PPlanet

Actually, it works :) What I saw as

<img alt="?" class="ipsEmoji" src="https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/72x72/3f.png">

In the database it was showing only as

<span class="ipsEmoji">?</span>

So the query that works is

UPDATE forums_posts SET post=REPLACE( post, '<span class="ipsEmoji">?</span>', '' );

Cheers

Hmm, I've tried all the options and it remains unaffected:

Not sure what I'm missing. Any ideas?

6 hours ago, IPCommerceFan said:

That should work, however I would verify by testing on a single post first.

After REPLACE(), add WHERE pid = 1234;   (post ID of a post that contains the emoji you're replacing)

Will do, and will do on my test site first too. Cheers!

1 hour ago, bfarber said:

UPDATE forums_posts SET post=REPLACE( post, 'what to search for', 'what to replace with' );

 

Thanks @bfarber

So for example to replace it with an image:

UPDATE forums_posts SET post=REPLACE( post, '<img alt="?" class="ipsEmoji" src="https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/72x72/3f.png">', '<img alt="alt text" class="ipsImage" src="https://forums.mysite.com/uploads/pixel.png">' );

Or for replacing it with nothing like below?

UPDATE forums_posts SET post=REPLACE( post, '<img alt="?" class="ipsEmoji" src="https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/72x72/3f.png">', '' );

Hello everyone. A few months ago my site was migrated to another server, and the emojis were corrupted as they used a mysql dump with the wrong character set. Anyway, not much that I can do about that now, but I would like to clean up the traces that now simply show as a question mark: ? (New emojis from the migration date onwards show fine though). But, the result is that I have 2 years of content with question marks where they shouldn't be, and this could confuse readers.

The code of the corrupted emojis is:

<img alt="?" class="ipsEmoji" src="https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/72x72/3f.png">

That emoji does not exist, and I would like to use a query to either clean it up, or if that's not possible (or too risky) to replace it with an image file hosted on my forum. I could use a transparent png or gif file of 1 x 1 pixel, which would have almost the same effect of showing nothing instead of the question marks. And call the file pixel.png for example.

Or if I'd only be able to replace it with another emoji, for example https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/72x72/1f642.png

(I'd prefer my own transparent pixel file though, as no emoji would suit all cases unless you know of a transparent one)

Anyway, I'll appreciate any help with this. Cheers!

13 hours ago, bfarber said:

If you disable the share by email feature, then spammers will not be able to use that feature. I am unaware at this time of any other areas where an end user could send an arbitrary email through your site.

Okay, great. Thanks for confirming.

On 8/8/2020 at 7:07 AM, bfarber said:

It's not an "exploit". There is a "share by email" feature in the software and we have made adjustments to the feature following reports of spam being sent using said feature. We pushed out an ACP notification at the time, as well as a patch, to address the concern, but it's not a true security exploit - the feature is in fact doing what it is intended to do.

I know this was fixed back then, but since I'm still on that version (4.4.9) what I did was simply disabling the share by email feature immediately. Since then, my email service has been used by spammers twice, but I'm not saying my IPS installation is to blame. There could be other reasons as I also send emails through other sites using the same STMP service/mailbox, but just to be able to rule my forum out among the suspects, has it been confirmed that you are safe if you have the share by email feature disabled?

(And yes, I know it would be safer to upgrade, but since 4.5 was in discussion for so long, I never got around to upgrade to 4.4.10 for shortage of time, etc. I thought to upgrade to 4.5 when the time comes, and all third party plugins are ready). So, this is a mere question about 4.4.9 and this problem with the share by email feature. I'll appreciate if someone could confirm your site couldn't be used by spammers if you had this feature disabled. Cheers!

7 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

What will have happened here is that the database dump was generated with the wrong character set (one that isn't utf8mb4). This will have corrupted the 4-byte characters in the data, which is why you see a question mark instead.

There isn't any way to fix this except for reverting to an earlier backup where the characters are not corrupt. However, due to the nature of this, it's likely that your backups may also have the same issue.

Thanks Stuart. I thought this had no cure at this stage. I guess I'll edit them manually as I bump across them.

Last June 17th my site was moved to a different server. Only now I notice that all emojis that existed before that date show as a question mark (and no matter what emoji it was; looking at the code it says https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/2/72x72/3f.png which is a file it does not exist).

All emojis posted after that date are fine.

Is there a way to fix this?

@SC36DC are you sure the link you are trying to embed doesn't end on .com instead of .be?

I use Firefox (for Mac) and don't seem to experience any problem embedding Youtube videos, unless they end on .com (but you'll notice that all current share links Youtube provides are .be instead).

3 hours ago, Joel R said:

There is a Duplicate Member application in the Marketplace from @CodingJungle that you can investigate.  

 

I'm using this and for the most part works well. I have suggested the author to have an option to move detected users to a different group, other than or as an alternative to banning them, which is what the app does now as one option.

