Joy Rex

Wasn't there a major change in licensing from FA4 to FA5 that might be behind why IPS hasn't updated it in their commercial product? Someone from IPS can chime in if that's not the case.

In addition to stickiness, another option (that should be brought back from 3.4.x) is the ability to collapse sections in the sidebar or the entire sidebar itself when it is visible depending on your viewport size.

I've been using BIM Chatbox and it's dope. Its creator, @onlyME, responded to me fast when I had a couple of things I needed help with.
 

If you are using third party items you will need to wait for each one to be updated for 4.5 or confirmed the current version is working with 4.5.  Since 4.5 hasn't been released at this point, nobody is working on updates just yet, once developers get their hands on beta versions they can start developing and testing for any needed changes. 
If you are not using any third party items, then once the final version is released, you can upgrade without issue!  
If you have a very large site or items of concern, and are self hosted, you can always do a test install to test your upgrade process and third party items before doing your live community if needed. 
The final golden rule, always do a backup of the database and file system before upgrades, things can sometimes go wrong, so it's always nice to have a quick restore as an option rather than freaking out if your community is troubled with an upgrade issue.
 
 

I'm surprised Pages doesn't come with a built-in template for this already...

Pages is meant as a stepping stone so you can create your own with ease. Leaving you to create whatever you can imagine.

You could however use Invision's simple guide:
Or use something like this:
For people like me who don't know how to code then these two options have helped greatly. While not quite what you're after you can certainly set permissions and content to certain groups.

I'm surprised Pages doesn't come with a built-in template for this already...

Nope as this is a moderation action only. 

The only action that lets the user still see/edit their post is for it to be in an approval status. You'd have to get someone that could mod in the ability to unapprove the post. Only warning for that is that this will put it in your moderators queue for approval.
In my opinion the best thing to do is to educate your users on the true use of hiding a post. Advise them its a soft delete function.
For your users with the polls create a special forum (like a test forum) where they can only see their posts. Advise them to use that and when they are ready have a moderator move it to the correct forum where everyone can see it.

The thing about ideas is that once they hit, then the OCD kicks in and you have to act on it...
SSSR 1.2 Released!
Pages CMS records in Streams default to a two-line truncation. SSSR now checks on those and more-aggressively truncates to match the usual two-line character amount. The javascript truncation routine will rarely, if ever, fire on those now. Demonstrably better (at least for my sites where this matters...)

SSSR 1.1 Released!
Fixed a default setting that was beyond form number limit. Removed setting for word count on Streams. Implemented a much more aggressive filter on streams. That default setting may or may not have messed with saving the plugin settings. Sorry bout that if it did.
The new aggressive settings is courtesy of one of my sites where the content items didn't begin with 'words' (don't ask...). While looking at that hitch I quickly realized that playing with customizable word count limits and so on wasn't really necessary and just cut this down to the bone. I looked at the three line stream results (where three lines of text are displayed for the item - that's the max right now, there are some  - like Pages database records - that push out just two lines), worked up a reasonable character count for those, and now we just limit and truncate right around that amount. Stupid fast now.
@Joy Rex without me working up animated gifs this is hard to do, so I'll just try to better explain.
The bottlenecks here are: 
The amount of text these search and stream results push out of your server and down the internet tubes. This large page size now being ingested by your end-user's browser, in addition to any other page load blocking items trying to spark up. The IPS javascript truncation routines that fire AFTER the entire page has loaded. This plugin addresses all three by limiting all the stream and search results text that those things have to deal with. Remember: the hitch is that by default the ENTIRE content item text is pushed out here, no matter how large it may be. That means ALL of that text is rendered by the browser before any javascript truncation happens.
Truncating this text server-side is stupid fast and easy to do. That's less for your web server to push out the door. That means smaller pages for your end-user's browser to ingest  - that's a faster page load time. Those javascript truncate routines have very little to do now.  If the vast majority of the text content of your community, that's forum posts, image comments or descriptions, etc. routinely consist of a handful of lines of text - seriously, like 2, 3, 4, 5 lines or something, you won't see too much improvement here. People aren't so much discussing as they are chatting. 
If instead you have in-depth discussions, people posting paragraphs of text, Pages databases where content items are walls of text (book chapters, creative writing, subtitles, articles, and what not) this is the thing that you NEED! Any animated gif I provide would, with the appropriate content items of sufficient length in the streams, show a before where you literally see walls of text appear on the screen only to eventually snap away Thanos-style when the js truncation fires - after the page has fully loaded of course. The after gif would be faster page loading and minimal, if any screen-snap occurring from the js truncation.
I can even see, for streams, a way to all but eliminate any firing of the js truncation completely. I'd just need to look at the default stream templates to see if they are wanting one, two, or three lines of text - the item type is already there, I can just read it and adjust the cut as needed. I'm noting this for a future rev. No screen snaps allowed (eventually when I get on this addition)
FYI, I've had this stuff laying around for a few years now - I just got around to cleaning it up and piling it all together rather than the hodgepodge of plugins it was.

