KT Walrus

16 hours ago, tforums said:

Yes, I said that. Which is why I am trying to see if IPB can cache HEAD requests instead of hitting the DB every time.

Sorry. I didn’t understand your issue. Maybe putting Cloudflare between the bot traffic and your server would help? That is, if you don’t mind blocking most bots from scrapping your site. 

Or maybe you could rate limit these bots with Cloudflare. 

Isn’t this the way the web works? 

HEAD requests are an optimization so no need to refetch the page/file if it hasn’t changed. 

You wouldn’t want Google or some other search engine re-downloading something that hasn’t changed. This would waste tremendous amounts of bandwidth. 

Perhaps reading this web.dev article will help you to understand manifest updates on various devices.

https://web.dev/learn/pwa/update

Not sure if article is updated to reflect latest OS/browser versions. 

I'm very curious about the UX improvements made to uploading/cropping profile photos especially when using mobile devices.

Perhaps you could do some blogs from the perspective of an iPhone/Android user in the future?

Any way to run a system task to download all the Giphy images referenced in existing posts, save those images to your site's storage, and to rebuild the posts with Giphy links to link to your site's storage?

Seems like something you would want to do before deactivating Giphy.

Maybe this should be built into Invision Community?

I hope you never do AI generated topic summaries. I’d rather use the ReaderView in Safari to read topics. If I want summaries of the topic, I’ll use one of the many AI tools available for MacOS to generate AI summaries of text in the browser. Browser makers are starting to build AI into their browsers to do these summaries. Check out Arc’s AI features. I’m pretty sure that Apple and Google will integrate more AI features in the coming year. As long as IC5 supports Reader View in Safari, I’m pretty sure that AI built into the OS will generate these summaries for the user. Use your developers time supporting ReaderView and properly printing Topics including all replies to a PDF for topic archiving on the user’s device. I bet next year’s MacOS release will build in AI features such as article summaries directly into Siri or ReaderView where they belong. 

This reminds me of websites that used to build in spell checking which never worked very well. What a waste of developer time. Some features really belong to the OS or browser so they are well implemented and generally available. 

Clicking on "Enable in this browser" does nothing using the new Safari PWA on my Mac.

Not sure if this issue is specific to me or is a general bug affecting other users.

Just started using the PWA for this site in Safari ("Add to Dock" in Share menu) on my Mac... The default theme for Invision Community still doesn't have buttons/links for Back/Forward/Refresh when using the PWA. Keyboard shortcuts are available and the Go menu does have Back and Forward actions, so not having UI elements is not a big deal on the Mac PWA. But the same issue affects the UX when using the IOS PWA so it is a problem for Apple device users.

Please fix the default theme for Invision Community to address this navigation issue in the PWA and make sure the new default theme in IC5 corrects this UX issue.

4 hours ago, Charles said:

For sure.

In v4?

Support for MySQL transactions in v5?

Database operations that insert/update rows in multiple tables should be grouped into a single transaction. This improves data replication and avoids data inconsistency from accumulating over time. This mainly affects content creation/modification.

Support for spatial data types and queries in v5?

I'd like to see full support for spatial indexes and queries on at least lat/long points.

Support for date and time types in v5?

I'd like to see full support for YEAR, DATE, TIME, DATETIME, and TIMESTAMP including fractional seconds for times stored in the database, e.g., TIMESTAMP(6) and TIME(6). 

Also support many of the remaining data types as you can including binary and json data types.

I feel like the database layer has been neglected over the years in favor of the UX and hope that v5 will address this side of the SDK.

I'd like to see PDF generation for content/invoices/etc in emails and for download. Users being able to archive content to PDFs stored locally on their devices is a big missing feature in 4.x. 

Don't know how difficult it is to generate PDF, but I don't think it is that much different than generating HTML using templates.

For my custom apps, integrating PDF generation as a core service would be very desirable.

Maybe verify what PHP settings you are really running with in the ACP?

You can run phpinfo from the Get Support page (under Tools & Diagnostics sidebar).

Scroll down to see what disable_functions is set to... Or, check out all the other settings in the phpinfo page...

My hope is that Invision adds support for B2 storage method. Also, I would like to see support for TUS uploading directly to S3 or B2 by incorporating a TUS/S3 uploader in Invision Community like Uppy.

I'm kind of hoping that version 5 replaces plupload with tus since tus protocol is more of a standard that many cloud services provide endpoints for uploading. I'd really like if my backend server didn't have to support any uploading/downloading of files, only HTML/CSS/JS over HTTPS. Leave all that to my cloud storage provider. Cuts my costs way down and allows me to support video attachments (not just YouTube embeds) on my site.

Note that for Uppy, you currently need to run their Companion on your backend to upload to S3, but many other cloud services (especially for video streaming) provide tus endpoints so no data transfer to an intermediate server is required.

Note: I have put in a request to Backblaze to add tus uploading to a B2 bucket. If this is implemented, Invision Community could directly upload all files directly from the user's device using tus or an uploader like Uppy. This would mean files wouldn't need to be sent to AWS at all so AWS wouldn't be able to charge for egress to the B2 bucket saving even more money.

These egress fees aren't a problem for me since I use OVH Cloud for my backend servers and bandwidth is included/unlimited for egress to B2 (or anywhere else). Also, I use Cloudflare Tunnel to protect my backend servers. No WAF needed for my backend servers since they reach out to establish the tunnel to the Cloudflare CDN.

@Randy Calvert, you misunderstand what I am saying.

I am not considering cloud storage/file serving to be part of your "enterprise level application". 

