christopher-w

First time I've really seen the new sidebar topic summary in action. Works really well especially on multipage threads.It gives a real flavour of what the thread is all about.

Just a thought on this, it works so well that I am wondering whether something similar couldn't be used in topic lists. I've got a feeling it would do a better job than what we currently have:

On 1/6/2021 at 8:22 AM, Milton Sojo said:

according to the CEO it looks cheap

I think that's subjective. Some folks reading the powered by notice will be impressed. Others won't.

Either way the licence terms are clear, and If you want your boss off your back then you know what to do.

3 hours ago, Andy Millne said:

Sorry @christopher-w, missed that. The theme templates/css are customisable via the default template editors if you wanted to change the layout but the aspect ratio is not configurable by default, no.

Thanks, that's what I assumed. Your demo page appears to be down. Will you be putting it back up?

On 11/26/2020 at 12:39 PM, christopher-w said:

Pre Sales Question.

Is there any ability to control the aspect ratio of the images displayed on this page?

 

 

@Andy Millne I'd appreciate feedback on this. 

Thanks.

Pre Sales Question.

Is there any ability to control the aspect ratio of the images displayed on this page?

On 7/20/2020 at 1:20 PM, AA15 said:

I posted this in another thread, but I feel it warrants it's own thread for visibility.

With 4.5, there is no longer support for all of the caching mechanisms aside from redis. In my experience, hosts don't know how to install or config redis. Not just how to do it properly, but not at all. They have experience with solutions like memcache and how to get it to play well with cPanel, but not redis.

Is it possible for the Invision team to please create a tutorial on the best way to install and configure the latest version of redis specifically for the Invision Suite with PHP 7.3/7.4?

And if possible to get it working with cPanel? I've read it is possible with EasyApache 4, but no comprehensive, up-to-date guide. I think the Invision team creating this would take care of some hardships we have as we would either be able to follow ourselves or give our hosts documentation for them to follow and get our Invision Suite working efficiently with redis.

Redis is reasonably simple to install and upgrade  

The key is to find the correct installation instructions for your operating system and web server. 

Once you’ve identified your server environment, for example Ubuntu 18.04/Apache, there’s plenty of guides around detailing every step from downloading the package to installing it.

My advice is to try it out on a backed up dev machine, keeping notes as you go. Don’t worry about breaking anything. If something goes wrong just reinstate the backup and try again  

In my opinion you learn a lot more by doing  it this way, even if along the way you stumble a few times and have to pick your self up.  

Failing this there are several very good Admins on here who I am sure would be delighted to help you with this, subject to fee etc  

Good luck. 
 

On 10/11/2020 at 1:54 PM, kmk said:

I try to use Gallery album for a club, then I discover using a topic to upload images and videos, embed image or video link... Is more confortable than using Gallery🤔😏

I notice Xenforo have introduced media mirroring whereby images uploaded to threads can automatically be copied (mirrored) into a named gallery. Nice idea but still needs more work.

23 minutes ago, sobrenome said:

Yes, Gallery has big potential and needs a revisit to be as modern as the rest of IPS apps.

It's frustrating. As you say big potential, but several annoying issues and inconsistencies. I do wish Invision would put a temporary halt to new features and first get all the existing functionality looking and working, as best they can, the same way.

Have you tried changing the elements passed in as parameters? Presumably these are cf_page_header and cf_page_element. 
 
Try adding a couple of divs in the global template and passing these in instead. Create both with ids and use them with # in front as in the example you posted. You may need to add some height to the divs in case the ad script doesn’t. 

We have numerous partner and corporate sites on Cloudflare including 3 WP sites which have been transformed by the reduction in TTFB since we opted in. It’s free too for those already on paid plans.

On 9/29/2020 at 7:16 PM, Morgin said:

Could open source this with a git repository that anyone inclined to assist could contribute to. I have none of the skills required to do anything technical and all I can do is cheerlead. Frankly I also like the default skin save for some decisions about how big text and other elements are on mobile/tablet which is why I run at 75% zoom on mobile, so not a huge vested interest either. But clearly there are a lot of people who want a default skin that is far more flexible for their needs, and there is absolutely the talent here to help. Doesn’t seem like a candidate for a paid exercise, but something the community will need to figure out on its own. Ultimately, maybe providing a working framework that can be compared to what Invision provides and makes the case for certain changes. Would love to see that sort of collaboration. Can also happily assist with any grunt work lower skilled tasks if they are needed. 

