Thomas P

On 5/26/2021 at 7:09 PM, sadams101 said:

While your home page score looks pretty ok, not great, let's face it, 90%+ of your entire site, like mine, consists of topics, so those are the most important scores for Google site speed ranking. Take a look at one of your thread page scores for mobile, and this is exactly what I saw after upgrading to 4.5, so I'm not criticizing your site in any way

I take it as a compliment 😉
To be fair: As I said we measure without Ads, this is content we could not influence. Plus topics consistent of User Generated Content (UGC) and in the sample you picked we have several banners and a screenshot. Most of the posts have >50-60%

Secondly Pagespeed does not work worldwide, they are measuring from across the pond from their HQ.
What about your GTMetrix numbers?
Log in there, use a server next to you and please tell me what you see.
This is what I see:

To achieve good numbers PHP Workers, GZIP/Brotli, Redis and several other components and configs have to be well tweaked. Just saying that code is not all.

On 5/26/2021 at 7:09 PM, sadams101 said:

The architecture of the site needs to be changed because the CSS loads EVERYTHING for the mobile site, and EVERYTHING for the desktop site. There are many other issues that are causing this, but IPS has promised faster speed scores, but 4.5 and 4.6 are both terrible.

I see that IPS is heavily improving their code performance and seo-wise from release to release, undoubtedly they do a good job compared to other comparable platforms.
There is always room for improvement, but are you sure that 4.5 and 4.6 -which is still beta- is "terrible".

How does a Wordpress perform on pagespeed and GTMetrix on your server?

11 hours ago, sadams101 said:

It has taken me ~3 months since upgrading to 4.5 (working with @Adlago) to recover my site speed, and eliminate the dozens of W3 html errors inherent in the standard version of IPB, and I won't be stopping until I'm in the 90% area for mobile (I'm currently at 97-98% for desktop). I'm just shocked that these issue continue in the latest versions, and in some ways were actually worse and harder to deal with in 4.5 than in 4.4.

One difference from 4.4 to 4.5 was that pagespeed was improved a lot.

Did you try to use the default theme? Try your test installation forum with default theme and let pagespeed visit it.

In March this was our result with the default theme and no ads:

Upgrade to 4.5, we had very good results with the stock theme and our custom theme without ads. With ads we are still on 83/99.

There are a lot of things to tweak before using a CDN imo.

I am not so sure about amp pages since they are mostly (not all) just black and white text and they don't tend to engage new members, it's more for news related articles/one pagers imo.

Do you have FTP enabled or SFTP only? Maybe a good idea to use 2FA, new passwords for Admin & root accounts and SFTP access.
You can check server logs for suspicious access and check your PC, as well.

43 minutes ago, PoC2 said:

"Forward" (like the term "Progress") has no meaning in this context, only "change". 

All I said that we and you should give it a chance. Just because it is new doesn't mean it is bad.
The only constant in life is change - this is an objective fact 😉

43 minutes ago, PoC2 said:

I personally have been happy with pretty much everything IPS has done up to 4.5. So, we shall see.

There you go 👍
 

Just now, PoC2 said:

From the looks on this board right now, it doesn't look less obtrusive or more elegant to me. Still, I suppose we will have to deal with it the best we can when it happens.

You couldn't deny: It looks cleaner

Just now, PoC2 said:

We always have alternatives.

Yes, bring up constructive suggestions to improve it.
After more than 20 years dealing with stars and ranks, it is time to look & move forward 😌

I understand the reservations as we are all used to the ranks system, which goes back to the days of vB (>2000) and UBB (<2000).
We are all familiar with the system of growing stars, ranks and thus titles and their static nature.

To proceed further on and step the game up I think the new proposal of using Achievements is a good approach and a thriving implementation. I think it is ranks and member titles 2.0. More granular, unobtrusive and elegant.

Give it a chance, let's play with it and help the devs and us to improve it. Every risk contains a chance 😉

13 hours ago, jwdenzel said:

From what I understand, only redis caching is available now. But you can't use redis with a MySQL database. 

Give Redis a try, works fine and requires little maintenance. Installation is easy on all major Linux distros.
Setup is easy, too.

What do you mean by it won't work with MySQL. Redis is a separate caching/key storage instance, which is being used by your Invision Community software. Instead of saving caching information to MySQL or to a Memcache daemon it is being sent to your Redis server instance.
This will take load off the MySQL Server...

7 hours ago, gaby said:

I agree with you, but I think that certain pages (like login, logout, /*?do=add, /*?do=reportComment*, etc. ) should be disallowed by default...
Can you tell me please which pages you have disallowed from robots.txt?

16 hours ago, SeNioR- said:

@Thomas P 

Thomas have you tested too:

do=GetNewComment
do=GetLastComment

?

I am asking because Google also indexes the same topic several times with these query strings.

Also

this query string is already excluded by the Meta Robots Tag so it doesn't need to be added to robots.txt.

Those are samples, as mentioned before every site, every site setting and environment is specific.
For the URL parameters containing "do" google recognized them -in our case- as possible attribute for the same content and decides by itself, if the parameter has no influence on the page content or if it changes the page content. Check Google Search Console and the appropriate section.

There are different methods to declare a page or url parameter not being indexed be it the robots.txt file, meta tags in the ACP or the Google Search Console settings etc.

