The Old Man

5 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

I'd like to challenge you to explore that: why not write something out every time you feel compelled to use a sad reaction?

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for your thoughts. Not having a go, but to be honest, personally I don't really want or expect to be challenged! To be fair, I've already answered this in previous responses and others have too. I don't feel that you have really answered some of my points that I clarified. 

Funnily enough, your stance on not backtracking isn't exactly coming across as being open to flexibility when it comes to the changes you're making to this community and the response did actually make me want to reach for a confused reaction! If ever there was a reason to use it, I feel it's representative of my reaction in response to your post. 😊

We seem to be going backwards with this community, against a backdrop of pandemic's emotional and financial turmoil going on, ideally we need to either be moving forwards or finding some stability, especially as we're now practically mourning the unexpected departure of such a knowledgeable, respected, prolific and supportive member of the IPS team without a chance to wish him well. I know that people come and go but still, IMHO he's left such a massive void. I'm not wanting to draw conclusions and there's a lot of talent and knowledge within the IPS company, but just this morning I read that IPS is dropping the facility to copy custom Pages blocks in 4.6 because it's overly complicated; surely copying and duplicating blocks is a basic facility for any modern page builder or CMS software. I'd actually be embarrassed as a CEO if my CMS couldn't do this in 2021.

Also, apologies as I'm in my early fifties and I'm not firing on all thrusters these days, but I just don't understand the cat reaction! What does it actually mean or reference, if it wasn't solely an April Fool's day inspired joke to make us chuckle, which it did me? I mean I've used it for fun which I thought it was for, and I'm not against it, but going back to your challenge, why do feel that adding a cat is any different or more acceptable than that of a saddened/empathy reaction in that it should require a follow up post/comment?

I feel that there's perhaps other similar things going on at the moment. I mean I have absolutely no idea what this Hump Day thing is all about, or FBF topic prefixes or whatever that is. We keep getting told that this a professional forum community, one that is representative of commercial products, which obviously it is, but where do cats and these bizarre references come into the equation? It's not really feeling inclusive, it's feeling more exclusive, to those hip enough, or those who have the time to read every topic or those in the know.

I kind of feel that we are also somehow almost going backwards in terms of new feature announcements being vaguely revealed within these obscure topics, where as for years they've been properly revealed and well demonstrated in the corporate blog. When people started referring to a new feature called Awards, I then had to search for the subtle announcement.

Anyway, thanks for reading.

Wow, that's a shame. Thanks though for the quick response and clarification.

Hi,

Can anyone else with Pages please confirm in 4.5.4.2, that if you copy an existing custom block from within the AdminCP, that it creates a copy with only the first tab 'Details', but the second tab 'Content' is always empty?

Many thanks!

On 4/10/2021 at 5:16 PM, Morrigan said:

I don't miss the confused reaction but I do miss the sad reaction. We are living in a tumultuous time right now with a global pandemic, and more. You don't always have the words to express that you are feeling for that person's difficult time and seeing a bunch of empty "I'm so sorry"'s in a thread I think is just as damning as no one replying at all to someone's rough time. The sad reaction gave people a means to offer support, show that they read the post without replying with an empty platitude that means even less than a supportive reaction.

As ever, Morrigan you are spot on. This is what I was rather clumsily attempting to get across.

I could live without the confused reaction here, but the saddened reaction is missed. Being saddened to read a piece of content is not simply about being negative or giving a negative impression of a community, it's about being emphatic too, sometimes showing solidarity, and I think being supportive of fellow members in a 'community' is just as important as 'liking' what they say.

That said, my earlier pizza instead of cat observation got no likes, or cats, so clearly I know very little. You know, I could really eat a good pizza right now. Even though it's 9am.

@christopher-w

Hi Chris,

I didn't realise those animated GIFs didn't have ALT attributes.

I don't know how useful it will be but there CSS accessibility improvements being more supported in browsers that may help to compliment the granular controls. 
 

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion

Real early draft, this one...

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-data

You may even be able to create a copy of your current theme, say "My-Theme (less clutter)", and make use of the CSS to display: block certain content, more of a sledgehammer approach I know. 

