Washerhelp

Also, the next renewal date is almost 3 months away (22 November 2022), so something must be wrong for me to be virtually spammed with the emails?

Hi. I've received 9 "Your Invision Community license expires!" emails in last 2 days. 5 of them within a 2-hour period. Surely that's not intentional?

Thank you for your help, apologies but I forgot to ask one final question on this topic. Once you have permanently banned a member, but then you delete their profile and account, does their name, address and IP address remain in the database to prevent them reregistering in future?

Many thanks Marc, there's no spam posted as every single post has to be moderated by me, which is easy because I only get a dozen or so a week. All their spam was in their "About me?" section.

Hello there. I've been extremely lax regarding my forum members. For years, I didn't pay any attention to new members. But recently I have started paying more attention, and realised I have hundreds of spam profiles, 99% of them from India. I'd been puzzled for ages about why so many people from India signed up but never posted anything. But because anything they posted would have to be moderated by me, I wasn't concerned. Foolishly I'd never noticed all these accounts had blatant spam links and adverts for all sorts of rubbish including massage parlours in Vietnam in the About Me section. So now I'm manually going through each of my 6,500 members and flagging them all as spam. I have a few questions, please, that I would appreciate an answer to - 1: Could there be any issue with me flagging so many users as spammers in such rapid succession? I must have flagged 50 yesterday in 4 hours, with some of the accounts having been created 2 to 3 years ago. This is just a slight concern, I'm just wondering if ironically Invisions' antispam system could think I am spamming them 🙂 2: Am I correct in thinking that these accounts should definitely be disabled and deleted in the sense that they are potentially doing my forum some SEO harm? I presume at least that thinning out hundreds of spam profiles would relieve some resources or database space? 3: Is there a more efficient method of routing out all of these profiles other than literally going through every single one of them? I spent about 4 hours doing it yesterday, and expect to be doing it all day today, and possibly tomorrow as well. Is there a way for example to pull out only profiles that have filled in their about me section, or all members that have never posted anything? And finally, once I have flagged them all as spam, and their accounts have been locked, am I correct in thinking that the best thing is to completely delete all of the accounts to alleviate any space they are taking up in the database, and if so, I can only see how I can delete them all one at a time, which unless there is a better way is another laborious task. Many thanks, and I apologise for asking multiple questions Andy

Nice one Nathan. Thanks very much for that, deleted and fixed instantly. I also took the opportunity to delete all the website URL and messenger details that I didn't know I could remove. So is it part of Invision, or did that feel somehow get imported from the old original forum format?

Hi and thanks for replies. It appears on everyone's profile, see attached. jesuralem, that's an interesting thought, I do use Invision's question and answer section, and my questions must be answered to register. But this bizarre, "enter numbers 1 - 9" can't be used during registration because no one fill it in. In fact my own profile is the only one where it shows 123456789 next to that section – as I clearly filled it in. If I remember right, I was originally on something like phpBB forums, but I've been using Invision for well over 10 years. I originally used Invision's import facility to convert over. It would be nice to get rid of it somehow..

Hello there. This has puzzled me for quite some time. One of the fields on my forums is - Enter numbers 1-9 Please enter 123456789 in the field below Apart from the fact that the field to enter numbers in is actually above 🙂 I can't think why it is there, especially as none of my members have filled it in. I can't even see any reference to it in a search on these forums.

I'd just like to report back, for the benefit of anyone else with this issue, that I managed to convert all my databases to InnoDB without difficulty. I'm pretty sure I did it the hard way – I'd be surprised if there wasn't an easier way, but here's what I did - I went to PhpMyAdmin, clicked on the database Clicked SQL tab and pasted in the following - ALTER TABLE my_table ENGINE = InnoDB; Then clicked the structure tab next to it, and copied the name of the first database (eg. ibf_ccs_folders ) Clicked SQL tab and replaced the "my_table" bit with the database name, ending up with ALTER TABLE ibf_ccs_folders ENGINE = InnoDB; I then clicked the Go button, bottom right. Then I copied the name of the second database. On returning to SQL I got a notice that it had saved my last query, so I let it paste it in, and then just replaced the first database name with the second database name and clicked GO. I repeated this manually for all databases (there's a lot). I kept thinking there must be a faster way, but I was so glad to have found a straight forward way to convert the databases I was happy to spend the time, which was quite satisfying.

Aye I'm not remotely interested in earning anything, nor did I have the faintest idea you could. Just confused because all I am interested in is using the spam protection but the dashboard is talking about earnings so far etc and threw me a curveball.

I signed up and logged into dashboard and there are 3 menus - Earnings - Analytics - Referrals, plus there's this in the FAQs - How much should I expect to earn from hCaptcha?# Site earnings vary based on three key factors: the number of answers users supply, the correctness of those answers, and real-time demand for the work. It is difficult to predict exactly what your earnings will be, as prices for a given job type vary based on the demand in the system as represented by bid prices.

