Randy Calvert

No... that’s incorrect. They’re a software company that makes community management software. Now… that community platform has some e-commerce features (specifically the commerce addon application) but IPS has ALWAYS been a forum/community management platform. They’ve never tried to position themselves as an e-commerce platform and they don’t see their competitors as other e-commerce companies. IPS has already said the primary purpose for using Shopify is not the e-commerce aspect but instead the fulfillment and delivery. It does not make sense for IPS to stock inventory of logo gear… or to deal with picking items that are ordered and shipping them. Instead of finding people to do this, they use another solution that does that. But again… that has nothing to do with being a community management platform. If you’re looking for a e-commerce platform, IPB is not the right solution for you. I don’t think anyone at IPS would try to convince you otherwise. If you need a community platform that can do BASIC e-commerce features while providing a robust set of content management and community engagement tools… IPB might be a good solution for you.

No matter what anyone says, you're not going to like it. And that's OK. We all have things that we want. There are things I've wanted for *20 years*. That's super unfair and not a fair comparison. Setting up a Shopify account was not something done by the development team. Matt did not spend hours setting it up taking away from other development efforts. It was done by the sales/marketing folks (Jordan, Charles, etc). There are different people within IPS that do different things. Some of that involves development, some of it involves other things. Again... it's not about you or me. It's about what IPS needs for a majority of their customers. That's not on us to determine. What IS for us to determine is to look at the features that are there and make a decision if it works for us. If it does, great... use the product. If not, we look elsewhere. Personally for me, while there are features I would like to see... the features that exist are more important which is why I'm still here. If that situation were to change, I would find another solution. There has been about a dozen people who've commented in this thread asking for it over 6 YEARS. So while it may be important to some folks, it's not something that "everyone" is clamoring for. Again... it comes down to what does the MAJORITY of users need? If this is such important functionality, there are some great third party developers you could engage to create the solution. But personally I think you're going a little overboard to say that IPS does not listen to its customers because a few feature requests that you want don't make it into the product.

Again… just because the feature does not happen does not mean they don’t listen. As Sonya said… there are only so many hours in a day. I personally have 10 other features I would like to see that I personally feel are much more useful/important than this. And while I’d like to think I’m the most important person in the world, I know I’m not. There are other issues and priorities. IPS’ job is to figure out what the majority of its users need most. As much as I would like to wish it was all about me, it ain’t. 🙂

Personally I disabled guest posting. That eliminated the majority of the spam for me.

Nope. No issues for me. Are you self hosted or on the IPS cloud?

It’s a raw file. If you’re cloud hosted, you don’t have access to it. If you’re self hosted, download the zip from the client area and find that file in the package.

In a MAJORITY of cases it won’t. You would be more limited by CPU and memory than bandwidth. Videos and images consume more bandwidth than server resources. If you use a CDN like Cloudflare, you won’t even have much server usage. Not at all.

Where specifically are you referring to? Are you meaning the board's logo image? (I just want to make sure I understand what you're trying to actually accomplish before making suggestions on something you may not be interested in.)

In your dashboard, does it say you're running 4.6.12.1? If so, you're already on the latest version. If not, you can try manually downloading the files from your client center, uploading them, and then running yourdomain.com/admin/upgrade to try the updater again with updated files.

I don’t believe IPS is using payouts for payments. Instead it is a normal payment. This would effect IPS here with the Marketplace otherwise.

Ahhh then you’ll need IPS staff to help in that case. Us regular ‘ol community folks can’t fix that. Lol. 🙂

Have you tried using recovery mode to regain ACP access? Disable all plugins/apps and then try again.

Spammers are pretty easily able to complete captchas now. There are several toolkits out there that are able to work around and complete them. While they stop the basic “script kiddies” it does not stop the determined threat actors.

There is not a table called collections in the default IPB install. I assume you have a third party plugin that is using that table? can you launch the installer without selecting anything but the default IPB applications?

This was happening due to a third party application issue.

As noted in the other post, this does not take up search space. It does not appear in the mobile UI at all and only is appearing by for you due to an incompatibility issue with a 3rd party resource. The link on DESKTOP versions of the page does not interfere or limit any existing functionality. (Replied as others later may not see what have happened with this and think it was an actual problem.)

It comes up every year or so. That’s been something gone almost a decade. Ultimately it ain’t coming back. You’re welcome to create a plugin to create that functionality yourself but it won’t be in IPB.

This is not something you would do in the IPS software itself. You would want to do it either at the server level or with a cloud-based WAF.

There are three sections in the area you're talking about: Automatic Moderation - This is not helpful for what you're describing. This simply says if a post is made by a member... if more than XX people report it, to take an action (such as to hide it). It does not prevent it from generating the post in the first place. Spam Prevention - This applies during account creation OR if you allow Guests to post. If a spammer can figure out the captcha, it will not prevent it. Warnings - Has nothing to do with stopping spam. It's about warning people who break your rules and setting up consequences for violating said rules.

Then disable the post before register option. 🙂

Correct. However again... you should not need it if you are using other alternatives. For example with @Jon Erickson's SES integration, you can pick what happens when emails bounce or if someone sends a spam complaint. For example, to automatically set them back into the validating member group if emails hard bounce. Also... with SESDashboard, I don't need an email notice. I instead have a web portal that I can see any bounced email, etc. If you want to receive notifications via email the event happened, great... do nothing. It's working as designed. Your complaint was however that you're getting tons of those emails when spammers attempt to signup with a fake address. You're going to have to pick your poison here. You can disable email validation and instead do manual user approval for all registrations. You could leave email validation enabled, but then you have to deal with the ones that just enter fake addresses that will never get approved.

You have two different issues here. The mailer daemon messages can be disabled within your SES settings so you don't even generate them. That will remove you getting notices about bounces via email. Under your Notification settings, disable email notification. Now... regarding your reputation... this is indifferent. It's not going to help OR hurt you. Regarding improving your reputation, you need to figure out why emails are bounding. I personally used SESDashboard. https://sesdashboard.com/#features You can set SNS to deliver notifications of all successful and failed messages to the dashboard so you can see what is happening. I personally will go through and look at bounced messages to see if it's legit members who have an old email address, etc. If you're using SES with IPB, I assume you're using Make sure your bounce management is configured and working. I personally for hard bounces have users changed to the validating group so they're forced to update their email address. If it's a complaint, I set the account to "Temporarily Banned". (If they want to stay a member, they're forced to reach out to me and I can educate them about not reporting our mail as spam. Otherwise, they can stay banned.)

Setting them as Spam does not report them to IPS or do anything special. It is just a status for the ticket. It helps by not skewing reports on agent resolution, etc if you use the ticket reports. But you could also just delete the ticket. I personally just use CleanTalk. It's cut down on the contact us form spam by about 95%. For my site, I would average 1-2 spam messages PER DAY... now only about 1-2 a MONTH get through. I had a new spam ticket this morning, but it turns out it was not even from the contact us form... it came from them emailing the support queue directly since we allow tickets to be opened via email.

You can also just create a server rule to automatically delete those messages as well.

IPS does not support 3rd party plugins. If there is an issue installing, updating, or uninstalling a 3rd party resource... IPS is going to ask you to contact the resource author.