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superaven

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Posts posted by superaven

  1. Believe we're on track to see it release this month? At least that was I was told last in one of my support emails.

    Fingers crossed... Wish we had a beta we could play with at least. I'd love to get a jump on getting my theme dialed in as well as explore the new UI and features a bit more closely than what we can gleam off the blog / news entries.

  2. 1 minute ago, Steven W. said:

    Some time ago, I launched a mobile app with push notifications using a modified webview for vBulletin and XenForo.  What the OP says is possible.  But, the iOS app needs adjustments to pass the app review process.

    This was a necessity as, at that time, Safari Web Push did not exist.  Now that it is implemented by Apple, the main (and I think, only) compelling reason to roll this out on a board now is that users know how to install regular apps.

    In general, from the many communities that ran it, it looks like users prefer that mode.  Later, I created PWA's for XenForo and back then I used the full feature set of iOS shortcuts; the reception was tepid.

    If you are set on a native mobile app for IPS using a custom skin, it can be done -- send a message to dev@vbresults.com.

     

    Steven

    vbresults.com - Enterprise IPS custom application development

     

    Thank you for jumping in @Steven W.. My motivation of doing this is in direct response to feedback from our community. Thinking it through, it makes sense that those without a dedicated app are at a disadvantage for the simple fact that dedicated apps have real estate on a the Home Screen. Granted, Shortcuts and web clips are able to do the same, but I've also seen how without browser controls, viewers are sort of contained to that ecosystem alone, versus closing a tab or jumping to a new one.

    As for using Shortcuts to accomplish this, its reasonably simple, but I have no doubt we'll get a few people confused, even if I eliminate the need for inputs like is necessary in the generic Shortcut provided in my first post. Also seems a bit sketchy dealing with the signed certificate stuff. Lastly, just seems so much more legit to actually have a spot on the actual App Store.

    We run a custom skin now, but planning to drop it once they release v5.

     

  3. So I'm still in the middle of this and wanted to update the thread. Apologies for the more experienced among you if this is kinda basic. (I'm figuring it all out from scratch).

    So for the most part, what we're actually discussing here is a Progressive Web App (PWA). You can Google the specifics on PWA's but as I understand, they're essentially highly optimized mobile web apps in a Javascript container. These days most things are optimized for mobile, but these are expected to run standalone, without a browser, so it would require a bit more consideration towards UI and especially navigation since otherwise, you're just running in a browser. Beyond that, there doesn't necessarily need much more than what you'd be doing for the mobile optimized web.

    I'm currently leveraging Apple Shortcuts to do a sort of bootleg version of this. (Linked in my opening post) and it actually works pretty great. Invision Community, or at least the theme I've been running for ages, doesn't seem to me to be entirely dialed in to use smoothly without browser controls... It works fine and you can do everything you need, but when compared to the UI of most dedicated mobile apps, it feels a bit clunky and crude. I have not had a chance to play with v5, but the developers have noted (and seems obvious from the preview videos and screen grab) that they have taken this into consideration and it has a more app-like UI, which seems perfect for a PWA.

    I haven't run a bunch of searches on the community around dedicated mobile apps and the like, so perhaps there's a thread I missed on that subject. I'll dig and link here if so (feel free to link to any relevant threads if you know any), but yeah... So far in the research I've done, there's been no info so far that states specifically that packaging a forum into a PWA is any kind of issue. I am curious if you have paid subscriptions or use the Commerce Module, how they might respond to that since Apple and Google are very specific in regards to Apps with transactions / micro-transactions, so I'll report back if I get to that step.

    I'm really looking forward to v5. I'd love to hear from the Invision team a little bit on this (or link me to the thread please) on their view of PWA's and perhaps provide some insight into their thoughts on mobile based UI and what sort of methodology or thought process is informing their approach to it. No doubt forum based online discussion (like most content and experience) is better on desktop, but likewise, the reality is that the overwhelming portion of users are generally using mobile.

    Oops, now that I know what a PWA is and searched that, I'm finding. bunch of threads. (Sorry moderators).

    Still nice to have a more recent conversation I guess. I'll try and provide new info.