Regards

2 hours ago, Chris Anderson said:

I respect your desire for positivity, but sometimes a comment warrants a less than positive response.  There should be some quick and easy way to express: "I respectfully disagree" or "Please for the love of pizza, no!" (or some other way of expressing lack of agreement or support) for a particular comment or feature suggestion.

You had me at pizza but the other expression is almost as good. In fact, thinking about it, I may start a new dialogue (I promise not to) about why Jordan didn't add a pizza reaction instead of a cat. I mean it cures everything, right? Negativity, sadness, leprosy, people who still say Message Board, senior men's problems, people who still call it IPB and so the list goes on.

🍕

4 hours ago, Linux-Is-Best said:

Come, now. We're much more civilized. It should be live streamed. 😂

 

LOL! Thank you. 😀

Thanks everyone for their responses and thoughts either way. 😊

11 hours ago, CoffeeCake said:

Contextual responses are important, and "I agree with everything you said" is a shortcut that works and is largely free of malicious intent (it's hard to "I agree with you" in a way that is offensive to the person authoring the remark), however the ability to react negatively to content without stating why in a medium that encourages exchange is at odds with the platform in some use cases.

I think it's great that IPS has the easy, built in ability to define reactions for each and every install and that administrators are able to sort out what works best for their individual communities. I also think that for some communities, like this meta one, it's important that the balance of opinions, the dissenting expressions and thoughts, and that the less than positive reactions to content be fleshed out with words and quotations over a wordless reaction. That 4 people were confused about a post doesn't help the author of that post (or the people working on this platform) understand what was confusing, nor provide context to clarify.

By removing shortcuts that add little value (in this case, negative reactions), you need to express those things verbosely, and for many communities (and for this community), I think that's a better thing than the alternative.

If you disagree with me, you're encouraged to reply how and why and we move the conversation forward.

Thanks for the response and your thoughts... I actually never said anything about negative reactions in terms of actual -1 scoring, I hate negativity as anyone who knows me personally would tell, I battled it in a real world team as a team leader and manager for years. I'm also all for company loyalty but proud not be a 'Company Yesman Jellyfish' for that matter.

12 hours ago, CoffeeCake said:

I think it's great that IPS has the easy, built in ability to define reactions for each and every install and that administrators are able to sort out what works best for their individual communities.

Absolutely, me too. I disabled the dislike -1 button on my own community for a few reasons, but mostly because I think deducting reputation points is not worthwhile and it can misfire when it comes to impacting member's reputation in their their profiles. However in my community, you are free to quickly express sadness at someone being ill or having lost their job, or express confusion (we renamed it bewildered for fun solely because I think it's such a great word!). We have members who are not great or are learning with computers, if they don't get something first time they can freely say their confused and ask for clarification. They can you these other reactions and they don't add or subtract a point, they're just neutral, they don't detract from anything. Members are free to add a follow up post, or not, it's completely up to them.

If you only allow one sided opinion to be expressed you're potentially on the path of manipulating your community in my book. How long until the penny drops in the minds of your community, or you start hiding and at the extreme begin deleting posts that don't conform with the management way of thinking. I honestly think, and again it's just my take, you can give people a choice of reactions without introducing negativity, just use positive and neutral reactions and back it up with a fair and reasonable set of community guidelines.

We don't always get it right, but I'd say is that my community is considered by many long term members to be a haven, it's almost 20 years old but it didn't start out that way. We used to allow all reasonable, work friendly and legal topics of conversation but politics and religion (yes, those 2 subjects that have been destroying civilisations for millennia) were an absolute nightmare. People just can't seem to behave themselves and give a respectful opinion. This was long before reactions came along. It was like the toxic vitriol you see every day on social media, that even from the normally respectable of people can leave you feeling dirty after 30 minutes of exposure, and heading for a cleansing hot shower. The best thing we ever did was remove those 2 topics except in the context of that shown in a particular TV series our community was originally about and we explained why. We now have 4 members of staff including myself and we've not moderated anything for maybe 16 years or so, except for the random human spammer or the occasional troll. Reactions came along and my members love them as much as they prefer old fashioned animated emoticons over emoji and giphys.

