Dreadknux

Hi guys, since v5 is right around the corner I want to put a stake in the ground and suggest a couple improvements to the otherwise super-cool "Copy to Database" feature that IPS has (it's one of the key reasons I'm migrating from my Wordpress install to IPS fully). Some ideas to make things a bit more holistic instead of looking like two apps that are sort-of talking to each other. 1. Option to Move Topic OP to First Comment I'm currently using a homemade plugin to prevent the Pages record content from overwriting an existing topic's OP content, but it would be great to not rely on this and have something native that supports this. As an example, a community user might share some news along with some personal comment... I don't want my news team to lift that content, connect the thread with the Pages record, and then lose that user's comment or content. Could there be a way for the original content to either be shifted into a 'first comment' that precedes all others (that might make things complicated if there are already many posts within the existing topic though)? Perhaps it can be inserted as an extra content 'piece' inbetween the synced topic/record content and the first comment/post (but something that can still be edited by those with the appropriate access rights), like so: Pages Record Example: Topic Example: This way, community admins could use the Copy to Database feature and have sync'd OP content between both, while also keeping the original posts' content alive (which is also good for context if a following comment in the thread directly addresses something the OP originally said). EDIT: I know that I could find a solution for this point to some degree, using Custom Fields in Pages, but while that could fix something on the Pages Record side via templates, I wouldn't be able to display any custom field content in the Topic as the example above. It would be great to be able to have a native solution that considers this, anyway. 2. Achievement Rules to Reward Topic Starters if their Content is Copied to Database I'm trying to do this manually at the moment, but I'd love to have an Achievement Rule in place that allows us to reward either points or badges to users who make topics that are later copied to a Pages database. I mean, more Achievement Rules in general would be fantastic, but for the purposes of this thread I'd be most interested in having a Ruleset that allows for this kind of activity. 3. Unify Metadata (Views, Reactions etc) between Topic and Pages Record It's a bit strange, but for some reason Reactions are not synced between a Topic OP and a Pages record that is created from that Topic (any reactions made against any comments to that topic are synced, though). It would be great if those gaps are closed up. Also, I would like the views for a topic and a Copy-To-Database'd Pages record to be merged as one single number (at the moment, I can see that the topic gets 250 views and the associated Pages record gets 125 views - this should be a flat 375 views number printed on both the topic and the Pages record). Many thanks for reading/considering!

I've found an issue with the search feature of the IPS Suite, relating to tagged content specifically. It seems that if a tag happens to include an ampersand ('&'), it messes with the Tag Search pagination. Possibly because of the way IPS handles tag searching within the URL (thinking that the & is a call to another function like "&sortby=relevancy" or something). To use an example on my live site, I clicked the tag 'PSO Episode I & II' in order to initiate a tag search. Notice the URL structure there. If I click through to Page 2 of these results, I am presented with the below screenshot: I'm given an error that there are no results found, and the tag I have been looking for has been changed to "PSO Episode I" (and not "PSO Episode I & II" as desired). I'm sorry, I didn't get the whole URL captured in the above screenshot, but hopefully you can see that there is a straightforward ampersand in the URL there, if it helps troubleshoot (although changing this to "&" instead does not fix the issue and still gives me 0 results). It would be nice to have a hotfix for this issue while v4 is still around... but while I'm here, I'd also like to ask, for v5, that we have better-designed URL structures (in general, actually, but in this case while looking for tagged content). Wordpress, for example, uses the URL structure: https://site.com/tag/this-is-a-tag/ While on an IPS Suite v4 install, you can see by my screenshots the URL is instead an unwieldy: https://site.com/tags/This IS a Tag?/

I will look into this, thanks. I guess the other thing to think about is to set the truncate to apply only on Topics/Content that is given a certain tag (say, 'Spoilers' or something). Any ideas on how to make that happen using IPS code?

