Wolfie

When a feature request is made, the IPS staff have to weigh out the options, benefits, drawbacks, necessity, demand and other factors that get involved with making such a request possible and available. Out of the thousands of people who put in requests and have reasons for using IPB and the included features, only an extreme few, such as yourself, want the IP address to NOT be recorded. So then, let's look at the overall concept. To prevent it from logging IP addresses, an option would have to be included that would ignore IP addresses altogether. Then other options and features that rely on the information would have to be reprogrammed to take into account that the feature may be disabled. Additional programming would have to be designed and implemented in order to adjust the board and the way it functions in order to not produce undesired or seemingly buggy results from the lack of obtaining and recording IP addresses. Overall, it's a massive undertaking just to make one very undesirable feature available for a select few people. If you're really that worried about IP addresses being recorded, then go into the Peer to Peer forums and ask for help making a task module to run hourly that would do SQL queries to blank out or put in "127.0.0.1" in place of real IP addresses. Then you won't have to worry about it because the longest an IP address would remain in the database would be up to an hour. Would be much easier to design and would accomplish what you want. I do believe I speak for an overwhelming amount of other board owners when I say that I would prefer that such a 'feature' not have a way to be turned off, because all it would take is for a hacker to find a way to inject malicious code to force a board to disable IP logging or a disgruntled administrator to turn it off on a board not his own, and then suddenly that board is vulnerable to all sorts of trouble. Not only that but someone could turn it off accidentally and then not realize it until they really need it. It's just too much trouble and too much that could go wrong with it.

I think the main point is, why bother to remove it? You can easily remove it from view, so why remove it from the programming?

First, he mentioned 2012, not 2009. Second, it'll be in the fall of 2013, not the summer of 2012.

That wouldn't be possible in this arrangement. Review the first post again. The individual seller would forfeit their license to the reseller group. Up until the license is sold, they can have it transferred back to them. The resellers would be a 3rd party group that would have the license, collect the money and complete the transfer of the license to the new owner. This special group of resellers could also have the authority to reverse a transfer, so if the buyer reverses the charge (ie, tries to steal a license), they would lose the license, making it pointless to try. If that happens and the resellers have already credited the original sellers account, that seller could just "refund" the charge so that the resellers aren't ripped off either. If the seller is given the option to sell the license for the price of their choosing, then there would simply be a list of available licenses and their asking price, and someone could come along and just click to purchase a license. What they are looking for could also be sorted/filtered by product (of course), time left on the license and (if it's IP.Board) type of license. The asking price would of course affect how quickly that particular license would sell. If it's set to a conforming standard, where the price is predetermined (except for LIFETIME and Perpetual licenses), based on the age of the license and when its support will end, then that could help as well, as it'd be a set price and in some ways would be a "first come, first sold" basis. I know that the idea as a whole is a long shot. Because for there to be any chance that IPS would even consider it, it'd have to be designed to give them extremely few problems (if ANY) to deal with because of it. But even then, it would depend on how much it would benefit the company. But one thing at a time. The more support this idea gets and the more any potential problems are discussed and solutions are provided for, the better chance we have of this happening. Then as people buy used licenses and then spend money to renew those licenses, IPS starts getting revenue on old licenses where they may not have gotten anything at all without it. I would actually predict that at first it may become busy, as old licenses get tossed on there to sell them off and get bought by members wanting the products, but the supply would die down and there would be an occasional license popping up to be bought. IPS would have more active licenses, which in turn means more income for them and that would be better for everyone, especially us consumers, as the company would have means to do more (more resources such as employees for example). :)

They may want to be able to provide a place where true anonymity is promised and supported. However, it's not theoretically possible, as measures taken to provide it only increase the amount of effort required to piece together what they try to not collect. If they are doing it to engage and support an illegal activity, then (#1) IPS can get their site taken offline until their software is removed (there is a license agreement to not use IP.Board for illegal activities) and (#2) that could result in the person facing more charges, for obstruction of justice, by purposely covering tracks of those who use his site to commit crimes. Bad bad idea. If it's just for freedom of speech along with trying to protect the persons identity, then I can understand wanting to hide their information, but they'd have to go through a lot of effort just to make it very difficult to piece together the information. For one, email addresses are stored in the database and the logs of access to those email accounts can be used to track the person down. Routing paths to the site can be used for getting logs of accesses to the site and the sources of those accesses. The contents of PM's and posts can be used for developing a profile and piecing the information together in itself can help narrow down who the person is and where they may be. It's a wasted effort really. But as for wanting to give the members assurance that their own staff can't access the information, it's easy enough to implement.

There's always a way to track. :)

Disabling IP logging/tracking on the board wouldn't stop it. If he thinks it will, he's mistaken. Take a log of when something was posted (from the database in fact) and compare it to the servers IP logs and poof, they're still traced. It is a bad idea indeed.

