Wayne B

This entry is about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release.
One of our more technically-oriented features for 4.2, we have added more detailed logs of user logins, and the devices and IP addresses used. This brings several new features:
 
Notification of a new device sign in
If enabled, users can receive an email notification when a new device is used to log into their account:
 

Email sent when a login from a new device is detected
When a user signs in for the first time, a special key is set to recognise the browser on subsequent logins. This mean the notification email does not trigger on a new IP address, which would be annoying when travelling or if using a network where the IP address changes regularly. Instead, the notification is only triggered if someone signs into your account from a new physical device or web browser.
 
UserCP Device Management
If enabled, a new page will show in the user's settings page showing all the devices which have been used to log into their within the last 90 days (which is recent enough that could still be logged in if "Remember Me" was checked).

Recently Used Devices
Users can see the device, browser, physical location (obtained by a GeoIP lookup) and if applicable, how the login was processed (for example, if the sign in was with Facebook or Twitter, this will show). If they chose "Remember Me" when logging in, they can undo that (handy if you realise you accidentally left yourself signed in on a public computer).
If they see anything they don't recognise, a page to walk them through the necessary steps to re-secure their account is available.

Secure Account Information
 
New Two-Factor Authentication Setting
"Logging into the front-end" is one of the options of when to prompt for Two Factor Authentication. In 4.2, this has been separated into two distinct settings:
Logging into the front-end from a new device Logging into the front-end from a known device If you enable the former, but not the latter, and the user has previously logged in devices, the system will automatically show an explanation to users alongside the other available recovery option. This can be useful especially if you do not want to offer other recovery options.
 
AdminCP Device Management
In the AdminCP, administrators can see all the device and IPs a member has used. They can also disable automatic login for any device.
 

Edit member page shows most recently used device and IP address
 
 
Viewing a device's details
The system can also detect if another user is using the same device and will show this in the list of devices.
  
Users sharing the same device
 

IPS is always auditing our software to improve security at the code-level but these improvements are not really visible to you even though they protect your site all the time. We are implementing some new features that you can use to enhance the security and privacy of your site. Many of these features depend on your personal preferences, local laws, or the policies of your own organization. Here is a list of what's new:
Birthday Control

You may wish to make birthday viewing only show to admins or you can completely disable prompting for a birthday if you consider that information sensitive.
Member Delete Name Retention
When deleting a member in the AdminCP, if you choose to keep their posts the system currently names the posts with a display name of "Guest user" where user is the previous display name of the member you deleted. You can how choose to retain their name in posts or not so you can either have it as it is now or simple "Guest" on member delete.
Password Strength

Password Strength
You now have two new options for password: show a strength meter and require strong passwords. You can choose to either just show the meter as a suggestion or you can also choose to enforce a password strength. You can choose between three levels of password enforcement parameters depending on how strict you choose to be.
Guest Terms Banner

Guest Terms Banner
There is a new option to show a guest terms of service banner when a new visitor first visits your site. You can set the text shown in the display and you can also put in two special tags to automatically link to your Terms of Service or Privacy Policy page.
Age Restrictions

Age Prompt
We have always had COPPA support in the Suite but we have extended this to be a more generic age restriction feature. You can now set your site to reject registrations from anyone under a certain age you specify. For privacy, the birthday entered on registration is only used to calculate permission and is never stored.
 
This change will be in version 4.1.17 which is scheduled to be released in early December 2016.

There are now two ways to get outbound RSS feeds in IPS Community Suite: Activity Streams and a new Custom RSS Feeds feature we are introducing.
Every Activity Stream you create also creates a related RSS feed. However, Activity Streams take into account recent activity and unread status per-user which you may not want if you want a simple, raw feed of content by date. The new RSS Feeds feature uses similar filter settings to Activity Streams but does a traditional by-date approach to the feed. It also only reports on the initial creation of a content item and does not update based on replies.

Configure RSS Feeds
You can finely select various content settings including selecting just certain categories within an application. So you might create an RSS feed that includes only content from an announcements forum and your blog section which would then be a total feed of all the news on your site.
RSS feeds are useful in the traditional sense for people to subscribe to a feed on your site but they are also useful for integration. Many clients use RSS feeds to pull content into external sources to embed content on a different site, mobile app, or other systems. For those of you looking for even tighter integration with external systems, be sure to check out our REST API.
 
This change will be in version 4.1.17 which is scheduled to be released in early December 2016.

IPS Community Suite 4.1.16 is nearing the end of development so I wanted to go over some of the new features in this upcoming release. Some are big and some are small but we always enjoy making any sort of enhancements to the Suite.
We expect 4.1.16 to go to public beta next week. If you are interested in using a public beta please check out our beta forum (clients only) with more info. We welcome as much testing as possible and our betas are considered safe to use on a live site. We do offer support for betas so, if you are technically minded, consider giving them a try.
Commerce: New Ticket Listing
We have redesigned the ticket listing view in Commerce to be much more user friendly and better use screen space. You can also now group by department which is great for organization.

 
Much like Activity Streams on the front end you can create custom views for tickets based on how you work.

The new My History view allows staff to quickly see their latest replies and actions along with some basic stats.

There are many other smaller improvement in Commerce in 4.1.16 as well. We think you will enjoy all the updates.
Security Questions
To enhance the security of your member accounts we now have a new security questions feature where you can allow your members to put in their own, personal security questions. The member will then be prompted to answer those questions for account actions you define.

Account Change Emails
Members will now receive confirmation emails when they change their email address...

and their password...

Topics per Page
You can now define the number of topics per page in forum view.

Remove all Followers
Moderators can now remove all followers from any item that allows follows. This is useful if you are archiving an old item or otherwise do not want people getting notified of new activity on an item.

Automatic Following
Your members can already choose to automatically follow content they start or reply to but now you can define this as the default behavior for all members. Your members can of course override this to their own preference.

Embed Failure Message
To answer the constant question "why didn't my media embed?" we now show you why. Regular members will just see a message indicating the Suite tried to embed but was not able to. Admins will get more information on what failed.

Suspended Member Page
When you banned/suspended a member previously they simply saw a generic permission denied message. We now show a more friendly page saying they were suspended and why.

The member can click to get the full information from the Warning System as well.

Contact Us
The contact us page now has configuration options to control where messages are sent. You can do email and even Commerce support departments now.

Announcements
Global announcements can now be restricted by member group.

And some technical stuff...
In addition to the new feature additions we have also fixed dozens of issues reported by clients. There was a particular focus on Commerce, Pages, and IPS Connect. Some other items of note:
Performance improvements in: profile view, sitemap generator, posting replies, and Activity Streams We now try to more reliably detect the AWS S3 endpoint for those using S3 file storage Tasks view will now show the last time a task ran More efficient license key checking to keep the keys from being checked too often which can slow your site down If group promotion based on date is enable the system will now auto-promote even if a member does not login If you move your site to a new URL you no longer have to update a constant if using the image proxy You can now press ctrl/cmd+enter in any editor window to submit the reply (yay!) In Commerce ticket view there are keyboard shortcuts to perform common actions (such as press 'r' to open reply box or 'n' for note) There is now logic to prevent double-posting when the initial post encounters an error on submit If your datastore (cache system) is not working properly the AdminCP will now show you a warning telling you that it needs attention.