Robert Angle

On September 30th all I was told was that there was a spike in traffic that caused the server to go into read-only mode. This crash my site. When I tried to reboot the server it died and I had to contact them to get it up and running again. Today I had another problem. Memory usage spiked, causing connection time-outs. Turns out there was a bruteforce attack on one of my other domains (a wordpress site). He disabled the login for wordpress to stop it and then everything went back to normal. So it seems that it is outside forces causing the problems, and not the server itself or the software. Even still, I need some education on Redis and Cloudflare. Are these options I should be employing?

We crashed the other day. There was a burst of traffic that caused out of memory errors which forced the server into 'read only' mode and then nothing worked, and when I tried rebooting the server it simply died. I'm back up and running now, but the site seems very slooooooooow much of the time. I involved my web host, and he tweaked a bunch of things, and said under normal circumstances I should be fine with our current VPS plan, but that he recommends I add CloudFlare to my site. I've done some reading about CloudFlare, and I am trying to wrap my head around what it actually does. It sounds like it serves cached static content straight from it's servers instead of my server. I am guessing this means images, pages, etc, that don't generally get updated. Certainly this wouldn't mean dynamic content that gets updated with reactions, replies, new posts, etc, right? Obviously I am concerned that visitors are getting up-to-date content when perusing the community. Another concern is that I heard it will end up messing up IP addresses. In other words, the IP address that the system logs will be that of CloudFlare's and not the ISP of the user connecting to the forum. If this is true, I would think that this would break all kinds of functionality of the software. In addition to possibly considering CloudFlare, I have been looking into 2 other options to try. 1) Archive posts over XX years old. We're currently sitting on 37,000 topics and 750,000 replies. If I chose to archive topics over 5 years old, about half of these would get moved to another table. These would be no longer editable and won't show up in searches, which would be a bummer. But, would it save load times? 2) Install and use Redis. Currently I use the file system as a datastore and no caching method at all. I haven't upgraded to 4.5 yet but it seems that Redis is the way to go moving forward. I don't know if I would benefit from using it though. Would I? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. As soon as I address this speed issue and check that my 3rd part plugins are compatible with 4.5 then I will be upgrading. - Bob

Let me refine my complaint with the following scenario... MemberJohn visits a news site on the web, selects a paragraph from the article, copies it, and then pastes it into my forums CK Editor, and submits it as a post. If the CSS for the news site had set the text to black, then the 'paste as rich text' feature will paste it as black. When a member using a dark template views it, he cannot see the black text over the black background. I know the user could highlight the text and change it to default, but none of them care to. I would love for there to be a way to automatically change all text to default while retaining the other rich text capabilities. So far, it seems my only option would be to set paste behaviour to 'paste as plain text', but then the other group of members get mad. Catch 22

Many members compose their comments in Microsoft Word or some other editor and customize it to their delight, and then paste it into the Editor on the forum. But if "paste as plain text" is enable, all that effort is lost. I created a "night mode" template which some members are using, but when someone copy and pastes from the web and the text is designated as "black" then they cannot see it against the black background, and they usually yell at one another, which gets annoying. I'm half tempted to remove the "dark mode" template altogether.

So we have this problem in our community where we developed a "dark mode" template for members who just prefer things that way, whether it is easy on the eyes or to save battery on their mobile devices. However, we've run into this conundrum and cannot seem to fix it.... We have "Paste behavior" set to Rich Text with giving the members the option to paste as Plan Text instead. If a member copies text that was originally designated as black and pastes it into the his post, the black text color attribute carries over into the post as part of that Rich Text. Members who use our dark mode template, in which the content area is black, will not see any quoted text, because it matches the background. Obviously, we could change "Past as Rich Text" always to "Paste as Plain Text" always, and we did that, then got a fair amount of complaints, so we switched it back. It's now an issue of a small amount of dark theme lovers vs the small amount of paste-as-rich-text lovers. If we could retain the Rich Text but strip away the text color attribute that would be perfect. We just need all text to be "default" so that it shows up dark on the white background and as light on the dark background. It there a way to make this happen by modifying something in the Invision code or the CK Editor code?

Is there any way to make it so that my members can choose between Public or Registered Members Only? By allowing the Administrators only option, my regular members cannot respond to status updates because these take you to the profile page.

Apparently @Fosters had abandoned this project.

Our site is jwtalk.net but the 4 blocks containing the feeds (topics, articles, files, and gallery [25 images]) are not displaying - as I've changed the permissions so that no membergroup at all can see them. When they are enabled, the site is crazy slow. When I disable them, it goes back to being fast loading. No. Okay, that's interesting. Do you get a lot of traffic? Are the feeds created on the fly on each page load? Do you have a large database? My database is large and I get significant traffic. What I didn't do was try to isolate which of the 4 blocks were causing the problem. I can play with that this weekend and report back. @TAMAN

So I purchased this app and took a great deal of time designing my footer and was really impressed with it's visual appeal, however, upon making it visible to everyone my site become unbearably slow, sLoW, SLOW! I actually contacted my host because it seemed like a connection problem (connection timed out) and we tweaked a few things, blocked all bots besides Google, Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo, etc, and nothing would improve the sudden sluggishness of the site. I finally isolated it to the Advance Footer. Row 1 had 3 blocks, a topic feed, a files feed, and an articles feed. Row 2 was a gallery feed with 25 images, and then rows 3 and 4 were just textual information and quick links. I removed all the feeds, and now my site is lightning fast in comparison. I'm assuming with each page view, the footer would have to check and see if all the feeds were up to date, and maybe even load the full size images and scale them down (probably not working with the new lazy-loading feature of IPS 4.4 either). Would it be possible to just have the footer refresh that information, say once an hour, and then cache it? The feeds gave my footer some meat. Now it's just text that I could have handcoded myself instead of paying $20 for the app.