If you modify the skins to not show the IP addresses used and even remove access to the IP matching features (staff options not internal board functions), then essentially, you wouldn't be tracking IP's. The board would only be storing the information for it's own purposes, such as built in security (for both the board AND it's members) as well as the ability to function properly. Just remove the ability for the board to tell you that particular piece of information. When you think about it, it would be exactly like the server recording the IP address. You set it to not release that information to you, then it's not part of what you do. Yeah the server collects and tracks it, as well as the board. But that's all kept away from human eyes. :)

That'd require a lot of work for the staff, having to hunt through to find the original issue. How about this idea instead? http://forums.invisionpower.com/topic/285816-feature-suggestions/

How would the seller charge back the transaction? All that would need to be done is to undo the charge/payment, and that'd cover it. Not make a new payment.

What about removing the ability to SEE the IP addresses? This would only have an affect on those who would be able to see it at all (moderators and/or admin).

That's why it would be a good idea if it was a notification instead of a PM and then you'd have something about the forums rules or policies where it shouldn't be questioned unless the member is severely convinced that it was moved for the wrong reason or moved to the wrong place. But also, could always turn it off. :)

As in, from a humorous aspect, right? :lol:

That'd work too. Wish they'd find different buttons for the undo/redo and put them in that order. I like that style, makes more sense. The two green ones, both going clockwise, leaves me confused.

I think it should go on the same row that the twitter button appears. But I'm glad it's there, been missing that feature.

I think that the only purpose of the PM would be to notify you and nothing more. Although come to think of it, I wonder if there would be a way for there to be a notification without it chewing up a PM slot. Where it would only be a notification with the only action being to keep or delete the notification.

Brandon, if you decide to add it in (like in 3.1.x), I'd like to offer a few ideas... #1 per ACP, per forum (Off/Optional/Forced on) #2 per member group, option to override the "forced on" setting, so a super moderator, for example, might be able to skip notifying the topic creator. #3 be able to add the notify feature within multi-moderation functions (as either off/optional/forced on). If a forum has it as off or forced on, then that setting is honored (unless that member group allows override). If it's set to optional, then the multi-moderation setting is used. #4 per forum/multi-moderation, allow to notify [only topic starter/topic starter + others who posted in topic] and option to notify those who are forum leaders. I know, a lot of work, but hoping that if nothing else, it'll give you some ideas to toy with. :) Could be really useful, especially if there is that much control over it.

I don't know the reasons, other than possibly making it easier to handle strings without causing issues or possibly to prevent malicious attacks (security). But I can tell you that if it's being disallowed in the Beta's and RC's, then it's going to be the same in the Final version unless by some miracle, IPS changes its mind and removes the restriction without any notice. So I wouldn't count on them being allowed, not without some sort of a modification that you'd need to make.

That would be better off as a mod. Ask in the mod support forum, someone might hop on it because that would be useful for many people. :)

Oh gosh I certainly hope not.

True, but I'd rather be annoyed by that, than to be annoyed by it being the opposite.

Oh no, how dare it error on the side of safety by trying to protect any data changes from being lost by giving you the option to save those changes! There should be a law against it! :D

Very important rule of programming: There is ALWAYS another bug. Doesn't matter how long the product has been available and worked on, there is ALWAYS another bug to be fixed. I personally think that there should be an RC3, with the number of bugs reported in RC2. But oh well. I already planned all along that when Final comes out, I will grab it, do test installs and test upgrades, so that when it comes time that I'll do the actual upgrade on the live board, it'll be a near perfect upgrade (referring to how I handle it). Also, I won't install Final for a few days, giving time for others to install and find remaining bugs that weren't uncovered by previous releases (and lack of a full audience), so that if there happens to be a major bug discovered, I can avoid it and just wait for v3.0.1 (and then repeat the process). As Magneto said in X3, "In chess, the pawns go first."

So then, 3.1 I'm guessing? So is it a definite to be tossed in or just up for consideration? :P Here's a quick edit via the ACP to allow a change to the default sorting method: Change default sort method of searches

When you say that you don't see a problem with adding a setting, are you saying it could be tossed into 3.0 final as a user based option, ACP (global) or something else? Don't want to assume you mean the first thing even though that would totally rock (if you do add it at any point, please make it default to date rather than relevance and maybe in 3.0.1 make the skin change to tell people on the search results that they can change the default setting in their UserCP). If not then I can wait until v3.1, if you decide to add it in. As for the design, and the reason for the second quote, I'd say to include a little bit more of each post, if the entire post won't be included. Either that or perhaps an ACP setting to either use the new format or to include the entire post in the result. Would be perfect actually, because then boards with heavy loads could use the reduced (new) style but low volume boards could allow for full posts.