Chris027

1 hour ago, opentype said:

I’m pretty sure they didn’t phrase it like that. They probably just asked for a proper imprint with data about the legal representation, which is simply the law here in Germany (see German Telemedia Act) and not something “draconian” that T-Online made up because the don’t “like” certain domains as you phrased it. 

But that’s all beside the point anyway, which is that services like United Internet (GMX, Web.de) in Germany or Orange in France have a market share of over 30% in those countries, similar to Gmail in the United States. So blocking these service would be like blocking Gmail. 

I have the emails. I couldn’t believe what they were telling me. I think it’s draconian to require a published physical address, in order to route email. 

I also know they don’t enforce it for every domain, thus my “certain domains” comment. 
 

Given that receiving email at one of these addresses is difficult, every member of my community who has an address at one of these addresses, also has one at a service that works much better. 

Just an FYI, I don't allow people to signup on my site with @t-online.de addresses either. The sole reason is that t-online.de has draconian policies about blocking mail from domains it doesn't like. They actually told me I had to post my physical home address on my website in order to allow their users to receive email from my domain. 

I just tell people, "You are not allowed to use that email address on this site."

8 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

Im not sure what that would achieve over them simply following the item?

Using the follow feature is too "inside baseball" to hook causual readers. One has to know where to look for the follow button and understand it. On the other hand, if a writer could put an email address form in each article and say, get notified each time I post, people would be much more apt to understand it and use it. 

I'd like to bring on a few mroe writers and provide them with their own spaces / clubs. They will build their own followings and possible their own sponsors. I want to make things as easy as possible for them. 

I have writers who want their own club section and want to give people the ability to subscribe to the club like a substack. In other words, receive articles written for the club as an email notification. 
 

I realize people can kind of do this already but it would be awesome to have a box where people could enter their email addresses to subscribe to a club. 

9 minutes ago, Matt said:

You won't be able to place ads anywhere on the Live Topics UI. The advertisement system has had an update for v5, but I don't think we've spoken about it much.

I think I spent more time making up fake adverts than writing about it.

Ok. It would be nice to discuss in another topic. One sub-topic is how some of us currently make manual adjustments so our ads aren’t blocked by the popular ad blockers. It’d be great to eliminate this need. 

Very nice looking and nice features. 
 

Please keep in mind that many of us use advertisements as our main source of funding to keep our sites going. I don’t see much room for ads in any v5 snippets. 

Given that FTP/SFTP access to IPS Cloud isn't allowed, it would be nice if the media uploader accepted more file types. Not all files are for playback or viewing directly inside a browser. I want to offer my readers a FLAC file to download within an article, but can't upload it via the media uploader. Because I'm still self hosted I will SFTP it to the server, but it would be nice to have this capability for when I eventually move to the cloud. 

Accepted file types js, css, txt, ico, gif, jpg, jpe, jpeg, png, mp4, 3gp, mov, ogg, ogv, mp3, mpg, mpeg, ico, flv, webm, wmv, avi, m4v, webp, m4a, wav, pdf, svg

Just now, Jim M said:

This is misidentification. The spacer image is just a spacer.

Thanks. I'll see if I can let them know and if they'll work on not identifying it as such.

Hi Guys, I just noticed that Proton Mail identifies spacer.png as a tracker in the email sent from my site. Here's the message I get in my mail client. 

Question: Is spacer.png really a tracker, and if so how can I stop it from being used in my community? Or, is this a misidentification?

1 hour ago, Durango said:

Hi

Just discover this

sounds weird to me, App store, Google play store, Wordpress plugins depository, it makes sense to find all apps / plugins at the same place, rather than to have to check all devs websites...

i am not sure that's a good move

I just don’t see myself looking at the providers page, then going to their individual pages, then looking at apps. Most of the apps I use were found by browsing here, not even searching. 
 

I’m guessing I’ll gradually use the stock, less good, version of Invision Community. Kind of a bummer. 

Very nice. 
 

One thing I’d love to see is the ability to restrict dark mode to specific user groups. This would be nice because we sell subscriptions that remove advertisements. Dark mode works great for subscribers, but for those who see the ads dark mode would make the ad images look really strange. 

I think I figured this out. It's a way for scammers to test stolen credit cards to see if they still work. Had it happen today.

7 minutes ago, CheersnGears said:

We all need to send out readers there so they discover our sites. This is effective a community of communities.

Doesn’t make sense to me. If I’ve already captured the reader, I could encourage him/her to sign up and follow my site, on my actual site. Or, I could send him/her packing and hope he/she follows my site  on CH and doesn’t find too much other content. Everyone’s time is limited. Sending someone away, where there is competing content, makes no sense to me. 