  4. Hey @Marc Stridgen I wasn't sure if I should have mentioned that you were the super helpful tech that assisted! 😉

    In regards to migration, I suppose you have a point that maybe many people are just starting from scratch. I hadn't considered that, but likewise, I was unaware that I'd need to ask, so lost a couple days waiting before reaching out.

    All in all, my criticisms are more just general feedback than any real flaw. You were super patient and helpful throughout and it all went as smooth as can be, so thank you Marc and thanks to your team!

  5. Hey all,

    I'm new to the gallery module and the manual on this topic is pretty brief. Hoping some of you guys in the know might be able to help fill in some blanks for me.

    I understand the basic role / function the gallery module has - to allow for the posting of photos and videos. Seems to be a sort of different view on online community sharing and discussion where the photo / video takes the lead, with comments and discussion following (versus the other way around for most standard forum posting / commenting). I gather that we can organize photo / video uploads by preconfigured categories (albums) as well as some standard configuration that are largely centered on group permissions.

    I was expecting once I installed the gallery module, that all the photos uploaded previously by users would appear in that users member gallery, so my first question is if that's possible? Perhaps a configuration or some admin maintenance so that the system indexes all uploads and adds to a members gallery or something?

    Assuming the above is possible, the next logical assumption to propagating our gallery would be to be able to go through and bulk categorize / organize all image / video uploads somehow so that all those assets that were ever posted to our forum via member uploads in posts are added to our gallery / album so it isn't starting empty from scratch.

    Anyhow, the gallery is an interesting feature I've ignored for a long time, but now that we migrated to Invision Cloud and have access to all modules, I'm revisiting it. 

    Just hoping to get a little more insight since I'm not finding some features that I was expecting.

    Thanks

    Oh yeah, quick link to this module for those that are new... https://invisioncommunity.com/features/gallery/

  6. I thought I'd follow up to this thread since I did indeed make the move to Invision Cloud services. Its took a bit longer than I had hoped, which was almost entirely my fault.

    As feedback for Invision, it would be nice if after signing up, that there is a welcome message that specifically outlines the process and what to expect. Unsure if it was just me or if it's standard protocol, but I got an acknowledgment receipt and nothing else for the first day or two and then finally reached out to check in. After reaching out, I received the sort of introduction / overview I'd expect that summarized what I needed to do and some details about all the steps needed, as well as an introduction to the Invision Support member that would be helping me.

    Once I knew what was going on, I took my forum offline so no new data would be added and created the backups they asked me for, in the format they needed it in. This took me a bit since to sort though since it was a ton of freakin data and I'm somewhat rusty on my CLI prompts, which was necessary in my situation. The Invision Support person was super helpful and very patient, after I blew one migration window after another trying to add storage to my hosting environment so I could create the backup (450+GB) and then prepare it in the way they needed it done (>50GB chunks). Once that was done, I had to download all that data, as well as upload it to an intermediary storage so they could then access and move to the Invision Cloud infrastructure, which took quite aq while for me to get done.

    After I got the backups they asked for prepared and moved to the platform they needed, it all went surprisingly fast and from my point of view, appeared to be smooth and trouble free. I was concerned since my forum has data going back to 1999 and we've migrated forum system about a half dozen times since then. Also do to complications with my former host, my forum was woefully out of date and hadn't been updated in at least 2 - 3 years. Seems that wasn't an issue and they got my forum migrated and updated to the current stable release within hours or so of me passing along the backups. Soon after, I got some instructions on how to update DNS to point to my forums new home and a few minutes later, we were back online.

    All in all a great experience, even if we were down a few days while I got my end together. So far the forum seems extra snappy and I haven't seen or been informed of any issues, so looks to have been a complete success. I am excited to now have our community hosted on a platform that is tailor made for the software and community we're running and all of it seems to be offered at a very competitive price. I did search around and did my homework and have done everything from running my own server / network to co-locating to running my own server instances wit5h AWS and Liniode through to managed hosting and virtual hosting. Time will tell if uptime is awesome and support is responsive, but so far, so good. I'd highly recommend it to anyone and everyone that's running an Invision Community.

