Fast Lane!

I think ALL periods are ignored in emails. Right?  If so then IPB should strio them first then compare. Not just a straight up select mysql search on the email field. 

On 10/19/2020 at 1:45 AM, Dll said:

To be fair, you've had a long time to test - the beta process went on for months, and the full release has been available for over a month now too. So, if you've not got round to it yet then that's still the issue, rather than an admin banner being visible.

Why would folks test a beta version that isn't final.  Why would anyone test the first several .x.y versions either. Much smarter to let it stabilize and then test.  This is how most large business do things to prevent disruptions. 

desktop: above fold (by topic title), under 1st post, under 8th post, after last post but before response box, to the right of topics.  Sizes are 728x90 centered and 160x600 for skyscraper.

mobile: same, but no skyscraper to the right.  320x100 for leaderboard, 300x250 for all the others.  Use ad manager to force sizes or customer css to drive it with adsense.  You can google to see instructions.  You will need to add manually to the skins.  

3 hours ago, Rhett said:

This notice is there for a reason, it's simple to remove and all automated, just upgrade!

If you can't upgrade for some reason, we would recommend you find the cause of that and resolve it so you can.

We do not allow code or plugins to remove this item though.

It's in your best interest to be on the latest version for your security, peace of mind, and to ensure upgrades go smoothly.  Skipping many versions can often cause unneeded issues when you do upgrade.

 

 

 

 

I think many of us are sitting back while the kinks get worked out of the new version. No major reasons to rush. 

41 minutes ago, AlexWebsites said:

Does anyone know how to shut off the upgrade notice on the site to admins? I can deal with the ACP notices, but not the live site every time I login. 

I close it but it comes back on my next visit....lol. I'm not ready to move to 4.5 yet.

Yeah kinda annoying. Not planning to upgrade for at least 6 months. 

How about fix the caching issue with topic views as well if that's a complaint?  Google analytics tracks fine even if the page is cached.  Just a small async js file.

4 hours ago, Matt said:

One thing to keep in mind with topic views is that with guest page caching, most guest views will not be counted. In addition to that, if you have a CDN in front of your web servers (as you would want to do, and we do with our cloud plans), then it's even less frequently that guest counts are recorded.

So while we can add the topic view count in there, it's not really reflective of the actual traffic that one topic gets.

Google Analytics is much better for getting statistical data on this level as it records every hit via a JS API.

I'm not against adding topic views in that block if it's clear what the number represents. 

It's still a relative metric, maybe just not absolute.  People's eyes are drawn towards posts with higher views then ones without. It drives organic traffic towards interesting items versus people having to read every topic. 

# of views is critical for readers to know what's more popular in a relative sense when your forum has hundreds to thousands of posts a day. In fact hot topics can be deduced by considering post post count and views within a certain time. 

Make sure to tell your members too!

I would think it's far easier.  In quotes simply have the editor insert a tag for the member ID that's replaced when viewed. Something like ##MID-2245##.

Since it's tied to the MID which never changes, a quick strrplace would just insert the currently associated member name upon displaying a post (or if none found then just list "Guest").

9 hours ago, christopher-w said:

Come on guys, Invision is never going to please us all. And even if they adopted granular ACP theme adjustment tools same as Xenforo has, we'd still need to sit back and adjust dozens and dozens of margin, padding, line height and similar parameters to suit all of our individual tastes. And then you have the menu, which in my view should be docked in an object that can be bound to the DOM either on the server or in a CSOM. But, even if Invision did that, we'd still need to position it ourselves, and move it around depending on the app currently in use. So I say, be careful what you wish for as even though I'd like to see pages that are rendered a little more tightly and menus that break from the current paradigm, you can bet if Invision did that, we'd still be back with another set of demands next month.

So how about we get together, put our hands in our pockets and see if we can find a designer come dev to create a configurable theme for us - and I mean a theme, not a (wanit in green, blue, red?) skinning exercise. It could include all sorts of presets including spacing, fonts, menu positions and so on, including specifics for desktop and mobile. Won't be cheap, but at least at the end of it we will have something we can use to give us what we want, rather than assuming Invision can pull a theme styling rabbit out of the hat which is going to miraculously please us all. I just don't see it.

Of course, Invision are more than capable of doing this themselves. But a bit a string only goes so far, and if they do this, then all the other stuff we need like video transcoding (ok I need that 🙂 ) will get pushed to the back of the queue.

So how how about it? Put our energies into something creative?

I think dialogue is good.  And do nothing is an "Apple" approach ("it's a feature").  There are many well thought out replies on this thread where people took the time to suggest css and layout changes that would help improve things. Many are excellent suggestions. I'm hopeful many get included -- but understand if not all.

Fwiw this is why I typically wait 6-12 months to upgrade my website to the latest .X version.  Rev .x.0-5 are typically loaded with minor issues that iron themselves out over time. The traffic impact (what we should all care about more than a new version of IPB) is the ultimate measure and waiting longer rarely does anything but help. 

17 hours ago, Matt said:

I appreciate the feedback here. We're listening as always.

My only request is that we keep it polite. We don't need to scream in each other's faces to be heard. If we don't reply or action the feedback immediately, it isn't because we disagree, or are ignoring what you're saying; it's more likely that we need to consider every change as a team and this takes time.

Thanks Matt.  Fair point and the same way many of us run our sites.

I'm personally hoping we can tighten up the layout a bit. I insert ads manually in the layout / skins and want to minimize extra white space (and any custom edits needed to get it back).