On 8/24/2023 at 7:37 AM, Charles said:

It only shows if you enable Community Hive on your own community.

Why would I want to send readers to another site to follow my own site?

Yes, we need this in V5 (without even seeing V5)!

I just tested out the new "Require guests to verify their email?" option. The popup that tells people they need to verify their email is way to small and disappears way to fast. I would love the option that would take people to a new landing page with instructions. This way it won't disappear and they could even leave the page on their screens while they verified their email addresses. 

Contact Us is critical to some businesses. 

I should also add that analytics and measurements aren’t for everyone. Just because we can measure everything doesn’t mean it’s helpful in reaching goals. 
 

I write about what interests me and the community writes about what interests it. If we went by stats, we’d all be talking about other stuff trying to boost numbers but simultaneously lowering our enjoyment. 
 

The ways in which we offer content are very similar. We do podcasts because they are fun and a different way to provide information. If we were to go by statistics, we probably would’ve stopped doing pods after 5 episodes. Now, the pods bringing new members to the community even with what I’m guessing is low numbers of listeners.
 

I don’t pay attention to stats. They lead to homogenized content for those with the goal of improving stats. 

14 minutes ago, Joel R said:

On the other hand, there is actual value to hits.  There's a growing trend among professional community management circles to view lurkers as learners.  They do read, and they do obtain value.  How we measure the extent of learning or value is hard though.  That's when you need to start measuring passive signals such as time spent on content. 

It should be up to community managers to decide who sees the value in these numbers. I can’t think of a single reason this information should be broadcast to the world on all communities. 

21 minutes ago, Charles said:

I would agree a view count is totally irrelevant. Trending over X period of time is way more useful.

But I don't think we can remove view counts as some people get very obsessed with such things 🙂 

Giving community owners the option to remove them would be wonderful though. 

This seems cool, but I’d like to ease into it. Can we disable the Community Hive button?

50 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

Maybe they don't get many views for a reason. Like not being interesting for example. 

 

Nobody is interesting to everyone. If a topic is interesting to one person or someone finds an answer found nowhere else, that’s fantastic. 
 

Number of views is indicative of one thing, how many views it got. Absolutely nothing more. 

I’d love an option to disable public view counts for articles and even forum topics. 
 

We’ve become accustomed to seeing this because it has been around forever, but I think it’s detrimental to a community. Encouraging everyone to participate can be really tough for those whose topics or blog posts don’t get many views. People get discouraged easily. 
 

Plus, view counts play into the whole “more followers is the goal” ideology, rather than good content and community are the goal. 

I received a notification icon that someone wanted his/her account deleted. Because I had no clue what would happen if I deleted it from within that specific section of AdminCP, I went to the user's account and removed it there. Now this red circle won't go a way.

8 minutes ago, Matt said:

I hear you 100% but we are not the arbiters of human habits, we just respond to them.

There are loads of old forums still busy but the bulk of those members and that content was generated a decade ago and they are kept alive by an older member base and probably good authority with Google bringing people in for short transactional exchanges.

We have a responsibility to you and our other customers to keep driving forward, it is pretty relentless. The worst thing we could do is just continue doing the same things and we lose marketshare and your community stagnates and goes into a slow decline.

Communities are more complex than a basic forum and very few have the patience to click loads of links in the hopes of having good content to read.

v5 will help with transactional content (I need an answer to this problem) and more social content (Lets discuss Thing) as well as content discovery.

Thank you Matt. This gives me confidence. 

5 minutes ago, Matt said:

v5 is a significant step forward for UI, discovery, noise versus signal and brand matching. Change is hard but it is kind of inevitable.

If nothing changed, then we'd still be using this:

And while you could absolutely run a successful community on that product even now, the chances of attracting new members would be low given the expectations modern audiences have for UI and ease of use.

Thank for the more reasonable reply. I hear you, but also am hesitant to buy into change when the only information available is sparse. There are some awesome communities full of information and interaction, still running terrible looking versions of software. For them, it's about getting and giving information fast and efficiently. This is the opposite of a site like YouTube where it's about dragging people along until you can show another commercial or sponsored segment or the site trying to get you to watch more videos until your eyes dry out. 

Perhaps I'm the only person without patience to weed through a mountain of garbage just to get the nugget of info I need. Much of the internet has become exhausting now days. 

I frequently think of this magazine cover compared to magazines of today and websites where there is so much going on it causes a headache. More isn't automatically better, and neither is less. There's a happy medium, and using technology to meet needs is always good.