Joel R

Currently, the only way to add links like Terms, Guidelines, etc. to the Footer is to modify the templates for each theme. The users should not find it difficult to locate these essential links on a site. It is surprising that IC lacks this basic feature after so many years.
Please add a module to add custom links in the Footer.
Also add options to Terms, Guidelines, etc. to include those links in the footer.
Add a box to render custom HTML before/after the footer like a <hr> above the footer for better formatting and layout.

I want to add for @My Sharona my ideas are not meant to reduce or detract from your specific feedback to IPS in any way.  IPS reads everything.  
Sometimes people get defensive in the Feedback forum when other users chime in with alternate workarounds, but suggestions from the community are meant to be just that: helpful and friendly suggestions, as imperfect as they are. I just want to be clear that your suggestion has merit on its own, and it also opened up areas of opportunity and learning for clients to consider other creative approaches. 

I know you posted in Feedback, but some creative suggestions for the creative community managers out there:
- You can reduce the # of posts that appear per page in a topic.  Really! Most admins rarely change this number (and why is 25 posts the magic number anyways??) but if you insist on symmetry, reduce the # of posts to match your sidebar length.  
- Add relevant blocks for users that help with self-promotion or content discovery. In other words, utilize all of that emoty sidebar space! Add your guest sign in widget, newsletter sign up widget, Community Hive widget, popular content widget, our picks widget, recent comments widget, etc. to inspire and grab your user deeper into your ecosystem.  
- If the Topic Summary is the only item of your sidebar, think about switching to the Compact View that layers the Topic Summary into the posts.  That will eliminate the sidebar completely and give you clean aesthetics.  

Several developers have opted in to the Providers designation, which provides a reasonable level of trust within the IPS ecosystem.  You'll recognize many of the same names who have been around for years.  
When you do buy third party mods or themes, one of the easiest things you can do is check that they're a Provider.  
https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/

I know you posted in Feedback, but some creative suggestions for the creative community managers out there:
- You can reduce the # of posts that appear per page in a topic.  Really! Most admins rarely change this number (and why is 25 posts the magic number anyways??) but if you insist on symmetry, reduce the # of posts to match your sidebar length.  
- Add relevant blocks for users that help with self-promotion or content discovery. In other words, utilize all of that emoty sidebar space! Add your guest sign in widget, newsletter sign up widget, Community Hive widget, popular content widget, our picks widget, recent comments widget, etc. to inspire and grab your user deeper into your ecosystem.  
- If the Topic Summary is the only item of your sidebar, think about switching to the Compact View that layers the Topic Summary into the posts.  That will eliminate the sidebar completely and give you clean aesthetics.  

I'd like to extend a public invitation to all IPS clients and the third-party community to celebrate the opening of the free listing of files on the Marketplace Directory of Invisioneer.org.  
https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/
What is the Marketplace Directory on Invisioneer.org?  
The Marketplace Directory is a free list of files by authors. Its goal is simple: a free, centralized list for you to browse third-party files.  
No files are sold or supported on the site itself. You will be redirected to the author's site for payment and support. 
You will find the Marketplace Directory to be immediately familiar:
Same categories and structure as the IPS Marketplace Same IP.Downloads app as the IPS Marketplace  Over 300+ files have already been listed in the Marketplace Directory, and we hope more will be listed as developers and themers update their files.  
Why visit Marketplace Directory?  
The Marketplace Directory will never be a perfect substitute for the IPS Marketplace, which had deep integration with the ACP and directly processed payments on behalf of clients.  
However, as soon as it became known that IPS was shutting down its Marketplace, it became clear that clients would confusingly need to go to multiple websites. Purchased 5 plugins from 5 different developers? You need to visit 5 different sites for support and payment.   
The Marketplace Directory doesn't totally solve the problem, but it's a step in the right direction.  It consolidates files by authors who wish to list together, and makes file discovery and author tracking so much easier.  There is power in collaboration, and the Marketplace Directory is a great example of the most trusted third-party developers coming together in the spirit of community.  
What is Invisioneer.org?  
Invisioneer.org is a broader project of mine to offer a suite of resources to help IPS owners and admins launch better communities - and to hopefully learn alongside you.  It's my goal to build an "ecosystem of success" around IPS owners and admins as we compete and thrive together on the modern web:
IPS helps you compete with community software Third-party developers help you compete with themes and extensions Invisioneer.org helps you compete with community strategy My goal behind Invisioneer.org is to help you compete - and win - with the "soft skills" of community management that are just as important as the technology: crafting a community strategy, leading with emotional intelligence, and leveraging best practices from disciplines like behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, and leading community consultancies. 
The Marketplace Directory is an important part of Invisioneer.org, and one component of the ecosystem of success for IPS clients to leverage.  
What do I do with my files?  
Purchases and renewals have stopped on the IPS Marketplace, and the Marketplace itself will shut down on October 30 2023 according to IPS.  
To continue receiving support and updates to your active Marketplace files, you will need to transfer your purchases' license keys directly to the author. To find the license keys for all purchases, go to My Purchases.  
Active authors have posted information on their file descriptions or in the support topic about their own support sites.  If you purchased a file from a developer who doesn't have information yet, you will need to reach out to that author.    
Official IPS Blog: https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/marketplace-the-next-steps-r1286/