This sounds really useful - could you provide a before and after example?

@Joy Rex, it's about filtering at the IPS level, not CKE.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50840168/how-to-detect-if-the-os-is-in-dark-mode-in-browsers
Some more helpful information:
https://css-tricks.com/dark-modes-with-css/

Adding this to custom.css should do the trick!
.ipsBox:not( .ipsBox_transparent ):not( .ipsModerated ), .ipsBox, .ipsPageHeader, .focus-topic-compact .focus-topic, .ipsPager, .ipsWidget, .ipsBox_alt, #comments, .focus-pickerWrap, .ipsfocus_megaFooter{ background-color: {hextorgb="area_background_reset" opacity="0.9"}; } Change the 0.9 value until you're happy with the result. It should be between 0 and 1.

That's a nice way to implement dark mode - not pure black, but shades of dark grays so it's easier on the eyes.
An idea is to offer an "automatic" dark mode - look at the user's local time and switch the theme from light to dark depending on what time it is for them.

The only things I like dark are:

- My code editor
- My coffee
- My memes

With an option to moderate changes I would start using the wiki functionality. I think this has a lot of potential.

@Joel R Sorry this is old, but I'm interested in what you mean. Are you saying the IPS templates @Lindy was open sourcing for instruction are held by @opentype and @TAMAN? or to purchase the template pages plugins like SuperGrid, and Pages Article Styles ?
I am still very interested in real-world examples like @Lindy is suggesting about (I think) the IPS site. The IPS site is an excellent example of what can be done with Pages, but it remains beyond me to figure out how to duplicate some of the better parts of the site. With templates like from the IPS site, seeing the code behind the result would be an amazing boon to using Pages for CMS layouts.
Thanks.

I hate it when my HTML chafes 🤣
This looks interesting - how would this work with IPS (the example cited is Wordpress)?

I hate it when my HTML chafes 🤣
This looks interesting - how would this work with IPS (the example cited is Wordpress)?

It's only a beta feature (i.e. it's hidden behind a special flag you have to manually enable) in Chrome 76, which was released 13 days ago.
I think we need to give a little time for this to mature first, but definitely when it does I think moving to natively supported browser functionality where possible would make sense.

Well I think I would much prefer pwa, read this: 
https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/how-to-implement-amp/

I too get complaints from some of my community members about the removal of the View Source (since it exposes the HTML vs BBCode) - I was surprised to find that many people mark up their posts prior to posting.
I get that, but with this version of the CKEditor, using keyboard shortcuts is a HUGE time saver, and much easier to mark up than manually writing BBCode, much less HTML.
Since I upgraded my forum to 4.x I have been loving the ease at which I can CTRL+B to bold, CTRL+I for italics, etc. - not to mention the paste and upload image capabilities.
Your forum may be geared towards more complex markup and hence why BBCode is important to you/your community, which I can understand.
IPS seems to be taking the "greater good" approach in abandoning BBCode (presumably to make the software easier to maintain and improve upon), but if it's feasible there should at least be BBCode support for those who want it (or if possible encapsulate it into an addon/application) as you suggested.

Honestly, I wonder why people who use IPS are seemingly obsessed with emulating or trying to improve upon Facebook, etc. - to me, the biggest "threat" are sites like Reddit when it comes to IPS-driven sites.