Randy Calvert

There are various third party resource providers who can assist with troubleshooting custom themes. Take a look at: https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers-directory/

Does this happen on a default/unmodified theme? This looks to be an issue with your specific theme and would be something you would need to work with the author regarding if it does not happen on a default theme.

Those are server configurations and not software settings. You would need to talk to your hosting provider about that.

You can add a link to it in your menu manager if you like. 🙂

domain.com/guidelines

If it’s in the sitemap and it’s not disallowed in your robots.txt… that would be a question to pose to Google. IPB can’t force Google to do anything. They can only list it, which they’re doing if it’s in the sitemap.

Turning off the site to guests does not stop an attack. It still takes resources to generate that site offline message etc. You don’t mitigate TRUE DDoS attacks on the server itself. It’s mitigated higher up in the stack such as at a firewall or with something that has capacity to handle them. If you try to mitigate a DDoS in software, I promise you will lose if it’s any sort of real attack. Even things like mod_dosevasive don’t really mitigate any recent modern attack. Ideally you want to fight the attack as far away from your site/server as possible. This reduces the chance of potential collateral damage.

There is nothing simple or straight forward with SES. It’s a great platform but those two words don’t come close to describing it. The plugin allows you to send email via API commands to AWS SES/SNS to handle. It allows you to also process bounces that AWS receives to automatically have IPB handle it (disable mail for the user, block user, etc). The plugin does not do all of the AWS setup (either SES or SNS). It does not get AWS to approve you exiting the sandbox. It’s a fantastic tool and the author has great support. Just realize SES itself is not for the faint of heart.

“Modern”? Uhhhh…. Not quite sure you’re going to find that elsewhere. But you’re better off not asking that here. Most folks (including me) will as you might imagine be a bit shall we say biased? Either way good luck with your search and I hope you find the right tool for you.

So it sounds like it was indeed a Twitter issue. I suppose that’s what happens when you lose like 90% of the staff. 😞

If you know the license is valid, what happens if you click “check again”. If it does not update, it’s possible your server is not able to reach IPS’ license server. You would want to have your host check your server is able to make outbound connections to remoteservices.invisionpower.com. You would also want to make sure your host makes outbound requests over TLS1.2 or higher. (If it is trying over TLS1.1 it will fail.) In all of the cases I’ve seen, if you can’t update the license… it’s because something is blocking your server from reaching IPS. (There are a few situations where it was an IPS license problem but if that was the case multiple people would be reporting it.)

They have said they hope to have a sneak peak by end of the year so they still have a month. You might need to wait a little longer.🙂

FYI... the recommended way to integrate Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel tracking is not to modify your theme. That makes things harder to manage across upgrades and means you have to do it in EVERY theme you have. Instead you should be doing it in: ACP > System > Site Features > Integrations This allows it to be applied site wide regardless of your theme.

A simple way to tell if this is a theme issue or not... Login to ACP Goto Customization > Appearance > Themes Click on Create New and choose Easy Mode. Give it a name like "Test" or whatever you want. Make the theme available only to your member group (like Admin) Go to your main website and switch to using that theme. When you have a theme that is 2 years old or older, it's going to be super difficult if not impossible for it to be automatically updated. There will be things that cannot be merged or not touched because they were previously modified. Using the method above, you will have something that is untouched in any way. Look around and see if the problem exists there. If it does not, it's a theme problem and you need to either fix your own theme, or you need to simply apply whatever customizations you previously made to the new theme. (Once ready simply make it the default for everyone else.) Also if you are only going to upgrade every two years, I would personally expect to be starting over with your theme when you finally get around to upgrading. You're talking about being over 20 releases behind in which there are typically MANY major changes during that time. Many sections of code across the site end up changed and if those templates are ever touched, the upgrader will ignore them so they don't overwrite anything you've done previously.

It looks like you're in WHM (the "root" or server level). It's not done there. It's done in the user level cPanel. Inside of the cPanel account for that user should be a section for cron jobs. You would find the existing one and change it o reflect the correct path. In your screenshot for example, you'll notice it includes the "ea-php80". That's what will tell cron to use PHP8 instead of what is most likely something like "ea-php70" or "ea-php74".

CRON uses a different version of PHP rather than what your Apache uses. In the ACP settings when you choose task method, you picked CRON. The path at some point changed. Copy the path it tells you and update your CRON settings. You're not changing your PHP version for your WEBSITE. You're changing the CRON to use the PHP8 instead of PHP7.

Issue 1… your cron is calling the old v7 of PHP. Edit your cron to reflect the path noted in ACP’s task section. Issue 2/3 look like theme issues. You need to update/fix your third party theme. Try switching to a new/default theme to confirm. Otherwise it’s possible a 3rd party resource is interfering. Issue 4… if you don’t know why those URLs are customized and did not do them yourself, revert them. Issue 5… don’t see anything posted so don’t know what you’re meaning. 🙂

Well more than a year ago, the support model was changed to be forum first. Self hosted users need to post on the forums here which are monitored by staff. If it requires deeper analysis or is something confidential in nature, they can open a ticket on your behalf which would be communicated via email. If you are hosted by IPS, you can open a ticket via the client area. What problem are you having? One of the values of being forum first is you get the experience and scale of other customers as well.

Remember… even though YOU did not change anything on your site does not mean there are not other things going on. For example if the server has more traffic (say an increase in bots or more traffic from Goggle crawling you) or another service such as mail processing bounces, etc… any of those things could end up in a situation where you don’t have sufficient resources. Think of a bunch of people checking out in a grocery store…. Even though normally 2 checkout staff is enough, if more shoppers come in than normal it might get slow. Or if one of those checkout staff is new (unoptimized) they may not be able to handle as many people in the same time. There are LOTS of components… and any one of them could become a bottleneck. For example how PHP is compiled can have a big effect on memory usage and could slow down once certain traffic volumes are reached.

Also if you are moving to a new VPS or dedicated server, it’s very possible you are using stock/vanilla setups that are not optimized like MySQL’s configuration, or Apache connections etc.

Also most servers /tmp is much smaller by default. Maybe also work with host to up the size of tmp. It won’t fix the underlying issue but could reduce impact. Or write a script to clean tmp occasionally.

Yes, you want to have IPB manage making links https instead of using htaccess or something similar to redirect. Chrome does not see the redirect until the response and as a result, it can complain when the button or link is clicked initially. Basically make sure SSL is installed/configured for the domain on the server and then modify the conf_global.php and everything should be good! Clearing the system cache just makes sure any system links get updated quickly so those http links get fixed sooner. 🙂

Also fyi… this makes the assumption your hosting provider supports https for your site. IPB can’t install/configure SSL on your server. It only can change the links that the software generates from http to https. Once you change this value, you may need to clear your site cache from the ACP in the support section.

IPS itself does not recommend SMTP providers. However based on personal experience, AWS SES was very reliable and reasonably priced for me. You do have to deal with their process for getting out of sandbox mode which can be a bit complex sometimes but once that is done… it works very well and is reliable. I never had deliverability issues.

Your host would be able to tell you what security controls that they use on your site. If your site supports HTTPS (again your host can confirm if it does) simply modify your conf_global.php file to change the URL in it to be https instead of http. Then go to the support section of your ACP to rebuild your system cache.