So, I have an "Inactive" group where they still can access the board and see a message saying the account has been disabled at their request or because it's a second account, and urge them to contact us to sort things out. So far it's me doing the chasing up after just being notified by the app, and changing second accounts to this inactive group or not. If the app switched them automatically the initiative would be left to them to contact us. As it is now, it's a pain in the butt to follow this through.

Why does it matter? I sell subscriptions to access parts of the forum, but at the same time I provide a small daily number of free views behind the paywall per member. Most only create second accounts to cheat the system and duplicate, triplicate or sometimes more the number of free views.

Hi @TheJackal84. Thank you for this app. I bought it some time ago and have been playing with it in my dev site.

Just one quick a question about one of the blocks. I think it's the one you called Secondary. I've been following a layout very similar to your example here:

Is there a way to include a clickable url to the images? There's one in the titles that I have active, and then I know I could use buttons (but I'm trying to stay away from them, so I guess that many users' behaviour would be clicking on the image as a link). Hence my question; cheers.

11 hours ago, bfarber said:

Typically you would edit globalTemplate and add whatever you want to the <head> of the document, or you can use the live meta tag editor to add meta tags to your site (if you set the URL as "*" the tags will apply to every page).

I'll do that, thanks!

Upon a second look, it looks like robots.txt files only work with allow and disallow, so I may not be able to add noarchive like I could in a meta tag. So, that probably means editing a template then?

Thanks @Daniel F. If I create a Robots.txt page just to include the "noarchive" tag, doesn't that interfere somehow with whatever is IPS native? (No idea how IPS tells bots what to do, so I better ask before going ahead).

As IPS has no robots.txt file, how do we instruct search engines not to archive or keep cached copies of your site? (Without affecting normal indexing of course)

Kitchen sink adds Mark Site Read to your user dropdown profile. Not sure if that's what you are after.

I have a few of these groups promotion rules in place but I've never done a time-based one. Now I'd need to do the following:

Members who belong to primary group A, with a post count of 100 and who have posted in the last week, get a secondary group assigned.

Those same members must lose the secondary group when they haven't posted in the last week. (And they recover it when they post and so on)

So, is it correct to think that I need 2 separate rules?

One assigns the secondary group to members of primary group A with a post count of 100 and who have posted in the last week (or 7 days).

The other, removes the secondary group to members who haven't posted in the last week.

Or, is it the first rule enough to do both things at once? (Somehow I doubt it though)

Wouldn't you be better archiving them (even to a separate database) rather than deleting them?

I know this doesn't answer your question because even archiving doesn't have that option (it's just time based regardless of number of replies), but just in case you change your mind further down the track, as you can also unarchive them too. Cheers.

32 minutes ago, Daniel F said:

That's an issue with a 3rd party application or plugin which added a custom column to your forums_posts database table called charmod_name

14 minutes ago, DawPi said:

 

Open PhpMyAdmin, go to forums_posts table and add default value (for example NULL) to charmod_name field. Should be fine then.

Thank you guys; my host solved it by disabling strict mode on the MySQL server configuration. So, I didn't get as far as  modifying the database.

I've just changed server, and now I'm finding that I cannot post in the forums.

It gives me this message:

[[Template forums/front/topics/topic is throwing an error. This theme may be out of date. Run the support tool in the AdminCP to restore the default theme.]]

However, I flushed cache several times, I flushed Cloudflare's cache. I'm testing this with the default theme and no plugins, etc.

The System Logs say:

IPS\Db\Exception::1364

INSERT INTO `forums_posts` ( `topic_id`, `post_date`, `author_id`, `author_name`, `post`, `ip_address`, `new_topic`, `queued` ) VALUES ( 251033, 1592461215, 1, 'PPlanet', '
<p>
    Test.
</p>
', 'XX.XXX.XXX.XX', false, 0 )

