Dreadknux

I might be missing something in the AdminCP, but it would be great to have the option to allow certain usergroups to upload particular file types/extensions to the community.

At present, there's a global option in ACP to allow users in general to upload files (and further set which filetypes they can upload). I use this to forbid regular users from uploading non-video/image files (like .zip or .exe files). But I would like the option for only Administrators to be able to upload .zip files to Downloads app (and other areas of the site), and there doesn't seem to be a way for me to do that. I trust the zip files I upload for my community, but I don't trust regular users with the same.

Can this be something that is added to V5 perhaps? Or if it's already a thing, please let me know! 😄

I have a general question relating to the new V5 design philosophy/restructure if that's okay @Ehren.

I've been using sticky nav headers in my current V4 setup, where the navigation strip underneath the header area follows the user as they scroll down. That's working very well, with one caveat; I've had to try and shoehorn in a bunch of additional CSS for as many anchored areas on-page as I can think of(i.e. pagination rows, anchored H2s etc) to ensure those anchored areas do not appear hidden behind the sticky navbar.

Unfortunately it's a little bit of a janky/inelegant solution - my code for each anchored part in my custom CSS goes something like this:

[data-resort="listResort"][data-tableid="topics"]::before,
[data-resort="listResort"]::before {
    display: block;
    content: " ";
    height: 60px;
    margin-top: -60px;
    visibility: hidden;
    pointer-events: none;
    background: none;
    }

The above code tends to help make sure that anchors are set underneath the sticky navbar (which is 60px in height), but it has the side-effect of pulling the ipsBox design up and above its container, which makes sense logically but is a little annoying (and I've had to find alternative way to fix this by modifying the container CSS further to resolve, on a per-section/per-anchor area basis)

So basically what I'm interested in knowing about is, do you think there is something in V5's design approach that accounts for this kind of customisation that a community admin might want to do, without requiring custom CSS for a hundred different containers to make it work?

I don't necessarily mean that there needs to be an option for sticky headers in the theme editor or anything (because there are too many variables at play - different heights of sticky containers, whereabouts that sticky area might be, etc), but perhaps there is a custom CSS variable baked into V5 for advanced CSS editors, where they can input a value for a sticky anchor height, and then the admin can add one additional line of custom CSS to set their desired navbar/area as 'sticky'... and then the set variable would ensure that all anchored on-page areas would be automatically adjusted to account for the sticky header (so nothing appears hidden behind the sticky container).

It's probably quite a complex thing to ask about, but interested to hear your thoughts on feasibility etc?

Hi Marc- sure thing, I can give two example users and topics promoted:

1. User #46786 and the promoted content is Topic #34241

2. User 326 and promoted content is Topic #34240

Appreciate you looking into this!

Not sure this is a bug or intended behaviour, but I set up a Rule on my community to award Points and a Badge whenever the following conditions are met:

• Content is Promoted
• (Promoted to Our Picks)
• Content is a Topic
• Topic was posted in [X, Y and Z] Forums

I saved it, tried Promoting two such topics to Our Picks and didn't see the Badge being awarded. I checked AdminCP and it seems the correct number of Points were automatically rewarded (50 for this new Rule, +10 for triggering a separate Rule for any content being Promoted), but the Badge was not.

The users in question have already been awarded this Badge. The idea is that the same Badge is awarded every time this Rule is fired, regardless of whether the user had already earned the Badge or not. There are no milestone conditions set.

The expected behaviour is that, if a Rule does not specify a milestone condition of "first [promoted item]", the Badge should be awarded every single time the Rule is triggered. But this does not seem to be happening.

On 12/13/2023 at 7:49 PM, Joel R said:

An observation on my end: one of the fundamental issues is that IPS has siloed the applications. And while IPS offers a feature to push Articles over to Forums, the reality is that we have the same content item in two different locations.  Should you go to Articles to read?? Or should you go to Forums to read?? 

One approach that I've seen from a competitor is to offer a long form article layout directly in the Forums.  So you're still in the Forums, but the layout of the topic is designed for articles.  If you go to page 2 of comments, the Article is condensed. It's an elegant approach to consolidating everything in one hub (aka the forums). And I find that simplicity is more important than ever to offer a simple and easy navigation.  

