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Joel R

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Everything posted by Joel R

  1. At a fundamental level, I wholeheartedly agree. This was web 1.0 thinking, and it's been proven that you can highly manipulate hits and views. I definitely think it would be better, especially for long form blogs and articles and indepth topics, that we think about whether or not the content solves a question, or fulfils a need, or brings value. To put it another way, what's the delivery of value? On the other hand, there is actual value to hits. There's a growing trend among professional community management circles to view lurkers as learners. They do read, and they do obtain value. How we measure the extent of learning or value is hard though. That's when you need to start measuring passive signals such as time spent on content.
  2. One option, which is not a perfect substitute but might be an acceptable workaround, is for your users to create private albums. Private albums are not shown to anyone except the user (and site admins or moderators who have permissions). Private users can then give access to individual users for access. It's a little more time consuming than a password, but it works.
  3. Something is in the works! Should have something to announce in October.
  4. If you're looking to host real time events using Zoom, then I encourage you to read the blog post about Events. This was a new enhancement that's very recent (and in fact, IPS hosts a monthly webinar that your team might want to join as a case study of how it's utilized). It incorporates real time chatting that are then migrated to topics, so it combined the best of both. Unite your community with the Events application https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/unite-your-community-with-the-events-application-r1265/ If you need persistent chat behind these one time Events , yes there are third party modifications for chat and shoutboxes.
  5. Yes, I will corral all of the Marketplace devs together so we come to consensus on this project. I've been fortunate to have worked with many of them over my 10 years with the community. They all know me (for better or for worse, ha 😆). My goal for this new Marketplace Directory is simple: provide an independent directory using Downloads. It will link you to the providers' own website for support. More broadly, to anyone who is hesitant about these changes, there are some pros and cons: - More independence, more variation, and total flexibility for developers and themers. They can build their own core, their own gallery, their own package of plugins. You can't do any of that in the current Marketplace. I expect to see some truly experimental and innovative approaches to how developers and themers work with IPS 5. - More independence, more variation, and total flexibility in how they charge. Providers can charge crypto, they can offer a bundled set, they can offer discounts, they can set their own policies for chargebacks and refunds. - Trust will be deeper, not wider. The IPS Marketplace gave a broad stamp of trust to all providers for meeting standard IPS coding. But for clients, this is an opportunity to deepen ties to one or two trusted developers and take our most important apps private and control our own development pipeline. I do believe the biggest developers will still offer - and can make healthy income - off a broad portfolio of single purpose mods, but those by itself aren't going to dramatically fulfill your community's specific needs.
  6. My goal is to provide a listing directory to make it easy for developers to list their apps. A directory will provide visibility, scale, and ease for everyone to visit. Developers will handle payments and support on their own.
  7. To Marketplace developers and the Invision community as a whole, I will be happy to host an independent and collaborative Marketplace directory. It's already in the works. I fully support a thriving ecosystem of developers and clients: to extend, to inspire, and to push the boundaries of our platform. Technology is an important differentiator more than ever in the modern web, and working with developers (either privately or through their public mods) can help fine-tune your platform. More information and invitations will be sent out to active Marketplace devs. You are also welcome to send me a direct PM. Follow this topic for any future updates.
  8. One immediate and easy workaround is to disable the various Gallery settings for the gallery index page, and then add your own gallery widgets.
  9. The new terms only begin once you opt in to the new terms. There's a certain amount of hysteria that these changes are being applied retroactively. If you don't accept or want the new terms and want to coast along on v4, then don't accept the new terms. It's understandable that clients with your worldview will skip renewals, perhaps because of experiences in other forum ecosystems. It would make sense that you are cautious about continuing to invest in an active license if, for example,your forum developer doesn't release any new features after years of no activity. If you truly and authentically evaluate IPS on its own merits by looking at the Release Notes and the Company blog, however, you'll find a development and release cycle that is robust, monthly, and feature rich. The terms by IPS seem more stringent in light of other ecosystems. I invite you to evaluate IPS on its own merits, instead of imposing the fears from other vendors.
  10. This is just me, but I would look to see a series of future pricing announcements targeted to: - current customers - future customers - competitor customers This new pricing scheme to renew all-in at $199 / yr is extremely good. I take it as a sign that IPS still sees viability in self-hosted communities at a very competitive price point. Some other thoughts: - To see this pricing leak so early is surprising, but I think it's IPS way of trying to adjust everyone to their "all apps" model as soon as possible. This will make future upgrades and pricing easier for the company for when they do release v5. - It wouldn't be IPS pricing without cloud pricing. If IPS is willing to be this aggressive with their self-hosted pricing, for any clients who are even thinking about moving to cloud, wait until you see their cloud promos before making a decision. ☁️ - Cloud clients already get all apps. This new pricing model for self-hosted also requires you to get all apps. My thesis is that IPS is moving away from a model of core + apps in v4 into One Big Core in v5 with all content types included. Maybe.
  11. This screenshot also says you're getting "Live Topics" and "Real Time Features" on classic. The page can really benefit from some proofreading, before it causes any more confusion.
