Joshua Hina

I’ve been using this software, and this company for many years and with recent changes to how support is offered it leaves something to be desired. There’s no means to directly reach IPS employees for technical matters; which there should be. Having to post in a community where potentially sensitive information can be gleaned out of a post. We are not supporting T-shirts or physical products. Here this is a piece of software that requires extensive knowledge and understanding to properly, maintain and run. It is the job of the software developer to provide at least a basic level of service with their software. Not rely upon their customers to do that for them. With add-ons this software can cost up to $300 a year and yet there’s no way to actually interface with a human employee for anything that involves the software being nonfunctional. Currently, Support is like and to that have an open source software product where you post on a message board, wait and hope that someone might eventually look at your post. That’s not acceptable for a paid product. In the past IPS had stated that the reasoning for their moving to community best support was that because so many issues were just very simple questions or extremely similar issues. There are people who only use support for actual systems level issues that require a technician with advanced knowledge of the software. These are not simple questions such as “how do I post a message” or “ what are the requirements of the software” these sorts of things are what a knowledge base is for. Issues with client specific set up, should not be a public matter, because that creates a major security vulnerability, especially if somebody provides access to their information or a link to their forum, which I have seen posted here many many many times. Even providing a link to an area where the server is miss configured, and the software is not functioning properly can cause nefarious people to be able to access a users sensitive information. The procedure needs to change, and there should be a means to reach a human should that be necessary… not post and hope an employee might see the request and look at it. Even massive corporations like a cPanel which get hundreds to thousands of service request a day provide a private means to reach a technical support representative in the event that a matter is not appropriate for support in there forum.

1 hour ago, Martin A. said:

Have you looked in your system log? There might be something there labelled as "template_error" that have information as to why it can't be saved.

Thanks. In the ACP System Logs when editing anything in a theme regardless of the theme INVALID_URL is thrown. I’ve even ran the revert and attempt to to make edits and the same thing still occurs. Never encountered this on my own equipment but the new host says everything is fine on their end. Not even sure what would be calling an invalid URL as when I’m editing stuff it’s not even related to the site; I’m adding links ect to the theme. Unless you have any more insight, it’s probably something that IPS is going to have to look at.

It's been almost a week and nothing from an IPS employee... C'mon guys... Even the host says this is something you guys would need to look into. A key function of the software (being able to edit even the default theme) is non-functional. that isn't a custom function or an add-on I created; it is literally a function of the software. Can I get something from IPS?

You would need to contact IPS Acccount Assistance; they can cancel for you.

19 hours ago, ThunderBlue said:

Not sure!!! It might be related to this problem

 

It is possible. I can edit the CSS files but not the templates. Even tried in the default theme. Hopefully someone from IPS can verify?

So it seems this is not a permissions issue; after confirming with my hosts support 

   - applications
    - datastore
    - plugins
    - uploads and all sub-directories of uploads 

Are all 777'ed and all other files have 755 as they should except the config which is 744. Any time I am trying to edit themes from within the ACP I am given "Theme file cannot be saved". 

Our site has been migrated to a new host and a new server. We had everything configured corrrectly on our original setup but now when attempting to edit theme files in the admincp we get "theme cannot be saved" error. I assume this is a file permissions issue. We have CHMOD 777'ed cache, applications, uploads, plugins and datastore but still encounter the error. Any folders we are missing? Any thoughts on what is causing this issue? The new server runs PHP 8 and is on shared hosting with DreamHost (we originally hosted it on our own equipment under a cPanel/WHM install.)

Our systems team reviewed the PHP configuration and extension list. They said that no major changes occurred in the configuration that would cause this level of behavior. The configurations between versions of PHP 8 are all nearly identical. We just had the system hang and crash again due to IPBoard. Why is it so much more resource intensive from 7.4 to 8.x… we never encountered this many issues with this software In php 7.x during any release.

Hi,

is there a native way to pass through notifications to mobile devices through the software? I know that there are third-party applications that do mobile but I’m hoping to just be able to use the software to accomplish this if possible.

5 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

segfault is an issue with writing of data on the server itself, and wouldnt generally be attributed to the software itself. Have you perhaps changed PHP version?