I like that approach - one major concern with it though, would be regarding custom fields and other bespoke customisations an admin might like to add to the news experience (for example, I have another Pages database that works like a wiki, on top of my News database, and I have a relationship field set up that can tie a News article to a related wiki page... that wouldn't be possible if the News database was replaced with a forum-with-news-like-design).

Also, if an admin decides to have a forum dedicated to both news and organic UGC discussion, there would need to be some kind of flag to identify a "cross-posted" topic versus a non-cross-posted one, for design purposes (i.e. Topic 1 in the forum list is cross-posted, so needs to have the "look like a news article" layout, but Topic 2 in the same forum list is a standard discussion topic so should keep the standard forum/topic layout). 

I just came across some kind of configuration error when trying to move a Blog Entry from one Blog to another. The error is below (root dir info removed):

Error: Call to undefined method IPS\blog\Entry::sendModerationAlert() (0)
#0 [dir]/system/Helpers/Wizard/Wizard.php(181): IPS\blog\modules\front\blogs\_entry->IPS\blog\modules\front\blogs\{closure}()
#1 [dir]/uploads/template_68_94a9d7649fb9cdbfc784d3516e61a717_global.php(879): IPS\Helpers\_Wizard->__toString()
#2 [dir]/system/Theme/SandboxedTemplate.php(61): IPS\Theme\Cache\class_core_front_global->box()
#3 [dir]/applications/blog/modules/front/blogs/entry.php(449): IPS\Theme\_SandboxedTemplate->__call()
#4 [dir]/system/Dispatcher/Controller.php(107): IPS\blog\modules\front\blogs\_entry->move()
#5 [dir]/system/Content/Controller.php(50): IPS\Dispatcher\_Controller->execute()
#6 [dir]/applications/blog/modules/front/blogs/entry.php(64): IPS\Content\_Controller->execute()
#7 [dir]/system/Dispatcher/Dispatcher.php(153): IPS\blog\modules\front\blogs\_entry->execute()
#8 [dir]/index.php(13): IPS\_Dispatcher->run()
#9 {main}

Here are the steps I took to get this:

• Locate Blog Entry
• Select 'Move'
• Choose destination Blog ("Fan Made")
• On destination Category page, check 'Send Alert to User', write Subject and Message.
• Check 'Anonymous', hit 'Send'
• Message above appears

It seems that the Blog Entry still moved to the intended destination regardless, but I obviously have no way of knowing if the User ever received the Alert I wrote (I had to move two Blog Entries from the same person, when I tried to send an Alert for the second Entry the Message textarea "restored" the text from the last Message I tried to send, which suggests to me that IC4 failed to deliver the first Message to the User).

Sadly not a feature that I will be able to take advantage of, being self-hosted, but still a nice addition.

I did notice a new icon in the userbar in this video though, right next to the profile picture. I'm guessing this is where users can quickly check the Activity Feed in V5? That'll be quite useful 🙂

Not sure where to post this topic honestly, it's a technical issue I think I'm facing but not entirely sure if it's something Invision needs to help with, or if it's a Chrome/Google problem or what.

Anyway, Google has been bugging me to add a GDPR message as part of its Adsense suite for months, and I figured I'd take the time to do that this morning and shut them up (they're going to automatically add a GDPR popup/notice mid-Jan either way so thought I'd get ahead of it). However, it seems like enabling the message has caused some strange performance issues with my Invision installation.

Loading pages and general browsing seemed fine at first, but scrolling up and down through long pages with a lot of content caused the browser (Chrome, latest version, on MacOS 14.2) to meltdown, stop processing the content (causing white-outs on the screen) and browser hangs. Eventually getting one of those dreaded "do you want to Wait or Exit the page" dialog boxes appear (clicking 'Wait' does nothing). This also happened while I was editing a Pages record, I had finished editing and by the time I went to click 'Save' everything froze up.

I am pretty sure it's related to the GDPR messaging and whatever code Google is inserting to make that happen, because I deactivated the message on Adsense and now everything is performing as normal on my community without any hangups.

Is anyone else experiencing this sort of thing when enabling their GDPR messaging via Adsense/Google directly? I want to make sure I'm not going mad (I can provide screencaps for IPS if needed, just to illustrate what I'm seeing here)...

11 hours ago, Joel R said:

but you can set an auto-scheduler to promote at certain times of the day.

I was not aware of this, thank you!

