The Old Man

Hi, if it answers your question, I was able to upgrade from 4.6.3 to 4.6.4 correctly this time via the internal upgrade facility. First time that's worked on 4.6 for me.

All the bugs are still present though, 4.6 should still be in beta testing IMHO.

I still have a locked task coming back to haunt me every time I unlock it from 4.5.4.2 for RSS imports, even though I deleted the actual feed import back in 4.5.4.2!

Uploading 1920x1080 photos into the Gallery, is buggy as hell, a truly horrendous experience. I have plenty of spare RAM available, 40 cores on a 6GB VPS that barely ticks over in terms of load. I'm not uploading straight to S3, and PHP settings and PHP memory all fine. I've been trying to upload 340 photos that 4.6.2 lost on S3 storage and it's taking days, because on 4.6.3 and now still on 4.6.4 it sometimes works, but mostly it fails on the progress bar at 5% when processing them, even if I do just 10 at a time.

I try again and it might work, next batch will fail 3 or 4 times times, then work again. It just suddenly aborts processing them and returns me to the Gallery, with 1 or 2 images having uploaded, which I then have to delete as they are not in the order intended, not that Gallery can sort them correctly anyway. It's agony.

If I try more 20 at a time, I risk more time consuming failures but also I suddenly get dozens of pop up error modals, one for each image I think, and have to abandon the tab:

Honestly, it feels like when you start using it for more than half an hour, barely anything seems to work reliably. I've never known a release like 4.6, aside maybe perhaps the original v4 release, maybe.

I honestly wish BFarber was still at IPS, because he would have been all over this before this unstable release got out of the door.

Hi Daniel,

Yes, actually the CSRF happened when I was using the default IPS theme at the time. I had switched to it to see if the lack of spacing on the follow and promote buttons was limited to my theme or not.

(Taken in Ipad tablet mode)

Re templates, I'm using Supergrid so yes, custom template.

More bugs in 4.6.3...

Pages Articles for some reason are locked by default when using 'copy to pages' feature:

When editing the article, unticking the Locked option and saving, it has no effect, the article is locked. :

However if you use the Article Actions drop down menu's Unlock option, it works 100% and the article becomes properly unlocked:

Here's another Pages article bug but seems intermittent and nothing shows in the Error Log...

Edit an article and save it... A Sorry you don't have permission to do that message shows with:

You only have to use Pages 4.6.3 for a few minutes to experience these bugs, so why they got through beta QA testing I don't understand. QA testing seems to have disappeared.

Removed - my bad this time!

Well, I'm amazed. Came back to my IPS 4.6.3 and noticed the achievements are finally showing!

I had just created a new Pages article database and page to display it, perhaps that's what caused it to sudden display the achievements.

Also despite the AdminCP earlier insisting otherwise in terms of not accepting I'd updated my constants file, the Redis cache is listed as active and working on the Support Dashboard.

Still showing I have a locked RSS Import task though, even though I keep unlocking it and I don't have any RSS imports at the time...

My 4.5 to 4.6 upgrade hassle continues..!

Despite having only 24 registered members on this particular site, and no background task running, its now been 4 days since 4.6 has been saying "Ranks are being recalculated. We'll show your current rank here soon."! What the heck?

Anyone having issues changing their constants.php file to enable Redis caching?

Just tried and it won't accept I've changed the constants file, it keeps telling me to do it, but I'm watching it using the dedicated and passworded Redis connection I set up for it live via Netdata! I edited the existing constants.php first (complete replacement) and now downloaded and uploaded via FTP the generated file, but it still won't have it!

Now discovered 340 images missing from one Gallery category alone, lots more throughout my site. I've set all file storage locations back to my server from S3 but somehow there's 100's of files and folders left marooned on S3. I have plenty of backups, it's just so time consuming.

When I first tried 4.6 as a clean new install, the installer was broken, it kept insisting I change the permissions on the datastore folder to 0777 (yike!), yet when I FTP'd into it I found its because the installer had completely failed to create the datastore folder in the first place! I manually created with default 0755 permissions and the installer let me proceed.

Then My first attempt to sign in to the AdminCP failed, never seen this error before!

Eventually I was able to gain access.

Some very minor bugs still in 4.6.3:

An AdminCP live search for WebP fails to produce any results, yet it's a setting mentioned in the Files > Image Settings page (JPG and WebP Quality).

Search AdminCP live search for the word image and it shows a missing language string for [Gallery] gallery_medium_dims

Latest version working great, thanks Nathan!

I upgraded one of my live community sites from v4.5.4.2 to v4.6.3 yesterday, the first I've done and although the upgrade went smoothly (I downloaded the full zip), afterwards I found it feels like a Release Candidate. 

