Morgin

4 hours ago, christopher-w said:

We plan on launching this across 3 to 4 separate platforms, each sharing the same parent brand identity, the first of which, altCars is almost ready. Once that is live I will probably post a link in the showcase thread.  Much of what we've done is about presentation, navigation, sorting and filtering, plus external link display via iFramely.  Just a series of little things, none of which amount to much on their own.

 

Thanks @christopher-w. I've much appreciated your input here over the last few years so would love to see what you've cooked up. Will watch for that post!

1 hour ago, christopher-w said:

We’ve not even launched yet and already have 12 nested scss includes, covering everything from button placement to injecting section  descriptions (selector:after etc ) when for example, core doesn’t offer the facility to add them in ACP  

We’ve also replaced the native menu system with our own custom implementation resembling the sliding menu in FB groups.

We are now working on cleaning up the native mobile experience. 

If you ever want to share any of this back (appreciating for strategic reasons you may not want to) it would be welcomed by many. Love seeing the small adjustments others make. 

2 hours ago, TDBF said:

 

I have had a few people who use IPads IOS 9.3.5 or < who have told me that they cannot view the forum now because it is broken and unworkable. Hard to tell them that they need to upgrade their hardware as they cannot update to newer apps.

This means they are on an OG iPad, ipad2, iPad 3rd gen, or iPad mini 1. Basically, hardware released at latest in 2012 (and possibly earlier) where Apple only supports up to iOS 9. iOS 9 has been out of security support for a few years now  

This also means the hardware is at least 8 years old. That’s a long time for mobile/tablet device compatibility, especially given how much changed over the last decade.

Can’t support everything forever. For the software to improve, it’s gotta look ahead. I’m sympathetic given how expensive it is to update what otherwise “works”, but also selfishly glad they are not burdening this software with legacies from the past. 

And as @Charles alluded to, someone on iOS 9 is gonna find 90% of the web unusable, not just IPS. 

This thread is a good reminder of the diversity of users. I haven’t thought about post numbers in decades. Would never have thought some people are so passionate about this topic. Certainly a curiosity to me as to why people are so hung up on them, but that’s what makes this community interesting!

There is no legitimate reason anyone or any organization should be using IE. If you have users stuck on it, that sucks, but it’s akin to having users tell you they unfortunately are stuck on 14.4k dialup and find the site loads too slowly. 

IE is dead. Let it Rest In Peace. 

11 minutes ago, Morgin said:

+100 for testing with a great album

Oh never mind you were just using what he was trying. Either way...

2 hours ago, bfarber said:

The URL we tested with previously is embedding just fine for me without editing any files.

Test here:

 

+100 for testing with a great album

My mods have asked if it is possible to have a line of text added above or below the submit post / submit topic button to remind users of the amount of time they have to edit a post before it is no longer editable or removable and a general warning about posting personally identifiable information. We are getting a lot of new users who expect us to operate like Reddit with an ability to delete content at any time. Without getting into the rationale, our community doesn’t operate that way (and we’re not bound by any of the regulations that would require us to make that an option).

Is this something I could do with the stock software editing a language string, or would I need a plugin to achieve this?

To piggyback, the one quality of life improvement I would like to see if the “trust computer for 30 days” option that has become somewhat standard. 

Just now, RocketStang said:

It seems like it would be a no brainer to number posts within a thread for easier reference but I don't see an numbers in IPS?  As a matter of fact, how would you even permalink a post if you needed to?  The only way I see possible is by using the Share>Email link as a permalink but that takes a few steps to access...

Click the time of post. Similar to twitter etc. in that regard.

Like actual cash?

16 minutes ago, Morrigan said:

Its a niche need (primarily for gaming communities that have a ton of trolls)

I run an education/academic community, so I’m not sure how accurate that is. It’s not trolls persay that are the problem for us, it’s people wanting to try out different opinions or perspectives and see the responses. Or people trying to deviously show support for their original comment. It’s not trying to specifically troll the site, they just don’t understand how toxic that behavior can be to a community. 

You’ll never stop everyone, but the goal should not be perfect detection, just another piece of data to help make informed moderation decisions. 

18 hours ago, Morrigan said:

The point is that some people will use a hammer for an electrical problem if they think that’s what they should do.

I’m not sure features should be dismissed because you worry some admins would use them in ways you disapprove of though. 

Duplicate users are a huge problem for my site. We have a very strict one account per person rule because of the nature of the content and that people sometimes want get the benefit of saying stuff not tied to their main account. I have a large mod team and we’ve had years long discussions about what works for our community and for us, one account per person is the best solution. We have very minimal instances, again given the nature of the site, that there would be multiple family members on the same computer or device. 

What we do have are lots of people who don’t agree with the community rules and make a point of signing up multiple accounts knowing it will take us a little bit of time to figure it out. Usually it becomes obvious after a bit of time with someone jumping right in and there are common tells in posting style, but having something to flag “hey, this person has logged in under another account on this device“ would be a huge help. 

Agree with all of the above on why it should also be a core feature - being part of the moderation toolkit and workflow would be ideal. It needs to be part of core to have that ultimate functionality. 

On 7/6/2020 at 11:42 AM, The Guy said:

Perhaps IPS should have its own Video Chat App.

Supporting video chat requires a platform and company that is probably at a minimum twice the size of Invision is currently just to deal with the rapidly changing landscape and support requirements. 

There’s a reason companies that succeed try to focus on doing a few things extremely well vs. trying to do everything and having half baked and poorly supported versions as a result.