11 hours ago, Joel R said:

In regards to your feedback, ne workaround that I've done (but I never considered this to be a major pain point to begin with) is to promote a reply or a comment instead of the main content item. For example, if there was an ongoing announcement about the Holidays, instead of repromoting the Topic, I would promote a post within the topic, which would be counted as a separate content item for Our Picks.

That would be useful for a topic node. My concern would be for things like Pages records and things where you can only re-promote the core/original post. For instance, I might make a 'news article' in Pages CMS that promotes an on-site/community contest, and I'd need to re-promote whenever there were updates to that contest. It wouldn't make sense to promote a comment or reply from that Page record. But, until V5 comes out (and perhaps this suggestion could be implemented) this would be a generally decent workaround for topics etc. Thank you for your thoughts! 🙂

I'm interested in leaning more heavily on the Our Picks (or the new 'Featured' function as it will be rebranded in V5) once Invision Community V5 comes out, and want to explore ways I can adapt that into a new homepage that covers all nodes/apps across my community. One weird quirk I've noticed with Our Picks, in its current state, is that it only keeps one entry for a promoted piece of content - meaning that if the same piece of content is re-promoted, the older Our Picks entry is deleted and 'replaced' with the new entry.

An example:

• I promote a topic "Test" to Our Picks, give it an image, title it something like "Check out this test". It gets added to Our Picks as normal.
• Over the next three days, I promote a few other things - a calendar event, Page entry, that sort of thing (not important, just mentioning it for context)
• Four days later, I re-promote the "Test" topic again, with a different image and a different title, "A new development"
• Checking Our Picks page, and scrolling through, the new promotion ("A new development") sits at the top of the list (as expected), but the older promotion four days earlier ("Check out this test") no longer exists (which is not expected).

Can we change this for V5 so that all promotions of the same content are visible and posted to Our Picks / Featured unless those older entries are specifically deleted by the mod/admin? Or at least offer an option on AdminCP to prevent deletion of older promoted entries of the same content? I'd like to maintain a history/archive of promoted content/works across my community, and I don't want older entries to be replaced when I re-promote content - I'd like to keep it all.

1 hour ago, My Sharona said:

Google claims to not penalize duplicate content on a site but regardless, it can still hurt your SEO practices. The problem lies in the fact that IPS places a <link rel="canonical" ...../"  /> tag (which directs a search engine that this is the master copy) on both the page and the topic. You can easily see this by viewing the page source of both the page and topic. It should be line 171. You shouldn't have a canonical tag on both pages claiming to be the master.

I have reported this previously but never followed up on it by placing the topic in the Feedback sub.

Oh I see, thanks. So I guess the solution with that issue is to have a setting that allows the Admin to choose whether a topic or the page keeps the "canonical" tag and supersedes the other. That'd be nice to see. Might have a positive impact on how your community's content is displayed in Google search results too (although I'm obviously not holding my breath 😄)

Good ideas, some of this could be included in my previous Feedback topics on Pages Improvements here:

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/462054-pages-copy-to-database-improvement-suggestions/

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/474203-ips-v5-topics-pages-improvement-suggestions/#comment-2944230

For Point 1, I can see the case for adding an option in ACP to allow for either full article copy or a snippet to display on-forum (I prefer the former for what I'm doing, but can definitely see why the latter would be useful - although I'm not sure if Google really penalises the dupe copy given it's on the same community/site in a different node?). I haven't seen any Topic content go out of sync upon editing the original Pages Record though, maybe there's a permissions issue confusing the system?

Agree with Point 2 for sure, I'm not entirely sure why synced topics are locked out from editing entirely. There might be reasons why an admin may wish to have different content display on the topic versus the Page record.

Regarding Point 3, I've noticed there is a per-category setting that allows you to post Page records into different forums besides the default one set on the database level. If you go to ACP > Pages > Page Database Name > Categories, and then edit the Category, there's a tab called 'Forum' that allows you to check an option "Override database forum options". You can then choose if any records you post to that category will deliver a topic to a different forum, or even not post a topic at all. This has been useful for me when sorting out a 'news' Page database. Unless there's something I'm missing there?

These UI changes are looking really nice, fantastic work as always Ehren. Having you join the IPS design team is undoubtedly one of the most exciting things to happen and your work here is just proving that every day. Looking forward to seeing even more!

