The Old Man

Hi IPS, Any news on adding spam protection features to the Contact Us facility? My clients and I are currently being spammed senseless with the most blatant, clear as crystal offers of illegal drugs, degrading filth and other vile spam through the wide open portcullis that is Contact Us, into my otherwise fairly spam-free fortress that is IPS community. I've had about 21 since Monday! Generals @Lindy @Charles , it's time for a Call to Arms! Gather ye brave fighting men and women coders of IPS and rage war on this unnecessary evil: Add existing IPS Spam Prevention facility to Contact Us Add existing Q&A to Contact Us Extend existing swearing/IP/email filters to cover Contact Us Add existing Recapcha options to Contact Us Post-haste and godspeed, thank you, gentlemen!

Blimey. That sucks. What a shame, but thanks for letting us know, all the same.

Thanks Mike, much appreciated as always.

Mike, It's been a long time and I've sent a few reminders, and although you did warn me in early April against updating to avoid breaking your temporary patch after beta testing for you, in a moment of madness I reactivated the Videos app again. I'd lost a lot of links in Google and was getting all these 403's on my server, so I upgraded Videos for better 4.3 compatibility to the current version and of course, it's now broken my All Activity Stream again (as the 'discover' furl is being used by Videos). I know you're so busy with so many mods and life, and I recently extended my subscription for Videos at your site again (no biggie). Amazing service over the years, you were always my favourite Marketplace dev and continue to be, you've never had the ego issues that a lot of devs sadly display, but unfortunately I'm going to have to disable and ditch Videos for good. All the best my friend.

Just about to tell you this, but I had to remind myself! First place I'd look is Videos - Settings - Thumbnails and Uploads!

Polite reminder! Thanks Mike! ?

I'm definitely better waiting for the next release then! My community would probably not be too happy with me, if we brought that issue back! Thanks again.

Great work, thank you Mike! Am I okay to update to this following the beta version fixes you PM'd me, or should I not?

Hi, I'm trying to use the free Openwesther API which provides weather data in JSON format. I've also tried to use the XML format into an RSS block but that didn't work, and they don't offer the data in actual RSS format. I've also been trying to get RSS news article feeds of text and image content into Pages Articles, but bizarrely for a CMS, it's only achievable via a small widget. I'd rather use Pages Articles than Blogs as the main front app. Is there a modern best practice method to import third party content into IPS? The web seems to be switching to JSON fast from RSS and XML for incorporating third party content between websites, but JSON is not available in the AdminCP. I can only seem to find RSS in the Pages and widgets sections, but Pages won't provide RSS feeds into Pages articles out of the box, unlike content import into Forums, Blogs and Calendar. Is it achieved via the REST API? I thought that was more for making IPS content available into external sites and web pages? Many thanks,

Awesome, thanks Mike!

The new Search Console has some useful tips and offers a few clues. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203 On one of my sites, entirely powered by IPS (Pages, mostly Gallery, no Forums), it says 2.5k out of excluded 6.5k urls were excluded for being duplicate pages without canonical tags. Looking at the list, a lot of them are as a result of Google following various sort and display options for Gallery albums in Profile view, but these are albums that don't exist because the user is brand new and hasn't even submitted anything yet. I'd exclude them too! Another 1.8k Pages were marked as excluded for being Alternative page with proper canonical tags. Again, looking at the list, the urls seem to relate to different sized versions of Gallery images. 380 were excluded for Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag. These appear to be various Pages Articles urls appended with options such as "sortby=record_views&sortdirection=desc&page=1&d=1&advancedSearchForm=1". Another 409 were marked as "Crawled - currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." Very informative! These seem to be urls of Gallery images and page articles. Another 300 or so were excluded for being soft 404s, mostly calendar events. One area I've had a lot of Google errors in the past is with Tags not being crawlable, on one site in particular the majority were Tags on Blogs, supposedly fixed in a future release according to a ticket at the time.

