The Old Man

Hi IPS, Just to let you know the credited link mentioned in the gallery.css template redirects to a site with a Hong Kong based domain. No idea what it is but I recognise a certain footballer! /* This is to make the video responsive in size See: http://3strandsmarketing.com/video-fluid-2.php */ /* top/bottom adjusted to avoid the 'fade' area */

No, I may be wrong, but I think that was EmojiOne that you're recalling. I remember IPS staff kept stating it would be done in a future release but not a minor one.

FA4 was rather amazingly last updated in 2016 and almost 3 years since FA5 was released, but despite multiple requests from clients, IPS didn't/wouldn't support it. Somewhat frustrated, but fortunately not in a sexual way, we chuckled cheekily that FA6 would be out by the time FA5 was integrated, but more seriously it is IMHO still a missed opportunity as there were a lot of really good features like Pro, Duotone and Light icons and of course the super useful themed Icon Packs. So I personally think, respectfully and sadly, that IPS 'dropped the ball' by not utilising a team member to update the outdated FA4 integration. If IPS had launched an integrated proprietary awards and badges feature (er, hello?) for members after adding the automated rule logic of member promotions, it could really have shined by supporting FA5's theme packs and new styles like the multi colour Duo Tone icons. Some time ago FA launched kits for FA5 with the ability to upgrade to FA5 on the fly, but the FA4 to FA5 shim although super useful, meant accepting a performance hit, especially if you use more than one style of icon. So here's hoping that Font Awesome 6 once released later this year will be integrated into IPS a lot sooner. If you have a Pro licence for FA5, look out for the limited time discounted FA6 Pro upgrade offer. If you haven't already seen it, enjoy the crazy video (that probably should have been shorter!) 🤔 https://fontawesome.com/6

Hi, Redis is fairly well acknowledged for providing better performance than Memcached, it is the current 'go-to' solution, so I'm a bit surprised. Your Redis Info/config may provide the experts with more clues, and perhaps a copy of whatever your Redis settings in AdminCP's Support pages are reporting as being utilised. I've found on my public sites, I've no private/Intranet sites, that the amount of stored Redis data seems to drop after a week or so, and seemingly isn't replenished until something major changes. Then the same thing happens, after another 7-10 days the keys/memory consumed seems to reduce again. It's almost as if the keys expire or maybe are evicted and not replaced when the software checks to see if the object is in the Redis cache. Btw, check your Redis is connecting via a unix socket for faster performance.

Just FYI, seems to have started around 3pm (BST) today on all email notifications from this site. Earlier emails from today doesn't show it although whether images and profile pics show is always hit and miss in recent months.

Hi there, I never understood why they ignored all the feedback about how there is no enable/disable toggle and it shows such a small image and makes navigation difficult. There is a third party Marketplace plug-in that disables the absolute abomination that is the v4.4 Lightbox. You'll probably need to renew your IPS License to be able to get it if you have one.

If you have Wordpress, I recently had to remove the Wordfence plugin (an excellent software firewall/security plugin) because it kept stopping me editing settings and templates in AdminCP, even though I told it to ignore my IPS Community folder. It got to the point where I was concerned about upgrades being interfered with.

Great, thanks Michael! Well I was actually thinking the tags which you can add to a topic. The ones that get separated with a comma if you add more than one. Yes, just for the topic template that you set up in the AdminCP. Currently every Birthday topic's first post looks identical, but if as an admin we could create a few templates instead of just the current one template (with varying fonts, images or wording), the it would add a bit more variety as the app would choose one at random each time it created the topic. Thanks Mike, have a great New Year!

Season's Greetings @Mike John Just a few suggestions for Birthday Greeter, if that's okay! When the Birthday Greeter sends out an auto birthday email, if there is also a birthday topic that gets/got created, perhaps the email could also include a link to it? This way an absent member would be even more likely to visit the forum if they know there's a topic with greetings. (This occurred to me because I think we had such a member visit this week after their birthday, but they didn't choose to post in their birthday topic, and I wondered if they'd missed it for some reason.) Secondly, I wondered if it was possible for the birthday topic to include a tag with the person's name? Before birthday greeter, I used to add a tag like 'Happy Birthday membername' to birthday topics, which was handy as we could click to see previous years greetings. Last suggestion! The birthday topics only have one template, so all topics look the same and contain the same message and images/emoji. If we could add up to say 3, or maybe 5 topic templates and birthday greeter used 1 at random, it would add some more variety, they'd have a less automated, more personal feel. Thanks! P.S. I lied. Here's another one. Through the use of extra language strings, perhaps the birthday greeter could also optionally send out anniversary greetings based on a member's join date?