I’d love for Invision as a company to be so successful that they could grow into other markets, but at the moment they are doing a great job of community software. Stepping up to try to compete with Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc. to provide a video chat solution would not be a great outcome without a few hundred million in cash to burn to hang with the big players are try to hive off market share. 

Thanks. When you say it doesn’t change content in the database, does that mean that if you uninstall the plugin, it will revert to the old names?

57 minutes ago, bfarber said:

There is no built in option to do this I'm afraid.

Thanks. I presume given it’s a unique name that I could probably do so via a direct database edit (I assume the name must be hardcoded into the post body as if it was based on the database username it would always remain correct). I’m holding off in this instance given it’s going to be easier to just hide the old threads, but agree it might be nice if there was some sort of tool to do this from the ACP. 

11 minutes ago, VaBeach_Guy said:

How can I block specific types of ads? Specifically, political type ads. Or can that even be done?

Who is your ad provider? With Adsense, you certainly can. It’s in the Adsense settings (they change things around frequently so I don’t actually recall specifically where, but it’s there). Other providers I’m not sure, but any good ad networks usually allows you to block certain categories of ads. 

I have a user who asked for their username to be changed as their registration name gave away too much personal info. I did so, but I understand there is an issue whereby the old name still shows up in previous threads where that user was quoted and cannot be directly edited. 

Is there any way to rebuild a topic so that the quotes use the newer updated username?

+1 from me. We have a rule only allowing one account per user because people often post and then want to distance themselves from something poorly received. It devalues the community to have a bunch of people utilizing multiple accounts, along with the trolls who make multiple to seed arguments. I would love to see some sort of opt-in centralized Invision user checker sort of like the global spam tracker. Make it a subscription add on, doesn’t matter to me. Just need some modern user moderation tools that don’t require so much manual work. 

2 hours ago, Morrigan said:

I feel like you take privacy out of banned users hands when you tell your users ANYTHING about something reported. This sort of behavior leads to really toxic and generally mean and vindictive communities that I've seen.

I agree in part. With the plugin I asked Adriano to develop, the intent was not to share any information about what the outcome of the report was (especially if it led to suspending another user), but to provide an ability to easily thank or communicate gratitude to the reporter. The vast majority of my reports aren’t related to specific user infractions - usually it’s reporting spam, mistakes, double posts, etc. I liked the idea of trying to generate more faith in the reporting system but not making it such a black hole. I will say 90+% of the use I get from it is sending a default thanks message for reporting spam. Just a nice touch that lets people know their report mattered and improved the community. It’s a bit of a feedback loop too - the more people feel like the reporting system actually matters, the more they use it, and the better my community is. Everyone wins!

I will say too that this is similar to what Facebook and Twitter do. If you report a tweet, you eventually get confirmation when an action is made. This is helpful to know whether there is any value in using reporting tools or not. 

I’ll be honest, I suspect (but of course do not know for sure) that one thing that helps show the IPS team if a feature would be in high demand or useful is adoption of workarounds or plugin solutions. So, while I agree I would love more use of the notification system for users generally as a core feature (IMO it really provides immediate feedback and engagement), I would urge you to try this out if you have the means to buy it and provide feedback. I think if we could show the IPS team that there is high demand for this sort of feature, there’s a better likelihood of it being adopted into core. For what it’s worth, I can also vouch for @Adriano Fariaas being an amazingly responsive developer, and to the extent we could show enough interest in the plugin to justify him spending time to enhance it, then also a better chance we could essentially build this feature out as a proof of concept. I agree with you though, I think it’s a great feature and a great way to engage users. 

50 minutes ago, Chippy365 said:

There is no functionality within the reports system for moderators to acknowledge that a report has been dealt with or allows a message to be sent to the person reporting.
When a user has been given a timeout during a heated discussion, users continue to reply and don't realise the person has been banned for a week - which causes users to think that the moderators are not taking any action upon reports - when they are.

Now, yes, you could say that moderators could PM the user who gave the report with a response - but IPB allows the PM system to be turned off and our community don't want the PM system enabled.

As a bit of an aside, @Adriano Faria developed this plugin for me to handle sending PMs to members who reported messages to let them know action had been taken.

My specifications asked for it to use the PM system to send a reply, but as I've used this, I've discovered that a better approach would have been to use the notification system - send a notification once the report is submitted to say "we've received your report- thanks!" and then send a notification once action is taken to be like "your report has been actioned - thanks for helping keep the community friendly" or something like that. People don't need a PM persay, they just need some visual indicator that their report didn't go into the ether.  It might be worth seeing if Adriano would be willing to enhance this plugin to let you choose between using the PM system and using notifications. Doesn't get you all the way there of having a badge for showing a user is banned, but might be helpful regardless.

5 hours ago, Morgin said:

As an aside to the app vs. PWA vs. crazy ranting aspect of this thread, I wanted to share the below link for those who are trying to get up to speed on what PWAs are and aren’t. 

https://web.dev/app-like-pwas/

Oops! While the above is helpful, I meant to link this: https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/

As an aside to the app vs. PWA vs. crazy ranting aspect of this thread, I wanted to share the below link for those who are trying to get up to speed on what PWAs are and aren’t. 

https://web.dev/app-like-pwas/

On 6/20/2020 at 10:45 AM, TheWorldNewsMedia.org said:

The current push toward native apps 7+ years too late is just a distraction.

That would be like Intel deciding it's going to go into the spinning HDD business in 2020.

What specifically do you want them to do? Not just a buzzword like PWA - PWA is just a descriptor for numerous frameworks and web technologies, some of which are already supported. What do you specifically want them to work on next?