You simply store files in Backblaze B2 and serve those files with Bunny CDN. That's it. It's "plug and play".

Here is a blog on Backblaze about Bunny vs Cloudfront that is a quick read you might be interested in:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/aws-cloudfront-vs-bunny-net-how-do-the-cdns-compare/

Invision can continue to use Cloudfront for Invision Community since that would be cheaper for AWS servers. But attachment serving can easily be separated from AWS where AWS doesn't get a nickel for any files stored/served to end users.

Setting up both B2 and Bunny CDN is incredibly easy and, if that saves you thousands of dollars a year you were paying to AWS for attachment hosting/serving, then this is a no-brainer. All that cost savings can either be passed along to the clients paying for Invision Community in the Cloud or can go to the bottom line as additional profits for the company.

In my opinion, Invision would be more profitable if they could halve the current pricing of their cloud plans. But, that is just an opinion. But businesses being more efficient is never a bad idea, again IMO.

21 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

Not to mention now needing two separate WAFs. 

Why would you need to maintain a WAF between the user's browser/BunnyCDN/B2 bucket for serving files? Nothing is traveling to AWS and IPS's cloud infrastructure. BunnyCDN and Backblaze are very simple to use and set up.

Now, if the files need to somehow make there way through AWS, it can add a big cost. Amazon's goal is customer lock-in and they try to do everything to prevent customer's to easily use services that AWS also provides.

It really is the "devil's bargain". But, the web is evolving to easy multi-cloud integration and cloud storage is easily separated from AWS, if the customer wants to benefit from significant cost savings.

5 minutes ago, Hisashi said:

That was not my point. I'm talking about the fact that Amazon S3's service is probably perfect in their eyes, and they don't see the point in adding another one.

My point was that IPS could save quite a lot if they are currently paying a significant amount of S3 storage and delivery. The "hidden costs" with using AWS is bandwidth fees which can really add up. Many B2 customers have saved 5x on their cloud storage/bandwidth fees by migrating from AWS to B2. Backblaze will do the migration for free and you will have minimal downtime if you use their service.

So, whatever IPS currently pays to AWS for cloud storage and delivery (including the bandwidth fees) could be reduced by up to 80% allowing IPS to make more profit on their cloud service.

17 minutes ago, Hisashi said:

I use their video(Stream) service, their CDN is ridiculously good. With an excellent player and functionalities.

If you don't want streaming, but only MP4 delivery, BunnyCDN can be configured for cacheing large MP4 files in 5MB chunks from B2 to the CDN PoP. This allows significantly better performance for playing the MP4 in the user's browser.

22 minutes ago, Hisashi said:

 due to the fact that IPS uses the Amazon S3 service in the cloud plans..

It would be simple for IPS to use B2 in their cloud plans and they would reap the savings in storage and bandwidth costs. Note B2 use would necessitate using some third-party CDN, like Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, or others.

Note Backblaze is part of the Cloudflare's Bandwith Alliance:

BunnyCDN is also an excellent choice for delivering MP4 videos stored in B2 since their CDN is optimized for video/large file delivery and charges as low as $10/TB for bandwidth. Transfer from B2 to BunnyCDN is free, of course.

2 hours ago, Hisashi said:

I support, Backblaze B2 is an excellent choice and widely known in the storage market.

https://www.backblaze.com/

Yes they are. And in full disclosure, I have a large amount invested in this company as I see them eventually becoming very large and taking significant share of the cloud storage market away from Amazon S3. Backblaze B2 is significantly cheaper to use especially since AWS charges such high egress fees to deliver content to end users.

39 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

Im not aware of any intentions to at present. If you have any specific suggestions, of course bring them up

Please consider adding a separate Backblaze B2 storage method. The existing S3 method doesn’t completely work.

B2 is very cheap at $5/TB and when combined with free Cloudflare CDN, B2 has NO egress fees  So, all you pay is $0.005/GB stored  Using Cloudflare Workers, you can even make the whole bucket private.

Making a separate storage method for B2 will allow you to fix the small issues with using Amazon S3 method so B2 works completely.

Found this thread on the topic. One developer posted a work-around by using event.notification.tag in the notification click handler. 

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/726793

4 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

No.  This is not an IPB limitation, but one from the mobile device itself.

Per https://web.dev/learn/pwa/progressive-web-apps/:

On iOS and iPadOS, PWAs are only installable if the user is using Safari. That means that users won't install PWAs if they use different browser apps, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge. On both Android and iOS, users can't install PWAs from many in-app browsers, such as Facebook Mobile Browser, Instagram, Google Search App, or Gmail.

Wait a few weeks and all browsers on iOS will have “Add to Home Screen” in their Share menus. 
 

Edge already supports installing PWAs. 
 

Apple added an API for this with the latest iOS update. 

Maybe you have a bad "Friendly URL" installed (in a third-party add-on?) that tries to match all query strings?

This would cause an infinite redirect as the FURL would keep redirecting to itself.

If you don't have any third-party add-ons, nevermind... 

Anyway, just a thought.

Is it possible that this is a bug in the Service Worker in the app and not a bug in iOS?

I don’t understand why it sometimes works and most times it doesn’t work. 

I’ve been using the PWA full time on my iPhone since updating to iOS 16.4. 

Seems to me it would be much better UX to have a fixed bottom menu bar like most apps on mobile have. 

My suggestion is to have these icons in a bottom bar:

Forums/Notifications/PMs/Search/Account

Maybe Unread also  

Could change Forums to Home but I don’t like that Home on this website doesn’t go to Forums. 
 

Could allow customization of the bottom menu bar in Account Settings.