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Hey IC fam, is it just me or does it feel like every morning I wake up and it's Wednesday. No more Mondays or Fridays, just Wednesdays. The weeks are flying by 🤯 
Maybe it's cause we're hard at work on 4.6 and the Achievements system.
I personally had a chance to play around with Achievements and it's super powerful and sleek. Without giving away too much, it's seamless and intuitive. If you are even semi-familiar with the admin panel (which I imagine many of you are 😆) then you'll pick things up rather quick. 
Below is a list of new fixes we made for 4.6 in the last few days:
 
- Fixed sitemaps not generating properly.
- Fixed an issue where font-sizes on mobiles weren't following the Font Scale setting. (FORUMS)
- Fixed an issue where users may not see the correct page after checkout if email validation is in use. (GALLERY)
- Subscriptions Grace Period setting will now allow a value of 0.
- Fixed an issue where AdminCP theme resource may continuously be written to disk.
- Improved performance of session handling.
- Fixed the hardcoded "Change how the notification is sent" text with the notification. (BLOG)
 
In case you missed last Wednesday's Hump Day post, tap here. Blink and it'll be Wednesday again! If we're lucky 🙂
Have any questions? Comments? Drop us a line. 

I dont mind reactions being shown in the notification menu but damn I dont want emails for it. The rest I wouldnt mind the option for emails with but yeah more granular is better with admins setting the default for new accounts with email etc.

I dont mind reactions being shown in the notification menu but damn I dont want emails for it. The rest I wouldnt mind the option for emails with but yeah more granular is better with admins setting the default for new accounts with email etc.

I dont mind reactions being shown in the notification menu but damn I dont want emails for it. The rest I wouldnt mind the option for emails with but yeah more granular is better with admins setting the default for new accounts with email etc.

I dont mind reactions being shown in the notification menu but damn I dont want emails for it. The rest I wouldnt mind the option for emails with but yeah more granular is better with admins setting the default for new accounts with email etc.

Hi
We have been doing test migrations and I noticed a huge amount of memory usage from Imagick on our install which reminded me that there is another option, GraphicsMagick which was a branch from Imagick a few years ago.
Generally it runs much faster and lighter than Imagick and also it seems to have less security issues. It does have some limitations over Imagick but most of them seem to be related to more advanced image processing so I *think* they would not be an issue for IPB.
If php was directly calling the Imagic binary rather than the php wrapper you used to be able to directly swap them out and it would mostly work if I recall.
Just a thought.

Hi
We have been doing test migrations and I noticed a huge amount of memory usage from Imagick on our install which reminded me that there is another option, GraphicsMagick which was a branch from Imagick a few years ago.
Generally it runs much faster and lighter than Imagick and also it seems to have less security issues. It does have some limitations over Imagick but most of them seem to be related to more advanced image processing so I *think* they would not be an issue for IPB.
If php was directly calling the Imagic binary rather than the php wrapper you used to be able to directly swap them out and it would mostly work if I recall.
Just a thought.

We're currently revamping the spam defence system to make it more accurate and to catch more spam. We'll announce the changes soon.

Great, anything that generates potentially a lot of notification emails should have its own control. You should turn on email notifications here for all staff so they can experience it 😉
Notifications in the dropdown/phone are less problematic but large amounts of email can be a big issue if you get a popular post.

Oh wow - we've been getting complaints from users as well since we recently installed the latest version of IPB and just found this post.
There is a MASSIVE use case for users wanting to get email notifications for when they are @ mentioned or have one of their posts quoted (and this is how the majority of our ~3,000 users have operated up until now, very happily happily).
There is VERY LITTLE use case (if any) for users ever wanting to get email notifications when someone reacts to one of their posts (as this happens SO darned often in a forum). 
Bundling the 2 x options together into a single option is madness IMHO.
We really do need this to be rolled back to the way it was before as even our VIP members have been complaining that it's now ridiculous to keep up as they all LOVE being notified by email when they have been tagged in a post so they can go and help out

(but turning this option on is now making them get bucket loads of unnecessary emails for every time someone reacts to their posts. In my personal example, this has changed my email notifications from IPB from say 4-5 a day to now around 50 per day 😨)
We have logged a ticket with IPB.
However, has anyone worked out any creative workarounds?
@Dii @usmf@shiobi @AlexJ @bfarber @Daniel F
 

Just a thought, if some of those cases are copyright etc related if you host it yourself you will have to deal with those sorts of legal demands.

I do have a small observation or small critique on this; please don't take this the wrong way but it seems like this could be a big issue moving forward and I hope my voice will be heard here. I mean NO disrespect.
---
ACP -> Community -> Forums -> Settings -> disable "Moderation events between posts"
---
I feel this option should not be an 'On' or 'Off' option, but rather a "permission set" type of item or perhaps both one to turn it on and another to allow who can see these; allowing me to chose which groups can see it. I feel this particular item is a staff only sort of item and I wish there was a way to only allow my moderators or administrators to see this; guests have no reason to see moderated modifications to posts but staff does. While this option is awesome for staff use, it seems a bit misplaced allowing a visitor to see changes that moderators do.
Please don't take this to heart, I just feel it is a change that needs to be implemented having used the product a long time, love the staff, and company, it comes from a good heart and place.