Of course the full suite is around 18MB or so compressed, so an incredible number of lines of code in there, so bugs 🐜 are unsurprising.

I only have 24 members on this site, despite the background task completing after rebuilding achievements from day 1, it's still reporting:

Ranks are being recalculated. We'll show your current rank here soon.

I had an issue in 4.5.4.2 with RSS feed import task hanging and it was attributed to a minor issue with the feed but one that would be better handled in 4.6. After deleting all feed imports, I still had the same issue, so after upgrading to to 4.6.3 I noticed despite having no RSS imports configured, the RSS Import task is still locking. May have to submit another ticket for that one.

The AWS S3 transfer facility is also still a little unreliable, I lost a lot of cover images (2 whole categories full), all Forum Grid images, Gallery and Pages images moving from one S3 UK bucket to another UK bucket using 4.6.3.

What still really bugs me about the S3 facility at basic level is that it bucks the trend (at least by Wordpress plugin standards) by moving your actual original images from localhost to S3, instead of offering to create copies which is much safer. If it goes wrong and it does, you lose your original images. So I was hoping that this had been improved by 4.6. Also the S3 file logs are still pretty vague too, they don't even have the time only a date, let alone the anything that can help identify the cause of transfer failure issue, plus multiple S3 buckets are still called by the same name.

Thanks Nathan. I rechecked my server and it seems its enabled for GD2 only. I have a CPanel and CentOS 7 based server and apparently need to recompile Imagick with the WebP extension and latest version of libwebp. I had Imagick 7 and WebP support before my recent container move last week but also Imagick 6 kept reinstalling itself and taking over.

Updated today:

How to enable the webp image format for use with ImageMagick on cPanel

7 hours ago, asigno said:

Thanks, I was hoping for an automated method which would also update all the links in the forum.

AFAIK they've been a little vague about how support for WebP images works in 4.6.
A search for WebP in the AdminCP live search brings up no results. The quality setting is mentioned in Image Settings.

My server has support for WebP but if I go to upload a Logo in the theme settings it doesn't mention WebP at all, just gif, jpeg, jpe, jpg, png. Same if I go to upload a profile cover photo.

If I try uploading a WebP image, I get a message saying "Allowed file extensions are: gif, jpeg, jpe, jpg, png", even though I have Allowed File Types set to the default of 'All Files', Allowed File Extensions set to 'No Restriction', ImageMagick and GD2 installed with their PHP extensions.

I was interested to see how this would work because despite being around for a decade or so, it's only now that modern browsers support WebP, only Safari on MacOS has some remaining caveats. Using a picture html element is recommended to provide fallback PNG/JPEG etc images, but it gets tricky with background element images.

You might be better with an on-the-fly type service like Cloudinary or Cloudflare's offering at the moment, they have a free tier.

Based on https://squoosh.app you could try their CLI tool to batch convert a folder...

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh/tree/dev/cli

Or API:

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/squoosh

Or Google's own CLI...

https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/download

On 6/30/2021 at 9:09 PM, Chris Anderson said:

Based on@Stuart Silvestercomment it appears the issue was server related and not due to the new update.  It appears that this particular release will require special attention with our sever configurations which isn't a bad thing for the community to know as well as with the advisability of testing out new releases on a non production instance and knowing how to backup and restore. 

TBH I'm not jumping to conclusions either way, my issue may also be server related as I did recently move to a new container, but the Support Dashboard is supposed to flag any server issues like folder permissions, missing PHP or Apache modules and extensions etc. The Dashboard giveth me a clean bill of health.

1 hour ago, Chris Anderson said:

As much as we all wish that IPS releases bug free code they consistently show they they are not up to the task.  Just like the rest of the software developers out there...

If anyone chooses to upgrade their site within hours of a new release they are likely to encounter problems and it will take time for IPS to investigate and fix.

If you want to minimize the potential for downtime, delay upgrading to allow for "all" issues to be discovered and addressed on people's test installs before updating your production site.

I think one issue is that when they release a bug fix for a new version but also mention a security fix (whilst not stating if it applies to just 4.6 or not), even more people will upgrade quicker, which is a pain for the Marketplace developers and designers because they are then under even more pressure to get their compatibility updates out. People were doing the old (when you going to realise a 4.6 compatible version of my plugin?) just days after the developer tools were released. 

I've personally come to dread big IPS upgrades because updating a local dev machine is scary because you don't know if it's going to work. Mixed and unclear advice, no documentation on doing so etc don't help reassure.
 

Thanks @Stuart Silvester 🙂

I wondered that but if it was one of those things, wouldn't the Support Dashboard flag it up? *I couldn't find the old System Checker tool in this version but I've just lost a filling and I'm grizzly!

