VaBeach_Guy

12 hours ago, Morgin said:

... (or, bluntly, if you have the traffic to support it, move onto an ad network like ezoic or something). 

My board is still fairly new, though it began its life with basically a 'built in' membership of about 1,000 people. An NFL team decided to close their 20+ year old forum and my board was born from that. They gave a 2 week notice of the closure, so that gave the new board 2 weeks to inform members of the new location. 

Right now, traffic between about 8 AM (Eastern US) and 11 PM never dips below about 75 members online at any given period. So it's not massively active, but it's the NFL's offseason with very little going on, so I wouldn't expect to see a whole lot of traffic right now. During the NFL Draft, at the end of April, traffic peaked at around 400 online and from past experience, I would expect at least that much during games.

I'm sure the numbers are different for everyone, but for my board, the ACP number is about 4.3 times higher than the Adsense number. Now, the ACP is around 27,000 with Adsense at about 6,200. My board is NFL related, so I'd expect those numbers to increase as NFL training camps and the season gets closer (assuming there will be a season). 

15 hours ago, Morgin said:

It’s one of those situations where both numbers are accurate in terms of the specific metric they show.

ACP shows page hits, and that’s it. How many times was that particular ad code placement requested from the server. Doesn’t matter if it was human, search bot, etc. If that ad code placement was requested, it counts.

Adsense shows actual ad impressions. That is, how many times did a unique ad actually get served in that location. As you can imagine, google doesn’t like (and has ways to avoid) loading paying ads to any request other than likely human with eyeballs who will actually see the ad. Page scraping, search bots, people with ad blockers, etc. do not count as “hits” for purposes of the Adsense impressions metric.

ACP is always going to show significantly higher numbers  than adsense will actually serve and pay out for. If you are lucky enough to have someone wanting to directly buy ads from you through IPS that’s great, but even podunk companies have gotten wise that buying a block of impressions without any insight into the demographics of the audience who actually were served and viewed those ads is no longer justifiable. That is, with all else being equal, you have a pretty good example that if you sold 18,000 impressions direct through IPS, it’s likely only roughly 3,800 of those impressions were actually viewed by an actual human looking at a screen. Again, somehow there are still people out there ok with paying for metric and demographic-less ad impressions with no guarantee the bad views have been filtered out of the counter, but here we are. 

I figured that it was along these lines but wanted to be sure. It would be nice if the ACP had a way of filtering out the bots from that number, to give a more accurate figure, but I guess it's not critical since you can get the number from Adsense. 

How accurate is the 'impressions' that are displayed in the ACP? I enabled Adsense on the 18th of this month, it's showing me that there's been almost 18,000 impressions (according to the ACP).  But on Adsense, they're only showing 3,800 impressions. 

I hate upgrading...

Quote

Incorrect integer value: '' for column 'starter_id' at row 493
/public_html/applications/core/sources/Setup/Upgrade.php::708

ALTER TABLE `ibf_forums_topics` CHANGE COLUMN `tid` `tid` INT (10) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT , CHANGE COLUMN `starter_id` `starter_id` BIGINT (20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 , DROP INDEX `last_poster_id`, CHANGE COLUMN `last_poster_id` `last_poster_id` BIGINT (20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 , CHANGE COLUMN `pinned` `pinned` TINYINT (1) NULL , CHANGE COLUMN `moved_on` `moved_on` INT (11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 , DROP INDEX `topic_firstpost_2`;

I just got the same error after trying to upgrade an old board (version 4.something), and submitted a ticket. I'll try the above mentioned solution and see how that goes. 

26 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

Did you install any plugin/app that affects the content edition? The only other way that I can think of why this is happening is the secondary permissions. 

 

No, nothing was installed or changed in the ACP at all. It seems to be intermittent though, because now it's not doing it. Very odd. 

I've just started getting this message, as have my members. Members can edit their own content and the time limit in the ACP is set to unlimited. I just tried to edit one of my posts, immediately after posting it, and I got the message. Before today, this wasn't a problem. Not sure what's changed. Looking through the Admin logs, nothing was done in there to cause this. 

"This comment can no longer be edited. It may have been moved or deleted, or too much time may have passed since it was posted for it to be edited."

Anyone else have this happen?

On 5/18/2020 at 8:36 AM, bfarber said:

Hm, we do support upgrading from 3.4.9 to the current release. What's the ticket number?

This actually brings up a question that I was going to bring up, I have a board that's running 4.1.19.1, would it be best to upgrade to the current available board then upgrade to 4.5 or just wait and upgrade it right to 4.5?

Will doing this cause uploaded images to no longer display properly or will that have to be re-built? I ask because I don't want the member list to have to be re-built, which I believe I did once on another board several years ago, and it screwed up the post counts. This new board is actually a sort of 'replacement' board for an official NFL team board that the team did away with. 

As part of building the replacement board, I had everyone archive their old profiles (on the discontinued, official board), and once they joined the new board, I manually set their post count and reputation score to what it had been on the official board. That just kind of gave a smooth transition for everyone, but was a good bit of work for me. But the majority of members didn't want to lose 10 to 20 years worth of post count (the highest of which is around 130,000 posts). I really don't want to have to do that all over again lol. 

I actually don't even know if 'rebuilding' is still a thing in the ACP, to be honest lol. 

2 hours ago, Morrigan said:

It’s more seo friendly not to have it. Use “Seo optimization” in the menu to download and fix the issue. Won’t cause any tithes and will give a good redirect.

As they are now, it looks like this (just a random example):

https://www.eaglesmessageboard.com/index.php?/topic/115-survivor-season-40-winners-at-war/

That URL would be less desirable than if 'index.php?' wasn't there?