Thanks Marc, I've just signed up to hcaptcha, but I'm really confused about all the talk of "earnings"?

Which one is that Marc? I use reCAPTCHA V2 at the moment. I've sort of assumed they are manual registrations as it's about 1 or 2 each day but presumably could be bots?

ha ha it's less hassle to just ban them when they come

Hi Marc, I mean being able to go to part of the dashboard, and select a country, and it's just done. As opposed to having to research the internet to try and find the ip ranges, and worry if they are accurate or not - and if the ranges might change sometime. I can see how to ban an ip address in "ban settings" but I just found a site that generates a list of India IP addresses but don't know how accurate it is, or how to put them into Invision. The list is 8,973 lines long!

Many thanks Marc, it would be highly useful if Invision could facilitate country blocking as an option. I don't know if there are any reasons I'm unaware of that mean you can't - or shouldn't. I appreciate a lot of communities would not want to block entire countries as they are for "all" but so many communities are aimed predominantly at specific countries and do not need members from all over the world. Mine for example is aimed only at UK.

Thanks Marc, would you need a range of IPs and are they available for specific countries? Adding one at a time would be little different from just flagging as spammers?

I too am fed up with Spammers from India. I get 2 or 3 signing up virtually every single day, relentlessly. Many post spam and are instantly banned, but many do nothing, which is puzzling. Is there no way to ban registrations by country in Invision? Just a note, I discovered that if you run Google Ads, your account can be closed for banning specific countries from accessing your site via a firewall or CDN as Google doesn't allow it, so that's not an option for me. Whereas banning from registering should be OK.

I've found out it was because I had what they called Ultrafast PHP enabled - "Standard PHP vs Ultrafast PHP Ultrafast PHP is up to 30% faster than the Standard PHP and while on it, all subdomains are inheriting the PHP settings of the main site. Standard PHP is slightly slower but allows for per instance PHP management." Thanks for your help.

Many thanks. I will quiz them about it.

Wow, I suppose some might, but I'm pretty sure mine allows everything as it provides full php version control, and php.ini editors in the dashboard.

Thanks Marc, I thought all this stuff worked according to specific unchangeable rules? .htaccess files, PHP.ini files, HTML, CSS etc. I didn't realise that different hosting companies can change the rules. Or that they would possibly want to stop PHP.ini files being used by software running inside a folder?

Many thanks for your reply Randy. I shall definitely bring that up with my hosting company, especially as it is actually their own cache plug-in that is the culprit. Are you confirming that any PHP.ini file in a root folder will override any PHP.ini file inside of a subfolder? I'm not sure how this all works, but are you saying that my hosting company has deliberately set it all up so that software running on it ignores PHP.INI files inside folders? I'm wondering what would happen if I removed the PHP.ini file in the root folder, and had separate ones inside the WordPress, and Invision forums folder?

My website runs both WordPress, and Invision forums. Both in their own folders. Some time ago, I received the "Dangerous PHP Functions Enabled" warning from my dashboard. So I added the following PHP.ini file in my root folder - disable_functions = "exec, system, pcntl_exec, popen, proc_open, shell_exec, passthru" This solved the issue. However, whilst troubleshooting a WordPress issue yesterday, I was told by my hosting tech support that some WordPress plug-ins need the exec function, and indeed this particular issue was fixed by removing the "exec" section. But the warning has now returned in my Invision forums dashboard. The warning states that, "we recommend disabling them on your server, at least within the directory that your community is installed in". So I went over to the forums directory only to discover that I already have a PHP.ini file there, and it is already saying the following - display_errors = Off disable_functions = "exec, system, pcntl_exec, popen, proc_open, shell_exec, passthru" auto_prepend_file = none So for some reason, Invision is not using the PHP.ini file it's "forums" folder. I can't help thinking that for some reason the PHP.ini file in the root is the only one being read and used. But if that is the case, what is the point in having a PHP.ini file inside a folder?

Many thanks for your reply. The overwhelming majority of titles created by forum users are very long indeed. Obviously there's no way to control what users decide to title their topics. It just seems unnecessary to lengthen the title considerably by automatically adding the name of the forum and the name of the sub- forum. I would have hoped that this would be an option you could turn off. Having said that, I presume it's only viewed as a technical error? And not one that affects results? It's just extremely annoying when all these places are constantly telling me there are errors on my site because I'm the type of person that is arguably a perfectionist and strives for things with no errors at all. It's very difficult to work out which errors are just technical errors, and which ones are the ones that you should fix. Am I right in concluding that having meta titles and descriptions that are too long brings only the concern that they may be truncated in search results, and not remotely an "error" that can cause ranking problems or any other problems?