Thanks Pete! 🙂

Hi @Pete T Thanks again for this great plug-in! Spotted a small bug that's causing W3C Validation errors for each member photo listed. The opening and closing HTML li list tags are missing from the template in two places, but it's because of the ul tag line preceding them. I moved that line down to above the comma separated list (no photos, text only) and it seems fine. <ul class='ipsList_inline ipsList_csv ipsList_noSpacing'> to: {{else}} <ul class='ipsList_inline ipsList_csv ipsList_noSpacing'> {{foreach $members as $row}} <li>{template="userLinkFromData" group="global" app="core" params="$row['member_id'], $row['name'], $row['members_seo_name'], $row['member_group_id']"}</li> {{endforeach}} </ul> {{endif}} and moved up the closing ul tag above the endif. Regards

FA5 has been out for so long and had like a dozen releases that, I can't believe it still hasn't been properly integrated. Grumble, dropped the ball, mumble, mutter.... Just kidding. 🥰 The new FA5 extra icons packs are really nice. I wonder if IPS might one day release a SASS/LESS where CSS can be more quickly updated. Not had much time to test but a few days ago I tried out the new FA5 'kits' option with IPS4.4.8 and it certainly has great potential. Anyone else tried it yet? You basically remove the existing FA4 import code and install one line of JS script to pull in your newly created kit, then on the FA5 dashboard site you can flick one of the toggle switches, and in theory it upgrades you on the fly to FA5, but better than the old 4-5 shim they originally released as a stop gap because it corrects any outdated icon codes and adds ARIA accessibility on the fly (i.e. all of them In the case of IPS!). It also only loads the icons you need, which sounds like a great performance boost. It allowed me to use Duotone icons. I tried the web font option first then the faster recommended SVG option, it worked but some icons seemed a bit off vertical alignment wise, on overlaid icons like the Twitter and YouTube social media buttons in the footer. So I switched back to the web font version for now, however it may be because I'd been editing the pseudo CSS a bit for something else just prior, so it may work as intended.

I don't know which is worse, the folks who don't grasp that dark mode is a form of accessibility and a necessity for many, or the haters who post the daftest comments. I learnt sometime ago with some surprise that a lot of people struggle with white text on black or dark background, it honestly never occurred to me. I was told by some an optician that as people get older, they often need brighter displays, televisions etc whereas I find they make me sneeze. Personally I like both white/black and black/white but certainly at night I find white backgrounds hurt my eyes, and I'm light sensitive anyway. Trying to read the bright white BBC News app at 3am with my iPad brightness at 0 is torture. When I see dark mode available as a choice, I enable it.

Thanks Mike, yes I have a 1 minute Cron working fine.

Thanks for the reply. I have time set to 00:00, with a time buffer of 1 hour (used to be 6hrs until this week). Activity cutoff limit is 1013 days. Age cut off range set to 16 to 130 years. It stopped working once before and started again after setting this. Exclude Groups set to Guests and a group for members who have passed away. Many thanks.

Yep, something is up with Birthday Greeter @Mike John. I noticed that there are 2 widgets with the same name. One is the default IPS Today's Birthdays block that correctly shows today's birthdays as they appear in the Calendar. The other one that comes with Birthday Greeter says there are no birthdays when in fact there are.

Hi, I recently noticed that Birthday Greeter seems to have stopped working. I have a 1 min Cron enabled with email, topic and Chatbox birthday greeting options enabled. It's missed some valuable member's birthdays including a co-admin, looking at my email logs shows shows no greeting emails sent. I think it may have happened after one of the small IPS4.4.x updates in recent months but I hadn't noticed. Anyone else had similar? Many thanks.

It's $45.

Hi, Do you think there is much difference between this approach and using the existing Cache Everything option in Cloudfront's Page Rules combined with Respect Origin Headers?

Hi @sobrenome Looks interesting, thanks! I'll have to have a play. Graham

Thanks @opentype Don't the existing notification options deliver the same objective, to keep members aware and ultimately engaged?

