djpretzel

See I'm having the exact same issue - when trying to do a lookup on "Add Tag" for a forum configured w/ closed tags, it just spins forever. I'm testing in Firefox/Win10 and using the default theme; error logged is: @Kevin Carwile any ideas?

@bfarber Precisely; the case I'm making is that you don't really *want* ANY of your customers using Disqus/FB for this when they COULD be using IPS suite instead. From a "lock-in" perspective, it gets valuable data into IPS instead of having it sit with a third-party, further consolidating the investment in IPS for customers with pages on their site that sit outside the IPS framework. I'm proposing that this be a standard feature, leveraging the REST API.... customization to fit a site's visual look & feel could (and should) remain an enterprise offering, but the core of it would be a drop-in script, available to all licensed IPS users, which makes the product far more flexible and lets it play nice with custom databases in Django, Laravel, etc. There are probably a handful of potential customers with existing database-driven sites for whom this would be a big selling point. Not a ton, but some. @Joel R This is accurate, but the use case I have - and which clearly some enterprise customers have had as well - involves comments on the same site, or at least surrounding the same content. I'm not looking for a universal solution, I'm looking to leverage the solution I already have @Aiwa Plain, semantic HTML5 would be fine; I agree that the REST API offers most of the tools necessary, which is why I think the "last mile" to provide a drop-in JS that adds the comments could be straightforward and provide a lot of value. I suppose there's always the possibility of a marketplace addon, or commissioning something similar, but given that IPS *already* offers this to enterprise customers, and given that IPS has a vested interest in its customers leaning on the IPS suite for comments (instead of Facebook, Disqus, etc.), it seems like a win-win for everyone.

@bfarber Thanks for the explanation; it makes sense, even if it's the result of lack of foresight on the design of the RSS spec itself. Atom feeds seem to handle this much better, with multiple author elements and name specified independently. Rather than hack/deviate from RSS, perhaps also supporting Atom would be possible? In a list of forum threads, who wrote the thread is often an important differentiator, and it'd be great to see this supported OOTB by IPS.

Forum RSS feeds do not include author. This information is useful. I'd personally recommend it simply be included by default, but an option to include it would also work.

Necro-bumping this - the RSS feed should absolutely include the author, no reason not to, by default.

Feature is described at https://invisioncommunity.com/services/remote-commenting This functionality is free & easy to implement... with Disqus AND Facebook comments plugins! ...but costs extra $$$ for IPS customers to implement using the IPS platform... 😕 Given that the primary competition for this product is both free AND discourages use of IPS, I think this "enterprise" feature should be democratized and made free/standard as well Would become a selling point for anyone with a site that exists outside of IPS (i.e. not implemented in Pages) that uses IPS as their community Would become a first-class working example of REST API for developers to learn from (assuming it used REST API - which it should!)

I'll be posting this in feedback as well, as @bfarber recommends, but I think the following should strongly be considered: Make the REST API mandatory (at least for access from same host) Start using the REST API within the default IPS theme for things like the widgets, user status In other words, even for the core product, start moving to more of an SPA paradigm, with graceful fallback to server-side content when possible In this fashion, the REST API becomes more immediately useful to all developers, because it's guaranteed to be present and is hooked in to the way the core product functions, OOTB.

@bfarber Historically one of the IPS "enterprise" offerings has been a comments widget that can be placed on any page, ala Disqus - at least that's my understanding of how it works? What I'd really like to see is that particular functionality democratized & offered as a frontend component that works hand-in-hand with your REST API. Our site has thousands of pages that are stored in a separate database, outside of IPS - for good reasons. I'd LOVE to offer integrated comment threads on these pages, to tie the entire community together. So whatever combination of REST API endpoints *AND* frontend JavaScript would be necessary to make that happen, that's my number one (by far) request. In the absence of something like this, my community and others with a similar use case are forced to resort to Facebook comments widget or Disqus, which takes us further away from IPS... I haven't taken that step yet because I've been waiting & waiting & waiting to see if something could be done via IPS. Thoughts?

If you supported a Bootstrap 4 theme OOTB (either as replacement default, or a streamlined & officially-supported secondary option), would people complain if/when it doesn't support Bootstrap 5? Probably, but... who cares? In other words, some people will always complain about certain things, right? What it WOULD allow access to is: A gigantic body of themes, free & commercial... Easier integration of third-party widgets/components which themselves offer default theming in bootstrap (often multiple versions) An exhaustive number of developers intimate with the core CSS classes and their application... More devs might then be more interested in theming and developing for the IPS platform because at least one component - the CSS framework - is familiar to them, and is thus one less thing to learn... also even potentially increases overall confidence in the platform, for some. Sounds pretty good to me? In other words, based on the level of adoption & familiarity with Bootstrap specifically, is it at least possible that this proposal deserves re-evaluation? Here, I'll write some copy for your FAQ/documentation, so it's one less thing to do, and "BS_VERSION" as a substitution variable makes me smile: Q: "It's FANTASTIC that you now support Bootstrap {BS_VERSION} for front-end themes, but why don't you support a more recent version? Eh?" We want to focus our development efforts more on functionality, and less on constantly maintaining compatibility with third-party components which have different needs & release schedules. While we eventually decided to move to Bootstrap for theming the IPS platform front-end, we did so knowing that we would need to follow a stable/conservative upgrade reconciliation/compatibility cycle in order to not divert our emphasis from core responsibilities.

