The Old Man

On 12/30/2019 at 5:04 AM, Mike John said:

This shouldn't be a problem, noted this for a future update.

Great, thanks Michael!

On 12/30/2019 at 5:04 AM, Mike John said:

Like the tag mentions? @The Old Man

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.

On 12/30/2019 at 5:04 AM, Mike John said:

If there's enough demand for this, I'll consider it. If it's just birthday topics, then adding a few additional message settings shouldn't be a problem.

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.

3 hours ago, Mike John said:

Thanks, that actually helps narrows things down. Because both the alerts and widget follow some of the same settings. I would first recommend you check what you've got set for your "Activity Cut Off Limit", "Age Cut Off Range" and "Exclude Groups" settings.

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.

4 hours ago, sudo said:

Yeah but I cant see the price without logging in. I just wondered if you could list/post the price even though you cant sell it as such here.

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.

On 6/14/2019 at 6:50 PM, Joel R said:

One of the biggest reasons for switching from AWS S3 to Wasabi is that you can use Cloudflare. 

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.

2 minutes ago, Mike John said:

Noted both in bug reports and this will be added next update.

Awesome, makes sense, thank you. 🙂

5 hours ago, Mike John said:

What was the email address?

Hi @Mike John

Located in applications/core/modules/admin/support/support.php, line 828 onwards

Confirmed the email address (and user names) as:

$supportAccount = \IPS\Member::load( 'nobody@invisionpower.com', 'email' );

$name = 'IPS Temp Admin';

$name = "IPS Temp Admin {$number}";

Perhaps you could add a similar filter to your Birthday Greeter app as well?

Many thanks.

11 hours ago, Mike John said:

I don't think I've used it before. I assume it's just creating the account for you and then your deleting once your done? Is it always the exact same username and email? (Perhaps just adding an exclusion for the email or exact username would be easiest then.)

Yes it is always the same name and email address that gets created for use by IPS tech support. Thank you!

I'm confused, not hard to achieve these days but I must be missing the glaringly obvious.

IPS keeps you up to date with activity and content which you can extend further with services like Zapier. There are browser notifications, in-line IPS notifications and I receive notifications coming through of replies to this topic via Gmail app. Admittedly, those notifications are actually notifications of new unread emails, but a snippet of the content is displayed, there is an audio alert, a pop up I can choose the format of even on my lock screen etc.

So is there any benefit or improvement with say end user experience with these extra proposed push notifications that we are currently missing out on? Or is it just reinventing the wheel?

😊

Just confirming that Afterburner has been tested and works fine with v4.4.4.

Updating to IPS 4.4.4?

No need to remove, disable or update the Afterburner S3 plug-in when upgrading to IPS4.4.4, it will continue to work in the background as your updated, compressible 4.4.4 JS and CSS theme files export to your S3/Wasabi bucket.

Or if you prefer, you can also transfer your theme files only back to the default storage method, upgrade to 4.4.4 and then transfer your upgraded theme files back to your S3 storage.

Great candidate for a pinned topic!

If you don't get much that's really rather fortunate, but some of it is really nasty and illegal, not just your friendly Nigerian prince who needs your $10 to reclaim his millionaire inheritance or another advert for magic, blue M and Ms. Secondly, if you run a community for a client like a local charity or organisation,  they don't expect to receive stuff about indecent images of children etc, and neither do you of course, as an admin.

If IPS can help block even some small amount of this stuff received through its software, whether it's integrating a new version of ReCaptcha or integrating or improving their anti-spam spam facilities, or other blacklists or honeypots, why not simply help? As an admin of your server you can do a lot to help reduce spam, but you also leave yourself at the mercy of others to do their bit too.

Hi @Mike John,

Is there any way to add blacklist or more specifically turn off autowelcome for the automatically generated IPS Support account?

Many thanks!