This is interesting. I too think it would be beneficial to have push notifications. I would think that a simple app that could display push notifications and then open links in a browser would be fairly easy to accomplish. However, I have never got my feet wet with Android or iOS.

This is already something you can do natively within IPS. Go to AdminCP -> Site Features -> Applications -> System -> Profiles.... click the lock icon, and uncheck the group that should not be able to see profiles (like "Guests" for instance). In the meantime, I should be able to accomplish this with a template edit, right? I want a member to be able to select between "All" and "Members Only" but leave off the "Admin only" option.

Sweet! Thank you. I'll update my plugin later today and check it out.

After some more investigating, coupled with your answer, there is a conflict between your plugin and the new 'Post before registering' feature of IPS 4.4 I've been having a problem with Guests being able to post, even though Guest posting is disabled on all my forums. The 'Post before registering' field asks for a Display Name instead of an email address, like so.... (I originally filed a support ticket with Invision and provided them with this image) SO.... I just disabled all customizations, plugins, and applications and re-enabled them one by one and found that "Dead Topic Protection" is indeed where the bug is. Dead Topic Protection is allowing guests to post without registering at all, bypassing the new "Post before registering" feature. (Your plugin changes "Enter an email address" into "Enter a Display Name" instead) Dead Topic Protection prevents logged in members from resurrecting old topics, but guests, who shouldn't be able to post anyway, can reply to old topics that should be locked (apparently because Guest hasn't been an option since 3.2, but now with 4.4 maybe it should be). I don't know if adding Guest as an option would be the easy solution, or if they would still see the 'Join the conversation and post now' message but see no editor, lol. I hope this was clear enough. Sincerely, - Bob

This seems to be either incompatible with the new "Post before registering" feature of IPS 4.4, OR there is a glaring oversight in that you cannot choose the Guest membergroup in the plugin's settings.

Then edit your template and put the button in the header or the user menu. I actually really like this idea. When our community is done developing our dark theme, I'll look at placing it in a more convenient area instead of in the footer.

I snagged that. Thank you. The Editor Toolbar was giving me trouble. I kept trying to change the color of the icons but wasn't happy with the results. Then I tried uploading other CKEditor Skins and they weren't all that great either. My approach to the above has been to create my own CKEditor Skin and edit the CSS of those, then Import it. The icons will really help.

^ True that. We are working on creating a "dark them" for our community. I have some members messaging me the suggested edits as I work on it. But oh my goodness is this a chore! While we will probably keep the results to ourselves, I now appreciate fully the prices that many of the themes run for in the Marketplace. In fact, I'd have been better off just buying one, lol.

A little late to the game, but.... "Our community outgrew the abandoned freeware forum scripts we were using, and Invision Community Suite saved the day. From a flawless conversion to regular software updates, new features, and fast and responsive customer support, our community is more active and growing faster than ever before." - Robert Angle www.jwtalk.net

As I consider upgrading to 4.3, I am curious if this is compatible still.

It seems I cannot select certain forums for this to work on, while exempting other forums. It's all or nothing.

No demo for this theme? I can't seem to select it on the hellshammer site.

So it sounds like it might be safe before upgrading to create a child theme as a backup (so to speak), have that serve as the forum default theme until the newly updated Magnum theme has been tested thoroughly. I had previously thought that changes to the parent theme were passed along to the child theme unless I had modified the file. Now it sounds like a child theme is simply a COPY of the parent theme.

Hello @TAMAN, I think I have an interest in this template. But because I like to heavily modify some things, I am worried about my personal changes being overwritten when installing a future update. I guess my question is two-fold.... 1) In the template settings, you can usually make customizations regarding color, whether to use the slider or not or choose where it appears, etc. Am I correct in assuming that these choices are preserved from upgrade to upgrade? 2) I also like to edit the HTML and use several IF statements within the template itself to add/remove functionality based on groups, because the IPS suite doesn't give me certain options I need. What are the risks of these being overwritten when uploading a new version? Does making my theme a "child theme" protect my changes? And if so, how do I know if you made a change that is important and should be passed along to my child theme? Okay, so maybe that's a little more complicated than I thought. I hope it comes across clearly - Bob

Do you have a demo site? I was using a heavily modified version of Cosmic before upgrading to 4.2

Something along this line would be better.... {{if \IPS\Member::loggedIn()->modPermission('can_use_ip_tools')}} <td class='ipsType_center' style='width: 10%;'> {{IF MEMBER = ADMIN}} <a href='{$url2}' data-confirm data-confirmsubmessage="{lang='ips_ban_ip_address_desc'}">{lang='ips_ban_ip_address'}</a> | {{ENDIF}} <a target='_blank' href='{$url1}'>{lang='see_uses'}</a> </td> {{endif}} For me however, I am just going to remove the ban link. We almost never ban IP's anyway.