Joy Rex

Anybody?

Thanks for everyone's replies - I guess I didn't make it clear that I wanted a way of knowing which applications and plugins are compatible with 4.6 BEFORE upgrading, so when I do upgrade, I'll know which apps and plugins aren't yet tested against 4.6 or aren't compatible at all due to version compatibility.

I think it is pretty common for users of IPS to have Applications and Plugins from the Marketplace - it would be helpful if the ACP had a built-in version check against the currently installed applications and plugins and what is compatible with the upgrade, rather than having to manually check each one (which for some could mean quite a bit of back and forth).

Has anyone found a more efficient/automated way of doing this?

On 5/8/2021 at 1:55 PM, ahc said:

Yes, please remember this guys. The marketplace here is definitely not the only resource for Plugins/Apps.  Lots of developers jump at the opportunity to earn more money by letting you purchase things on their own websites or even directly so they don't lose a chunk to fees.  Don't be afraid to use the directory to contact someone privately, the worst they can say is no.  It's how my community survives without an active license. 

And right there is why this suggestion is problematic for several reasons:

1. No active license - you realize you are putting you and your user's data at risk by not maintaining the latest version of the IPS software? I would be very surprised if you are patching bugs and keeping up with changes to PHP versions, etc.
2. While plugins and apps are useful, unless they are maintained and managed via IPS and the developers you run the risk of breaking your community software if an addon doesn't keep up with any changes to the main suite (and any bugs)
3. Using unsupported apps outside of IPS again underscores the above risks, and potentially opens you up to liability if someone decides it is your fault, and not some developer you hired to create an addon that has leaked their personal data or made it vulnerable to exposure.

Also, if a person ignores their own thread (I know, just hear me out), will it stop sending them notifications?

Just now, Adriano Faria said:

It removes the notificaitons of the followed topic. I'll take a look to remove these 2 when I have to upgrade to 4.6.

Okay, so to be clear - until 4.6 comes out if someone ignores a topic that they have posted in and someone quotes or reacts to their posts, they WILL get notified of said quote/reaction?

I just purchased the plugin, and my users who have posted in a thread they now ignore will get notifications from the ignored thread if a user quotes or reacts to their posts in the ignored thread.

Any ideas?

I cannot get AdSense to detect the code I pasted into the box in the Advertisements section - Google AdSense keeps giving me the message:

But in the Advertisements section, it says the ad I created that has the AdSense code in it has gotten 78747 impressions - how is this possible?

I just purchased this, and everywhere it is showing "1 viewing" (on the forums that actually have activity), but when I click on it shows many more users - is there a problem?

And yes, this is in Table view - I thought this was similar to VBulletin's "users viewing topic".

I'm currently using SendGrid's Free tier, which allows 100 emails to be sent - has anyone tried using their Google for Business (e.g., your own custom domain email address) for this?

On 10/26/2020 at 5:52 PM, Morgin said:

What’s the need for plug-in toggles or specific settings for when to enable/disable? Shouldn't this be as simple as the ACP specifying the default dark theme and then just relying on @media prefers-color-scheme? If no dark theme set as default, nothing happens? I’m not exactly in the running for developer of the year but even to me this seems like a pretty easy solution that utilizes OS features re night/dark mode and not have to reinvent the wheel in Invision. 

IPS would have to update their default theme (as would any theme developer) to incorporate the

@media prefers-color-scheme

selector.

Also, you would want users to be able to decide if they want the theme for the site to honor their system preferences or not.

As a matter of fact, how it is implemented on Mobile is perfect - just make the Forum filter modal window available on Desktop as it is in Mobile!

8 hours ago, wegorz23 said:

Great app!

I have only 2 things:

- menu is not visible on mobiles? I see it only on desktop.

- it blocks switching skins. Some users are confused by that. Is there any option to make it better?

I experienced this too (the inability to switch skins) and it does not show on the user menu (for me or anybody else).

I think the idea behind this is users are supposed to choose two themes (one for bright, one for dark) and maybe that's why it doesn't allow theme switching (as that would conflict with the user's choices) to switch between for the light and dark modes.

I really like the Fluid view, but it would be great if there was a way to hide the forum selection sidebar once you've made your selections so the other sidebar items aren't pushed down because of it being at the top, or maybe move it to a modal when you activate Fluid view?

@Anawa - thanks, that helped me too.

Is there any better way to display this? As a sidebar, it eats up 25% of the horizontal screen real estate, and as a box under the first post it also fills a lot of space. Is there any way to make it a collapsible sidebar?

The information is useful, but not at the cost of screen real estate.

15 hours ago, Allegheny said:

So does this mean that "self hosted server licenses" will be phased out at some point?  It sure seems like that's very much on the table.

 

There's advantages and disadvantages to having IPS as SaaS versus self-hosted - most software nowadays is SaaS, and a lot of companies without the resources or expertise prefer that over having to maintain everything themselves. Cost will be the biggest factor in whether IPS could go fully SaaS and keep smaller customers (depending on what percentage of their customer base that is). 

