Interferon

I have been working with this and am about to put it into practice. The system itself is actually very simple. Your general users don't have any significant numbers of Facebook or Twitter followers, and they aren't going to share anything anyways. So don't think this is something you just announce and suddenly everyone uses it. You will need to seek out the people who will promote your site, and they have to be someone who already has a big audience. Plus, you don't want to have to deal with potential fraud or abuse that could occur if you have it open to everyone. Start with 1-3 partners that you think will bring a lot of traffic over time. Ideally this will be someone who creates their own content on a continual basis, like videos that are related to your product or service. Give your partners a generous commission. No one is going to do anything if you offer 5 or 10%. I am offering 30% and it's still hard to find someone who doesn't prefer cash up front. You could also use the referrals system as a method to track external advertising. Just set up a dummy account for each advertiser and use their affiliate link to track which ads are resulting in actual sales. I can think of an easy way to commit fraud with this system, so be careful who you allow to use it.

I can now confirm this works. I created an iframe in my website header that displays a special page in IPB Pages. The page just prints out the referral ID (passed in the URL) very faintly so it is barely visible, but I can still check and make sure it is working. I had someone who has never been to our site go to the main site with a referral link, then they registered an account (without using a referral link to our installation of IPB) and the referral signup worked.

So OpenID allows a reusable login system that can be reused across multiple sites? This would solve the problem of people having multiple accounts to keep track of?

We have a "contact" page on our site, and the email address is shown in an image that looks like text on the page. No problems for years.

It's a good idea to use images that are double the resolution you need at 100% DPI scaling, especially for logos.

I just did a check in the skin to see if a header image is provided, and I skip the "pattern" block if it is missing. It would be good to be able to require the user to upload a header image for each new blog entry. This would prevent blogs without header images, but it would also put pressure on users to be more selective about posting a blog article, and encourage fewer high-quality articles. A lot of times my users will create a blog entry just for a single video or image, along with a short explanation, and I feel bad removing it but I don't like this happening.

The gallery application has gotten very good. We had our user images running through another system for a while but it is all back and everything is happy (thanks in no small part to the bulk upload feature). :) It would be nice if the user profile had a tab for the user's gallery images and downloads / files.

We've been using VideoBox for a couple of weeks, along with the YouTube video importer, and engagement is very high. We're getting about 1000 views daily and the users love it. People are even uploading their videos on our site rather than YouTube because they get more views. Two suggestions: Add a single-column option so the video feed block looks like the IP.Gallery image feed block. Automatically generate a thumbnail for an uploaded video file. Great application!

Doing the support > something isn't working re-caching trick fixed this.

I am migrating my community to a new website with the following steps: Compressed the community folder on the server, downloaded the zip, uploaded it on the new server, and extracted it. Downloaded a backup of the database and then restored a database from the backup on the new server. Added a new database user with permissions. Adjusted values in the global_conf.php file on the new server, including database username, password, and community URL. Everything works perfectly on the new server, except that all the font-awesome icons are missing. What's going on?

Not most of it. Our users post YouTube video IDs of videos themselves using our products. We have a large collection of videos users have linked to in a database. I am not saying this is super urgent, and this is bigger than just IPS, but we should be talking about whether it is acceptable for Google to monopolize web video and keep changing their service to terms that are more and more negative.

Americans always think everything is a big joke and then when obvious consequences catch up to them they act offended when no one feels sorry for them.. Here is the current situation: YouTube has effectively monopolized all web video. Video-driven affiliate marketing is the primary mode through which real web commerce is being conducted today. This method allows value to be exchanged without Google getting any piece of it. Obviously they do not like this. Killing YouTube annotations was most likely an effort to hide away affiliate links and force usage of Google ads. How long do you think it will be until all affiliate links are removed in all video descriptions? It would be very easy, just strip off all the optional parameters. Make up a cover story about "making the web safer" and no one would do anything about it. If you understand that Google is not a search engine but a data aggregator, it is not hard to extrapolate things we can expect to happen next: Google AMP is stealing content from news sites and displaying it on Google's own domain. News organizations are forced to go along with this in order to have any ranking at all. This is happening right now. How long do you think it will be before Google forces all websites to rely on AMP, and starts serving up the entire web from a cache on their own domain? How long will it then be before Google introduces "Google CAMP"(Communities on AMP). "Build your own rich interactive web experiences with forums, blogs, galleries, and other great features! Best of all, it's running entirely on Google's servers! No more accounts to create! No software to buy and update! And it's free!" 70% of Invision's sales vaporize overnight. Webmasters who refuse to switch to "CAMP" get blacklisted from search results. The address bar gets hidden away in Chrome, the same way they hid away bookmarks to drive all traffic to the same 7 "top sites". The normal web effectively is transformed into another dark web. Google has total control over all Internet forums, accounts, commerce. The web is now 100% run off of Google.com and we're all forced to feed data into their proprietary system. There's no more world wide web or domain name system. There's just Chrome and Google. Is it really that hard to imagine something like that happening? I don't know what the answer is, but everyone in technology should be discussing this and finding ways to build around Google. Posting a funny picture and thinking everything is a big joke is not the appropriate response.