Had a member tell me they could not get the sign up page to work but their friend could from outside of China.  A bit of digging shows that ReCaptcha (google based) may be blocked preventing anyone in China from getting past the sign-up page if it is used (including the invisible flavor which we use).  Thoughts?  @bfarber curious your thought on a fix in the core suite.

Discussions on this topic:

https://www.quora.com/Since-Google-reCAPTCHA-does-not-work-in-China-how-do-Chinese-websites-prevent-bots-and-denial-of-service-attacks

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/recaptcha-google-in-china/

Thanks!

Also I would suggest that a "schedule to be sent later" feature be added to mass mail. That way we can schedule an email to go out at peak hours on certain days of the week.  Email marketing is a key traffic driver.

@bfarber thoughts?

7 minutes ago, Fast Lane! said:

Hi @Lindy, just trying to dissect your reply. Are you saying you have no plans to drop the ability to self host but may just have new feature mapping (some saas only) and potentially different cost structures for self hosted support. This is a super soft spot that could undermine my business if self hosting were to go away. 

Lindy I just tried to message you privately. Doesn't seem to be possible. I'll post my PM here with my site redacted (I'd love to send it to you though so you can see why I am talking about):

"Hi Lindy. I replied on the forums but self hosting is pretty critical to my business. Both because I can control upgrades/changes and because we make the forums an integral part of a larger website (and try to make it seemless).  We have tons of custom parts of our site that work with the forums but are not IPB based.  If it's just a cost structure change for self hosting I'd be cool with that, but losing the ability to self host would be earth shattering.

Here is my business, so you can see what I mean: www.****.com. We are a sizable site/business with around 50k users a day.

3 minutes ago, Lindy said:

Hi there - it's been a while! That's exactly what I'm saying. I can't say never (because that always comes back to haunt us on the Internet) of course, but we have no plans to drop self-hosting at this time.

We cross posted. Thanks for the quick reply. I'll sleep better :-).

15 minutes ago, Lindy said:

I always try to be honest and transparent, as you know - that doesn't mean what I say today will ring true forever and ever, however. There will most definitely be certain future services/features (those that depend on our infrastructure) that will be cloud / SaaS only and there may be changes to how we provide support in a self-hosted environment, but the on-premise segment of Invision is currently very healthy and viable - it would be silly to mess with that. 🙂

Hi @Lindy, just trying to dissect your reply. Are you saying you have no plans to drop the ability to self host but may just have new feature mapping (some saas only) and potentially different cost structures for self hosted support. This is a super soft spot that could undermine my business if self hosting were to go away. 

On 9/17/2020 at 10:07 AM, Paul E. said:

That would be the day we'd immediately begin transitioning to another platform.

We have to many custom mods and site integrations.  If IPB dropped self hosting I would have to change to another platform.  I love IPB and have been using them since they were free!  That long. But serious, we have a huge site and I expect most large sites do want/need the flexibility of self hosted if they are anything but a pure forum. 

16 hours ago, jackflash said:

I think it's possible to do that now, no?

 

Not in 4.4.x at least. 

Title says it all.  It would be great to allow segmentation of emails by customer profile fields.  This would add a powerful tool for audience targeting based on interest or any other profile value.

9 hours ago, xtech said:

I see too much criticism here for the theme and the white space. UX is always a matter of discussion, and everyone has its personal tastes. Now try to put personal tastes aside, because everyone has his own ones.

Do you have any UX test metrics other than "i don't like it" to present to support your views?

My opinion is, this new theme is  great improvement over the previous one. Is it perfect? No, specially mobile-wise topic page navigation (you have to completely scroll down or up to move to next page, which is not user friendly, for example - surely this can be measured) but regarding the white space, i like it. It helps the text to "breath", and allow better reading. It doesn't bother me at all. My personal taste here, as valuable as anyone's.

This is not a challenge of "how much content can be put in the screen". Simplicity is beautiful. Crowded interfaces confuse users.

Thumbs up for the overall improvements that the IPS has put in the 4.5 theme. I could not use the 4.x theme directly without customizations, but 4.5 theme is good enough for it.

Except Google frowns on content being pushed so far dow below the fold.  Bad SEO.

1 hour ago, ahc said:

This can be deleted.  We can't wait around for white label service on an app that doesn't even work for a website that doesn't focus on forums, so we've gone ahead and commissioned someone to create us a custom mobile app.

Yeah.  Feels like the app wants to make our forums "facebook groups" in an IPB social platform. I run a business so I agree with the OP that we need Advertising and an ability to show more than just the default IPB if this is going to work and not break our entire site (business) experience to our users. 

What's the SES cost delta versus sendgrid?

Does IPB get a $$ cut for sendgrid?  Maybe that's why there isn't a native mode for SES. 

I worry this will cause the IPB staff to have to maintain 2 code sets (strike that, 3... for iOS, Android and web).  Assuming no additional revenue, then will this slow the development of future releases?  Keeping 3 code bases in sync is far harder than 1. 

12 hours ago, breatheheavy said:

Nailed it! It's got to have some starting point. 

I think the notion that if it doesn't work for everyone right off the bat, it's not worth developing. Couldn't disagree more 🙏 

Do you have anything thoughts on the concerns several of us have raised? 

• Fracturing sites that contain content not "IPB" based
• Adding custom features and skins that sites have (but the app cant)
• Additional costs to maintain a custom app (versus responsive web skin)
• Decreased Monetization (especially advanced schemes like header bidding)
• SEO when web traffic drops due to app usage versus web