Several developers have opted in to the Providers designation, which provides a reasonable level of trust within the IPS ecosystem.  You'll recognize many of the same names who have been around for years.  
When you do buy third party mods or themes, one of the easiest things you can do is check that they're a Provider.  
https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/

Several developers have opted in to the Providers designation, which provides a reasonable level of trust within the IPS ecosystem.  You'll recognize many of the same names who have been around for years.  
When you do buy third party mods or themes, one of the easiest things you can do is check that they're a Provider.  
https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/

Some questions and / or observations: 
- the Sidebar Menu offers a lot of links.  The (regular) browse menu on mobile offers much less links.  I'm guessing you have an option per link on whether to show on mobile? 
- Bottom mobile menu is nice.  This is a well established design theory by Luke Wrobleski from Google product design, but I actually thought many mobile apps were moving away from the bottom menu because it overlaps with some built in browser or phone options.  Thoughts? I don't think there's one right answer, just more interested in your perspective.  

- traditional view of menu only offers single row.  I already do this on my primary community today (not because of any special study on design theory, but for simplicity!) but would be interested in your perspective in why you're imposing this approach.  The current Menu structure already encapsulates this and more. Why change it? 
- performance improvements.  You removed JavaScript and a lot of CSS.  But then we also need splashy grid pictures of our latest trip to Australia and croc suit for the new Forum Feed / Big Grid view!

Some questions and / or observations: 
- the Sidebar Menu offers a lot of links.  The (regular) browse menu on mobile offers much less links.  I'm guessing you have an option per link on whether to show on mobile? 
- Bottom mobile menu is nice.  This is a well established design theory by Luke Wrobleski from Google product design, but I actually thought many mobile apps were moving away from the bottom menu because it overlaps with some built in browser or phone options.  Thoughts? I don't think there's one right answer, just more interested in your perspective.  

- traditional view of menu only offers single row.  I already do this on my primary community today (not because of any special study on design theory, but for simplicity!) but would be interested in your perspective in why you're imposing this approach.  The current Menu structure already encapsulates this and more. Why change it? 
- performance improvements.  You removed JavaScript and a lot of CSS.  But then we also need splashy grid pictures of our latest trip to Australia and croc suit for the new Forum Feed / Big Grid view!

If you only need an extension for articles and news, I strongly encourage you to evaluate Pages and simply host your entire ecosystem within IPS.  Pages is perfect for news and articles, and with a couple of good templates by third party developers, you can have a very robust news system that compliments your forum. You can even feed articles into your forums. 
My entire Resources section is built on Pages: 
https://www.invisioneer.org/resources/
It also means, more importantly, no maintenance of bridging or SSO.  It means one unified login, one unified set of notifications, one unified activity stream, etc.  WordPress is an unrivalled ecosystem, but if all you need it for is news, you may want to think about the native solution within IPS.  
As Marc mentioned, there is no downloadable trial.  However, if you are self hosted, you can opt in to the new license terms (which you must agree to eventually anyways) and grab all the apps including Pages immediately.  

Traffic spikes should never "corrupt" your database. Increases in load can slow the server down, connections flooding and exceeding your MySQL servers configured max allowed connections can cause the website to "crash" and display an error page when they can't connect to the database, running out of memory can cause your server to resort to swap space and slow your system down to a crawl or get to the point where Linux starts forcefully killing processes to free up memory, but none of these scenarios (excluding possibly the last if the MySQL process is forcefully terminated, which is a case where your server is not properly configured in regards to maximum allowed MySQL conenctions and etc.) should result in database tables becoming corrupted.
This is not normal behavior. There is something wrong with your systems configuration if this is a frequent problem.
But outside of that, yes, I recommend looking into Cloudflare to help block illegitimate traffic and reduce the load on your website. It's not a solution to whatever is causing your database to become corrupted, but it's a good idea.
However, your host putting the blame entirely on the software is just factually wrong. If they're trying to suggest it's normal for this to happen, they are absolutely incorrect.

It's your site URL plus /admin
Guide on how to use is here...
 