TBH I don't think there is a strong enough community here (ironically) to work together on a labour of mutual love. That's why I suggested a paid project, which in itself hasn't attracted much interest.

It seems to me that most folks just want to solve 'their' problem and off they go. Which is a shame because I see mutual client cooperation as the only way some of these projects will get completed. Otherwise we are left with the Hobson's choice of wait for somebody else to solve our problems for us.

On a more positive note, based on my belief that there is a lot of reinventing the UX 'wheel' here, some of it buckled, we've been looking at developments on Apple News, Twitter and FB. Apple News in particular has really nice UX patterns on both its desktop and mobile apps. At first it looks very simple, but benefits from a light and open design, whilst keeping information itself tightly packed. This follows Google's material design pattern mentioned by me earlier, and sort of has us thinking, these guys have put $billions of user clinic tested UX into common usage - so why not learn from them and follow suit. So that's the direction we are headed for now.

I had a look at our O365 Exchange account when I first came across this thread. It has snooping tools wrapped up in language that suggests corporations have the right to engage with any information created under its purview.

That’s what we are really discussing here - when a user interacts with a 3rd party entity, be that cloud platform, company system etc, that entity often claims the right to oversight and goes further in assuming, in specific cases, that it has the right to control. 

To my mind the only way to get round the scenario being discussed here is to employ a 3rd messaging platform that sets out to maintain complete privacy for the user. 

Hammer to crack a nut 

So I’m thinking one way forward for this is to develop an encrypted api level integration with one of the many 3rd party messaging systems - one that could also propagate alerts. Login would be handled on and with the client, making it effectively impossible for snoops to eavesdrop on pms. 

Failing this, I’d also look at third party email integration, again with everything handled on the client, with email username entered  during sign up and with password entry and message retrieval handled during client sessions. After all that’s what happens with billions of email clients everyday. No reason why the same system can’t be embedded in a 3rd party cloud system such as this. 

48 minutes ago, Paul E. said:

I would strongly recommend looking into integration with a service that has figured this all out if important to your membership.

Interesting. Our thoughts crossed. 

32 minutes ago, breatheheavy said:

Appreciate the feedback, guys!

Yes, it's more of the ethics behind it. Imagine if you knew with 100% certainty Apple could read your text messages. They promise they won't, but they could.

I do like the ability to login as a user, because it's useful when debugging an issue, but something about having access to their PMs has always irked me. 

In my ideal world, admins can login as other members, but the system doesn't give access to PMs. If there is harassment etc then that will have to be dealt with another way (versus an admin going into the inbox and having a look for themselves).

Thoughts? 

I agree with your sentiments. I’ve had my messages read by admins on more than one forum over the years and immaterial of a forum’s terms and conditions, if that happened to me today, given tighter control of privacy, I’d report it to the data protection authorities. 

Even if it was considered acceptable practice, and it never would to me, mail/pms that have been read should be marked as such - when it was read and by whom. Just as mail used to be when it was intercepted by the authorities and read in the interests of the authorities/government/country. 

Just another small point. The use of the term pm or personal message should be reviewed by those platforms that use it. It suggests communication is personal which of course, on boards that have the ability to read it, it most certainly isn’t.

So in summary if one is going to read mail/pms for whatever reason, state openly to members that admins might exercise that ability and if they do, the communication will be marked and time stamped to reflect it. 

6 minutes ago, Lucas James said:

 

Take your choice then. Speed versus efficacy.

What's to stop you using the PHP or SMTP options? I'm using Mailgun SMTP.

Come on guys, Invision is never going to please us all. And even if they adopted granular ACP theme adjustment tools same as Xenforo has, we'd still need to sit back and adjust dozens and dozens of margin, padding, line height and similar parameters to suit all of our individual tastes. And then you have the menu, which in my view should be docked in an object that can be bound to the DOM either on the server or in a CSOM. But, even if Invision did that, we'd still need to position it ourselves, and move it around depending on the app currently in use. So I say, be careful what you wish for as even though I'd like to see pages that are rendered a little more tightly and menus that break from the current paradigm, you can bet if Invision did that, we'd still be back with another set of demands next month.

So how about we get together, put our hands in our pockets and see if we can find a designer come dev to create a configurable theme for us - and I mean a theme, not a (wanit in green, blue, red?) skinning exercise. It could include all sorts of presets including spacing, fonts, menu positions and so on, including specifics for desktop and mobile. Won't be cheap, but at least at the end of it we will have something we can use to give us what we want, rather than assuming Invision can pull a theme styling rabbit out of the hat which is going to miraculously please us all. I just don't see it.

