Charles

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.

We are preparing to launch new features where you can see send, view, and click statistics for all emails sent by your community right in your AdminCP. You will also be able control your own suppression lists for reputation management. This means you will be able to reactivate emails that bounce (though spam complaints you cannot reactivate). That allows you to increase me Postmark is our current email vendor as listed on our legal disclosure sub-processors, is themselves GDPR compliant, and is used my thousands of sites all over (including in the EU). There is no GDPR issue. Be careful not to automatically assume every little thing is a GDPR issue as you will end up putting yourself into an unnecessary corner. All that said, if you still for some reason wish to, you can always use your own and put the SMTP details in. We do not run our own email servers. We have always used third-party systems. Can you imagine trying to build out your own email network? It would be quite a nightmare. I am sorry for your concern with this and if you feel we overlooked something. I have disabled email sending on your community for the moment so you do not have further concerns about this and purged all your email send logs, views, and clicks. Feel free to contact support if you need help using an alternative email service. The global enabling of view and click tracking regardless of your community settings was an error and has been fixed.

Now this does not mean a spam complaint will not happen as they can be delayed so let me know if you see a block come through again.

The alpha preview, and other sites, will notice the unblock eventually. They only check every so often. Let me know when you send a test email and I'll copy the log here.

Just to provide more information, assuming you are referring to the email address k******er@yahoo.com: On Saturday, January 13, 2024 1:08:27 PM Yahoo sent us a spam complaint for an email sent to that address. Unfortunately they don't really tell us why/how/who put in the spam complaint. When we receive a spam complaint, the email is automatically added to our suppression list and we never email that address again. I went ahead and manually removed your email from our suppression list so it should email again. Since January, we are now on a new email provider. If we get a spam complaint again, it will tell us a tiny but more information about the complaint but only a bit more. If it does spam complaint again, I can at least share that data with you and you could contact Yahoo. If you want to go in your AdminCP, email settings, and then do a test email to that address I can check the logs and see what happens.

We do 🙂 You can subscribe to the status page to get an alert when there is a planned update that will be impacting. You can also get alerts when there is any major downtime event.

My apologies for these intermittent issues. We were doing backend improvements and some of the worker nodes got out of sync. This meant that some had your proper configurations in place and others had the wrong configurations which caused those random errors. We re-deployed the entire cluster so everything should be good now. Unfortunately, a re-deploy takes a bit as we sometimes have hundreds of servers running at any one time. But we're good now! Again, sorry about those random errors you were getting.

Please post about the alpha preview on the alpha preview site. Thanks!

We will soon let those on the alpha testing group share their test sites for more feedback. Not much longer now - it's all coming together - which (hopefully) those in the alpha group can confirm 😄

That’s a shame that they’re so negative over there. If you look beyond a “forum script” there’s so much a community can be.

We would love to have multiple language packs b default but unfortunately translations are hard. We tried auto-translation software but the lack of context confuses it. Our plan is to eventually gather statistics on what the popular languages are and look into hiring someone to maintain translations.

The TL;DR version: We actually provide the service you pay for through constant updates and communication. You don’t see people on our community wondering why we do not communicate or release an update in years. While there are countless differences in goals and vision, we cost more because we do more. Ask yourself: do you want ye olde forum script that you see people begging for updates on or a living company behind an evolving product?

We will be inviting another batch of testers in next week. Keep an eye on your notifications for the invite!

Right now we are asking the testers not to share links to their test sites until we get another alpha build or two out.

That's strange that you are seeing no CSS on your screenshot as that is all loaded via CDN.

We do not plan to change the package requirements.

We made a change a few hours ago to reduce the challenges. Are you still seeing people being prompted?

Live Topics is available for all customers on the following packages: Creator Creator Pro Team Business Enterprise Live Topics is not available on: Beginner Classic Feel free to reach out if you have questions on upgrading.

Invision Community 5 is still several months away from a release. We will keep posting blog entries about its development over the coming weeks. Those entries will keep you informed.