  12. Hi, can I get an investigation of user ptop96 on my community to understand his subscription history It looks like he renewed on the Hero $12 plan on 06/22/2022 Most recently, he renewed for VIP Downloader $200 on 06/17/2023. However, it's showing his expiration as soon as 06/22/2023 It's almost like he's being penalized and being charged to complete the past year
  13. Providers database here on Invision Community for inspiration: https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers/
  14. The user is asking to search Club overview and Club description, not content items in the club. @JesCiTy this is intended behavior (at this time). With that said, one easy workaround is to simply write a forum topic that exactly duplicates your club description. This will then be searchable. A couple of queries: - Can you give more information on your specific use case? Just curious. You ask about club locations, and then talk about user locations. Those are obviously two very different mappings. - How do you envision searching and sorting by location? Just curious. Searching for Cambridge can return Cambridge, UK or Cambridge, MA, USA. - If your goal is to offer user to user matching based on locations, I highly recommend a third party app Connections by @Andy Millne. It's one of the more underrated third party apps in the Marketplace, and offers suggested connections between members who are geographically close. The setting can be enabled / disabled. Bonus: You may be able to ask him to customize his app, so members can be connected to both nearby members and nearby clubs and nearby events, etc. Not sure if this helps, but wanted to throw this out to you. 😀
  15. Clubs - I would like to see club statistics and to offer them to Club Leaders and / or Moderators.
  16. IPS already offers a built-in Word Filter feature You can also check out third-party Marketplace items, such as this: https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/8483-bim-hide-link-and-code/ https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/8395-ne-hide-content/
  17. The settings are tucked away in a user profile. Go to any user profile in the ACP, including your own. Click on the dropdown next to Posts or Reputation to Recount. Recount content or reputation.webm
  18. 1. Complete in order The settings are located in both front-end and back-end and it can be confusing. I can see why the settings would be separated, but it's still confusing. Complete in order for modules: Part of the ACP settings for the Course Complete in order for lesson: Part of the module settings on the front-end 2. Next Lesson | Back to Course Similar to Next Unread in Forums, there should be an easy button to progress the user to the next lesson. This should make it easier to progress on mobile. 3. Long Lesson Name / Description This could probably be truncated for a cleaner look. 4. Custom Fields I can see myself adding custom fields to the modules and the lessons for things like: Attachments Field: Upload various resources / handouts Text Field: Suggested time on how long to spend on the lesson 5. Inclusion of interactive elements These could be things like: A forum discussion A poll A quiz 6. Copy Lessons / Copy Modules Be able to copy lessons or entire modules to make course creation go faster.
  19. Some thoughts regarding Google: Focus on your community and your community's experience. You are building a community experience for humans, not for crawl bots. If it's useful to have widgets like Recent Topics or Popular Topics for your users to explore and discover and navigate and "be sticky" with your community, then be confident in your decision.
  20. We were hit with multiple waves of the "airline spam" for several weeks. To the point where I turned off my registrations. I do agree that moderator approval for the first few posts were one of the most effective strategies for dealing with spam. However, that's ultimately a bad experience for all new users. It essentially imposes a cost on all legitimate new users. Looking back, I should have used Word Filters to automatically mark any posts with the word airlines for moderator approval. That would have been a much more targeted method. This is the standard advice given to most community owners, but I question the assumptions behind this standard advice. The reality is that challenge questions actually need to be acceptable to all legitimate users, which means catering to a fairly low common denominator. I don't have data, but I'm almost certain that if IPS conducts an analysis of its communities, my hypothesis is that almost all communities would have simplistic and "Google-able" answers that anyone can answer with questions that are not domain-specific. You set the questions even moderately challenging to the average user, and you start to thwart legitimate registrations. My insight on challenge questions is not to make harder questions, but to make MORE questions. If a user is randomly presented with one challenge question per registration and you have 3 challenge questions, the spambot (or person who is directing the spam bot) will need - at a minimum - 3 attempts to correctly answer all challenge questions. If you have 10 challenge questions, the spambot will need at least 10 attempts to answer all challenge questions. With the randomness of challenge questions, it actually becomes exponentially harder for the spambot to capture all of the answers as you increase the number of questions.
  21. Running latest 4.7.10 Recently imported a small IPB installation (dating back to 2004!) Something has changed with the membergroup or profile settings, which I cannot resolve. Users who are not moderators or administrators can view the email address on profiles. Steps to reproduce 1. Login as a user in Member group. 2. Go to any other user profile. You can view the email address I've already checked membergroup settings and email settings, and could not find anything related to this.
  22. FYI my community was spammed by the airline spammers for weeks. It was very frustrating. The suggestions posted above by IPS are insufficient. I customized and enabled ALL spam prevention options in the ACP. I even rotated and changed these options in a near daily basis (eg. Switch from hcaptcha to recaptcha, then back to hcaptcha) and rotated through unique and highly customized challenge questions. I even enabled profile completion with required steps where users were forced to upload profile pictures and fill out their profiles. This would delay the spam by one or two days, but the spam kept coming through. It was so bad back in January and February that I turned off registrations completely for several weeks. When I backtraced the IP addresses, I discovered even more accounts in my member database that were inactive and never used for spamming. If you're being hit by waves of spam, the spam prevention in the ACP is only one part of your arsenal. I took additional steps including: - installing the third party Cleantalk. - Moderating all new posts (Ive never liked this step, because it slows down the engagement of new users. My sites activity is at a level where new members post almost every hour, so I had to expand my moderation team.) - Requiring profile completion (I've never liked this step, because it applies and frustrates ALL users) - Requiring strong password and 2FA - Aggressively rotating and changing up Spam Prevention options. (This was probably the least effective strategy)
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