Very nice plugin, but if you click on the category from the product page it takes you back to the main store page, without the correct tab selected.

Well, they can go to hell. It's not their content.

I found a bug in paid videos. After purchasing, I am forwarded to this page: (CommunityURL)/index.php?app=videobox&module=videobox&controller=view&id=293 A "page not found" error is displayed. I have friendly URLs enabled on my community.

In business there is a concept called a whole product. You should study that. It is very frustrating to find a solution that is almost perfect and then be told "lol sorry you can't use it". BIM YouTube Importer does not currently support importing an RSS feed but I am talking to the author about it. I made the following fixes: In "interface/sliders/nivoslider.js" find the text that says "random" and change this to "fade" to get rid of the different transition changes in the Featured videos block. In "Application.php" change line 283 from this: return "<iframe width='560' height='315' src='{$embed}' allowfullscreen frameborder='0'></iframe>"; to this: return "<iframe width='560' height='315' src='{$embed}&rel=0&hd=1' allowfullscreen frameborder='0'></iframe>"; This will not prevent other videos from appearing after the video plays, but it will prevent videos from other channels from appearing. The "hd" tag will ensure the high-res video thumbnail is shown by default. In all your themes you have in use, go to videobox > front > embed > player and comment out this entire block of code if you don't want to show the weird "external URL" / "Part 1" buttons: <br> <div id='playerPanel'> {{$serverID = \IPS\Request::i()->serverID > 0 ? \IPS\Request::i()->serverID : $current['vbs_id'];}} {{foreach $video->videoOnline() as $name => $server}} {{if \count($server['online']) > 0 && ( $server['groups'] == 0 || \IPS\Member::loggedIn()->inGroup( explode( ",", $server['groups'] ) ) )}} <ul class='ipsButton_split ipsMargin_bottom'> {{ksort($server['online']);}} {{$cnt = 0;}} <li class='ipsButton ipsButton_verySmall ipsButton_primary vbServerName' style='width: 100px !important;'> {$name} </li> {{foreach $server['online'] as $videoID => $row}} {{$cnt++;}} <li> <a href="{$video->url()->setQueryString( array( 'area' => 'online', 'serverID' => $row['vbs_id'], 'vid' => $videoID ) )}" class="ipsButton ipsButton_verySmall {{if $serverID == $row['vbs_id'] && $videoID == $current['vbo_id']}}ipsButton_light{{else}}ipsButton_veryLight{{endif}}" {{if $server['upload'] == 0 && $video->canEdit()}}data-action='managePart' data-videoid="{$video->id}" data-partid="{$row['vbo_id']}"{{endif}}> {lang="videobox_videopart"} {$cnt}{{if mb_substr($row['vbo_url'], -4) == '|end'}} {lang="videobox_end"}{{endif}} </a> </li> {{endforeach}} {{if $server['vbs_upload'] == 0 && $video->canEdit()}} <li> <a href="{$video->url()->setQueryString( array( 'do' => 'addNewPart', 'server' => $row['vbs_id'] ) )}" class="ipsButton ipsButton_verySmall ipsButton_veryLight" title='{lang="vb_addNewPart"}' data-ipsDialog data-ipsDialog-title='{lang="vb_addNewPart"}' data-ipsDialog-forceReload='true'> {lang="vb_addNewPart_icon"} </a> </li> {{endif}} </ul> <br> {{endif}} {{endforeach}} </div>

Well maybe someday I will actually be able to use it then. Until then, I just wasted $60 on another half-baked add-on.

And we need a way to bulk import videos. I have thousands of videos I would like to add into the system but there's no way I can click each one.

This block should be hidden if the video only has one part. It looks really strange and confusing:

The featured videos carousel block looks very good, but why did you use randomly changing transition effects? A simple cross-fade would be nice and subtle. The random transition effects make it look like a CSS demo site. I know. The question is WHY are you adding a bunch of extra steps that is going to result in people not bothering to submit videos? You have to make things as easy as possible for users to engage.

Is there any way to make the submission of YouTube videos easier? There's no way my users are going to bother filling in the title and description for each video they post. It's easy to grab that information from the video URL, so why isn't it done automatically?

The videos per page setting is stuck at 25, and does not seem to obey either the category or global setting for this value. --Edit This was caused by another plugin.

I am seeing a number of bugs but the application is nice to have.

Okay, I got the RSS feed working like this: echo('<media:group><media:content url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v='); echo($vid); echo('" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="390"/>'); echo('<media:thumbnail url="https://i4.ytimg.com/vi/'.$vid.'/hqdefault.jpg" width="480" height="360"/>'); echo('</media:group>');

I notice that a notification is generated when a new user signs up with your referral link, but no notification is sent when the referred customer purchases an item. The commission is silently added to the referrer's account balance. The only way for them to know anything happened is to periodically navigate to the account balance page. It would be much better if there was an option to send a notification when the referrer earns a commission. Otherwise their account can accrue a balance without them knowing.