Charles

We’ve got some exciting news! All communities hosted on the Invision Community platform will be switching to Cloudflare Enterprise edition for CDN and Firewall services. This transition starts now and will be complete by the end of January 2025. Don’t worry, you won’t experience any downtime during this transition. If you do see any issues, like a secure certificate warning, just clear your cache and try again. If your community keeps getting connection errors for more than 5 minutes, please reach out to our support team. We’re thrilled to offer you these improvements, including enhanced security, faster speeds, and more redundancy. We’ll also be able to better control bots and filter bad-bots while still allowing Google, Bing, and other safe search engines to crawl your community. AI content scrapers have become a real pain for communities, constantly searching for great human-generated content. This change will help us control those AI bots. We’re confident that this transition will be smooth and hassle-free. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We’re excited to see these improvements and many more in the coming months!

Our entire cloud network is on B2. Hundreds of terabytes.

Backblaze is S3-compatible. It, and every other S3-compatible service, can be used right now. However, we are adding a direct Backblaze integration for those who don't know that but it's really just a copy/paste of the S3 integration with wording changed to say Backblaze instead of AWS S3.

You should use a service like S3, B2, or countless others designed for mass-media storage.

We handle hundreds of terabytes of attachments without issue.

I might suggest you stop using the betas of version 5 if you do not understand what a beta means 🙂

It's possible it is related. Email support an example page. I looked at your site now and did not see any issues.

Over the next few days you will see some improvements for static resources served on our network. Static resources are items like images, videos, JavaScript, CSS, and any other file attachments. These changes do not yet apply to your actual dynamic community pages. We will follow up with more updates on improvements we are making there. Brotli Compression When your browser supports it, all static files will use Brotli compression. Brotli offers a higher compression which often results in faster page load times. WebP Images WebP is an image compression format that offers higher compression for images which also results in faster load times. Most images will automatically be served as WebP with no input from you. We will be also adding an option to opt-out of WebP compression for your community if your focus is on high-quality images. High Cache Hits We can now server a greater percentage of request as a cache hit which means responses will be more geographically centered where you are. More speed improvements. EU Restrictions For clients choosing to host in our EU region, your static media is already stored in the EU. Our new changes will also mean that the network layer will also be restricted to EU locations. If you are interested in moving your Invision Community to our EU region, please contact us. There is no charge to move to EU on the Creator Pro package and above. Better Analytics In a future release, you will be able to see static media storage, bandwidth, and traffic statistics in your AdminCP. Video Speed Viewing videos will be greatly enhanced with chunked buffering allowing for more responsive skipping to different parts of videos and faster encoding of newly uploaded videos. Enhanced Security Files that require a signed URL for download will be more secure and allow for more reliable signing. We will also be enforcing the latest version of TLS for connections and implementing connection rate limiting to disallow scraping. Finally, we will be implementing bot control to block unfriendly bots or things like AI bots that do not provide direct SEO benefit. We hope you enjoy these improvements. Look for more updates as we announce other back end improvements to speed, security, and stability.

Please submit a support ticket as this is not something we can assist you with in public.

I am sorry you were not notified before the system auto-blocked your emails. It's not really an excuse but this is the first time the backend ever had to block a site for email overuse so we did not have a good communication procedure. In 20+ years we have never had a site sending millions of emails a month so it just never came up 😀. We host communities with way more members than you have but it seems like you are sending a lot of follow up and activity emails to them that is outside the norm for community use.

The popular now widget was removed because it had technical problems on many communities and those issues were inherit in its design so were not fixable. It was a very old feature so could not be adapted to a modern framework. It seems you were not having those problems so I can see why you might be frustrated. I am sorry for the disruption there and how it might seem like we just removed something for no reason. You can always read our Release Notes to know everything that changes with each release before upgrading.

Plugins in v5 work different than v4 but you can still do things 🙂

The staging site is live as it is attached to your production one so it would go when it got purged. However, you are right, we should have suspended and archived the staging one when the parent live one did. Your old production site data is just archived off until it reaches the auto-purge. But, either way, I put in a thing and it will all purge today.

Should be back now.

When a community package expires, it is kept suspended for a bit in case a client returns (which happens a lot). After a bit the system will auto-purge all data. I can go ahead and force it to purge now though.