Nothing showed in my mysql logs, error log or access log.

I did a full file download and it completed the install perfectly again.

* Note to self, the whole Dashboard is the system checker!

@Karina HarumiThere's nothing wrong in coming to the community support forums to ask if anyone else is having similar problems to you especially after putting in a ticket. 😉

For what's it's worth, I tried updating a brand new fresh install (still in offline mode with cron configured) of 4.6.1 to 4.6.2 yesterday and it just wouldn't have it. It stalled every time at the extraction stage after downloading the updated files, despite the Support Dashboard saying that there were no issues. 
 

V4.6.1 to 4.6.2

I did a full download from the Client Centre in the end, which worked fine.

Just now I tried it again to update from 4.6.2 to 4.6.3 and exactly the same...

V4.6.2 to V4.6.3

So I'll do a full install again to get past it. (Edit: it worked again)

If you plan to upgrade your community, seriously do yourself, your community and IPS Support a favour, turn off your community and make at least 1 complete file backup of your IPS folders and files, and at least 1 full database backup first before upgrading!

On 6/25/2021 at 5:52 PM, The Old Man said:

I wish we could edit Marketplace reviews, this plugin is far from being simple.

Hi,

I just read my earlier comment and realised that this could be completely taken the wrong way. What I meant was in my review I'd described this as a simple plugin which didn't do it justice. There's now far more going on under the hood than at the time of my review (of the first release), it's also now an app, and because I can't edit my review, despite not being to give it more than the existing 5 stars, I can't add that it's even better now than it was with the new functionality!

Shame we can't edit Marketplace reviews or add a review of the current version.

15 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Install the plugin I sent to you via PM please

All done and responded, thanks!

15 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said:

I have it chugging away on 2 sites.

Great, thanks for letting me know.

Meanwhile the other features are working fine for me too.

Hi there Nathan, sorry for the slow reply. No I couldn't get it to work (it refused to accept the api key is valid), but then I got sidetracked by an unexpected server move. Still finishing up on that but I will definitely take you up on the offer once I'm sorted if you do want to run some tests. I could also try it on a brand new 4.6 install I had just installed before getting sidetracked. Have you had the AIPDB working on your live site/s yourself?

Re the 2 options you mentioned, I don't feel they are particularly needed from my own personal perspective, for the reasons you mentioned. Storing spam instead blocking it, no thank you! Checking a valid email address, I don't think it's worthwhile, I think many spammers probably use temporary 'burner' addresses and hacked servers that may very well mean addresses are valid when an email is sent but it doesn't mean much. 
 

BTW, another positive of this plugin; my unexpected VPS container move resulted in the loss of domain filtering in WHM's email settings. No such problem there with your plugin, everything is still snug is my IPS database!

I wish we could edit Marketplace reviews, this plugin is far from being simple.

Thanks for the recent update! 

Hi Nathan,

Not at all urgent but have you had any issues with using the api key for abuseipdb?

I'm using v1.3.1 keep getting a message saying my key is invalid. It's definitely correct, I've created new replacement keys but always get the same message.

Regards

Graham

Hi

Just a thought... Have you got your SSL/TLS encryption mode in Cloudflare on Full Strict? If so try it on Full (not Full Strict).

That fixed it, thanks Nathan. Love the new options.

Just updated to v1.3.0. Looks great, love the new options.

Oops, sorry to be a numpty, but what am I missing? I enabled the SFS option, read the info via the useful help links and just left the settings at default, but when I try to save the form it always says:

Something went wrong. Check the values provided on the marked tabs and try again.

Thanks Matt. Yes, me too!

I've often thought it's a shame there isn't just one clear browser setting or maybe site you can set and forget once and for all either to opt in or out of cookies, and that's it. Every reputable browser and site would honour your choice all from one convenient place. No more annoying pop ups on every site you visit.

Thanks both.

I know that the IPS wording is different to the default wording and your privacy policy is clear you share data with third parties and advertisers, but I think the current Cookie options could be improved for improved compliance with GDPR. Shouldn't there be a clearer choice making it easier to change consent and/or opt out when first visiting, and so that third party trackers can be removed by providing a Reject button? 

I'm personally glad there is no horrible, obstructive, confusing Privacy Popup supplied with IPS4, you know, the type that has unnecessarily ruined the internet and appears in many cases to have been abused my advertisers and sites to make it difficult or vague to opt out.

When you come across a site with a categorised cookie control that has everything disabled aside from necessary cookies, giving you the choice to opt in and not out, it's a real confidence booster in that site.

Interesting article I was reading yesterday on the BBC News about efforts to sort out the cookie consent mess:

Privacy group targets website 'cookie terror'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57306802
 

Thanks for the response IPS!