The current Saved Actions cannot be reordered by alphanumeric, date, etc. Nor can they be graphically moved similar to how forums can be moved by drag-n-drop
I would like to suggest the ability to move the Saved Actions similar to how forums can be, and/or other methods of sorting. 
As they are now, once created they stay in that order which is not always optimal or a desired outcome
 

The current Reputation and Reaction feature could use some enhancements. Currently it's either ON or OFF.  It does allow Groups to be excluded which is good.
We would like to see the following additional features added at some point soon in the future
Reputations - Filter by Forums, On/Off per forum Reputations - Exclude by Member, On/Off Reactions - Customizable count for maximum reactions in a set period of time on per User level  

For increased privacy, please offer youtube-nocookie.com and adding &rel=0 to auto-embeds for YouTube videos.
Safari 14 now makes it trivially easy to see what trackers are trying to follow you on what web sites. Cheers.
 

I suggest that IPS require all Marketplace downloads have the dev files for maintaining the download should the developer disappear available as a separate download. You can charge extra to download the dev files (say a fixed fee of $10 per Marketplace purchase) if you want to generate a little more revenue for the developers.
I certainly have been very hesitant to install a Marketplace app/plugin if I am not sure I can easily take over maintaining the software myself (or hire someone else). Having the DEV files for the all software I deploy on my site is a requirement for me, and I would have to think for others as well.

This is it in a nutshell. Those of us with significant investments and commitments in ongoing support of our communities understand that it is wholly unwise to leave ourselves at the mercy of individuals who may or may not continue supporting something critical, or continue maintaining an active license, or to assume that they have plans in place should they, for whatever reason, no longer be able to continue developing their resource.
We have historically looked at marketplace offerings as springboards that help us minimize our resources on getting new, needed functionality, yet with the understanding that anytime we add things to our installation, we now own the responsibility to ensure that we can take over continued support and development should the original developer no longer be available. In our plans for 4.4 to 4.5 migration, we've had to do this very thing and recreate functionality for marketplace purchases that are simply not being updated or where the developer has since left the building. Having access to those 4.4 files that we had previously stored in our code repositories made this compatibility task easier for our developers. Having dependencies like a need to integrate IPS extensions with Laravel or other frameworks or platforms is exactly the sort of thing that helps define how you should consider what and how you add things to IPS.
As I've shared before, we have found Not Good Things(tm) in the past from the resources we've downloaded, and have purchased resources only to find that the developer's implementation did not meet best practice guidelines and/or took steps that would put our community at risk by installing. That knowledge comes from having our developers audit those resources, install them in local development environments, and through our identifying and anticipating problems before they become incidents. The IPS folks here doing their absolute best to audit new resources should be commended for their efforts and talents, and it's great that they're increasing that effort. Yet it is fool hearty to think that they, or any small group of developers, would be well positioned to test for conflicts with a seemingly infinite number of configurations, back end systems, dependencies, and resources, and would not make errors in judgement or mistakes. We are all, after all, human.
Hobbyists and up and coming communities aren't worried about this. IPS' core market isn't worried about this. IPS sees this as a fringe case, where the benefits of turning off the ability to extract files from Marketplace in a downloadable format outweigh the incentives to turn it off. I understand their approach, and the business reasons for doing so.
Yet that understanding comes with the knowledge that the Marketplace we had in 4.4 is no more, and instead has been converted to some sort of imagined "Applesque" app store that caters to the lowest common denominator and that no longer meets the needs of customers like ourselves. If the equivalent of Steam Integration stops working for the local book club's forum, oh well. They'll survive and adapt. That's okay, and the change works for the people that comprise the core customer here. If integrating with Steam is the core of your community, you don't want to find yourself in that position.
It would have been nice to have had that shift in strategy and functionality communicated to us in some capacity in advance instead of finding out about it by surprise so we could have planned and anticipated for increases in budgeting for development time. When you consider simple things like IPS not maintaining a transparent versioning system, and instead favoring nebulous patches that only appear if you think to click the "something's wrong" button, we should remain cognizant that the focus of IPS right now seems to be on CIC and building their SaaS model and making things look as stable, magical, and seamless as possible for that market. From that vantage point, this all makes sense.
If your goal is to expand upon what others make available, or to maintain a solid operational continuity plan, or to understand what you're adding onto your installation, the understanding that purchasing something from 4.5's Marketplace is akin to "it will attempt to install and does whatever it does right now and that's your only guarantee, no looking under the hood, trust us, good luck in the future, not our problem" is something that should most definitely be informing how you use IPS' Marketplace.
Communities that are worried about these things would be wise to purchase resources directly from developers or create their own and bypass the new marketplace entirely, ensuring that they have the tools to pickup where that developer left off should the developer no longer be able to provide needed updates, stop renewing their license, become incapacitated in some way, or just have new interests.