    That being said, a few suggestions for Invision from my humble point of view... As said in the start of this post, an auto response email along with the transaction confirmation (receipt) that has a welcome and clear explanation of what to do and expect is an obvious one. The instructions I received were pretty clear and complete, but perhaps a bit more insight and suggestion would be great. Perhaps better would be an auto degenerated DM message or link to a help desk or private thread so there's a running list of dialogue between a customer and Invision would be welcome. Its a scary thing to consider shutting down a community and moving it and the extra hand holding would probably be appreciated by anyone making the jump.

    Additionally, using a browser based upload system to upload chunks of backups in 50GB pieces seems like a bad way to do this. It worked, but https seems like not the best protocol to handle sustained transfers of this size. I'm fairly certain that Invision has a reason for this, but it would have made a ton more sense (IMHO) to use SSH to tunnel between the source and destination and then setup a CLI based SFTP session or rsync to move all the data. It took me hours and hours to download and hours and hours more to upload, with the transfer failing several times before I managed to get it done. Granted I had 450GB+ worth of files and database, so maybe it's just that most migrations are less data. I can't imagine what a forum two, three or times the size of mine would be like with that system. I suppose the upside to doing hot this way is that I have a local copy of the backup as well. In any case, it all worked so ultimately this is more a question / suggestion than any type of criticism.

    All in all, it was a solid experience and I remain pleased that I made the move. Hopefully it continues well and I'm really looking forward to putting more energy, focus and investment into our community and really excited to see what its like running our community on the upcoming v5 release.

  7. Makes sense, @Marc Stridgen and @FanClub Mike , thank you for the insights. I suppose we're left with not knowing until someone gives this a shot. I'll report back once I'm that far along, whether it works or not, so we can definitively answer this question.

    In the meantime, if anyone has any additional information or answers on this subject or any relevant experience on the app/play store(s), please chime in.

  8. 7 hours ago, Marc Stridgen said:

    I can tell you nobody has done this, as version 5 has not been released. 

    Okay, to clarify... Has anyone does this with ICv4? 

    @Marc Stridgen Ignoring if anyone has done this, is my thinking on this correct? I see many dedicated apps, often online stores, that are just packaged websites or pages. Based on that, I'd assume doing the same on forum would work the same way, but guess I'm just wondering why there doesn't really seem to be many examples of this?

    Also, is anyone planning or researching this?

    For the longest time people were begging for a solution to a dedicated app so kind of surprised to not see more around this topic since it appears that this is actually very doable (unless I'm totally missing something).

    *Oh, that merge reply function is pretty awesome!

  9. Hello,

    I know there was a ton of threads regarding a dedicated app for forums. Considering how beautiful considered and built Invision Community v5 is, as well as advancements in technologies that have since been developed and incorporated, I'm wondering if anyone is considered or has already packaged up their community into a dedicated mobile or desktop app. I'm an Apple person, so my references will be on that their platform, but for example...

    I've seen several projects utilizing iOS shortcuts that allow you to go a step beyond a Web Clip to create something that feels almost entirely like a dedicated iOS app. Seems to make use of the Safari framework to simply compartmentalize the website at a specific URL and launches outside of Safari as if its own thing and without the usual toolbar and controls.

    Link: https://ios.gadgethacks.com/how-to/turn-any-website-into-full-screen-app-your-iphone-0384426/
    Link: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d18b423ea42d47fbb82a03d07156c747

    It appears that ICv5 has a UI that was developed so that it doesn't really require (or even benefit) from the standard forward / back buttons found in just about every browser. So packaging it up using the tools in the two links above pretty much give you a full fledged mobile app. Considering many apps I've seen are just packaged websites, I'm wondering if anyone has formally packaged and submitted (as well as been approved) their Invision Community on the Apple or Android stores.

    Here's similar examples of forum systems that look to be simply packaged websites on the Mac OS:

    Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/forum-talks/id1477197448
    Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/discourse-hub/id1173672076

    Anyhow, I haven't seen the topic come up recently or in this context. Also wondering what the rules are for what constitutes an app on those two App Stores. Seems odd that there are so few forums / online communities represented on there, but maybe I'm missing something. Would love to hear from the community and developers here on the subject.