I'm not sure if this is a Feature Request or if this is something the Suite can currently do and I'm just missing something, so figured I'd ask. I'm playing around with a possible new landing page for my community - you can see it here: https://board.sonicstadium.org/home/ What I'm curious about is the Activity Stream widget at the bottom there (ignore how it looks, I've been playing around with the theme templates). It shows a preview of every piece of content that is listed in the stream, which is nice. But my community likes to make forum topics about spoiler-heavy subjects (i.e. new Legend of Zelda game, Succession finale, that sort of thing) and posts made within those topics are also displayed in Activity Stream with a full preview text as well. This has led to many in my community to accidentally see spoilers for things they are otherwise interested in, and I've had a few complaints about that. Just asking my community to wrap all their posts in Spoiler blocks within the topics isn't exactly a viable/efficient solution either; these topics have titles that say 'Spoilers Inside', as well as tags that highlight that users should not open the topics if they don't want to be spoilered, so it would be an overreach for me to ask my community to take such a further step within a topic that is well understood to be a spoiler-heavy zone. So I feel that there should be (or there is, and I'm not seeing it) a feature/option for the Activity Stream widget to either avoid showing a text preview of (or truncate more than usual) any content across the community that happens to have a 'Spoilers' tag assigned to it. I also would like the option to include Topics in the Activity Feed but avoid Club Topics (or at least, not show posts/topics from Clubs that users are not following). Is there something like that within the ACP or Widgets block options, or is this something I need to feature request?

Think it’s safe to say that this app has been abandoned. A shame because it had some useful design features.

Thank you @Jim M. I also wanted to add a note about this that I only just learned this morning, too. This issue occurs to all users who have the permissions to Copy to Database, not just the user that posted the specific articles. So for instance, in my steps/examples given above, I was the sole user creating both articles, but then a different user in the same permissions/usergroup as mine tried to Copy to Database a different topic, and found the images I had previously uploaded in their images drawer too. It also seems to build up all images from past Copy to Database-actioned records as well. So if I do not eventually click an 'X' against the images, they will continue to appear and stack alongside other images uploaded to previously Copy-to-Database'd records. Here's a snapshot of my images drawer, when writing Article #3 (using Copy to Database a third time in a row, without clicking 'X' on images uploaded to previous articles): This issue doesn't seem to occur when directly creating a new record/article to the database (even when doing so in-between multiple Copy to Database article creations), only when using Copy to Database to create a record. Hope this helps narrow things down for you guys.

Hi IPS Staff, have a unique issue concerning Copy to Database feature via Pages/CMS. If I use this feature more than once in a row (i.e. I use Copy to Database on a forum topic to post a 'News' database record, then immediately use Copy to Database on a different forum topic to post a different/new 'News' database record), any uploaded images I added to the first story is automatically added to the Upload Files drawer space. These image/s do not have any relevance to the new database record I'm working on, so I click the 'X' to remove the image from the drawer... but what happens then is that it DELETES the image upload entirely from the first database record that was already published. Steps to reproduce: FIRST Article: Go to a forum topic Click Moderation Actions > Copy to Database. Go to Post Editor Edit the Title and Content fields as desired. Upload one or more images to the Images drawer underneath the Content field WYSIWYG. Insert uploaded image/s to content field as desired. Save record, publish as public record. SECOND Article: Go to a new forum topic Click Moderation Actions > Copy to Database. Go to Post Editor Images from previous Post Editor instance are automatically slotted into the Images drawer underneath the Content field WYSIWG. Remove the irrelevant image/s from the drawer by clicking the 'X' on each image. Complete rest of record as desired, Save record, publish as public record. Visit record URL of FIRST article already published (where uploaded Image/s were originally added). Images are deleted, and are displayed as broken images. Check user's "existing attachment" media - uploaded images have been deleted from here as well. This is obviously not desired behaviour - the images uploaded to one article should not be appearing for use in a different one in the first place, but when trying to remove the irrelevant images from the second article it actually ends up deleting already-posted media content, and that adds extra work for users who now have to go back to the first article and re-upload the same images (if they still have them on file). The only way to get around this in a safe manner (i.e. not deleting the first article's image/s) is, on the second article post editor, to simply not use/insert the irrelevant image/s (which automatically inserts the image/s to the bottom of the published record), then go into 'Edit Record' and remove the image insertions that way. Which is not an ideal solution really. Any chance this can be looked into and fixed please?

Yes I agree with this. It would be a great QOL improvement for the standalone app if there was a thin progress bar or something that appears at the top of a page whenever you’re loading the next page. I actually tried to look into implementing one myself using custom JS and HTML within the theme templates, but could never get it to work. 😞 So IPS doing something out of the box would be appreciated for a future update.

A great step forward for community managers looking to be more compliant, thanks for this. A quick question; if a user requests account deletion through these new features, can an administrator approve to delete all user PII but anonymise their content so that can be kept on the community? Or does a deletion approved in this way remove absolutely all content as well as PII?