There is no negativity, it's never hurt my community and people can say if they don't agree with something we're talking about, either by a quick reaction and or a reply. It's about striking a balance where conversation and viewpoints are appreciated, even if people have a different view than your own. 

11 hours ago, Matt said:

We call him Jordan, but that's also fine. His reasoning, which I agree with is that we'd prefer positive sentiment.

Lol. Yes don't we all! So it's a yes then, it's confirmation of what I was concerned about; a not so subtle coercion! I knew they were all out to get me.

Seriously though having a sad or confused graphic doesn't mean that people can't express disagreement with a particular corporate stance or comment, or that members in your community here should be prevented from quickly showing empathy in they're a bit are worried about you, because you are struggling with COVID in an off-topic part of the community that's for member to member chat.

10 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

My logic for removing the "sad" and "confused" reactions was two-fold. For one, they were extremely underutilized according to the reports.

Thanks Jordan, I appreciate your reply as well. My personal take on that first point is that it reminds me of the old saying, "Statistics, statistics and damn statistics"; incidentally I do like all you can eat stats and analysis myself! There's two ways of looking at your report. Yes, one is that those 2 reactions may be under-utilised compared to Likes and Laughs. The other way to look and interpret it is that it's showing you that you're generally or even more strongly so doing something right, because the reaction to your websites content is mostly positive and often light hearted and good natured. Isn't that what Matt said he prefers? By removing the less used reactions simply for the sake of their usage, you've kind of shot yourself in the foot, because now you're effectively no longer seeing as true, reflective and clear snapshot of your community.

10 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

More importantly (imo), if someone feels confused or sad, we want to encourage you guys to write out a response. Those are more fragile emotions, so I felt, and still feel, that if someone is sad or confused about something, that it's important they take the time to respond why they feel that way. If they're confused, it gives them an opportunity to seek clarification from someone in a reply. And if they are sad, it allows them the freedom to explain why.

I can understand that, it being a corporate site, but please consider too that not everyone feels comfortable having to justify themselves over every little thing, by and large. Sometimes people simply don't have the time or confidence to do so or plan to come back later. Sometimes a quick sad reaction to some news is enough to show support or solidarity. Sometimes people are new to a community and aren't quite ready to jump in yet. Your stance could equally be, however unintentionally or with the best intentions, interpreted as sending a message; that only the most vocal of people's opinions count, are welcome, are as important, interesting or deemed valid.

10 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

Most platforms stopped offering a "dislike" option because it causes unnecessary conflict. I can attest to this personally on my own community. A few members were using it non-stop to essentially start fights - especially if their posting was restricted (they can still use reactions as a form of communication). We removed the option to "dislike" replies and it created a friendlier environment. 

Yes, as above. I've also found positive and neutral scoring reactions work best.

10 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

Ultimately, I am aiming for our community to feel more high vibe.

That's cool but it's about striking a middle ground. It's not about allowing or risking dissent in the ranks.

In the spirit of *maintaining my upbeatness and positivity, thanks for not removing the 😔 😩 or 😡!

Hey, this is a feedback forum, where IPS asks for feedback, and so I gave it. To those supportive, thank you, to those reacting to my post by calling me a pussy, cat or whatever the cat emoji actually now means now that April Fools Day has gone, that's fine, you 😻!

4 hours ago, Linux-Is-Best said:

I agree removing any negative reactions was a positive change. There is a reason why most social media sites do not use them. When available, they're abused, and often.  Beyond that point, can we focus on something else?  I feel like this thread was made to complain for the sake of complaining (in my opinion). And no, it is not lost on me that complaining about someone's complaining is too ironic.

Again, I never said anything about restoring negative reactions. You're so wrong about why I created this feedback topic, in a feedback forum, that's always been for feedback, like from customers. Of all the cheek, right? I should be flogged. Publicly, in the village square and my IPS licences torn up in front of my face, friends and family. But wait, you're being negative, we don't do that hear, I'll report you good!

Moving on...

* Me, maintaining my positivity and upbeatness!

Still positive, don't worry I got this!

Here's some of the books I personally use to achieve my positive zen, without falling down a negative shame spiral...

Available from all good bookstores near you... or Amazon, they're positive folks...

Sent this to a few people at Christmas, highly recommended...

Next, a personal favourite...