    As mentioned, those iOS shortcuts (first two links in this post) make it unbelievably simple to create something that already feels like a dedicated iOS app. I'd assume with the iPhone notification feature introduced in ICv4.7.9 it pretty much takes it the rest of the way to behaving like a dedicated app, assuming that they can be successfully submitted and approved.

    Am I missing something?

    Thanks!

     

     

    A few ICv5 links that relate to this topic:

     

  10. Ah, that's all great news. Thank you @FanClub Mike and @Jim M for taking the time to respond. Indeed, I think the "classic" moniker might have thrown me off, but likewise, so much seems to have changed in this last two years.

    Has pricing on the license to v5 been announced yet? I have the base system and commerce package and based off the blog stuff, was interested in gallery. Seems like its all rolled into one on v5, so I'd expect that license cost to reflect all the additions.

  11. Hey, been a minute since I've been here. I've left my forum largely on auto pilot for the last two years and finally in a place to take the next step in the evolution of our community.

    Apologies ahead of time for the noob questions but really not finding the answers by searching around. Reached out to sales and got a one sentence reply that wasn't especially helpful, so here I am. I will state ahead of time that spent a couple hours looking t all the blog / news entires regarding v5 and was blown away. It feels like in my absence, Invision has pulled past trying to compete toe to toe with social media on features and finally found their way towards developing a true alternative that might attract back members that were lost to social media. Anyhow, I'm impressed. Feels like some of the largest changes to forum systems like this one to happen in the last decade took place in this last year or two.

    Questions:

    1. It appears that v5 will not be made available for set hosted customers, but wanted to confirm that.

    2. If so, I also assume that there's like an end of life plan for v4 and self hosted installs of Invision Community?

    3. I assume that v5 is already out, but I'm not entirely sure of that since it appears this community isn't running on v5?

    --------

    Wondering if anyone on here running their own community has moved from self hosted v4 to the cloud based v5 (assuming it's available)? If so, what has the experience been like? How was scheduling and migration? How has the service been for you? How good has customer / technical support been for you?

    Anyhow, the hosting packages appear pretty competitive when you factor in everything from license, storage and system resources, but I must admit that it makes me nervous giving up self hosting for SaaS type solutions. Just hoping for a few answers and some feedback before we make a final decision. 

    Thank you in advance.

  12. Hey Sorry, got sidetracked. Not seeing anything in the error logs but I've opened a support ticket. Seems that its only affecting a single user so I'm almost certain it must one an issue on their end, though I can't for the life of me figure out what could cause this since they've confirmed that they've cleared all cache and cookies and it still persists.

     

     

  13. Hello,

    We've recently upgraded to Invision Community v4.6.4 and have a veteran member of our community reporting they are unable to login on their main home computer. They did successfully login on two work computers. I am running a custom theme mdPanel and have upgraded that as well. I have also instructed them to clear caches, clear cookies and site history. I've also cleared system cache in Admin. They're restarted their computer and the error is always the same, "Something went wrong. Please try again". Error 2S119/1.

    I'm hoping this is only an isolated incident but concerned more users could be seeing this and just not contacting us. Any idea on the issue? Google search seemed to indicate its an issue with outdated code, but again, IPB  install went smooth and I also updated the theme I'm using.

    Thanks,

     

    Allen

    646072747_ScreenShot2021-07-19at1_30_32PM.thumb.png.48c4c7005f4e1218c8e190ab963b06fa.png

  14. On 7/18/2021 at 10:39 AM, thisisabaddisplayname said:

    Another solution is shift the help desk to a different provider. I'm using the one provided by Invision to handle support for billing, account, things of that nature. They still are excellent in that regard. But, the immediate one is through Spiceworks, which is more readily available. It's free and has built-in spam blocking from IP's. It's more built for IT, but it fits forums based around tech. People also tend to trust it more on certain things. I've used it for every IT-related job I've had.

    https://www.spiceworks.com/

    Its a bummer to have to come tot his, but you might be right. I only bought the commerce app for the help desk system so its a bummer. Guess I'll just drop that end of things, especially since there's been no reply to my support thread simply asking fort a MySQL query that I can use to mass delete them until. real fix is put into place. Assume that might be a bandaid for @Scott Allen as well.