I'm also now interested in seeing some of the improvements to the UX that complement the UI changes - in particular the mobile topic/posting experience, which in V4 is currently quite miserable now when you compare the ease of posting on social media apps. Just this morning I tried to post a topic about a news story I read earlier, and it was a constant battle of scrolling up/down just to reach post editor toolbar icons that had been moved off-screen as my post got longer (some elements, like the GIF implementation and URL insertion, are pretty clunky as well).

Not knocking the V4 experience as I know it's a decade old at this point and originally designed to serve a desktop experience over mobile - but at the same time, I can see why many in my community prefer to post status updates when it's currently so difficult to quickly and easily post a topic or a post on the forum via their phones. 😅

Hey @Ehren sorry for the topic bump but I was rewatching this and something came to me when seeing these newly-designed widgets:

Considering how great these particular 'scrollable column' widgets look both on desktop and mobile, is there scope to include these widget designs for custom content blocks in the V5 Block Manager (or as a built-in template to leverage in the AdminCP Block Editor)? I can just see myself using this particular widget design to list the latest records in a 'News' Pages CMS database, for example.

I just checked the rogue online event and saw that it was set for a repeat the following year, I unchecked it and it removed itself from the Online Events widget. So I guess that was that. Thanks for that Jim, guess you guys already know about that then! 🙂

Liking the new Overview design of the Events app, but I have been having some issues with past events always being displayed on there and I was struggling to identify what the issue was, and I think I've figured it out.

It seems that if an event has been set as 'Featured', or set as an 'Online Event', it will always appear on the Overview page even when the date for the event has passed.

Please see an example below.

Obviously, as this snapshot was taken this morning, the 'October 11' event should not be there (either in the top featured rotation - or, arguably, under 'Online Events') but it still clearly is. Any Events tagged as 'Featured' also appear in the top featured rotation section too, even when the event's date has passed - the only solution is to manually edit the past event and un-feature it (which is a lot of needless busywork).

It's incredibly confusing for the end user, and I can't think of a logical reason why past events would need to be stuck to the Overview page (or why the events are organised the way they are in the widgets - it looks like the October 11 event is due to take place after the Dec 10 event, which doesn't make any sense). So I am concluding that this is a bug of some sort.

(I also think the 'Online Events' widget should be changed to 'Upcoming Online Events', or ideally an option should be added in AdminCP settings to toggle this widget on/off entirely as I don't really see a need for it)

Is there a chance this can be addressed in a future update?

11 minutes ago, Matt said:

It's an interesting question but I don't think we'll have that much influence over what Google decides short of 301 redirecting forum content to the CMS content which would be a terrible idea. 😅

Haha fair enough! I'm not super au fait with the inner workings of Google so I figured it was worth asking the experts! 😄

Thanks Marc - so the solution you mentioned there sounds like a manual thing (i.e. I upload a video somewhere, I post the link into my Adsense, Adsense spits out a code, and then I paste that code into a topic/page/whatever on my IPS community)?

What I'm thinking about is an integrated/automatic thing, built into the video player on my IPS community. So, I upload a video to Gallery, for example, maybe check a box to say "let this video run ads/pre-roll/whatever" and the ad is then served whenever users visit that Gallery's video page (or indeed, any instance where the video is embedded elsewhere on my community). I'm guessing that's not really possible with the links Google Adsense offers?

Quick question about the advertisements we can include in our communities. Is there any plan to support video ads/pre-roll on the built-in IPS video player? Connect something like an Adsense or other GAM instance to allow for pre/mid/post-roll, with options to appear on all/only certain categorised videos?

Looking at my Adsense help page, it seems I can create a video ad tag but I don't think there is a means to insert this into a video on IPS. I imagine this could be an extra option in the AdminCP's Advertisements section?

EDIT: Just realised where I've posted this, d'oh. If there's no functionality for this yet, please feel free to move this to the Feedback forum. Sorry!

This is a very interesting development on the SEO/Google Search side. I definitely hear the concerns about opening things up so wide, but on the other hand if it can help position my community's content on the same level as content posted on social media that can only be a good thing in my eyes.

Since we're talking about this, I figure it might be worth asking a (sort of) related question to IPS: are there any considerations being made as to how different node content is being served/displayed on Google Search results? For example, how prominently a community's forum topic might appear under a search result as opposed to an Event entry, or a CMS Pages record?