That's a great question. I couldn't find the answer in the developer documentation, so I'm really not sure. I'm asking here to find out and generate a discussion for the benefit of all. I should be able to provide a link to you right now in those docs that says "here's how to handle background tasks," but I couldn't find it. That's problem #1.
Problem #2 is that absent that, and absent the ability to inspect resources in advance of install, we now cross our fingers and see what happens.
At the rate the plugin was converting things (50 members at a time, ~1,000,000 members, at what looked to be about 1 second per 50 members) this would have taken just shy of 14 hours to complete this task.
I can think of two solutions:
Process the conversion as a background task that runs regardless of whether or not a connection is available. Prompt the administrator to run SQL directly in the background as various parts of the 4.5 upgrade do for long running queries, and press continue when complete. It's insane to create a dependency that 20,000 calls to a web server need to execute flawlessly or else the process breaks.
Looking at the code on my test machine and examining the upgrade.php script that runs, this could have been handled with two queries. One that would have inserted a row per match from core_members, and another that would have dropped the column from core_members.
Something like:
INSERT INTO autowelcome_members (welcome_member_id, welcome_sent) SELECT member_id ,member_welcome FROM `core_members` WHERE member_welcome = 1; ALTER TABLE `core_members` DROP COLUMN `member_welcome`; This used to be a problem I owned. I could download a plugin, look for things like this (we're primarily interested in 1. will it scale?, 2. is it secure?), make any necessary revisions, and we'd be happily on our way. Yet, now IPS has taken that ability away from us. I have to go digging around the filesystem of my test install to find what this thing is doing, whereas before I could look straight at the tar or xml and catch it ahead of time. The above query runs in under 3 seconds on my install. 3 seconds compared to 14 hours.....
If IPS is going to take on the responsibility of looking for issues in lieu of allowing us pre-install download and inspection, then the recoverability of upgrade/installation scripts is something they should be examining for potential issues.

To be honest, apps and plugins that get abandoned are one prime reason we need a way to sensibly obtain the files to fix issues ourselves if we want. I know many wont have the skills to do that but as someone who has patched abandoned plugins for vbulletin for years I think we as customers of plugins should have some ability to get plugins manually.
We are customers, pirates will always find a way to do what they want and they arent all lost sales but causing issues for customers will lead to lost sales. Always think of those that are prepared to pay over the concerns of those that would never pay.

To be honest, apps and plugins that get abandoned are one prime reason we need a way to sensibly obtain the files to fix issues ourselves if we want. I know many wont have the skills to do that but as someone who has patched abandoned plugins for vbulletin for years I think we as customers of plugins should have some ability to get plugins manually.
We are customers, pirates will always find a way to do what they want and they arent all lost sales but causing issues for customers will lead to lost sales. Always think of those that are prepared to pay over the concerns of those that would never pay.

I figured there would have been a way to manually grab and install marketplace files post 4.5 as I like to archive old versions and track changes but I wont be able to do that any more?
I love the marketplace integration and it makes sense for a lot of users but a manual fallback should still be in place as well.

Hi
We have been doing test migrations and I noticed a huge amount of memory usage from Imagick on our install which reminded me that there is another option, GraphicsMagick which was a branch from Imagick a few years ago.
Generally it runs much faster and lighter than Imagick and also it seems to have less security issues. It does have some limitations over Imagick but most of them seem to be related to more advanced image processing so I *think* they would not be an issue for IPB.
If php was directly calling the Imagic binary rather than the php wrapper you used to be able to directly swap them out and it would mostly work if I recall.
Just a thought.

To be honest, apps and plugins that get abandoned are one prime reason we need a way to sensibly obtain the files to fix issues ourselves if we want. I know many wont have the skills to do that but as someone who has patched abandoned plugins for vbulletin for years I think we as customers of plugins should have some ability to get plugins manually.
We are customers, pirates will always find a way to do what they want and they arent all lost sales but causing issues for customers will lead to lost sales. Always think of those that are prepared to pay over the concerns of those that would never pay.

To be honest, apps and plugins that get abandoned are one prime reason we need a way to sensibly obtain the files to fix issues ourselves if we want. I know many wont have the skills to do that but as someone who has patched abandoned plugins for vbulletin for years I think we as customers of plugins should have some ability to get plugins manually.
We are customers, pirates will always find a way to do what they want and they arent all lost sales but causing issues for customers will lead to lost sales. Always think of those that are prepared to pay over the concerns of those that would never pay.

I figured there would have been a way to manually grab and install marketplace files post 4.5 as I like to archive old versions and track changes but I wont be able to do that any more?
I love the marketplace integration and it makes sense for a lot of users but a manual fallback should still be in place as well.