But really I owe it all to...

The +1 button was a great idea but please return or improve the number of reactions here at the IPS Community forum. It's feels to me IMHO almost like we're being stifled by some dark, manipulative branding and marketing PR department or something. Reactions allowing the ability to show you you're saddened, disagree or are confused about something and help provide a balance of opinion, freedom of expression and thought.

Thanks for reading.

SVGs are definitely great for logos and non-complex images, they scale nicely being vector images although they can add a lot of bloat to a page but fortunately they're cachable. Something that came to mind, I'm not sure what if any protection is in place within IPS for non-IPS provided/third party uploaded SVGs. You need to be careful and make sure that they’re sanitized to stop SVG/XML vulnerabilities affecting your site.

There's a good library available here that can help to avoid opening up security holes by allowing uploads of unsanitised files, it's used by some highly rated SVG Wordpress plugins:

https://github.com/darylldoyle/svg-sanitizer

Just something to be mindful of. 🙂

Thanks @Nathan Explosion just installed. That's what I'm talking about!

I get this particular PITA spamming me from the Contact Form about 4 times a week, every week for months now.
His IP may change, but the email address never does.

eric.jones.z.mail@gmail.com

Honestly it drives me nuts that I can't simply block him by adding his email address to the existing IPS AdminCP email blacklist facility. A quick check of that list by the contact form would sort it.

I can't flag his emails as spam in my mail client, because then I'd be reporting my owner server and shooting myself in the foot in terms of anti spam blacklists (because the email is sent via my server), such is the nature of contact form spam. I increased the strength of the Google Recapcha in their settings but no joy. 
 

I can't use the spam filters in CPanel because the form sends the external message, he doesn't spam via a traditional mail client.

The From field sent by IPS is my sites email address, not the email addresses of the spammer, which may be RFC compliant in doing so but doesn't help.

I set up DKIM, SPF and DMARC correctly but that actually works against me, because Spam Assassin is rating my server and reduces the spam score.

Subject: A user sent a message via the contact form
From: "Eric Jones" <my sites email address>
X-Spam-Status: No, score=4.3
X-Spam-Score: 43
X-Spam-Bar: ++++
X-Ham-Report: Spam detection software, running on the system "vpsxxx.myserver.com",
 has NOT identified this incoming email as spam.  The original
 message has been attached to this so you can view it or label
 similar future email.  If you have any questions, see
 root\@localhost for details.
 Content preview:  A user has sent a message using the Contact Us form. ----
   Eric Jones ( eric.jones.z.mail@gmail.com ) said: 
 Content analysis details:   (4.3 points, 5.0 required)
  pts rule name              description
 ---- ---------------------- --------------------------------------------------
 -0.0 SPF_PASS               SPF: sender matches SPF record
  0.0 HTML_MESSAGE           BODY: HTML included in message
 -0.1 DKIM_VALID             Message has at least one valid DKIM or DK signature
  0.1 DKIM_SIGNED            Message has a DKIM or DK signature, not necessarily
                             valid
 -0.1 DKIM_VALID_EF          Message has a valid DKIM or DK signature from
                             envelope-from domain
 -0.1 DKIM_VALID_AU          Message has a valid DKIM or DK signature from
                             author's domain
  2.0 PYZOR_CHECK            Listed in Pyzor
                             (https://pyzor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)
  2.5 FREEMAIL_FORGED_REPLYTO Freemail in Reply-To, but not From
  0.0 TO_EQ_FM_DIRECT_MX     To == From and direct-to-MX
X-Spam-Flag: NO
X-From-Rewrite: unmodified, no actual sender determined from check mail permissions

My email goes through Sparkpost, so technically I'm sending the spam (from my server and it has my email address in the From field) which puts me at risk from their policies.

I think that simply manually blacklisting an email address in AdminCP is worthwhile, doesn't have any negative aspects in terms of legitimate users being able to get through. It won't block the first email but at least we could do something about it.

Gallery fixes? Hopefully those super devs will be able to fix sorting images so they can be display in chronological order. 😄

Thanks for finally getting around to this, I never thought it would happen after asking for gamification for years. I think the possibilities are almost endless especially if devs can add their own extensions as well.

