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The new changes are all really great - the rank progress sidebar in particular I think is excellent. 

Thank you IPS for implementing the feedback so quickly! 

Seems like a great idea! 😄 

I saw in another thread that the points system is already active on this site, and that the points have already been calculated...

So I am surprised to find I still have the lowest 'newbie' rank, given I have over 100 posts here.

Maybe I misunderstood and the points only start counting from the day the feature went live, but I'm sure I read otherwise?

This also raises another question... assuming we do have the option to recalculate points/achievements based on all-time member history, does that mean users with thousands of points and reactions will get inundated with badges all at once? 

@Jordan InvisionI know this is more of a bug than an idea, but I would be keen to hear your thoughts on this. 

Surely there should be the option to hide the 'buy now' button after someone has purchased it, since a lot of Downloads files are not things that need a license and to be bought multiple times.

I understand there may be some cases where purchasing multiple versions of the same file is needed, but surely for the majority of sites that is not the case?

I thought it was a glitch - I can't believe this is a built in feature that can't be adjusted.

@AtariAgejust wondering if you found a workaround, or @Adriano Fariaif you created a plugin around this?

I just find it really odd that there wouldn't even be an option to disable the buy now button after someone has bought the file.

Agreed! I've seen this suggested several times before here, and personally I would definitely use this.

Ideally the option to re-arrange emoji categories (especially putting custom emojis higher up), and even customise which emojis show in the emoji box, rather than a simple yes/no of whether to show emojis. Right now you either have to have thousands of them, or none of them. 

4 hours ago, SJ77 said:

I had a downloads cart developed for my site. One of the issues that I have ran into is something I didn't think about before hand.

If many items are in a cart and purchased at the same time, then the customer wants a refund on just 1 of the items in the cart things become tricky.

The refund feature will refund the entire purchase and not just the single item.

Is the downloads cart you had made available for download/purchase? Or is it specifically customised for your site?

I really feel it's an important feature that's sadly missing in the core software, and looks like you first requested it 4 years ago. 

On 2/11/2021 at 12:29 AM, AlexWebsites said:

Yes but they are listed as individual forums, so if you have 50 clubs...enjoy scrolling your page on the traditional forum view home page.

Completely agree.

I would love to see both of the following options:

1. Only display individual forums for clubs that the member has already joined (so rather than them seeing all 50 clubs in this scenario, they would just see the ones they've joined and are actually interested in).
2. Have one category/forum for 'clubs' within traditional forum view, and then once you click on that, have a list of all clubs (essentially the same as the sub-forum idea @AlexWebsitesalready suggested - although I think it would need to operate very slightly differently to normal sub-forums, because it would still look a little messy in traditional forum view homepage having 50+ sub-forums).

Either way, for communities with a lot of clubs, the forum view just isn't practical with the current setup. 

On 10/18/2019 at 9:02 PM, Sergey_SV said:

it is part of the "Advanced tags and prefixes" app

The Tag cloud in this is great, but as mentioned above, sadly the app has been abandoned.

Would be nice to see IPS incorporate a tag cloud widget by default, as we found it was a really popular feature. 

And if we're really dreaming here, it would be even better to have the option within the widget of whether to show all tags for the entire site, or specifically tags for the current app.

By which I mean, if you're in the gallery, you could opt to have the tag cloud show only tags used in the gallery, and when clicking on a tag, only show gallery items with that tag. Same would apply if the widget was used on the forums, or in downloads and so on. 

But either way, any sort of tag cloud (that shows a clickable list of all the different tags used) would be a really useful feature.

On 2/23/2021 at 1:59 PM, Adriano Faria said:

 

Nope, It was never an option, although there are requests for it.

Thanks for clarifying. 

My initial instinct was that I must be missing something, as it's the kind of thing you'd just assume would be included - which probably suggests it would be a very useful feature. 

I imagine if this were an option at least, there's a lot of Downloads customers who would want to enable this for their sites. From a user perspective, I am far more likely to buy multiple things at once, than go through the checkout individually one at a time (especially for small cheap files).

I'd probably use this feature on the IPS marketplace too. I can already imagine adding a couple of themes & plugins to my basket as a bit of a shortlist, then ordering them (all at once) later on. 

The topic of chargebacks came up recently as well - this would help with that. It would be better for someone to buy several things in one transaction, than lots of things in separate transactions, as that significantly increases the total amount of chargeback risk & fees that could be incurred. 

Agreed! 

On 1/13/2021 at 2:51 AM, Gabriel Torres said:

After researching about this, browsers have now native lazy loader. We only need to edit the templates to add:

loading="lazy"

To all img tags.