Sorry all, I still don't get it. IPS has notifications coming out of its ears. How many notification choices and options does Invision Community need? What am I missing, why are more notifications a positive thing in a world where every app and program wants to notify you 24/7 about something? Have to say I'm increasing switching to digests for things, you can quickly scan for the highlights that interest for everyday content. That said, it surprised me yesterday that I can follow a file like Chatbox for years and receive immediate notifications of new releases which are more important than replies to a topic, then when my IPS upgrade fails, it transpires I've somehow been unsubscribed from that file so wasn't aware of a necessary compatibility update. Are iOS notifications a way of preventing this situation from happening?

Hi @FabioPaz Sorry I don't have a comparison test with them, to be honest I'm not a huge fan of the current Pagespeed Insights. I don't see why there wouldn't be a performance and scoring improvement similar to those visible via GTMetrix because additional caching response headers are being added via the plug-in. I find that these days Insights gives me so many different readings every time I run a test, not just a small variation either, but wide deviations with scores fluctuating anywhere from 80s to 90s then suddenly down to 70s without me changing anything; it's just too much all over the place to have much faith in whereas other PI's are more consistent and helpful. It also always states "Ensure text remains visible during webfont load", but I'm already using the new Font Display as advised in my CSS and it doesn't recognise it. It would be nice to place a tick next to Page Insights as it supposedly is reflective of the speed scoring now used in their search ranking, but I think GTMetrix have the right approach in finding some sensible middle ground with the Pagespeed tests it uses and we should similarly take a balanced view across multiple performance analysis services. Happy to provide a demo version of the plugin for you to test with to see if it's for you, just drop me a PM anytime.

Interesting, what type of issue did you have? I've been using AWS S3 with Cloudflare using Full Strict mode without any problems. I use it for Theme files too, taking 1000's of Requests off my server every hour and bringing the Theme files closer to my international visitors. Re the brief discussion on Public access to files (Astrapi addressed this in his excellent guide) In general it's a really bad idea to make your files public on S3, I'd definitely recommend keeping them private whilst permitting/restricting access via IAM permission policies and API Keys. Amazon have really increased awareness of this when you look at the s3 bucket configuration console, but in there documentation there are still outdated references to be found stating you have to make bucket content public when actually you don't and shouldn't. It's true that 99% of your stored content is going to be everyday pictures of cute cats and hot cars etc but it makes sense to also consider the impact, cost and repercussions of someone directly accessing say, a list of passwords and authentication details shared between staff, or photos uploaded to private gallery albums containing EXIF gps coordinates identifying where a photo was taken. If you keep your files and bucket restricted with no public access, you help reduce and mitigate risk. Some quick examples here would be: you don't have to be as concerned about potential security issues (confidential documents or images uploaded as attachments in price forums or PMs, for example), you help maintain higher GDPR compliance (both with the principles of the GDPR and Data Protection legislation and in terms of complying with your site's published GDPR policy), and you help negate the risk of people or bots finding and publishing direct URLs to your content and therefore being able to bypass your CDN entirely which poses an escalated risk of higher monthly S3/CDN usage costs, potential for DDoS attacks from a financial attack vector rather than aimed at taking down your site etc. Wasabi, don't get me wrong and I have nothing against it and haven't yet used it myself, is attractive price-wise, but its cost saving is relevant to your individual usage case. S3 is already very low cost, especially if you front it with a CDN like Cloudfront, Cloudflare or both, so 80% of little becomes quite little. Unless you are storing and accessing massive amounts of data, the difference in cost against AWS S3 could be almost negligible for the average IPS community, a few cents or maybe a dollar or two. Plus when you start looking at Wasabi's documentation, it becomes apparent that there are some services and functionality that they don't provide or that are planned for a future date. If you a bit of a performance nut enthusiast like me and want to attain increased or 100% Pagespeed ratings, some of those services may become more relevant and necessary to you. For example, if you are going to self host webfonts like Google Fonts, Icomoon and Font Awesome to get to that 100% rating, or you (hopefully) have a good Content Security Policy set up, your are definitely going to need CORS headers. https://wasabi-support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006985652-How-do-I-use-CORS-and-custom-domains-with-Wasabi- Again, I'm not intending to distract or diminish Wasabi, just highlighting that there are possibly additional considerations for some IPS communities more than others and that AWS have lots of extra tools, bells and whistles.

Awesome, makes sense, thank you. 🙂