Can I ask about about the badges appearance, will they be based or optionally based on Font Awesome codes? FA codes especially those in FA5 make for some great looking rewards. Perhaps an option to upload PNG/SVG's too?

Secondly, will there be an option to award special one off badges/trophies to members?

Final question for now, will there be a few options where to display them besides the obviously in user profiles e.g. say, like a trophy cabinet style page, small badges next to or in-line below posts, perhaps when you hover over one it could perhaps rise up with a title text?

Don't forget some achievement widget options for them too! 😀

Great thanks Matt. 🙂

Please can you add the option to receive the existing digest format emails (daily, weekly etc) when following a member? 

At the moment they are only available for topic followed content. It would save on large numbers of separate notifications when following very active members or following lots of members, be more convenient to read and scan through and also potentially reduce some lag for very large communities when sending out large numbers of separate emails.

Many thanks.

This new support system sucks, why do you have keep fixing something that wasn't broken to begin with? 

We had a perfectly good ticket system that allowed us to keep track of our ticket history and it was clearly organised per licensed community site, but you suddenly abandoned it and transferred our data to Zendesk without requesting our consent or with any form of consultation.

Now you've dumped Zendesk because you prefer 20th century email format correspondence, and we have this disorganised mess, with tickets lost in an Inbox myriad of emails. Have Zendesk still got our contact info and details?

It doesn't even work properly. I recently used it for the first time and it was good to see I could upload a short mp4 screen recording of my issue I was experiencing that Support couldn't replicate. However after attaching the mp4, typing my reply in that tiny cramped box, it refused to send the message until I removed the video attachment.
Why let me upload a video clip in the first place if it's not going to let me submit it? Why no error message to actually tell me why I can't submit a reply?

What does it mean when it says "What channel do you prefer"?  Er, The History Channel and Discovery HD. 

Thanks Ryan, I'll play around with the settings a bit more!

Hi,

Is there a way to receive digest email notifications for followed members? 

Reason I'm asking is that I quite like the daily and weekly digest emails after trying them here, I'm not sure how they work as they seem a bit hit or miss as to when IPS4 sends them out, but one thing I've noticed is that if you want to follow content by following a specific member, you don't get a daily or weekly digest like you do with followed content, but separate immediate emails. That is good for the most part but not for all cases, especially very active members.

For example, when I started learning more about the development side of IPS, I found following @bfarberreally useful to follow as you can learn a lot from his replies and insights, but he's just too damn helpful (!) and the stream of separate email notifications can be a bit distracting when you're busy. I'd like to get a daily or weekly email that I could view in my own time to scan through and dig out any gems to visit the forum for and catch up with. (I mean a scheduled digest email for individual members and not for every person you follow in the same digest email as it could be huge).

Hi Paul, yes I thought the same but preferably I'd like IPS to improve the integration as stock. They removed Gravitar due to privacy concerns, this seems a worse scenario. Plus it's not a full removal, just managing the risk better IMHO. 🤔

Interesting I found a lot of articles raising concerns about Stripe.js, one example is this article and a follow up after someone decided to see what is being sent with each request...

https://mtlynch.io/stripe-recording-its-customers/

https://mtlynch.io/stripe-update/
 

Please IPS reconsider reducing the privacy impact of this by only loading it on the Commerce pages that need it like the checkout process. Stripe do not need to know about website visitors mouse movements and clicks to this extent, it's hugely intrusive and disproportionate which goes against the principles of GDPR and other modern privacy legislation. Our end users don't get the chance to opt in to sitewide surveillance tracking, even if they are guests and not signed in registered members they are potentially being tracked. 

Alternatively please give us the toggle option to disable it for ourselves if we prefer, or some template logic limiting it to Commerce or perhaps maybe a CSP that we utilise.

For now I'm going to disable Stripe. It's a great product and very reliable, but global intrusive privacy implications and lack of transparency are very off putting.

Many thanks.

Thanks @Adriano Faria Yes that's how it should normally work but it seems like that very first $member->isOnlineAnonymously() may somehow be a false positive.

Last online seems to be missing on some member profiles, I've noticed it happens here too, @ahcfor example.

 I don't think it's because they are using anonymous mode. Could there be any other reason for it?