Michael Parent

Thanks for the help @Jim M
To clarify for any other future person who runs into the same problem, it's Admin control Panel and then "Get Support".

Once there I was able to use the system there to convert the database to this suddenly required format, but I had to use Cpanel for the site to manually edit a file to finish the job.

No such luck with converting to InnoDB tables, apparently I'd need to contact my hosting provider for that, BUT on a whim and since I didn't have even more time to spend on this today I decided to try upgrading again and this time it worked, so apparently converting the database to sql_utf8mb4 was required but the second change was not.

 Regarding whether or not removing direct support tickets is a downgrade, it most certainly is. The forums already existed, direct tickets were removed. This is a way for some of users' problems to be resolved before the actual Invision tech staff need to get around to it, by being helped (at no expense by Invision) by other users. In other words, this off-loads some presumably decent amount of technical support onto the very user base that pays for Invision to stay in business in the first place. Why doesn't Invision offer a built in discount system for forum members who actually resolve customer problems for Invision? Is their time doing Invision work for them not worth anything?

Also, now that the technical support is forums only, the help seems to be more in the flavor of, "OK, you're no expert on PHP, databases, etc, but follow these confusing and sometimes not quite right instructions in this link, and get back to us after however many hours of confusion and frustration reading through walls of text and trying to do things you've never done before if you can't figure it out." instead of actually fixing the issue for the paying customer directly.

I wish instead of the error report blasting me with a giant list of things to do myself that the Invision system just told me to go to ACP/get help and use that built in system to change the database format, as that would have been much more clear and direct help and I would have likely been able to resolve this issue weeks ago.

Also, My forums worked fine for years with the older database format, so this is a new requirement which was silently put upon us, causing some percent of us the need to make this change with no warning or knowledge how to do so.. why couldn't the system detect this beforehand and give is the fast and clear instructions for how to make the change through the "get help" system?
 

When I try to upgrade There's a supposed database error, even though the forum and store all seem to work fine, and when I click "FIT THIS" it generates the following message and an enormously long list of manual things to do (all above my pay grade):

"There are some problems with your database. Normally it is safe to try to fix these problems automatically however if your community is large, you may want to run the necessary queries manually. If so, the queries to run are:"

and at the very bottom of the huge list there's a "Fix automatically" button, and after clicking that and letting it do it's thing I swear the list of supposed errors or manual fixes It's asking me to do is even longer.

I used to be able to send support requests, but apparently all our accounts have been downgraded to needing to reply on these forums?
 

3 hours ago, Jim M said:

If what my colleague suggested does not assist, you will also want to check the following:

When viewing your community, I am seeing various errors related to CSS and Javascript not loading. I would suggest checking to ensure that your upload folder and all sub-folders are writable on your server (and owned by the correct user/group) then clear cache by going to ACP -> Support -> Clear System Caches (right side).

After repeatedly complaining to Siteguarding, and clearing the forum system cache a second time, suddenly the issue is fully resolved. I have a suspicion their system was blocking the folders from being written to, but I guess I have no way to verify. Does anyone know if there's a way to see if folder permissions etc have been changed on specific dates, via c-panel for example?

51 minutes ago, Mark H said:

That "security check" error is almost certainly reCAPTCHA not working correctly.

Please visit your ACP and find the captcha settings, then set them to the method you want. 

(Invisible recaptcha is the default method, but there are a couple other methods from which to choose.)

I've done that and even changed the entire captcha google account in case the whole account was somehow broken and the same problem persists anyway. Thanks for the suggestion, but I tried this. :9

49 minutes ago, Jim M said:

If what my colleague suggested does not assist, you will also want to check the following:

When viewing your community, I am seeing various errors related to CSS and Javascript not loading. I would suggest checking to ensure that your upload folder and all sub-folders are writable on your server (and owned by the correct user/group) then clear cache by going to ACP -> Support -> Clear System Caches (right side).

Thanks very much for this info. We have our community hosted at siteguarding.com and there's a good chance they "protect" (read as over-protect) folders from being written into. I'll give this info to them and see if they can fix it. I'll report back if that resolves the issue or not.

It's been days now and we can't find the cause or solution for this problem ,and the support ticket system seems to be gone or hidden beyond finding in the IPS dashboard.

When new potential members want to create a forum account either for the forum or to buy our product or both, they get as far as the sign up page and are able to fill everything out, but the section titled "Security Check" just has the title and no captcha or check box or anything else... and when a potential customer fills out all the other info and clicks "create my account", after a few seconds it just says something like "failed security check, try again".

Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this?

Are there any IPS technical support staff around, and if so, where did the support ticket system go? How do we contact you in case of an emergency? This already cost us a few hundred dollars in sales and will continue to do so every few days.

 

I have a massive problem costing us new customers and costing us sales for days now, and this is how I discovered the system has changed and support tickets are either gone or hidden.
Why?

What should a long-time customer do if a technical issue of some kind is blocking new users from joining or making purchases of our products, just send a generic 'contact us' email or post here on the forums and hope it reaches the eyes of actual IPS staff? 

58 minutes ago, TAMAN said:

Sorry, not possible without editing html templates which i can provide support

Can you give me some tip, or link me to general instructions for editing a template please?

Hi, I'm using the slider and using the following code to add a button. Any idea how I can change the position of the button to somewhere near the bottom left corner of the slider?
"<a class="ipsButton ipsButton_medium ipsButton_important" href="https://brashmonkey.com/forum/index.php?/store/product/30-spriter-2-pre-order/"></i> Pre-order Now</a>"

You can see the slider I'm talking about here: 
https://brashmonkey.com/forum/

Thanks very much,