I don't mind having the board rewrite the URLs, I just don't want to 'break' the board by doing it. I wish I'd done it before going live, but it's just one of those things that I didn't do and now there's about 50,000 posts. I really don't want rewriting the URLs to cause a mess.

I guess I could clone the board and install it in a test forum, then rewrite and see how it reacts. I could then use that test forum for the 4.5 upgrade test forum when it gets released. 

1 hour ago, Pescao6 said:

I wouldn't know because I was whitelisted when I configured my Google Adsense. My admins don't have access to Advertisements because I've restricted them from it and I definitely don't want anyone adding scripts to my AdminCP; so if it's blocking Administrators from doing that, I see that as a good thing.

After you applied the changes I mentioned and cleared your cache like I said?

Did they clear their web browser cookies and cache and have no images or links on their signature?

I'm the only Admin that makes changes like this in the ACP, so there's no worry there with anyone else adding things. 

I haven't made any changes yet, I'll dig into that tomorrow afternoon when I have time to sit down with it. 

1 hour ago, Pescao6 said:

Sucuri's Firewall blocks third parties to prevent cross scripting attacks and unfortunately they don't have a way to whitelist third party URLs at this time.

Twitter Style emojis are not hosted locally on your site.
If you look at the source of a twemoji image like  is it originates from:

https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/72x72/1f64a.png

Standard emojis like 🙊 shouldn't give you this problem and load faster on your site if you care about performance, but I prefer the twemojis because they look better.
This can be changed on AdminCP > Customization > Emoji

I found members were being blocked when:

An example where I was blocked is when I was in the ACP and went to change the Advertisement settings, where I have my Adsense code set. Once I tried to submit the changes, I got the "You're Blocked!! You're a Hacker!!" page from GoDaddy ... ok, it didn't call me a hacker, but it did say that I was blocked for trying to cross script.

One of the members on my site was posting a news article, which didn't contain any pictures or other things of that sort, just text, and he got the same 'You're blocked!' screen. So I have to wonder if there's people trying to access the site who can't, or people who are trying to register and can't. 

The board that I'm referencing in this post is fairly new (1 month live as of the 20th). I have Friendly URL's enabled, but index.php?/ is still part of the URL. Is there a good reason to rewrite the URL's to eliminate that? Is there an even better reason NOT to rewrite, such as major problems that it may cause? 

Like I said, the board is new, but there's around 50,000 posts at this point. I don't want to do something that's going to screw things up if the current setup is just fine.

On 5/18/2020 at 12:47 PM, Pescao6 said:

Sucuri was acquired by GoDaddy, so it's cheaper to buy it as GoDaddy Web Security which includes both a CDN a WAF making it easier to manage all of your site's security from one place. The things I like the most about Sucuri include that they remove things by having a security expert manually scan your site, their exceptional customer service, their easy to understand documentation, and the fact their Dashboard makes it really easy for you to add additional security features.

I just implemented GoDaddy's firewall service on my site back on the 13th. Since then, there have been a few issues. One of which I just discovered yesterday and it was that all of the visitors (guests and members) were being assigned the same IP addresses. I found the "Trust IP addresses provided by proxies" setting and set it to be on, and now that's resolved. But some members have told me that they're getting error messages saying that GoDaddy's firewall is blocking them due to cross scripting, when they're only trying to post as normal. I've even had it block me when I'm in the ACP doing normal admin stuff. I had to go and whitelist my IP to prevent that from happening. But trying to whitelist any and everyone isn't a reasonable thing to do. 

That's why I sought out anything (here), about GoDaddy's firewall service. I want the protection, but not if it does more 'harm' (for lack of a better word), than it does help. 

Is the firewall service just a superfluous service for an IP board or is it a genuinely beneficial thing to have? When I had them implement it, my belief was the latter. But I'm curious to know some other opinions/experiences.  

On 5/13/2020 at 10:22 AM, bfarber said:

You will be able to download CSV exports of stats in 4.5. Right now you would need to manually count the marks on the graph charts.

Additionally, 4.5 introduces some "raw stats" via stat overview pages which you may find useful.

Thanks. I'm sure it's stated somewhere, but any idea of when 4.5 will be ready to download and test?

They did away with chat a few years ago, so I'd be surprised to see it come back.

1 hour ago, breatheheavy said:

My first board was started way back in 2003 and I did a ton of customizing on that, both with addons and the skin. It seemed like every few months, there was an upgrade and that would break a lot of my addons and my skin. After a few rounds of that, I just stopped upgrading. 

This new board has no addons, and the skin is customized, but only slightly. 

Is this new upgrade worth upgrading to, feature wise? I really don't want to get caught up in that vicious upgrade cycle again. 

I just created my board in mid-April, well, my second board. Will there be significant changes in the new version from the most recent version? 

Is there a way to get the stats in raw numbers as opposed to getting the graphs? I'd like to more easily track how many 'guests' are visiting the board and seeing the raw numbers would be easier. 

Is there an easy way of hiding the 'Support' tab? Also, is there a simple way to rename the 'store'?

17 hours ago, Jim M said:

Need to click the “Source” button in the editor to insert HTML

Thanks, I'd have sworn I'd tried that and it didn't work but doing it now works, so I must not have.

I want to enable posting HTML for the Admin group, I've enabled it in the group permissions but HTML is still not posting properly. Am I missing a step that needs to be completed?

On 5/2/2020 at 4:43 PM, Fosters said:

No, it doesn’t need to be your home page. Just keep Forums application as your default application to keep it as homepage .

Thanks, I just have to decide if it will be a useful module for me to add. 

I'm thinking of adding Pages to my forum, but I don't want the Pages installation to become the 'home page', I'd want the forum to be the home page with Pages as an additional section. 

If I purchase and install Pages, will that automatically become the Home Page or would I have the option of designating that?