One reason why I ask, is that I have CMS Pages databases that have relationships with certain forums (so comments on the CMS Page record and the Forum Topic are practically identical), but in the case that someone searches for some terms I'd rather the CMS Page record be the primary result (and maybe a nested result for the forum topic version of that same content underneath). But I don't know how much control IPS has over that sort of thing, or whether that's something that it entirely in Google's power/wisdom to design.

So call it a question of curiosity rather than a proper SEO-related feature request. 😄

Thanks @Jim M - I suppose this would be a feature request then as my issue is not about whitelisting "nofollow" domains but rather ensuring I am able to set certain links with a "sponsored" attribute instead. This is recommended practice for site building as per Google guidelines;

"Not to mention, there is a significant update to Pages underway."

👀 👀 👀 👀

"We also have a lot of less flashy updates, such as the new consolidated Feature/Our Picks feature, which is now a single feature."

This is promising and definitely reduces a lot of duplication of features across the community. Will there be any further optimisation/features for Our Picks as well? Ability to filter entries by content type/node category, auto-feature of certain content nodes (ie. automatically Our Pick a 'News' Pages record), that sort of thing? It'd be great to use this as part of a more advanced homepage feature!

Looking forward to hearing more. Hopefully there will be more to say about other apps as well (Gallery, Blogs, etc) but I'm happy with the chat about theming, Forums and Pages so far! Thanks for all the amazing updates! 😄

I've been working with a pretty frustrating issue with my Invision Community's post editor. I'm working on a piece of content that includes affiliate/commerce links and so I want to make sure that I assign the "rel='sponsored'" attribute to the links via HTML.

I tried creating a custom post editor button that inserted this HTML attribute to an A HREF tag, and it sort of worked... until I saved the post (it is not public as it is not finished, if that context helps). It seems that when the content is saved, viewed and edited again, the attribute is changed to "rel='external nofollow'" instead of "rel='sponsored'" as it should be. I even used the Source button in the post editor to re-edit those link attributes back to 'sponsored', but upon saving it reverts back to 'external nofollow'.

It probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but the principle of the matter is that if I've decided to set a link attribute in a certain way, it should be saved and reflected in the post upon saving, not changing it to whatever it feels like. Would appreciate some insight as to whether this is by design (surely not?) or if this is some bug I've come across?

20 hours ago, opentype said:

Not relevant to the issue, but to be fixed later: don’t use hard-coded styles. Create a custom CSS class for the theme and call that. Also, white-list all classes. It doesn’t matter for the admin account, but will matter for user accounts. 

Thanks - I only included a hard-coded style for the purposes of the test, but you're absolutely right. As for CSS white-listing, this isn't something I'm familiar with and Google searching this appears to take me down a number of roads relating to C#/Java programming, which is quite advanced. I feel like this might be something IPS should include as a built-in feature in the AdminCP for V5.

@Nathan Explosion - Understood regarding the 'content' function, I guess that's redundant for what I need then. Any ideas on the 'option' side of things?

I am trying to create a new button for the post editor, to display affiliate links with an "ipsButton" format. This is the setup I have:

I want to use the Option field to inset a URL into the ipsButton when the HTML is output, but this does not seem to happen at all for me. In fact, when I click the button nothing displays at all. This is output html (using Google Chrome inspect) after I have clicked the button in the post editor and included a URL in the option field:

<p>
  <br>
</p>

If I click the button and type nothing into the Option field, it does display the rest of the HTML correctly...

<p>
  <a data-cke-saved-href="" href="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" class="ipsButton ipsButton_important ipsButton_medium" style="text-decoration: none;">
    &ZeroWidthSpace;&ZeroWidthSpace;&ZeroWidthSpace;&ZeroWidthSpace;&ZeroWidthSpace;&ZeroWidthSpace;&ZeroWidthSpace;
  </a><br>
</p>

And the text insertion point is in the right position (where the ZeroWidthSpace text in the HTML code is placed), but when I start typing the text I want to include in the button, the text automatically positions the text outside of the button:

<p>
  <a data-cke-saved-href="" href="" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" class="ipsButton ipsButton_important ipsButton_medium" style="text-decoration: none;"></a>
  hello<br>
</p>

I'm not entirely sure what's going wrong here. I'm assuming the "text outside the button" thing is happening because there is no URL in the A HREF tag, but I can't insert a URL into that space because the {option} tag does not seem to be working as intended. Any ideas?