'Estimated Location' was St Petersburg, Russian Federation... a location I have marked in my Geolocation Spam Prevention settings as one that requires users to be manually approved before successfully registering.

I'm not sure why Invision Community's spam prevention tool failed twice to capture this user but it's an issue for sure, and I wanted to flag it up so the tools can be tweaked to avoid this problem in the future.

I think I made a feature topic about Our Picks before, but I had this brainwave and wanted to share another idea.

It would be great to allow community members to 'suggest' content for promotion onto the Our Picks (or Featured, or whatever it's going to be called in V5) page. They could click a button saying "I loved this! Suggest for Promotion" or something, and a dialog could appear with a text field asking why they liked it and why they want it to be shown on the front page (so others may see it). These submissions could be collected into the ModCP and mods/admins could consider them for inclusion - if so, they can tweak a suggested headline and body copy much like they can with the current promote system.

They could also choose/create a Category for the Featured content to sit within (this is related to a past feature idea I had in the last topic I made - Our Picks should have the functionality for 'categories' so that mods/admins can promote content to certain 'buckets' that can be used as a filter when displaying on a custom homepage).

Reason why I think this might be good, is for large communities with a lot of content. Sometimes it can be difficult for just mods/admins to find and promote good content they see, if there are a lot of clubs/forums/pages etc to work through. And it would allow users to feel like they are helping to contribute to a community that they love.