Hi there, currently testing this app before populating it with items (via profile gifts) and launching it with my community. I was wondering if I could suggest a slight UI tweak for the Mystery Box, to make it a bit more engaging with members using it? At the moment, the notification on whether a user wins/loses appears at the bottom (where you usually get message notifications etc). Could the ipsAlert dialog be used instead? Some quick examples of what I mean: Lose Dialog: Win Dialog (with item image): Maybe there is a template for membersshop that lets me play with this that I'm missing, but thought I'd put it out there as a suggestion if not? I know that placing the 'sorry you didn't win' notice at the bottom makes sense in that it doesn't put up annoying popups for users buying the same item over again, but I think for Mystery Box specifically it could add some visual excitement to a user winning something or not. 🙂 Also, I think someone might have suggested this before, but if it's possible to consider setting individual Win % ratios for each Item in a Mystery Box, that would be hugely beneficial for what I'd like to use Members Shop + Profile Gifts for. Thank you for your hard work on this app, it's a great piece of software for my community!

I'm happy to share my site as an example, @The Allspark. My forum is here: https://board.sonicstadium.org/ and the news/articles side of my Invision Community is here: https://board.sonicstadium.org/news/ I wanted to unify my Wordpress (which has been the main platform for my site since 2008) and my Invision Community (which I've had since mid-2000s but treated very much as a separate world to my Wordpress site) in the same way you're looking to do. I started this whole process a couple years ago, and I'm not quite ready to make the full transition yet but as you can see the Pages/CMS app is really flexible with the templates and what you can do with them. A few cool things that I was able to do that would have been very difficult to do on Wordpress: Automatically post news stories/articles into a specific forum as its own topic, so users that are more familiar with your forums (and don't necessarily look at your articles directly that much) will see your articles and can post replies in those topics... which will then be synced with your articles as comments! It works the other way too - I have a 'news' forum where my users can post news they find interesting and, if our news writers haven't covered it already, they can copy the topic to the news database, rewrite as they like, and copy any posts in the existing topic into the news article as comments, and sync the two up for future comments/topic replies. I was able to add a "Member" custom field in my news article database, where I can search for users in my community and assign their name to a news story. I use this to manually credit my users who post news stories in my forum before our news writing staff can get to it. I want to look into making this crediting work automatically or even tie Achievements into this, but I think that's something that only IPS can do (or a third-party plugin). You can see this at the bottom of this article here. I also have another 'wiki' like database (which is heavily WIP atm) and have been able to take advantage of custom fields, database relationships and templates to allow news stories to be paired with records in the wiki database. You can see it at the bottom of this article here - and if you click through to that database link, I created an 'articles' tab in the wiki database to allow users to see any news that have previously been tagged with this database record too. I do recommend exploring the CMS app for the Invision platform, because as others have said here once you get stuck into the templates and various customisations, you can really make something impressive. It's arguably as important an app as the core forums itself, for me. However, as you're coming from Wordpress like I am, I figure it's worth advising you of some hurdles you may have to overcome, as there are many functions and features that are different between the two and the last thing you want to do is jump both feet into CMS only to get 'buyers remorse' about how good Wordpress was all over again! Experiences are obviously different for every person, but these were some of the teething problems I have faced/am facing with the suite so far... The post editor will feel familiar to you if you are used to Invision Board of the past, but that's also its achilles heel as its based on an age-old ckeditor version that doesn't allow for a lot of features/functions that would be obvious in today's content-creating world. You may need to rely on a couple of add-ons for the ckeditor, and that is its own headache as not every plugin ckeditor offers can be installed due to the custom nature of Invision's implementation of the editor. Media uploads are not great for content creators. The media uploader in the post editor is adequate for forum use, but if you have a news writing staff that share resources there is no way to easily allow for one accessible media folder that a privileged usergroup has collective access to. AdminCP has a 'Media' section under 'Page Management' within the CMS app, but it's useless for posting content and cannot be accessed through the post editor. I suggest an improvement here. One of the big drawbacks to the current editor is the lack of any way to build inline image galleries - or any other content 'blocks' - out of the box. Wordpress is a big obnoxious mess in the CMS side, but you are able to cleanly upload images in bulk to a shared staff media gallery, and insert a number of images into a nice flexbox/gridbox into your post content. At present, if you want to post multiple images in a news story, your only option is to upload them to the Invision post editor media uploader, insert each image (which may be massive) into the space you want, then double-click each image and resize them in a way that they all have the same height values (so as not to look terrible) and then center the entire 'paragraph' of images. Here's an example of this in action - this was a news story featuring lots of images, and it took me WAY too long to manage every single image in this way. I suggest an improvement here. While it's a very cool feature, there's a lot of jank with the topic > cms "Copy to Database" function that I hope are fixed/improved in v5. There's currently no way to copy a topic to database and completely rewrite it (so it matches the house style of a news story from your staff) without it replacing the topic OP on sync. I had to create a plugin to stop that sync from happening (so that the community user could feel like their content was still valued and existed, while also allowing staff to leverage the topic as a basis for active comments section). If you go down this route of leveraging forums for news creation, like I have, you may find that multiple topics will be created by multiple users (and sometimes your staff may write a story without realising there is an existing topic), meaning you could end up with two or three topics to merge. Usually this isn't a problem, but if one of the topics you're merging happens to be the one auto-created by your news staff when they wrote a news story, it causes all sorts of problems. I suggest a number of improvements here. ------ Overall, I think you'll find that the Invision platform will do what you're looking for really nicely! Especially if you're happy to get into the nitty gritty of template/theme design, you could make something really special. And the ability to connect your articles to your community and help reinvigorate the comments section is well worth the jump. Just be aware of some of the QOL issues mentioned above (I'm hoping IPS will make some serious improvements to the above for the upcoming v5!), and prepare yourself for a different experience to Wordpress in terms of content creation. If you manage your expectations, you'll be more than fine. Hope this post helps give you some insight! 🙂

