Ryan Ashbrook

Spam has always been an ongoing battle for community owners as spammers find new ways to circumvent existing anti-spam practices.
We have seen an uptick in new ways spammers are breaking through existing defense.
As such, we here at Invision Community continue to look at new ways for community managers to combat against spam. For our September release, we have added several new tools that can prevent spammers from registering in the first place and help combat them even if they register successfully.
Let's take a look at these new tools and settings.
Geolocation based registration filtering
Oftentimes, spam attacks can originate using bots and servers from specific regions. Using our existing Geolocation service, we have now added filters that will allow administrators to hold registrations from specific regions for administrator review, or deny the registration entirely.

Using this, administrators whose communities are under a spam attack from a specific region, can temporarily filter registrations from that region. Multiple regions can be defined at once, and each individual region can either be held for administrator review, or denied completely.
Disposable Email Filtering
We have added an extra option to our spam defense system to filter users registering with throwaway disposable emails, which are often used by spammers to bypass email validation.

During Spam Defense checking, we now also check the domain in use for the registration against a frequently maintained list. If the user passes through the normal spam defense checking, but is found to have a disposable email address, then the administrator can define one of the following actions to be taken.
Allow the registration to proceed Allow the registration, but moderate all posts (which an option to remove moderation after a certain amount) Flag the account for administrator review Register the account but immediately ban it Completely deny the registration For both Geolocation and disposable email filtering, the existing Spam Defense Whitelist is always honored ahead of these filters.
Contact Us Email Verification
A common pain point has been the Contact Us page. While the spam does not go to a user facing location, it does still land in the administrators inbox, or other area defined by the sites Contact Us settings.
To help with this, if a visitor who is not logged in attempts to use the Contact Us page, then in addition to the existing CAPTCHA, the administrator can optionally require the person to verify their email address before the message is ever sent. This applies to all Contact Us behaviors, including any added by third party applications.
Cloud Content Analysis
For our Invision Community Cloud customers, we have also added an additional layer of spam prevention after registration.

After a user registers, or if the account has been dormant, then the first few content submissions will be analyzed using a custom developed algorithm within our platform.
The algorithm takes into factor many different elements of the content, and will rank the post between 1 (not spam) and 5 (definitely spam).
The algorithm can be constantly adjusted and improved based on trends without any intervention from the administrator, and without the need to update to new releases of Invision Community.
The administrator can then decide one of the following actions to take based on the score that was received.
Allow the submission Hold the submission for moderator review Deny the submission completely Of course, specific groups can be made exempt from this and not have their content checked at all, which is useful for sites with subscription based registrations which may not want to have this applied to new subscribers, but do want to have new non-subscribers checked.
Spam can quickly become a headache for most community managers, and these new tools will help further combat it at the source. For our enterprise and Invision Community Cloud customers, being able to check for spam when posting is a new tool which will further filter out more of those annoying topics and posts.
We hope these new features give you additional tools in the fight against spam.
The features and changes presented here are available in the following packages:
Geolocation based registration filtering, Disposable Email Filtering, Contact Us Email Verification: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise, Invision Community Classic (Self Hosted).
Content Analysis: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise.

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This has been said already and answer will be still the same, if IPS decides to provide even a downloads with links forwarding to authors website, they put themselves in place where they still have to be some sort of middle man and people will hold them accountable if something goes wrong, or demanding removal of such file from downloads.
It's simply not worth it for them as a business and I fully understand that you should too.

So it turns out this was down to a plugin I downloaded from the Marketplace... I deactivated it and the issue no longer occurs.
This plugin was created to actually REMOVE empty paragraphs from posts and content... so I'm a little bit shocked at the sheer irony of that!! Still can't believe it.
Thanks for listening to another one of my feedback topics anyway - but this is a non-issue now!

This should be fixed completely now.

It depends on your server. As long as those directories are writable by the software, then you will be fine regardless of what the actual permissions are.

Can you try now?

Yes, the file will be compressed. If you need less compression to happen, you can change this in your Admin CP > Files > Image Settings > JPG and WebP Quality.
Setting that to 100 will provide the least amount of compression, however the image library (which is necessary for things like cropping, orientation, resizing, and so forth) may still alter the image slightly. You may also get better results by using ImageMagick, if you aren't already, however that would require your host to install it if it hasn't been already.

Meanwhile, myself and fellow Cloud users watching all this pricing confusion unfold 😛

Fixed.

Already done. 

I'm very excited to see the new version.

Oh it's not that literal 🙂 it's about total time combined with total paid. If you lapse here and there it won't have any impact.

Honestly I like this. I do appreciate the self hosted option and I think IPS deserves to be compensated for continuing to provide the classic version. 
 
This provides a creative solution to an ongoing problem and allows a path forward for the self hosted version. 
 
This should allow both classic and cloud versions to co-exist for years to come! 
 
Kudos to whomever developed this solution! Thank you for not giving up on the self hosted version!!! 

Not to mention that you can monetize your site in many ways using Commerce. 

But this is also a chance to grow your site with pages, gallery, and commerce. 

I must say I like this. 👏👍

These are a part of the converters application.
conv_password misc  

These are a part of the converters application.
conv_password misc  

These are a part of the converters application.
conv_password misc  

This should be resolved now. If you are still seeing an error, please go to your Admin CP > License Key and click Resync License Data.

We had a temporary error with the license server, which we have now resolved. If you go to your Admin CP > License Key and Resync License Data, the message should go away.

I know many of you are very curious how our cloud services work and how we manage things when we service thousands of Invision Community-powered sites on our platform.
I am writing this quick post because I just got an alert from our monitoring systems and signed on to see what was happening.
We use AWS WAF with both managed rules and our own, custom rule sets. With those both combined, we are able to filter a lot of malicious traffic. Sometimes people do attempt a direct attack on one of the communities we host. That is what is going on today.
As I am typing this, our WAF setup is blocking 10 million requests per minute on our network. Yet, even with that huge amount of inbound traffic, our actual operations are not impacted at all. This is one of the advantages  of a robust network backing your community.

I just thought I would share because 1. our monitoring summoned our team to look at "abnormal traffic" and 2. I thought you might find this interesting.
 

With the exception of deleting - you can optionally send an Alert to the member when hiding or moving their content. When sending the alert, you can also optionally allow or force them to reply, which will prompt them to start a PM conversation with you.

With the exception of deleting - you can optionally send an Alert to the member when hiding or moving their content. When sending the alert, you can also optionally allow or force them to reply, which will prompt them to start a PM conversation with you.