I edited the following templates:

core > front > global

reactionBlurb
reactionLog
reactionOverview
reactionTabs
reputation
userPhoto
userPhotoFromData

This enabled lazy loading for user photos and reactions, and the "Defer offscreen images" warning from Google Lighthouse is now gone! 🙂

(I also made the same edit in my cms custom templates)

Thanks, that's great to know!

Presumably the admin cp lazy loading setting has to be enabled for the loading="lazy" code to work?

We are in an odd situation where we actually don't want lazy loading for forum attachments, but would like it in other areas like profile pictures. 

24 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

Oh, so a process where you select a number of files and then make one purchase for all the things in your cart. That's surprisingly not a thing?

Maybe I am missing something, as I agree it would be surprising if it wasn't a thing already. 

But within downloads, I can only find 'buy now' button, and so you have to enter your address, payment details, and checkout every single time. As opposed to a normal online shop where you'd press 'add to basket', then browse through other files and maybe add a couple of others too before checking out all in one go. 

Much more convenient for the user.

But also likely lower fees and more sales for the site owner. 

I am surprised there has not been more momentum behind this request. 

Individually checking out for every download item surely reduces the chances of bulk buying. 

An 'add to cart' button would be incredibly useful. 

On 10/23/2019 at 5:51 PM, Steve Herschbach said:

I don’t think most of my users ever scroll down far enough to even know there are custom emoji for the forum.

Exactly. Option to have custom emoji at the top would make so much more sense.

I also feel it would be good to be able to choose which emoji appear in the emoji box. Obviously all emojis could still be used on the site, as people could use the built-in emoji keyboard on their device. But in the emoji box in the editor, we don't really need 100s of flags and symbols to be loaded every time - would be nice if we could just select which emojis to show in the emoji box in the editor, since a tiny fraction of them get used. 

On 2/9/2021 at 4:52 PM, Jordan Invision said:

I have a registration wall that pops up if guests try and read more than 2 topics in a day without an account. 

Could you confirm what you're using to achieve this please? Is it a plugin from the marketplace?

And have you found it had any negative impact on SEO, or can you allow crawlers full access still? 

Thanks! 

The issue seems to be with all kinds of streams - activity stream, search stream, filtering by tags etc. 

The thumbnail image displays really small for the gallery items. In gallery settings the thumbnail dimensions is set much higher, and indeed the thumbnail images are saving at a good size, they're just displaying really small in certain areas.

Inside the actual gallery app, it's fine, but in activity/search etc they are shrunk too small. 

Would be very grateful if anyone has any ideas?

3 hours ago, bfarber said:

Link to a script that serves the image (instead of to the actual image), and let that script serve an error/alternative "no access" image to guests. Main con: you lose the benefit of using a CDN (such as Cloudfront) to serve your images.

So it could be a setting for users not using a CDN? (I also wonder whether it would still work with something like cloudflare, which seems to work differently to a 'full CDN' like Cloudfront)

3 hours ago, bfarber said:

Use javascript to provide an alternative experience for guests. Main con: simply disabling javascript circumvents the "protection", so it's not really that useful if you truly want to block guests from seeing the images.

Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but this wouldn't be an issue at all for me. 

If someone really wants to go to the trouble of disabling javascript to view it full size, they could probably just register in the same amount of time. I can't imagine many users would even think to do that. But even if some did, it's not that I'm trying to completely block the images or anything, it was more about increasing registrations, with a possible bonus of less bandwidth/server strain in picture-heavy topics. 

3 hours ago, bfarber said:

• Store different content for guests and members. Main con: you duplicate the bulk of your database, and all existing content would need to be rebuilt on upgrade.

 

I agree that doesn't sound worthwhile or practical.

And I get your point that it's not exactly straightforward either way, and so I really appreciate you taking the time to explain why. 

But for me at least, option 2 sounds good!

1 hour ago, Jordan Invision said:

I tend to agree with you on this 🙏 

From a UX standpoint, if I saw an image as a guest but had to register to see it in full size I might be like 

 

But at the same time I do get wanting people to register. I have a registration wall that pops up if guests try and read more than 2 topics in a day without an account. 

This confuses me a little, as a registration wall after viewing just 2 topics a day seems like it would be far more of a frustrating user experience than being prompted to signup for trying to view an attachment full size. But ultimately they're both just different ways of achieving the same goal: converting lurkers into actual members. Once they're registered, you have a much better chance of re-engaging them, or them actually participating and leaving replies/reactions etc. Sometimes they need a little extra incentive to join though, as if they can view literally everything without registering, then there's less need. 

1 hour ago, Paul E. said:

I'd venture to say that this is something that might backfire on you, and you'd not realize it until it was too late.