Ahhh, I missed those two rules. Apologies Marc, thanks for clarifying and waking me up! 🙂 If I changed any of these rules (i.e. removed the content and rep count rules) and then saved the Promotion Rule, would the Task to promote those users happen automatically or would I need to manually re-run some tasks?

Ah no worries then, I can share the user IDs no problem. 🙂 The resulting members from my search mentioned earlier, who should have been automatically promoted in the Group Promotions... 47509 47508 47506 47501 47500 47498 47494 47478 47454 47440 47437 47428 47423 If you're able to log in and take a look, I only have one Group Promotion Rule implemented which is the one that I'm worried isn't being fired correctly. Or maybe I'm just doing something wrong. 😅

Thanks Marc - would it be okay to DM you this information to protect usernames etc from my community?

I don't think that's the issue with the user who complained about being unable to post a topic, at the very least, because they had used their account to log in and tell me they were still stuck in Newbie usergroup. If it's happened to one user, it's likely to have happened to a lot more too. I re-ran a member search, limited it to users registered between 1 Nov 2022 - 31 Dec 2022 (so well over 60 days ago) with last activity between 1 Mar 2023 - 11 Apr 2023 (within 60 days and 60 days after the latest possible registration date of 31 Dec 2022). There are 11 results. All of these users have logged in within the last month. So again, I think there may be something else wrong, or something I'm missing Task-wise.

Last year, I re-organised my member usergroups to help protect from spammers and malicious users. The idea would be that, upon registration, a new user would be set in the usergroup 'Newbie', which requires their first 10 posts to be approved by mod/admin before being able to freely post as well as other restrictions (one of which being unable to make topics). These restrictions would be lifted when the user is promoted to another 'Regular User' group. I set up a rule for this ages ago with the following settings activated: Any Achievement Points Not Banned Groups: Newbie Member Joined: More than 60 Days Ago Last Posted: Anytime Last Visited: Anytime Actions: Move to Group: 'Regular User' However, I have just had a user complain that they registered back in Oct 2022 and still is unable to post topics. So I've had to manually 'promote' their usergroup. I checked the Member list in AdminCP and did a search for all users who had registered between Nov 1, 2022 and Dec 31, 2022 who were still in the 'Newbie' usergroup and to my surprise there were four pages of results! What am I doing wrong? These users should be automatically promoted but it clearly isn't doing that. The 'Enable Group Settings' toggle is ON in the Newbie group under 'Group Settings' in ACP as well. So it's not that. Is there a specific Task that isn't running properly here or something, that I need to look into? Any help is appreciated!

Yeah just to clarify/reinforce Randy's point in case it helps other people as well... you need to enable Push Notifications for EACH device you have in order for it to work. You can't just set it once on a desktop/mobile browser and expect it to work once the PWA is set up. I realised this myself when I had enabled push notifications on my community within the iOS Safari app (before I PWA'd it), but didn't get anything come through when I set up the PWA after. It treats the PWA as its own, separate "browser", so you will need to log in on the specific app instance, go to Settings > Notifications and scroll down to the bell to ensure that your PWA is specifically set up for push. Then it works. 🙂 I'm guessing this is some quirk with iOS, but figured I'd share just in case anyone else is pulling their hair out at this.

