lordi

would be great if an update comes for 4.6

Yes, we are aiming for a release every single month which will bring a mix of new features and bug fixes.

Just wanted to follow up on this one. We have been working to find better ways to provide information to you regarding items which may not yet be solves, but are awaiting being solved. When there are items such as this, you will now see prefixes are added to the topic to state they are known issues, or they are fixed in a future release.
You can see an example of this here, as we have now started using them

This is in addition to other items we have for use internally to follow up on items. So we can internally add to our own records to follow up on an issue, and come back to keep you guys updated when we can. 🙂 
 

It's unfortunatly not compatible with 4.6.
It requires a small file change to make it 4.6 compatible, but requires a lot of work to follow the new MP guidelines and I'm really lacking time for this.

As Ballmer would say:

It is one of the reason several of your competitors were not options for us, they are so so valuable to a platform even if a customer doesnt buy an addon, its the perception that they can and there is a diverse ecosystem of addons as options.
Nearly all big platforms over the last decade have been powered by very strong developers adding value. iOS, Android, forum competitors all have got where they are because of developers. Windows Phone died because of the lack of developers. Keeping them onboard and happy is a huge deal, it wont necessarily affect huge enterprise customers but it has a big effect on your long tail customers.

Speaking of that: There seem so be another change, causing entry-level cloud customers to loose the ability to even install resources which are not from the Marketplace. From a developer’s perspective, that makes offering products outside of the Marketplace even less appealing. 

I am not sure where to start with all this. I cant believe you guys did all this along with a site redesign at the same time and no notice period, I am speechless!
I cant believe I will be losing email support while you increase the price at the same time. I paid for priority support and now that's an insane price per year for what is email support. It takes serious cahoonas to both increase the price and cripple email support at the same time. Email support pricing should be far far more reasonable, I honestly thought $1250 was a mistake when I saw the screenshot above, I could understand having an email support pricing tier and then a $1250 priority support tier but also renewals shouldnt be going up while we lose proper email support.
Then if we dont pay for support we cant use the market place and cant even save our prior purchases so if we need to reinstall an addon we are out of luck.
We are lucky, we can afford the support increase price wise but one of the HUGE reasons I liked IPB was the email support, it can be very curt at times but I valued it and if you had only increased the price and not removed email support I would have dealt with it as it has been a decade.
I am strongly considering renewing our Xenforo license to have a play and test viability after this.
Initial feedback:
Build the knowledge base publicly first before removing support
I understand the desire to have self support with a knowledge base, its a good thing for everyone if it gets populated but you should have been doing this months ago building the knowledge base publicly before doing any changes, that way you can point to the option and say its there and useful. Get a common ticket theme in, create a KB article then have the subject field for support request do a search as you type pointing you to articles that sounds similar before submitting the email request.
We need a reported/acknowledged bugs area
This needs to be along with the knowledge base really, a bug tracker would have cut your support requests because people would be able to see if it has been reported before, I know the support forum kinda does that but its not a bug tracker and its not clear if its an active bug with a fix pending or release or even workaround.
When I hit an issue on other software I always check to see if it has been reported first on bug trackers but because of the strange mantra of open a ticket you guys have we are blind to upcoming fixes usually until release, Jordon has at least been mentioning them but its still not a proper solution.
Both things above should have been done before these policy changes with support
That way your customers would have become familiar with them and you could have iterated through any issues with them before removing email support and you could actually see if this type of support works well before causing big issues for your customers, it seems so rushed.
You guys made the whole "tickets are similar" problem yourselves with the submit a ticket mantra that is here, you should have been correcting that before making sweeping changes to support. You have entered self support mantra with none of the real tools used by others to help aid people do this. You may have plans for these tools but you literally have not shown them to us which is crazy if they exist. Right now we have a sole forum for support, I have no idea why you have rushed this through.
I have more to say but I thought I would shoot out first.
Please get the knowledge base live and a bug tracker live asap to at least help and to be honest delay the email support changes past the renewal/January deadline until this mess is sorted and people are comfortable, this should be a much much slower transition.
 
Also contributors/devs need a discount/special license to prevent the massive bleed that will happen.
Its crazy you dont have a way of reducing their burden and its a major issue to the viability of the market place and IPB. Their are fewer addons here than other competitors and it will only get worse with dev's having to pay large amounts to renew AND customers of devs having to pay to even buy their addons or even install them. This is crazy crazy crazy and so hostile to developers. Its one of the main reasons no one wants a certain v5 of software out there, regularly people complain about the lack of addons.
You could get them to apply with the proviso the license isnt used to sell addons not on the marketplace and not run a full site on. Aka they can have a public site showcasing with the options etc and even getting support there but it cant be a way for a serious site that has nothing to do with the developer to get a cheap license. Hell they could apply after they have published an addon and the large discount applies to the renewals side of it.
I am really disappointed some of the best developers here are now looking at possibly removing addons to reduce their burden rather than developing for those addons and being able to test on those addons, its so opposite and harmful because of the increased costs.
 
And there was me thinking things had improved a lot when @Jordan Miller with communications and community activity, I actually could see things improving a lot with better engagement with end customers then this whole chaos happens.

I agree and when looking at different platforms for whatever, I always look at third party apps and integrations for expansion. A healthy 3rd party marketplace tells a story of a healthy platform in my opinion. 

There are still "online visitors" instead of "page impressions" in the Frequently Asked Questions section https://invisioncommunity.com/buy 
I hoped there would be better condition for niche communities and/or multiple licenses holders. E.g. self-hosted licenses entirely without support. Or affordable monthly cloud price. 