You can easily create a robots.txt files with wildcards:

Check the section: "How to Use wildcards in robots.txt" here: An SEO's Guide to Robots.txt, Wildcards, the X-Robots-Tag and Noindex (builtvisible.com) for example.

To prevent the report URL or other sections being indexed we use this e.g.: 

Disallow: /*?do=reportComment*
Disallow: /*?do=add

As the robots.txt file is very site and version specific and there are other methods, see article mentioned above, I think every site owner has to create his own robots.txt file or "no index" mechanism.

5 minutes ago, Gauravk said:

Can you please explain what do you mean by "smaller database". How can we control that size?

There are various options to keep the DB small, in the context of server optimization using Redis for caching instead of MySQL and Elasticsearch instead of a MySQL search index helps. So if you don't use the caching method MySQL and for example not the MySQL search index, both keeps your database smaller. 

Hi Gauravk,

we use Redis since quite a while. For bigger forums with lots of concurrent sessions I'd say it's the way to go.
Try those settings for one week and measure your pageload with GTMetrix, Pingdom or Webpagetest.org.
If Redis has an impact on server load or on pageload, you will notice it.

Another server service you could have a look into is elasticsearch, this will offload your search index from MySQL to a dedicated search service.

In our setup every task I can take away from MySQL, such as caching or searching, helps to have a faster, smaller database.

Regards,
Thomas

After several tests it seems that this application is not ready for forums which use "Guest Caching" and Caching mechanisms like Redis for example.
It works well with all Caches turned off, but shows a weird behavior with Caches set On.

Hey,

so should I ignore the message until the next upgrade?

My mission, thus this request, is to make sure there is no flaw lying dormant in our DB which leads to an error now or in the near future.
Atm we don't use OAuth and postponed the setup.

If this is non-issue due to the upgrader adds the column multiple times, that's fine for me, as well. 😌

Thanks,
Thomas

Hi IPS Team and community admins,

I have to raise the issue again, as it happened twice to me: During an upgrade from 4.4.3 -> 4.4.6 in 2019 and just recently when upgrading from 4.4.10 -> 4.5.4.2. Same error, same duplicate column. See a.m. [1] [2]

It is fine if a table or column has to be modified, of course. If it is within the nature of the upgrade process to add the column several times, with an expected error in case it is already there -several times after version changes- I tend to be fine with it, as well.
But I need to know, if this is the case, as we got the almost same error twice within 2 years.
@bfarber: I understood from your last answer back then that this happened due to a build system artifact which should have been sorted for a future maintenance in 2019; still I got an error about the same column just recently. 

I have to make sure that there isn't an underlying issue lying dormant in our pretty huge database.

Thank you,
Thomas 
 

Hi Miss B,

thanks, that happened to us from 4.4.3 to 4.4.6, as well.

So we still have that artifact present in 4.4 and 4.5, i.e. when migrating?

Hi folks,

our upgrade to 4.5 went smooth after several tests, unfortunately our production install shows a single error message in our system log:

Error (1060) Duplicate column name 'prompt': addColumn ["core_oauth_authorize_prompts",{"name":"prompt","type":"ENUM","length":null,"decimals":null,"values":["login","reauthorize"],"allow_null":true,"default":null,"comment":"The requested prompt type","unsigned":false,"zerofill":false,"auto_increment":false,"binary":false}]

It was triggered by admin/upgrade/?controller=upgrade&key=ABC&mr=5&_=1616529281484

Anyone else had this error regarding the sql db column core_oauth_authorize_prompts?

Thanks,
Thomas

51 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

In the app install it should have copied the plugin settings, added it to the app settings and then uninstalled the plugin. For some reason which I have no idea only talking to you here, it didn’t do it. If you then uninstalled the plugin and have it now as app then it seems ok to me.

I see, that didn't work as described.
Well, I did it in our testing environment. I can handle it manually, this is no problem as this app doesn't have historical data or a complex configuration.

This is just a report for you that an Upgrade from 4.4 to 4.5 didn't work as expected in our case / so not in all cases...

 

Something went apparently wrong, after upgrading our test install from 4.4 to 4.5 I noticed that the old plugin wasn't automatically uninstalled, so it was still shown as Plugin.

I understood that it should be converted to an Application, right?

Hi @Adriano Faria

just converted to 4.5 and matched the marketplace App in our test environment

I noticed that matching went fine and the Icon shows that it's from the marketplace, but it is still a plugin in ACP.
Then I uninstalled the plugin and re-installed from marketplace. Now it shows correctly as Application.

What went wrong during Upgrade or Match?

I refere to this description...

Quote

Upgrade from (any) plugin version

• Just install this application and it will port the plugin settings to the new format and the old plugin will be automatically uninstalled from your community.

Thank you,
Thomas

@Fosters Great news. Any ETA when it is going to be released? 🙂

Hi,

is there no sign or marker to identify those who used the post before registering function?

I anticipated that in the ACP at Statistics or the member's information at "All Recent Account Activity"...

Regards,
Thomas

Hi mates,

when "Post Before Registering" is enabled, is it possble to see Users who registered that way?

We enabled the feature quite a while ago, but I can't see how many registered through it.

I checked the user activity log on specific users and the statistics in general...

Thanks,
Thomas

After searching in the wrong direction (ckeditor config docs, ckeditor file locations) for a while, I found it simply using the IPS Translation options:

ACP > Customization > Localization > Languages > "your language" > Translate (button). Then look for entries (Keys) like editor_code_clike or editor_code_perl etc.