Field 'charmod_name' doesn't have a default value

Backtrace

#0 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Db/Db.php(937): IPS\_Db->preparedQuery('/*IPS\\forums\\To...', Array)
#1 /home/fakedomain//public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Patterns/ActiveRecord.php(487): IPS\_Db->insert('forums_posts', Array)
#2 /home/fakedomain//public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/applications/forums/sources/Topic/Post.php(339): IPS\Patterns\_ActiveRecord->save()
#3 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Content/Comment.php(185): IPS\forums\Topic\_Post->save()
#4 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/applications/forums/sources/Topic/Post.php(128): IPS\Content\_Comment::create(Object(IPS\forums\Topic), '\n<p>\n\tTest.\n</p...', false, NULL, NULL, Object(IPS\Member), NULL, NULL, NULL)
#5 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/init.php(820) : eval()'d code(27): IPS\forums\Topic\_Post::create(Object(IPS\forums\Topic), '\n<p>\n\tTest.\n</p...', false, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL)
#6 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Content/Item.php(4386): IPS\forums\Topic\cms_hook_Post::create(Object(IPS\forums\Topic), '\n<p>\n\tTest.\n</p...', false, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL)
#7 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Content/Item.php(4197): IPS\Content\_Item->processCommentForm(Array)
#8 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Theme/Theme.php(847) : eval()'d code(3809): IPS\Content\_Item->commentForm()
#9 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Theme/SandboxedTemplate.php(61): IPS\Theme\class_forums_front_topics->topic(Object(IPS\forums\Topic), Array, NULL, Array, NULL, '\n\n\n\t\n\t<ul class...', Array)
#10 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/applications/forums/modules/front/forums/topic.php(437): IPS\Theme\_SandboxedTemplate->__call('topic', Array)
#11 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Dispatcher/Controller.php(96): IPS\forums\modules\front\forums\_topic->manage()
#12 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Content/Controller.php(50): IPS\Dispatcher\_Controller->execute()
#13 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/applications/forums/modules/front/forums/topic.php(39): IPS\Content\_Controller->execute()
#14 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/system/Dispatcher/Dispatcher.php(152): IPS\forums\modules\front\forums\_topic->execute()
#15 /home/fakedomain/public_html/forums.fakedomain.com/index.php(13): IPS\_Dispatcher->run()
#16 {main}

Excatly the same happens in both my live and dev forums.

It would be interesting to know if what the OP writes is possible to achieve somehow. I lack the technical knowledge to suggest a solution. However I wonder if this could be solved by merging two sites (databases) and all you merge from one of them is 1 member and/or his content. Probably easier said than done, but I reckon he shouldn't give up until knowing if this, or what he says is possible at all.

If it comes to choosing between the deleted content and the new content generated since the last backup that includes that member's content, I guess it depends on how important that member and his content is, in comparison to the amount of new content generated after the last backup. A potential tough choice indeed.

A pity the site wasn't taken offline immediately after the deletion of posts. This spam flagging function has caused some similar problems in the past from what I've read here. I recommend everyone to use it like I do, please see the screenshot below.

Even the "Hide" option could become a small nightmare if you manage a large community.

On 4/4/2020 at 6:51 AM, Pavel Chernitsky said:

So as you can tell from the WTF headline, this issue/question is quite hard to summarize in a few words. So that also means a search is useless.

Thing is this:
Say that in your community of many many forums, you have one that's restricted for posting only for manually approved users.
A user opens a thread in a public forum where he and everybody else can post. However, said post is more suitable for the restricted forum. So obviously the thread's moved there.
On our old platform (VB) the user retained posting rights ONLY for their thread.

Questions is, how is this issue handled in IPS, and if by default the user loses posting permissions on that thread, is there a way to solve this? 

@DawPi made a plugin for me that does that. When I started charging subscriptions for access to some subforums, I wanted the topics starters to still be able to see and post in their own threads, even without a subscription (meaning even without the secondary group that buying a subscription assigns to them). What he made for me does more than that, but that it's certainly a part of it. So, you may want to PM him and discuss it with him.

Hi @CodingJungle, I've been using the Duplicate Detection app, and other than a possible bug I reported before, it has made a change in my community, so thank you for creating and supporting this app. I charge subscriptions to access some parts of my forum and it's amazing to see the amount of people who have created multiple accounts just to waive a small fee. (As I also use a teaser system that allows non-subscribers to see a few topics per day).

Now, if I may, I would like to make two suggestions. The first one is regarding this thread. As a user it's becoming too difficult to follow when it deals with multiple, unrelated applications at once. It would be much easier if you had one support topic per application/plugin. You'd just need to follow them and I don't think that would add more work for you, if you go by your notifications (maybe all it would take is asking people to "mention" or "quote" you, so you can be sure you'll get a notification). But of course, entirely up to you; I won't love your app any less for it. 😉

The second suggestion is about the app itself. It would be great if you were able to add a new option to the settings, where apart from us being able to choose between banning or sending a PM, you could move the member to another group and send a PM too.

Reason being, banning is a bit too radical IMHO; it may be warranted in some cases, but not in others... and that's the reason why I don't use it. So, currently I send automatic PMs instead, but then in practical terms, the workload is on me to review each case and send a PM after any changes to the account/s. I have suddenly found myself with a new daily task of following this up.

However, if we were able to automatically change groups, we could put detected members into a group where you basically have very few permissions, and also sending a PM explaining them and asking them to contact us to resolve the problem. This would reduce this workload since it would be up to them to contact us, and we wouldn't have to worry until they do.

Plus, and this is a big factor, we wouldn't need to chase up from behind an ever growing amount of newly created accounts, as it happens to be the case for me. This is a problem that those who use the "Ban" option probably don't have, but those, like me, who use the "Send PM" option certainly do.

In visual terms, what I suggest is something like this (together of course with a setting where you select the group they are moved into, which I forgot to include here).

Thanks for reading, cheers.

Hello @InvisionHQ it looks like the latest version of Classifieds is interfering with merging members. Please see the error message. Cheers.