But then you would manually have to feature and unfeature records to show them as new. The better options would be to use a custom field to create your custom badge(s).
Here is a tutorial for a multi-badge setup from one field:
https://www.opentype.space/superdocs/ips-community-tips/pages/multi-color-select-box-badges-with-pages-r16/ 

OK, I think I've did it. Thanks for everyone.
 
P.s. I'll confirm it later.

Do you mean that you solved the issue? That's great. Do you mind sharing the solution as it will help other users as well who might run into the same issue as well.

🍂🍁 Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! 🍁🍂
Thank you for checking out our weekly, round up post. I hope you have had a wonderful week. 
This week's updates from the Invision Community team are below. 🙂 
 
Current Happenings
Version Five News is Flowing! 🎉
Ehren has more to unpack about this new version. Dark mode, accessibility, performance, oh my! 🤩 
Check it out for yourself 👇

 
Marketplace Closure
Reminder that our Marketplace Closure is set for October 30th. Information can be found in the following two blogs. 
 
Changelog
For those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the last two weeks for version 4. 
 

Getting some great quotes for the marketing material, thanks!

It always worked like that in 4.x. 
I usually avoid using default values for fields because of this behaviour. I’m sure it’s all “working as intended”, just not exactly what a user (or even admin) would expect. 
Suggestions:
show the actual number of filtered items don’t pre-select default field values (which are useful in the record form and during record creation) in the filter widget.  (Clover’s point 3 is just a side-effect of point 2.)

Hey Joel,
1. The advanced search page is still available. The search modal is just an "enhanced version" of the drop-down filter menu which we currently use in version 4.
2. We'll have a lot more information on this in a future update 🤫 But to answer your question, they're FA 6 icons.
3. Correct, this is static. You could use your own javascript code to target the element and change the text every x seconds, but it's not a feature which is coming with version 5.
4. "Focus rings" for focused elements are very important for keyboard users. It's definitely not for power users or developers, but rather users who find it difficult to browse your site with a mouse. Imagine a condition which affects motor control such as Parkinson's disease, or someone who has a broken arm - both of those users would likely find it more convenient to browse using the TAB key instead of using a mouse.
Focus rings only appear when pressing the TAB key on your keyboard (they won't appear when clicking with a mouse), so they've been added purely to improve accessibility for those who need them. Accessibility took a back seat in version 4, however we've placed a higher priority on it with version 5 and will be improving it further in future updates. This is a desktop only feature, but will also work on iPads if a bluetooth keyboard is connected.
5. Currently hard-coded, but customization is currently on my "would be nice to have list". Certainly something to consider.

Looks great, good job on tackling some of the oldest bug bears 🔥

Such a great idea!  
So happy to see others have the same lightbulb go off of crafting smarter menus of links.  The hard thing now is how do we customize and craft those menus for different member journeys??  🤔

I'd prefer not to share my site links openly, but I'll give you an idea here.  I use Activity Stream as my landing page and customize it to show what I want from a site content perspective.  Members can still create custom streams if they'd like but that seems like a high bar for most.  My members want maximum convenience and quick browsing experiences to get to what they are interested in (don't we all).  However that means they rarely use menus unless they must and whatever they're looking for is important enough to force them to open and use menus (i.e. you aren't really driving them to any content via the current v4 menus especially with a mobile hamburger icon).  This is another reason the v5 sidebar menu is good for desktop, as it will open the visibility up for members to see what's available vs hidden under submenus.  However for mobile, this still could be a problem as I assume that sidebar is a desktop only view otherwise you'd be stacking menu items in your most valued ATF content.
Regarding the actual "feature menu" I use, I put something simple together with font awesome icons that resemble the purpose of the link and created a simple Pages block to display these in a flex container.  As mentioned earlier, because it's inserted as a block at the top of the page content, it allows me to have these targeted links at the top whether on desktop or mobile.
Maybe there's other or better ways to do this but it's helped me focus and drive members to places of interest in a given moment of time while also allowing me to have "popular" links there when there aren't specific content links commanding that space. 
For example a similar niche Facebook group owner was complaining about Facebook taking down members ads to sell certain items, so I reached out to him to ask to post my site's Classified link.  He agreed, so I quickly added a Classified "feature menu" item to that site as I anticipated members from that group checking out the site to look for that right after I posted about it on the Facebook group.
Another example is I had a merchandise release for members, which they were chomping at the bit for, so I added that as a "feature menu" item to give it proper exposure and drive the sales.
Here's a sample screenshot of what it looks like at the top of an Activity Stream.  I just mix things in and out as needed based on whatever is going on at the moment or where I anticipate interest or want to drive traffic. 👍