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!

4 minutes ago, Dll said:

When you say they can be used right now, I assume you mean just on V5?

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.

47 minutes ago, PanSevence said:

So how can we do this if it will be deprecated in the future?

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

21 minutes ago, PanSevence said:

There's no point in hiding the truth. Please answer my question: when I have so many attachments that one server can't handle them, I need to use storage servers.

We handle hundreds of terabytes of attachments without issue. 

22 minutes ago, Omri Amos said:

No fix for the followed topics notifications? very disappointing.
This is a major feature and a major bug, IMO.
Can you imagine Facebook without notifications on new replies to your replies?

I don't know how the fact that this basic|major feature is not working can be ignored...

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

12 minutes ago, James Hargreaves said:

I am seeing lots of formatting issues across both our site and ACP, plus problems with the editor not loading properly, etc.

Could it be related, or do I have a separate issue do you think?

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 🙂 

Just now, Dll said:

Thanks @Charles, that would be good. No reason to think it wouldn't be secure or anything like that, but just good to tick it off the list. 

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.

30 minutes ago, Markus Jung said:

And my e-mails are set to “Uses Invision Community servers to send emails.”, not Postmark, and Log Statistics is deactivated. 

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.