Hi guys, had a couple questions about the way the manifest settings work with certain browsers. 1. Desktop Safari in iOS seems to have broken the favicon to the point where it is just showing a white circle. My version is 16.3 running on mac os 12.6.3 if that helps (maybe it needs an update?). I've uploaded an image that has black vectors, but I also tried deleting that file and just having nothing set for 'Safari Mask Icon' and I'm still seeing just a white blank icon where the favicon should be in the bookmarks tab. 2. I uploaded a Maskable Icon (which features a circular logo for my site and a colour/image background) and while it seems to be used correctly for various areas on Safari and Chrome (as a bookmark or saved app), on Mobile iOS when I try to save the community to my iOS Home Screen (using Bookmarks > Add to Home Screen) the icon that presents itself is the one I have uploaded for Application Icon instead. Is this down to the iOS Home Screen/Push notifications thing being quite new? Is it possible to force iOS to accept the Maskable Icon if it is available, as using the Application Icon (which has a transparent background) does not look good on iOS Home Screen (it fills the transparent space with an ugly black colour). 3. I notice that in Chrome browser, it ignores the favicon uploaded to the Icons & Logos section and instead includes the Application Icon where available. Is there a way to force Desktop Chrome to accept the Favicon instead? When I set the Application Icon to match the Maskable Icon (i.e. having an image background) in an attempt to see if I could fix the iOS Home Screen issue above, instead Chrome just decided to adopt the Application Icon in the tab window - and I'd much prefer to use a basic logo with transparent background for Chrome browser desktop (using a background looks ugly). Thanks so much for your help!

I’ve just been trying out the Gallery app via the demo, and I’m very interested in it - I would like to use it as a shared media depository that multiple users can pull from when making posts/content. However it doesn’t look like this is currently possible. I’d like there to be an extra permissions column setting that allows for usergroups to ‘access’ all uploaded images within a gallery/album when creating a post or other content in Post Editor. Not just images the user uploads themselves, but ALL images uploaded to that specific gallery album by ALL users with upload/access rights. Please let me know if this is possible, it’s literally the only thing stopping me from investing in the Gallery app (well, that and the ability to add custom fields to Gallery albums but I can ask about that later).

Well in the UK it has been nothing but typical beautiful British weather: Honestly, it’s surprising to see summertime come around so fast over here. Thanks for the updates, Olivia, it’s appreciated!

This is unbelievably cool. Thank you Matt and IPS Team for this new feature (and thanks Apple In a way I guess). I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really sure what all the options in the Icons & Logos / Manifest were all about (and I don’t touch Android so it’s benefits would have been wasted on me) so I just left it all alone. This has given me an opportunity to look into this more and offer a way for our community to stay more connected. Having a Home Screen app definitely helps lessen the pressure when dealing with competition via other platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Thanks again!

Agreed! The way things are going with my community, the CMS/Pages content will likely be some of the most valuable we will have (with collaborative databases etc), would be great to have an extra layer of backup security for this app.

I recently created a record / news story that included a quotation in the headline (or record title in IPS Field terms). Something like the below: Person From Company Issuing “Notice” to All Users It turns out that, upon publish, the “ quote marks in the title are being printed in the URL slug. So the resulting URL would turn out like this: [site]/[database]/person-from-company-issuing-“notice”-to-all-users-rXX I think the same thing happens with single quote marks like ‘ as well. I don’t think this should be happening… I don’t have any screenshots to share on this I’m afraid, but also when I tried to fix the situation by editing the record in the front end and creating a custom URL slug (basically just the same thing but without the quote marks), the IPS Suite errored out on me. I can try to replicate this for you if you need me to, but hopefully this report is enough?

This would be nice to see in the core IPS framework but I wonder if this is something that @SoftwareFactory would be willing to include in their Brilliant Discord app as well?

Thanks a lot for the information @Matt, it's really appreciated. Just to beat the dead horse a little bit more, would the restoration of the two publish date concepts also allow for past date publish as well as future date publish? It's really less of an issue for me these days with this plugin I found, but I figure since I've been banging on about it for so long now I'm just curious. 🤠