This would STILL be an amazing feature...

4.1.19.1 is out - can anyone confirm that it includes the patches previously posted, and works with this addon?

No problem with the 4.X version of the add-on being charged for separately. Problem with things continuing to break on 4.X updates... I get that the finger can be pointed in both directions, IPS devs & add-on devs, but finger pointing isn't helping all that much... right now there's a 4.1.19 update marked as security-related that breaks this add-on, leaving two options: Update, be secure, and break the add-on. Wait, be less secure, and hope the add-on is fixed or that IPS patches to 4.1.19.1 Both options are poo. Whatever can be done to prevent poo options being forced on us is an improvement.

This would (still) be beautiful...

Shouldn't the actual install queries be modified as per IPS's request? Will the plugin be updated to match, or will we always have to run this queries.json file? @Ryan H.?

I don't know about the rest, but I do agree that turnkey Wordpress integration would be a pretty compelling selling point for anyone not satisfied with bbpress and wanting something more robust while keeping their main content on WP... that's gotta be a meaningful cross-section of sites, I'd think... It's a new era, y'all... Microsoft open-sourced .NET, released it for Linux, and even ported SQL Server to Linux... the days of pretending the (overwhelmingly popular) competition don't exist and not playing nice are over. If there were a roadmap (dirty word, I know) for IPS 4.X, I would just expect more bug fixes and feature enhancements of the type they've been doing - which have been great - but IPS 4.5 or even 5.X could start being a little more expansive & supporting (only the most common!) CMS integrations... namely, WP... and perhaps also offering framework integrations for Symfony3, Laravel 5... yes, it's work to maintain these... but it's a selling point, and a meaningful one...

@Ryan Ashbrook Would you mind elaborating? I'm a little frustrated that this level of comment integration is a "custom" service that IPS only provides to larger clients, when it *seems* like it could be an addon/product that you could make available to everyone, for a reasonable price... is there any reason that this solution/integration needs to be client-specific and (presumably, since no numbers are provided!) more expensive than a traditional IPS offering?

Yeah it's an unfortunate situation right now, because critical security patches are being bundled into feature releases that have their own sets of bugs PLUS cause compatibility issues with third-party stuff... meaning that if you want to be secure, you have to break things. Right now there's no way to run a secure version of IPS4 that also handles linking mentions correctly... I can chalk most of this up to "IPS4 is still stabilizing" but that *would* be easier to remember & swallow if the roadmap was brought back from the dead (again!) and we had an idea of when we might see a change to versioning & the concept of an "LTS" release that gets independent security patches...

Beyond simply liking this post, I have to quote it & emphasize that this is exactly what I'm thinking as well... also a big fan, also want to see IPS succeed, also believe that the testing process should be automated beyond whatever level it currently is so as to address more of the types of bugs we're seeing with each release...

It *feels* that way to us, but I trust @Lindy that they are testing as best they can... what I'm wondering is whether there are process improvements on their end that maybe they're not aware of, suggestions, ideas, etc. from people perhaps more intimately familiar with web application QA, etc. that could benefit them. I sometimes think IPS underestimates the technical prowess of its community and doesn't treat it as the resource it is & could be...

@Lindy Thanks for the detailed response as always; much appreciated. From a technical perspective, with regard to automated/unit testing, I'm wondering if you have anything that could catch something like this bug: ...? If not, I do think there are solutions out there... in this specific case, anything doing automatic/scripted content generation that included mentions would potentially be able to catch the resulting 404 error on the flip side, among other approaches... I know from experience that *writing* such tests can take a ton of time, but that investment usually pays off long-term when you can run a more comprehensive battery of automated tests and have that additional assurance...

Yeah people often assume things when you aren't specific... you just said the thread was being presented "in a hysterical manner" and didn't provide any specifics. Which part was "hysterical," exactly? Tell us next time, and no one will *have* to assume anything... win-win for everyone.

I don't get how bugs like this: Make it past QA Don't get addressed with a 4.12.1.2 (e.g.) release ASAP, because they are resulting in CORRUPT DATA being generated... Sometimes I feel like there aren't any unit tests, or Selenium tests, or anything of that nature, and for each release, they're just kinda winging it... TBH, though, I feel like we're still in a state of flux, and things still haven't settled down for IPS4.... I'm hoping 4.2 will represent a stable, largely bug-free milestone where things stop breaking with each new release...

I'd consider this more of a bug and less of a feature request, since it's an inconsistent implementation that doesn't display essential information that is acknowledged as being essential by the other IPS applications. Perhaps log it?

Yes +1

Precisely this; well-said.