Morgin

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Ezoic is somewhat unique in that they’ll take sites with as low as 10,000 monthly visits. Most bigger ad networks (Adsense excepted) want to see 1 million monthly page views at a minimum, and often won’t take forums unless they also have regular content posted.

Ad software is very complicated these days. What IPS offers is a nice little value-add to do some very basic direct ad sales, but it’s honestly a bit of a relic at this point in terms of the ad industry. Ad buyers want and expect more data from their ad buys now. If you need anything beyond what is offered in IPS Community Suite in terms of serving ads and stats associated with them, it would be worthwhile to start looking into Google Ad Manager or OpenX (or, bluntly, if you have the traffic to support it, move onto an ad network like ezoic or something).

It’s one of those situations where both numbers are accurate in terms of the specific metric they show. ACP shows page hits, and that’s it. How many times was that particular ad code placement requested from the server. Doesn’t matter if it was human, search bot, etc. If that ad code placement was requested, it counts. Adsense shows actual ad impressions. That is, how many times did a unique ad actually get served in that location. As you can imagine, google doesn’t like (and has ways to avoid) loading paying ads to any request other than likely human with eyeballs who will actually see the ad. Page scraping, search bots, people with ad blockers, etc. do not count as “hits” for purposes of the Adsense impressions metric. ACP is always going to show significantly higher numbers than adsense will actually serve and pay out for. If you are lucky enough to have someone wanting to directly buy ads from you through IPS that’s great, but even podunk companies have gotten wise that buying a block of impressions without any insight into the demographics of the audience who actually were served and viewed those ads is no longer justifiable. That is, with all else being equal, you have a pretty good example that if you sold 18,000 impressions direct through IPS, it’s likely only roughly 3,800 of those impressions were actually viewed by an actual human looking at a screen. Again, somehow there are still people out there ok with paying for metric and demographic-less ad impressions with no guarantee the bad views have been filtered out of the counter, but here we are.

Any way to temporarily bump the max number of items shown per page from 25 up to like, I dunno, 500?

Last I checked I thought there was a built in option to add code to head too. Thinking it was related to selecting where to put analytics code, but hoping someone else thinks this sounds familiar and knows better.

Sorry to bug one last time - is this still a relevant way of having the ad show up inside a box like a regular post? If I wanted to drop the profile picture and left column and only have a single box containing the ad, could i just use the article itemscope, delete the aside class, and keep only the div class? Thanks @newbie LAC!

Can you do ads after every X posts (i.e ad after every 10th post, so if 20 posts per page is the setting, there would be 2 ads) in your enhanced ads app?

Is this possible with this plugin? that is, given different users may have changed their settings for how many posts show per page, would it be possible to have this simply show an ad after every 10 posts, as opposed to after x posts on a page (or all pages). Also, what does "reverse" mean?

Any chance you’d be willing to share your site url through PM? I’m currently switching to Ezoic but would love to see an example of it in use. Are you using the free service or did you pay for branding removal?

Nothing is really “necessary”. Objectively though, it’s an option for users that many enjoy having, so I think saying it’s not desirable is simply false. All major browsers and OSes now support native dark mode. There’s a reason (hint: has to do with being desirable.) For me, I use it at night if I’m in the rocking chair with my infant. I have an iPhone X so anything that uses true black is very dark which is perfect. I read a lot of reddit (which supports dark natively) because it’s not too bright for the room.

I think rather than IPS doing a night theme, it would be better to add an admin option to designate a light theme and dark theme, and once that's completed, the front end displays a user option for "follow device dark mode setting". I think that approach is more than sufficient. I guess you'd also need to then have the core check for https://drafts.csswg.org/mediaqueries-5/#prefers-color-scheme and select the appropriate theme based on what the admin selects for each. That to me seems a better solution than IPS doing its own dark theme (maybe down the line you could, but what's missing from the suite is the ability to check for prefers-color-scheme and having it just work). Edit: Or I could just read the whole thread and see that @opentype who is much smarter than me already covered this. 🤦‍♂️

Does this require custom code in Invision, or is it all handled in Ezoic?

When you say "2 custom - user defined - lookup table" do you mean you added a new table to your DB to do group lookups for ezoic?

https://caniuse.com/#feat=prefers-color-scheme this is a great solution then since it follows the user device setting. I will also +1 for inclusion in the IPS core as a toggle option for users.

@stoo2000 not to pile on but also wanted to see if you might be open to adding Mailgun support? It has replaced Sparkpost for me given it has a free tier up to 10k emails a month. Thanks!

I just tried out the more accessible page size/zoom tools in ios13. this is at 75% size, which IMO is a huge improvement over the default mobile skin (which while I think is great, my primary complain about has always been that everything is so big). anyone have any idea through css if there is an easy way to essentially make this the default by reducing everything in the phone size css to 75% of its default size?

It’s an assumption that increasing engagement decreases substance. I disagree with that assumption for my own community, but I suppose that is very dependent on each community and the type of content you have to begin with.

Weird flex, but ok. Lots of people also like and enjoy the instant notifications. You do you, but as a forum admin, I’m not sure why you’d not want features that people can selectively enable to increase their engagement with your community.