 

I knew the prices would rise with this site relaunch, but I expected more a generous correction for inflation for new orders (not renewals). But the changes are far from slight. And for people like me who have many licenses, it actually threatens my entire business, because the price change is multiplied by the number of licenses. And the new terms make it all even worse. For my oldest license, I had an upcoming renewal of $85 as the last payment in this financial year. Now that jumped to $310—well over 300%! Yes, it’s for 12 months, but I still need to pay it NOW without having earned this money through the site or even planned for it. And even if would manage with this one site, I certainly can’t manage it for 5 self-hosted licenses and their upcoming renewals. 
And it didn’t had to be this way. There is the established system of grandfathering existing prices while only charging more for new customers for example. Or it could be a slow transition that is announced a year or two in advance, so we could have prepared for it someone. Dropping these drastic price and terms changes on us like a bomb, effective and possibly charged immediately, was a bad move. 
 
 

still waiting?

Hi and welcome to our new series of updates for our contributors.
We'll highlight the most common mistakes, ways to resolve them and also generic improvement suggestions once a month here:)
 
As first, I want to apologies that some files took really long to get approved, but we really expected that new submissions and upgrades would have a better quality, but unfortunately >60% of the submissions ( 90% in the first week) were still not following the new marketplace guidelines, which resulted in a devils circle.
 
Let's recap the last months issues resulting in rejections🙂
Core Database changes. Version details not changed. Usage of existing IPS error codes in your own code. Usage of \IPS\ROOT_PATH in your code.
See 4.5 dev changes Upgrade steps trying to process too many data.
Please try to process data from huge tables in batches instead of iterating over such a big datasource in one step.  
We're also seeing a huge trend in extra queries and extra joins, which are unnecessary most of the time, please don't be lazy and try to use your common sense and ask yourself what's the preferred solution in this case? A global join each time the object is initialized?  A second query when the object is initialized? Lazy load the data when needed?
Last but not least, please avoid altering the Groups database table! While we allowed this in the past,  we see a big trend that many developers already use own tables and logic for this too, which works really great. Because of this we'll start to be more strict here, so starting tomorrow any new submissions will have to follow this rule too! 

The version for 4.5 was finally finished and is being tested right now. 

I have given up. I have tried different ways to bypass csrf check for one user. But any attempt failed. I can successfully login as Crawler in browser however the crawler itself fails. The account is blocked after three failed attempts and there are no logs in IPS of what is wrong with the login. Without logs in IPS and any logs from AdSense it is like pocking in the dark. Sorry!

I've put together a plugin which handles this in a different location, making it hookable - have sent a new copy of it to @Mopar1973Man to try it out. If anyone would like a copy then please PM me directly.
I won't be releasing it to the MarketPlace, as it does circumvent the security which IPS has built in to the product (albeit for only one configured account) - all I ask is you chuck me a beer 😉

I've done a "dirty" hack to allow a crawler to login into my community. Attention: This changes core login functionality for one user and will be overwritten when you update:
Create a user with name "Crawler" and give him access to the areas the crawler should have access to. Open file system/Login/Login.php and edit a method authenticate(): public function authenticate( \IPS\Login\Handler $onlyCheck = NULL ) { try { if ( isset( \IPS\Request::i()->_processLogin ) ) { // Allow access for the AdSense bot if (\IPS\Request::i()->auth != 'Crawler') { \IPS\Session::i()->csrfCheck(); } ..... }  
Go to your Adsense account and add credentials:

Be aware of the additional field _processLogin to be added to login credentials. Again, it works, but this is a very dirty solution that works till next update. I hope that IPS can add a setting so that we can exclude bot user from checking csrf in the future, so that we do not need so dirty hacks.

reCAPTCHA3 was only released a couple weeks ago. It is indeed something we will look into closer, although I can't promise any specific version target for inclusion.

You can use the live meta tag editor to do this. From the AdminCP visit System > Site Promotion > Search Engine Optimization > Meta Tags (tab)

I'm seeing a lot of crawler errors as well, in relation to the pages that require a login.  Features like /discover/unread and private forums mostly. 
Anyway, I don't want crawlers accessing our data behind logins, so, it looks like I need a directive to do this.  Here's what Google says about it  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?visit_id=636773196575520711-1843243888&rd=1:
"You should not use robots.txt as a means to hide your web pages from Google Search results. This is because, if other pages point to your page with descriptive text, your page could still be indexed without visiting the page. If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection or a noindex directive."
I then click on the noindex directive and get this page:  https://developers.google.com/search/reference/robots_meta_tag
It looks like the best way to hide pages is through a HTTP noindex directive.  Do we have more information on how to add this 'noindex directive' to the areas we want to hide from crawlers?
PS: I already have these pages in my robots.txt file, but, it seems Google is showing them anyway.
 

Response...
So we are basically without the ability to have Google Adsense Bots login to IPS software. 

As I mentioned previously, there seems to be a CSRF token in the login form.  This would also need to be sent as login parameter, but this kind of tokens have a variable value.  So, this is likely to make automated login impossible (but it would be nice if somebody from IPS could clarify this).

Month passed out!

Today i get a same Crawler issues.

I set
index.php?app=core&module=global&section=login&do=process
as login url

and ips_username ips_passowrd as parameters

auth still doesent work, "test login" in adsense ui showing blank page

please, provide us your support, we wait for it a whole month

It would help if the instructions here identified login page, method and parameters concept.

You can already give Adsense login credentials for your forum to account for forums that can't be accessed by a guest.

4.0 will also allow you to restrict where ads show, which can be used to disable ads in non-guest forums if you prefer.

The hook is still current, it adds a map to users profiles.

It should extend based on the custom markers, send me a link to you map and I'll have a look.

Hopefully not too long, I'm real busy at the moment though.