Of course, Invision are more than capable of doing this themselves. But a bit a string only goes so far, and if they do this, then all the other stuff we need like video transcoding (ok I need that 🙂 ) will get pushed to the back of the queue.

So how how about it? Put our energies into something creative?

On 9/23/2020 at 3:25 PM, Dave Baker said:

...testing them against some kind of "interface" standards that the Forum hook/theme developers should follow

I know @Makoto has been trying to get his fellow devs to adopt a standardised approach. Whether this includes unit testing I don't' know. But from my experience spanning back almost 40 years (I am 61 next week) and having built and sold tech businesses, one to an American car giant and another to a Microsoft/Investment banking consortium, unit testing just helps me sleep better at night. Yes it can be tedious and sometimes expensive to set up, and at times has forced us to dump and restart code because we couldn't unit test it, but it's another tool in the box that can identify issues that other testing might overlook.

Matt says his team here doesn't use it and I can understand that. But for new greenfield projects, my view is you design the tests before you start to code and then you publish those tests to all those contributing to the stack - internal and external devs, and in mission critical situations like med and pharma, space etc, you might even have to provide those tests (or resultant KPIs) to clients as part of their due diligence. But then as I said, I am old school and probably out of touch with how folks do things these days considering in many cases boilerplate libraries such as jQuery would have been unit tested a billion times or more - negating much, but not all, of the testing that would otherwise have to be done by application developers. 

Either way it's a great platform and as long as IPS fixes stuff quickly, I'm cool.

Ah yes thank you. I didn’t read it properly earlier. 

Hey. How does the up/down voting correlate to the star rating? What's the formula?

7 hours ago, rainstone.digital said:

I agree with most of the criticisms here; way too much whitespace. I understand some of the design choices were to allow other applications to insert bits of UI, but there should be better ways to approach it than "placeholders just in case".

Discourse is a good example; I wish I had their UX but this backend .

We run Discourse servers for a couple of our projects and there's a lot you can do with it once you understand the CSOM.  It's a very well thought through platform, although default policies are a little over zealous in places.  Some really nice plugins too, including Google powered sentiment analysis for identifying toxic elements. There's a big team working on it now, with two of the original founders behind Stack Overflow. But Discourse is a very different animal to Invision Community. Both have pros and cons.

On 9/22/2020 at 4:10 PM, breatheheavy said:

I didn't realize how much space was being utilized until I switched to 4.5. This is kind of a lot I agree 😂 

I would love to somehow simplify this so it's about 75% shorter in length. For instance, it says the author and time stamp twice.

 

Love these colours

Anybody know if 4.5 marketplace changes were accompanied with changes to the software licence and or, terms and conditions? I don't recall seeing anything when I downloaded 4.5 for standalone install. Maybe I missed it?

On 9/19/2020 at 5:20 PM, Martin A. said:

As of right now it will only show those records on the main map. There is currently no way to embed just a portion of the map somewhere else, but that is of course something I can look in to. 

Thank you. We can easily finish what we are doing, so don't put yourself out for us. But if it's something that you do introduce in future then of course we'd be silly not to consider it, especially given the other site wide benefits it offers.

If I click on an image in a Gallery Category it opens in a lightbox. When I close it, it returns to the underlying page.

If I comment on the image in the lightbox and then close it, the behaviour is the same -  it returns to the underlying page.

But, if I review the image in the lightbox and then close it, the underlying page has changed to the image's static page. Disconcerting!

Is there a setting somewhere to make image reviews in lightboxes act same way as comments?

Thanks for any help.

Hey @Martin A.

This looks good. 

We are in the middle of adding Google Maps to a pages db with several categories and I'm wondering whether we should switch to Community Map.

It's unclear from your description how the map is shown for records. Do I have to alter the record template to show the map? Also, can I show all the records for a single db and filter that by category and show them on a map, and if so, again, how do I show the map? Do I add it to the listing template for example?

Many thanks

Chris

10 minutes ago, xtech said:

Now, i wouldn't like the white spacing to be reversed or shrunk. First, because i my opinion is exactly opposite (fair enough, i guess 😄 ), and second, because there is not any objective data to support the opinion that shrinking the white space would improve the interaction.

Really?

Quote

How users interact with a component should determine whether or not you increase the density in a UI. When users view and interact with large amounts of information, high density components can improve the experience.

Google Material Design Guidelines: Applying Density