jair101

Everyone can have their own opinion and style how to run their community. In mine I have decided that I don't want polarizing topic like the one existing here. I don't think the sense of family is encouraged by such topics where people are bragging how many people have entered their ignore list. Of course, different opinions are possible, I don't think there is a right or wrong way in this situation, it gets down to moderating style.

I won't lie, it hasn't been easy 😕 Being in the travel niche, my community is heavily hit and it was an enormous task to moderate travel related discussions (flights cancelled, borders closed, etc.) from the general, speculation ridden, chit-chat covid talk that pretty much goes everywhere (including here). In the end I had to enable pre-approval for posts in the virus topic. First time in seven years since my community start, but I guess desperate time requires desperate measures. It helped a lot! Before that it was pretty chaotic with everyone posting their own theories, unproven links form the internet etc, we had to try to keep it on topic by hiding almost 50% of the posts at some point. It was not pretty and people got annoyed and alienated. After pre-approval was introduced almost all posts were strictly on topic, you can say that by starting the pre-approval the moderator workload dropped at least 90% and was confined to quick approval to most of the posts. But it is still challenging, because with travel shut we have almost nothing to talk about besides the virus, quarantine, etc. Instead of discussing upcoming travels, most active discussions are based on what we do at home, cooking recipes and the emotional toll of the blockade. What I did to brighten the spirits and it worked extremely well is to organize Zoom conferences, where one presenter shows pictures and talks about his recent travels. As most people are stuck at home it is a very nice way to socialize and at the same time take your mind away from the constant negative news bombing. We will try to do it on an at least bi-weekly basis, maybe increase the frequency even more. I always avoided chats as they may steal content from the community, but now I am contemplating chat setup as well, it will at least give the people a reason to stick around until this is over. I am just afraid that if I start a chat it might be difficult to remove later and I definitely do not want a chat when the things are back to normal. Might start a book club and netflix/hbo movie club as well, we'll see.

Even though I was not affected, in my opinion this was pretty severe issue and all customers should have been informed, either via email or via the nagging upgrade red banners. It is quite possible that people are ramping up severe email bills as we speak.

May I ask you, how did you get the facebook one working? Do you use different apps for login and promotion and what are the settings on the promotion app? Is it in dev mode or did you get the permissions from facebook? If you got the permissions, how? Sorry for the many questions, I am still looking for someone that has fb promotion working as it should 🙂

Yes, it has affected it. Tons of uneducated people trying to give us their few cents of worth, basically drowning the opinions of the few REAL experts that do that for living and can help the humanity get through this. Instead, we need to discuss patented BS and give credit to a guy that can collect few excel charts together in a medium.com post. Next time before retweet, repost, replicate in your own words someone elses opinion, please ask yourself "Do this guy/gal has the credentials/education/experience to be lecturing us about it?" If the answer is no, probably don't do it. Applies not only to this pandemic, but in general.

Sounds like a good motivation tool to "clean" the counter by reading the board 🙂 I guess an option to disable it might be useful though, many users will consider it nagging.

I was one of the first people that purchased this, but I didn't renew, because the renewal period fell within a period of inactivity by you and I wasn't sure this won't be abandoned. Now I see that I am unable to just renew and I have to buy it again. Is it like it is supposed to be or there is something funky going on?

Credit where credit is due, from my experience the spam filter works beautifully without any false positives. I have seen other forums, using competing systems, being destroyed by spam and their admins being overwhelmed and don't know what to do. I am so glad that IPS has a solution that does not require any maintenance and in combination with the regular captcha makes my board virtually spam free. I see there are some spam detection enhancements on the marketplace, maybe useful for other users, I am speaking just from my experience that the built-in functions are perfectly fine and I am thankful for that.

This. With that said, it probably can be reversed with sql query, but I can''t help with that.

Did you dopplegang-ed Travolta just for this cameo? 🙂

Please keep in mind that at some point GIPHY might decide that they don't want to pay for the traffic of hosting gifs for free and demand paying or your site will out of a sudden have all gifs broken. It has happened before with another service: https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/4/15919224/photobucket-broken-images-amazon-ebay-etsy-paid-update In my opinion, if you don't have the space for hosting the gifs yourself, then simply don't enable the option.

Will it work retroactively or only for new stats from 4.5 onward?

I think its one of the features more geared towards enterprises - these are the clients that have stats and charts as priority. The average forum owner and his audience will use it mainly for amusement.

I went immediately to check for a new blog post, but alas. At least there is hope 🙂

Maybe it is nice to be able to distinguish between the personal and stock photos. Small pixabay logo in the corner or caption, something like that. I think as a reader I would want to know if a photo in a thread is a stock one.