FZ

Oh come on, Daniel. How was this a bug? It worked perfectly for years and it gives the community an indication of what they have not yet read on the community. Removing it basically removes functionality that is (to my mind) critical for the user experience. What if we decide that we should remove $10 from your license renewal fees because you removed something that we used and need? You wouldn't like that very much (if it was possible for your customers to do), would you? Not happy with IPS and the response to this criticism. :(

They don't care.

I've been running an online forum since 2006 and I have been using IPS since (I think) at least 2011), so I've been a customer for 10 years. I have two licenses, another one is used for a client's website. I just want to say something about what I perceive is poor development practise from IPS regarding upgrades. Since version 4, every major point upgrade has brought me nothing but grief. You remove features that are integral to the functioning of my community and you introduce things that are, to be honest, seldom very useful. I don't know why you remove these things. Maybe there are reasons that make sense to yourselves as a company, but I have to tell you that after 10 years of going through these upgrade dramas, I am fast approaching the last straw. I don't have hundreds of hours to waste fixing things that were working before "upgrading" so that I can continue to use software I am paying for and which is supposed to me making my life easier (not harder). I understand the need for technology to change, but functionality should never just be tossed out the window because you may think it isn't working for your customers.

I don't know what to say. I have been running the previous gen since it came out and only upgraded now because I know that falling behind doesn't work in your favour here. My home page has a widget feed on it with the last 25 topics discussed and if there was an unread message in them it made the topic bold. I had the option to specify the cache time for my widget. To be honest, this is a step backwards and it makes no sense to me that something highly functional would be arbitrarily removed for no apparently sensible reason.

Sorry? I was running 4.5 up until last week and my widgets were showing bold type for all unread topics in the feeds. So am I delusional or is there something else at play here?

I just "upgraded" and am getting complaints from my community about this too. Please put it back - there was no performance problem on my server. My cache is 1 minute.

Honestly Invision, this is really poor form. Why didn't you include a message during the "upgrade" to say EXACTLY what would happen if you opted into the new system. Geez.

I see my upgrade to 4.6.5.1 has caused half my clubs to fail with this: Error: Undefined class constant 'SELECT_SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS' (0) So, this has me questioning the usefulness of the Clubs feature as well as this enhancement. I really don't have the time or energy to be faced with this kind of admin every time there is a big upgrade. How do I revert my Clubs back into regular forums?

I had some issues the last time I upgraded IPS before the theme update came out so I think I will wait until everything is hunky dory before going ahead. Now if somebody could reiterate to IPS that this infernal system update message that appears every day is seriously annoying.....

Thanks for the link. Glad to hear that it will continue on in 4.6, but... if it were to become attractive to ex-WHMCS customers it might well become a really good option for IPS to develop further in future versions of IPS. Lord knows WHMCS might be good at billing but as a CMS it is pretty awful, so being able to combine the great CMS here with server management is something that I think will attract new customers who are really fed up with WHMCS' attitude to its customers. See here. There is also a blog post somewhere on their site with a lot more comments but I can't find it right now.

I don't know why removing this feature would be in their interest? Does it require much additional overhead to maintain?

One of my sideline gigs is to sell website hosting to help me pay for the server that my Invision community needs to run on. To manage that side of things I opted to use WHMCS to help me with the billing and it's been fine. I also tried using the built in Invision Servers feature which does a similar thing and it integrated pretty well with my WHM/cPanel software. However WHMCS has now gotten greedy and they are now charging their license out based on the number of active clients each of their customers has. They are introducing changes on 1 July that have upset a LOT of their loyal customers, myself included. So I thought I would look at migrating my client base from WHMCS to Invision, but I see that there is a message in ACP advising that the feature is deprecated in 4.5 and will be removed in the next release. This is sad because there is now an active need for a good solution for web hosting billing and this might be a great opportunity for Invision to provide that solution. Maybe management can provide some input as to why they are removing it?

It's the built-in advertising system in ACP. Basically for custom placement of ads you create a tag in brackets like this {advertisement="KEY"} and then place it wherever you need it to go in the templates or other places on the system. I'll have a look for the slider template. 🙂

I was hoping to be able to use an advertisement tag in the slider but it doesn't seem to parse that. Is this something that I can tweak to work in templates, or will it require some custom coding?

I'm also looking for a way to do this. I have many guest posts with attachments from a legacy site that I need to remove. There must be a simple way of deleting them all if I am able to filter them using ACP > System > Files.

Ah, OK. Thanks for clarifying. I was sure it used to be there and had this idea to create a page with a feed of maybe 20 topics pulled from my 15 years of archives.

Is there a reason why you can't have a random topic sort on a block fed from existing topics?

Fantastic! Thank you. 🙂

Have run the latest update and would like to thank you for fixing the floating bar announcement issue. 🙂 However, I am seeing that if I want to change the colour of the text in that bar using the Frontend Colors tab in theme settings, it doesn't work - just stays white. I need to make it black to stand out on the yellow colour I have chosen for the "warning" message background. Tried custom CSS and that isn't working either. .ipsMessage, .ipsAnnouncement { border-radius:var(--radius-1); position:relative; margin-bottom:var(--sp-3); color: #000; border:1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); box-shadow:inset rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1) 0px 1px 0px; } Can you advise?

I think that if we are going to be asking for money back it should be from IPS who have made the life of the webmaster using their system incredibly difficult in the move from 4.4 to 4.5. I have lost so many days to this "upgrade" and honestly, I just can't see anything that is so radically different between those two versions that justifies the move. I have 2 licenses and there is no way I will be moving the other one up to this 4.5 notch.

I can report that something else is definitely going on, because that copy of the theme got completely screwed up when adding the code and nothing I could do would revert it back to where it was. I tried clearing Safari cache, I ran the support wizard and got that to clear cache too. When doing that there was a patch that IPS asked me to install because of something to do with CSS, which I duly did, but nothing will restore that copy of the theme back to where it was. As I said before - I am over this stuff. It is the very last time I take an IPS upgrade on good faith as being functional.

Seriously tired of this now. I can't understand how a move from 4.4 to 4.5 can cause webmasters so much unnecessary stress. I don't have time to constantly fix these stuff ups, man!

@TAMAN that code has completely screwed up my theme. I removed it but it is still doing the same thing - completely messed up everything. I'm going to send you a PM now.

Sticky nav bar is still having issues after the update. If you set it to "fixed to top" all message pop-ups and tooltips are appearing underneath it - see screen grab. Also the announcement that used to float on top of the navigation now sits on the top of the page. It sticks underneath the navigation when scrolled, but not sure I like this if it is supposed to do that.

Found another glitch. When using the sticky menu the flash message appears underneath that.