Thomas P

This is a custom .htaccess to use on the IPS Community Suite Forums. It helps to improve your forums Google Page Speed and YSlow scores.
The top segment is the same .htaccess that is generated by the IPS Forum software.
The bottom segment is based upon research of several websites and the references listed below. Please be careful when using this file because the contents may be incompatible with your server setup. Preventative measures have been taken to ensure that it should be safe to use in any Apache based environment.
Google recommends a minimum of one week: https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/LeverageBrowserCaching
GTmetrix recommends a minimum of one month: http://gtmetrix.com/leverage-browser-caching.html
 
This file is provided as-is and works with Apache based systems only. Server configurations may vary and there may be unexpected results, preventative measures have been included to try and keep any problems from occurring.
This resource is not supported. Help will be offered to the best of my ability and the community's help and feedback are welcomed. Contributions to improve the overall performance gained by this file are encouraged.
 

We are not ignoring this topic. We just haven't commented is all.

Coming from another prevalent widespread community software IPB has helped us to leverage stability, performance and community management in general.
All areas and features from forum management, permissions, module integration are top of the class.
To us Invision Community clearly offers the most feature-rich all-in-one suite on the market, I would recommend any community owner, especially of big communities, to evaluate the Invision Community software suite.
Thomas Praider - https://www.MCSEboard.de
 

Coming from another prevalent widespread community software IPB has helped us to leverage stability, performance and community management in general.
All areas and features from forum management, permissions, module integration are top of the class.
To us Invision Community clearly offers the most feature-rich all-in-one suite on the market, I would recommend any community owner, especially of big communities, to evaluate the Invision Community software suite.
Thomas Praider - https://www.MCSEboard.de
 

Yes, there is an issue with IE11 not supporting newer coding standards. I'm gonna push out a version for this fix now, and move all new features to the IPS 4.3 version.

No. IPS4 search only searches for TITLE and CONTENT.
 

Probably not, since there was still no causal connection shown between sitemap creating speed (the actual topic here) and decrease in indexing/ranking. So there is probably nothing to fix. 
 
That might be, but IPS didn’t as well. Google changed things and you can check wether their algorithm updates (e.g. Fred in 2017) correlate with your problems. That would actually tell you more about what you could probably improve. 

Ok, right away I can see the LD is fine.
"interactionStatistic": [ { "@type": "InteractionCounter", "interactionType": "http://schema.org/ViewAction", "userInteractionCount": 80927 }, { "@type": "InteractionCounter", "interactionType": "http://schema.org/CommentAction", "userInteractionCount": 1239 }, { "@type": "InteractionCounter", "interactionType": "http://schema.org/FollowAction", "userInteractionCount": 3 } ], Testing the link using Google's tool shows the meta data is being received perfectly.

Invision Community is doing its job.
 
 

So many misconceptions.
If @daveoh were to share his site, you would see it's very clean, well organized, has high quality content and a glance shows his backlink profile is strong. He also has little to no apparent ads.
@Nesa while I understand your concerns and understand your frustration, the sitemap itself is not the cause of your issues. This was posted earlier today and was already indexed by Google hours ago. I've checked some of our larger enterprise sites and their content from today is also being indexed in a timely fashion. I just searched the topic you referenced and it too is listed. There's no magic bullet in 4.3 or even other software that's going to put you on the front page of Google or instantaneously push new content directly to Google.
The big algorithm update of 2017 targeted a lot of sites with some losing as much as 90% of their traffic. Some of these sites flew under the radar with what Google considers low quality content and in Google's eyes, they were righting the scale. There are many factors that influence your position in Google, your index rate and frankly, whether or not Google just likes or hates you.
Ads
If your site has ads that detract from the user experience and content on your site, Google WILL penalize you and that was the single most biggest hit in the "Fred" update. An ad in the header and footer are ok. An affiliate link or "sponsored content" that is appropriately placed and blends with content is ok. Ads all over the page and in the sidebar are obnoxious to users and Google agrees and doesn't want to subject us to it (for which I'm, as a user, appreciative.)
Backlinks
Backlinks can account for up to 1/3 of your overall standing with Google -- that is, quality backlinks; not "hey, link to me and I'll link you back."
Content Freshness/Quality
You may very well have 15 million posts, but if they're all from 2003 and you get very little new content, your old content is going to have less value to Google and they may drop it. Keep it fresh, keep users engaged.
Google has gotten very intelligent and can distinguish rehashing the same musings over fresh information. General discussion sites with loose/generic content won't likely fare as well as those with unique, relevant content. Pages with thin content (such as picture threads, a bunch of "lols", etc.) are likely to get hit by Google.
 
Again, Google cleaned house in 2017 - many sites got hit, including those using Wordpress, vB, etc. There's just too many variables to get all up in arms over one component: a sitemap. A sitemap, even the complete absence of a sitemap is not going to cause your indexed pages to drop. If this has happened to you, it's because Google penalized you and dropped your content. A sitemap is also not a magic wand and Google will not consider it the be-all for indexed content. A sitemap is a good gap filler and provides Google additional insight, but most content is still indexed organically through links.
4.3 will provide for the mentioned improvements to the sitemap. Given 4.3 is so close, I'm sorry, but it would not be worth re-engineering those improvements for 4.2 and again, it's not going to be the magic solution you believe it to be. Unfortunately, I can only suggest focusing on the above list as one or more of those items is the likely culprit for your site being dropped.

It wasn’t a issue in the plugin, btw. Your posts were flagged as best answer but a bitwise column were not updated, probably something changed during the conversion. Fixed with a query. 

Thanks Adriano, your support helped to fix that issue.

Upgrade should work seamlessly. After upgrading the app will be listed but not installed--there should be a button to upload/upgrade to new version, which will walk you through the process. Data should all go through. If there are any catches, they're not coming to mind--it's been quite a while.
I don't know what to make of that error or what you're trying to do that's causing it. I haven't seen any such issue.
I haven't seen that error either, but have you tried doing what it says? Just a thought.

Excellent - purchased

Thanks, fair enough. I now edited your plugin to remove the top notice, so it just shows the bottom notice next to the quick reply dialog.
I am aware that this is a quick fix and I have to look into this issue at a later time...

Hi,
This is the same app. I've just taken over the rights to it from @stoo2000.
It should be upgradable from IPB3, but it's not something I've tested in a while. You should test it as part of your test upgrades. There's information on how to do it in the included PDF documentation.

Yes, posts marked as best answers on 3.4 will still be set as best answer with this plugin on 4.2 in Discussion forums.

Seemed to be a timing issue, e.g. another task was running atm.
The second try went fine, all is running
Thanks for listening