  15. Sort of relates to a ticket I just opened here: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/462616-how-to-mass-delete-support-request-tickets-in-admin/

     

    There's definitely a little attention that needs to go into the support request feature, especially since this is a pretty sizable paid upgrade. I think it does most of what's needed, just needs a little thought and polish to smooth out some pretty glaring issues that can quickly make it all but unusable very quickly.

    Hoping a host has a way to block it really isn't a great solution.

  16. First off, thank you adding this new Rulers feature under Achievements. Very, very cool and fits well with the trend towards gamification I see happening all over. I can see this potentially giving forums a little better chance in fighting social media platforms for users with stuff like this.

    This said, I'd love to see some options to affect user groups, both positive and negative or otherwise tapping into existing forum features, which I suppose is a sort of blending of your new Rules feature and the Automatic Moderation or tapping into other stuff like promotions, warnings, etc.

    Example...

    Positive: If user passes xx reputation and / or receives x badge, then user is promoted to xx group.

    So by way of doing this, we can provide incentives since groups can already allow access to hidden areas, etc. On the flip side, we can already Auto Moderate so I can build out something like:

    If Member is in groups Members and reputation is less than 50 and receives 3 points, content is moderated.

    But what if we extended this into the warning system? So...

    If Member is in groups Members and reputation is less than 50 and receives negative xx reaction within xx time, user is warned.

    If Member is in groups Members and has received X warning in the last x days, user is suspended for xx days.

    And further...

    If Member is in groups Members and has received X warnings in the last x days, user is banned.

    What about communication triggers...

    If Member receives X promotion, message the user with X message.

    or optionally...

    If Member receives X promotion, email the user with X message.

    No doubt this is a new feature and will evolve with time and likely you guys are already thinking of all this, but if not... There's so many great features already built into the Fortum system already that this new Rules feature would be exponentially more powerful if it could tap into some of these existing features. I'd love to be able to setup Rules that go beyond just assigning badges / merit and so that I could automate the reward or consequence of user behavior through the use of access or privilege as described above.

    Anyhow, keep on keeping on...

    Thanks!

  17. Hello,

    A while back I started a thread about this, but it never really went anywhere. We got broadsided by spammers and there's literally thousands of messages in the queue before we realized and setup a filter / block. Selecting all, only selects all on that page and doesn't select across pagination. Can you please supply a solution, if even it's just a MySQl query to delete all requests when email matches xx or delete all requests when subject matches xx?

    That being said, since you do have a nifty filter feature it would be amazing if selecting all filtered results actually selected all results and not just the ones displayed on that page.

    Thank you,

    Allen

  18. 7 hours ago, TAMAN said:

    Hi,

    You might need to install the update from marketplace and then copy paste your customizations from the current theme you have to the one installed from marketplace, thats the only option 

     

    also, theres a new update coming for this theme you will be able to import/export all theme colors with a click in theme settings 🙂 

    Awesome, yeah... While waiting on a response I ended up just copy / pasting all the color and configuration settings over. Sort of a pain, but not horrible. While doing it, I was wondering why you can download the theme, but not simply export the theme settings / colors so that they can be easily shared or imported, so very happy to hear you are working on that. Big Help!

    This being said, I wonder why IPB doesn't handle parent / child similar to WordPress in that the parent is the actual code and the child are simply changes to it? So that when you upgrade the parent, anything not specifically changed as part of the child is automatically upgraded. Seems more logical.

    One other question... How do I get rid of the front end customizer button? For now I just added some CSS to display none, but would think there would be a toggle in the theme settings to disable? Likewise, can you explain a little more about this feature? The day / night mode makes sense, but wondering why supply an alternate 5 theme colors for users?

    Thanks!

    1162617983_ScreenShot2021-07-16at12_43_35PM.thumb.png.bd2bcb0413357f73ce9d340d68bd6f8f.png

  19. Hello,

    Its been a long while since I've worked on themes or have updated do I sort of forgot the process. Today I updated our forum to Invision Community v4.6.4 and now need to update the MD Panel theme. Our custom version has a few pages that were customized and a complete change of colors and most images. I didn't create it as a child theme (guess that was my first mistake), so now it just says "customized" instead allowing an option to update. Can you please explain how best to proceed?

    Thank you

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