You are focused on what you do and what works for you. Broader user trends are different. As @opentype noted above, it is true that anecdotally there’s lots of people who actually prefer to not have push notifications enabled, or who maybe prefer email. However, it’s obtuse to not recognize that the broader market has moved to a place where engagement is massively increased with native push notifications. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, snapchat, etc etc have all essentially built their broader advertisement based business model around keeping eyeballs in the app and on the screen to increase advertising metrics. There is no better method to increase eyeball time than native notifications. They’ve already figured this out, shockingly around the same time that traditional forums started their engagement and retention decline. 🧐

I understand why you think that’s a good option, but I really strongly believe it’s not. At least, it’s not something I believe would have a positive vs negative impact on engagement and wouldn’t be worth spending development effort on. The iOS and android ecosystems have evolved around the idea of native notifications. They have notification settings, drawers, home screen views, silencing options, etc. By comparison, iOS hasn’t significantly changed how it handles SMS messages in approximately a decade. Facebook primarily used SMS notifications in 2008ish, prior to smartphones, and it suuuuucked. You could get hammered with a few notifications in a row and they might come from different phone numbers and they were intrusive and annoying. They also ended up having to make it so people could text back vs replying on site because that sort of two way communication is what people expect from SMS. Everything about SMS screams last decade. It’s a dying protocol that shouldn’t even be used for 2FA due to its inherent insecurity. Anything but native notifications is just lipstick on the metaphorical pig, and IMO not worth the time to even think about in 2019.

100% understand where you are coming from. It’s time out of your presumably jammed packed work day for you to write something up and I appreciate it’s likely of no consequence. All I can ask is that you pretty please with icing on top try to make time for it, even despite all of that, because at least then someone of some developer stature has done what webkit/Apple claims they need done right now. If you look at the feedback that has stacked up, it’s actually of fairly poor quality. I’ve seen how the IPS team can lobby for and justify decisions even right here in heated feature debates. If there is any group I trust to put something on that bug tracker that is well written and justified, it’s your team. You never know until you try is the old adage. It may be increasing the odds someone revisits this at Apple with the business team from 0.0001% to 0.0002%, but as someone who desperately wants the feature and thinks the long term health of forum software as a whole requires the feature, I sincerely believe we need to try. All of us.

If you could get your members to use Prowl, you’re miles ahead of where I’m at!

What would the app do? Offer a wrapper for the mobile site? If so, likely to be rejected by app store. Can’t have apps that are essentially adding no functionality to the mobile site (and simply adding push has been grounds to reject apps, so that’s likely not a strategy) Should it be a single app for all IPS communities (essentially IPS tapatalk), or should each admin get a white label app? Some people are strongly against the idea of a one size fits all app and want a custom white label to market their own community. Guess what though, white label apps that duplicate other apps in function and only change the branding are also banned from the store. Would your community members download an app that’s not branded with your site logo and info? Should it work with individual plugins, or not support any third party plugins? People will have opinions on both sides of this, but generally speaking it’s likely it wouldn’t be possible to support plugins or marketplace add-ons without significantly reworking how they all interface to ensure it won’t break the app. Should they increase the licensing costs by 10x to support having dedicated android and iOS software development teams to keep feature parity and deal with customer support and bugs and all the stuff that comes along with being app developers? Unless you are a large enterprise site that can justify custom development of an app for your community that plugs into the IPS api, it’s unlikely you will see any sort of app for iOS for IPS. The technical and practical challenges that have caused this idea to fail for the last decade continue to exist. Progressive web applications are the answer to all of the above problems. There are the existing technical challenges (i.e features an IPS admin would use are only currently supported in android) and the perceived challenges (some including the IPS dev team believe Apple is purposely not including PWA support in WebKit to prevent cannabalizing App Store sales). I’ll say this until I’m blue in the face, but the current landscape that actually exists and can be verified through reading the actual WebKit developer’s statements on the topic of PWAs is that if you want to see further support for PWA features in WebKit (and by extension, iOS), they want people to provide detailed use case examples directly through the bug reports listed above which will aid in prioritizing development resources. The parallel benefit for this community is that if iOS implements additional PWA support, IPS will be able to finalize a strategy for support across all devices, and everyone who wants push notifications will likely get their wish. Sorry if I’m coming across as a bit grumpy on this topic, but for the dozens of threads we get on this topic and that every other community software package has had on this topic, there’s currently to date “ONE” person who has taken the time to follow the process outlined by WebKit to provide feedback on why they should devote development resources to the various PWA features we all want. I’m as guilty as anyone of sitting on this, but at the very least I am hopefully going to redirect people’s efforts from this forum where it’s shouting into an abyss to the webkit bug report tracker where it very well may also be an abyss but there’s a more than 0% chance it may have an impact. Also, @Matt, I’ll reiterate my request that IPS should still make a formal submission through the webkit tracker, even if you think it’s in vain and Apple is blocking PWAs. There’s at least a chance it helps move the needle if it comes from the developers vs the end users.