Hi Mike, I just enabled Clubs and when adding a Video with a YouTube link, it doesn't seem to grab the Description from YT. I tried adding a video in the main Video app to compare, and the same, the video appears with the thumbnail but without a description. Is that intentional? I'm sure it used to fetch the description as well as the title and thumbnail. No biggie as the videos look nice and neat with no description but may be a bug for others? Many thanks.

@Matt Thanks for taking an interest in this. Will 4.3 support Google Tag Manager I.e. the latest Google recommended method of adding Google Universal Analytics via Google Tag Manager? At the moment I use the current input box for Google Analytics code for the Google Tag Manager snippet code which goes in the head section, then I create a new global front system/core template called GoogleBodyTags for the Analytics code snippet which gets included as close as possible to the opening body tag of the globalTemplate, which seems a bit fiddly.

It is a bit weird how you can't set a default tab in Profile, though. The profile almost appears to work like there are two profiles*. The About Me tab (if it exists on a site) would be the most obvious candidate for default on a lot of sites. It's also odd to my mind that when you go to a profile you see a list of Activity first, under the tab heading "Activity", but then you spot the button that says "See my Activity", er, I thought I was! "See my Activity" should probably read Detailed Activity or See All Activity, since that's what it shows (aside from the Status Update input box above it, whilst the Activity tab should probably read as something else, as it's kind of like the condensed Activity Stream option. *"See my Activity" doesn't seem a cohesive part of Profile, since there are no breadcrumbs or navigation elements to suggest you've gone deeper into a Profile, other than another button that says "View Profile" which suggests you ar no longer in the person's profile. Meh, semantics.

Sad its not going to be supported in v5. They made a v4 shim for quicker updating to 5.x (you can also stick with the Web Fonts with CSS icons rather than upgrade to the SVG icons) or you can follow this process for a complete upgrade which seems to be mostly search and replace tasks. https://fontawesome.com/how-to-use/upgrading-from-4 Perhaps someone at IPS could do a feasibility test on the full, proper upgrade to v5x?

Any news on a fix, please Mike? My videos are still showing no image thumbnails since moving to S3 and Cloudfront. The rebuild tool doesn't fix the thumbnails. If I edit a video and save it, it creates a new thumbnail but I need a bulk fix, ideally. Thanks.

Thanks Fosters.

Thanks, PM sent.

Thanks, got it, awesome support as always!

Hi, I've recently set up S3 and Cloudfront. I followed the Amazon guidance recommendation and console warnings about only granting CDN access to the S3 bucket and removing the Everyone Read permission to ensure the file cant be accessed directly. I've got the CDN path in the file settings and once I got the full path correct, all works as it should. However, looking at the files that IPS moved over to the CDN, it appears every file transferred is accessible via the s3 bucket direct URL, because the Everyone grantee permission for Read is enabled. What permissions do you have enabled for your IPS buckets when using a CDN? If you're only using US and Europe endpoints, and S3 bucket direct access is disabled, does that mean visitors from say China can't view the images? Thank you. P.S. The guidance in the Help section really needs updating, best practice examples if using a CDN with S3 would be nice, and the video although out of date, is so hard to make out, even in HD quality, although listening to Charles is strangely very relaxing! He should do the shipping forecast of voice overs on History and Discovery documentaries!

Hi, Does v1.3.2 fix the issue with trophies awarded prematurely due saving them during the creation stage before criteria was completed? I've logged into AdminCP to see a task running called rebuild trophies. Thanks.

Weird, I just can't download from the Marketplace again.

Hi @Pete T Just tried this plug-in, and it doesn't seem to honour the WYSIWYG text. Once saved it appears as plain text, no paragraphs or formatting, just a line of plain text. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for this! Each time it fails to download the tar for me, it keeps saying Download Failed. Downloading fine, now!

Hi Mike, Yes, I have FTP access to my VPS, not on IPS cloud hosting. That would be great, currently my Videos System looks very broken. Many thanks.