21 hours ago, Haku2 said:

I am actually a professional software engineer who works for one of the big tech giants. I never said it was easy. As you stated above, without going into the specifics, it's a lot more difficult with web-based software and would likely incur overhead. The point of this topic is that IPS has shifted from methodology that provided customers with a versatile way to install third-party applications to one that is fairly locked down and prone to issues if the surrounding conditions aren't nearly perfect. And, then, in the event that something does go wrong, there is no longer much you can do yourself to fix it without contacting the developer or submitting a support ticket. This results in time being wasted (in addition to possible service outages) to explain and get support for the issue. It also makes those who invested time in getting a technical background to solve these types of issues feel powerless.

First off - my apologies for my rude assumption - guess I was in a bad mood when I wrote that...

Second, I hear what you're saying - but how many IPS customers are like yourself and @Paul E. that do know what they are doing - probably not that many. So from a business perspective, it makes sense for IPS to move towards a framework or methodology that allows them more flexibility in software development since any support requests are likely to come though the ticketing system anyway.

8 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

The above query runs in under 3 seconds on my install. 3 seconds compared to 14 hours....

Against 1M records? IPS should give you a free license for massively optimizing their script!

I see what you mean - so how they've changed the upgrade/install process has made it more difficult for users like yourself with the knowledge and understanding to be able to tinker under the hood so to speak - well, you can't say they didn't deliver the Apple Experience™ you were wanting!

Hopefully IPS' support can help you out, especially when it seems you've done most of the heavy lifting for them.

1 minute ago, Haku2 said:

If they were really determined

You've never done software development, have you?

I cannot think of the hundreds, nay, thousands of hours IPS must have put into 4.5 - all the testing, planning, trying to make things as smooth as possible for their customers to upgrade their sites, etc.

If the connection between the host and client is terminated, there's usually no way to tell the host process "hang on, something's wrong" and stop whatever processes are running, and record a stopping point (can you imagine if it was inside a query - I suppose a rollback is possible, but again, a lot of overhead for something that isn't likely going to occur).

The absolute safest way is to run the upgrade via a RDP or similar process, so that way if the client connection is cut, the VM running the upgrade can continue uninterrupted (because presumably the host machine is on a solid connection with redundancies for power, etc.).

This was unfortunately a case of bad luck on @Paul E. part, but I take exception blaming or insinuating that IPS is somehow "not determined enough".

10 hours ago, jucs said:

WHY change colors in the default!?  I had never customized and now a bunch of defaults are changed in 4.5.2.  Now, it creates a huge amount of work for me.  Does anyone have a theme with the OLD default colors?

Thanks.

So if you never customized anything, what's the issue? You liked the old 4.4.x colors better? IPS had been saying for some time there was a new default theme coming, etc. - it's not as if this should be a big surprise to anyone...

I guess what you could do is find a site running 4.4.x and ask them to provide you the hex values, or maybe IPS could give you an old to new color mapping (doubtful they would have it)...

3 hours ago, Paul E. said:

Unfortunately, my internet connection blipped out during the upgrade, causing the process to fail, and leaving the plugin in a state where it's not fully updated

And exactly how would IPS or any addon developer account for a disconnect from the client machine running the upgrade?

On 9/4/2020 at 2:37 PM, Paul E. said:

60 characters is crazy short for thread titles here, yes. If I were a new customer, I'd think that was out of the box, unchangeable behavior, and it would have been a hard pass. 

What we did was create an issue in our tracker for each dependency, find each dependency in the Marketplace or in our own repository, tested each resource, and linked back to the Marketplace entry.

We then performed test upgrades using a copy of our production environment and make sure that our results matched what Marketplace thought it did using our test license. It didn't, we reported those issues, and they've since been fixed by IPS. We do this in a way that we can repeat it quickly over and over again by utilizing virtualization.

This helps us know exactly what to expect when we "do it for real." You can see after completing marketplace onboarding and checking for updates what applications/plugins/themes/language packs have updates available, and see what happens if you turn on the ones that do not. Our beta testers play around and try to break things.

We then update our tracker and we know we're not ready to go until we've successfully completed the issues attached to the 4.5 upgrade milestone.

What did you use for your tracker (out of curiosity)?

On 9/4/2020 at 2:18 PM, Joy Rex said:

As for themes - if I used the Easy Mode to create a default theme, will it for the most part carry over, or would I need to start from scratch?

Any advice on themes @bfarber?

<rant>You guys need to lengthen your topic titles so people can use full words 😧</rant>

So, based on the abbreviated topic title, what's the best way (short of looking up every Application or Plugin manually) of finding out if there is a 4.5-compatible version?

I'd like to see which of my Apps and Plugins are compatible first, so I know which ones I need to disable or at least double-check once I update to 4.5.

As for themes - if I used the Easy Mode to create a default theme, will it for the most part carry over, or would I need to start from scratch?

On 8/29/2020 at 9:37 AM, Nathan Explosion said:

Looks like it conflicts with the ipscontextmenu plugin which is already in place by default.

 

So could editor buttons be added to the ipscontextmenu plugin similar to how they can with the contextmenu plugin mentioned? @bfarber?

I too wanted to do this (to simplify the editor with only the most commonly-used buttons, but still have them available if needed) - is it possible?

@Josiah Wallingford - did you ever get this working? If so, how?