We upgraded to php 8 as advised by the software (as noted by the php version number in the path). That’s the only change since versions. We were previously running PHP 7.4 but with it reaching EOL soon and given IPS’s recommendation to move from it; we did so.

Hello,

 

our IT contractors have reported that IP.Core traffic is causing heavy load and high usage on our web server. This only started happening with the most recent upgrades to the software. Attached are serverside screenshots. Please advise on ways to optimize the software as this didn’t happen prior to recent upgrades.

E-Mails from IP.Board are not being sent as an error occurs. The error reads Network is unreachable 101. We have verified that our cPanel/WHM server can see the outside world, communicate over ports 25, 465 and 993 and ping smtp.gmail.com which is where the SMTP sever we are using is housed. The cPanel server is hosted on Azure and we have configured the NSP to properly allow through its firewall mail traffic.  Test mails from other accounts on the server arrive successfully and report proper SPF and DKIM signatures. Please advise on what with the software could be cuasing this issue. Attached are screenshots of debugging and errors for reference. Our domain is not redacted as that is public information and anyone can find it.

 

 

5 minutes ago, Dean_ said:

Yes. Go to ACP, then go to the user's profile. Click edit password, and then use 'force user to change password'.
That will send a link to their email address and ask them to change the password the next time they log in.

Thanks. I was not aware that that function sent out an email to the user as well. I created a ticket for her informing her that she should have a password reset email now. 

Hello,

My team has a user that has forgotten their password. They refuse to reset their password telling our support team they do not have an account. We have repeatedly told them they have an account and told them to use the forgot password feature to reset their password. We have forced them to reset their password in the member area but is their any way for us to force the system to send them a forgotten password email from within the ACP?

Josh

We are also still interested in this plug-in. Please let me know when there is further progress or if you need testers.

Good morning,

 

in spite of enabling SPAM prevention measures, adding a captcha and walling off our contact form to a specific page we continue to receive a large number of SPAM tickets in our IP.Commerce ticket system. To my knowledge we have everything configured correctly so I’m not sure how SPAM is getting through… especially to the volume of SPAM tickets we get per day. Does anyone have any thoughts on this or can a member of staff take a look and see if there is anything we haven’t done that would be effective in preventing this; there’s obviously never a way to completely eliminate SPAM but decreasing the amount that we receive would be ideal.

I just purchased this and cannot seem to get the dice to post in threads. is a new version coming out for support; do you have a working beta build? @Nathan Explosion

Lindy, what about something where the user can check off a list of things that match their problem..

Please choose from the list what best matches the issue you are having.

( ) Is your board offline, inaccessible or giving errors?

( ) Are you having a problem getting into the AdminCP?

( ) Has your board been hacked, attacked or in some other way compromised?

( ) etc

( ) None of the above.

Picking the wrong item from the list can cause delays in your ticket.  If you are unsure of what to pick, then pick none of the above.

A few like there where the person can choose what best matches their problem (similar to the list you have but could be after they have submitted the ticket the first time and before the final submit. "None of the above" could be pre-selected and would cover things like low priority items. Obviously it's hard to cover all high priority items, but if there are 3 for high priority that are generic enough to cover a wide range (but specific enough to eliminate false positives) then that could potentially help prioritize some of the tickets.

Obviously the ones marked "None" might benefit from a fast review by a staff member to see if it's a high priority so it can be bumped up in importance, while leaving the rest of the tickets alone, but no system is perfect.

Hope something in this post is of some use, be nice if it helped to improve the ticket times, even if only a little bit. I've generally never needed to submit a ticket for problems on my boards before, but I can imagine how the customer must feel when it is an important issue and every minute seems like forever.

Interesting idea. Though IPS ticket response times are decent; at times i would compare them to a web hosting company (2 - 4 hours during business hours depending on the issue, 6 hours at night again depending on the issue) On weekends it is only normal to have a lessened response time because of less staffing then again when it comes down to it no companies support services will ALWAYS be fast as Lindy stated above with a major release comes wait time; its just like if a data center got a large batch of servers and a massive influx of orders; that would increase ticket response times due to the fact that techs are working on getting those servers up as well as trying to deal with client support issues on top of their other tasks.