I agree with you that every site is different, and so this feature would only work if it were configurable. For example, it sounds like your main goal is you want as much traffic on your site as possible, but my goal is as many engaged community members as possible. 

Do I think I might lose a few guests who click away after getting prompted to register? Yes. But to be blunt, a guest who never registers isn't really bringing a lot to the site anyway (in fact they're just taking resources/bandwidth), so I absolutely believe the increase of registered users would be worth it.  

We have an images section of our forum, and as a trial we stopped allowing guests to open topics in that area, along with a custom error message about registering for unlimited access. In the following 24 hours, we had about 4 times the registrations we normally get - which sounds very similar to what @Kjell Iver Johansen mentioned.

I think a crucial point is we make registration incredibly quick and simple - I agree if the form looks like it's going to take 5 minutes to fill in then it's probably not going to work so well.

And of course, from a user perspective I do agree with you. I would obviously rather have as little friction as possible with everything, but sometimes we have to think from our 'evil admin' perspectives of doing what is best for the community overall.

I can honestly say there are 2 vbulletin forums that I joined specifically because I wanted to read the attachment image full size - but then because I then had an account, I ended up adding a few replies I probably wouldn't have bothered with otherwise, and before you know it you're part of the community and getting email updates etc. 

It would just be another useful way of getting more people signed-up and integrated into the community. Not for every site, but for certains sites I believe it'd be very useful. 

Having said all of that... it doesn't sound like it's realistic anyway. 😂 

On 3/4/2020 at 4:19 PM, Adriano Faria said:

Probably this: 

 

I’m already in the theme ID 64.

You need to recreate the default theme.

On 3/4/2020 at 4:26 PM, TDBF said:

Hi Adriano,

Thank you for that! You have just saved me about three hours uploading images!! 👍

Sometimes, being a developer you look for the hardest solutions before thinking about the obvious ones first! 😂

Hi both, I don't suppose you remember what the issue here was? I'm having the exact same issue with set_resources whilst using a theme other than the default.

The thread that was linked isn't visible to me, so I'm not sure if it's been deleted or is an area I can't access (as I'm not a developer).

Many thanks 

When viewing search results, the thumbnail preview for gallery items are now much smaller after upgrading to 4.5.

The thumbnail file itself (e.g. if I click 'open image in new tab' on the thumbnail) hasn't changed size, but thumbnail images are being displayed at a smaller size in search results. 

I was wondering if anybody could please point me in the right direction of what code to look for to change the default/maximum width of thumbnails in search results.

Thanks.

11 hours ago, Jordan Invision said:

Heyo! This sounds like a great plugin idea 💡 

Just out of curiosity, is there a reason this would be more suited to a plugin than a core feature? 

I was guessing this could be quite a widely used setting as it's both a bandwidth saver and an incentive to register - (although I admit I may be way off the mark and nobody else wants this) 😂 But I've definitely seen it put to good to use on quite a few other forums.

Apologies if I am requesting something that already exists, but if it does, I really cannot find the setting for it.

It would be great to allow guests to view images at a smaller size, but when they click on them to view full size, ask them to login/signup.

I know vbulletin has this as this feature has made me register to several vbulletin sites in the past!

It would be great to save on bandwidth from guests (but without blocking their access to topics entirely) but also give an extra incentive for registering. 

Thanks.

Agreed! Would be very handy to have this built in. 🙂 

After upgrading to 4.5 from 4.4 the first thing that really stands out is how much excessive empty space there is. Everything seems further apart, and within minutes I've had complaints about changing this.

I understand some of it is necessary, but has anyone found any CSS changes that can make the spacing more similar to how it was in 4.4? It was pretty perfect there.

On 8/7/2019 at 11:09 PM, theipsguy said:

A very belated response - but thanks for pointing me in the right direction for those plugins.

I'll certainly take a look at both, but I still feel in the future it would be great to see more announcement options within core IPS.

For example:

• Announcements via notifications
• Announcements via private messages
• Announcements as popup window
• Announcement where something must be agreed to / clicked / acknowledged before proceeding to use site (similar to when rules/terms change, but customisable for other uses)

I realise different paid plugins can do some of these, but I am sure I can't be alone in hoping that IPS consider adding more ways to directly reach users in future versions. 

So I believe I can achieve the first 3 of these, but it requires 3 seperate third-party applications, some of which haven't been updated in a while. 

I'm not sure if this on IPS' radar at all, but I'd still love to see more ways to directly communicate with members. Right now it's difficult to know who has seen the announcement, whereas with the latter option above you could be sure someone had seen it, or with PM's you could see who'd opened it etc.