CoffeeCake

This is why I think it'd be great if you were in the position of blogging your attempts at administering and extending the platform. What's the experience for a non-developer/non-expert trying to create a template modification, or setup a dev environment, or use the documentation to craft a basic application or plugin? You have the experience of a community leader who will have clear asks. I'd really like my community to have feature X. Were you to go through that process, document lessons learned, and share the results, I think that would be a great way to find opportunities in what's out there now in terms of documentation, highlight for others the thought process and challenges you had in going about doing it, and create a library of examples that others can build from and use to get started. It's win-win-win. Wasn't a low key joke at all. Except for the part about the name, and only slightly.

Interesting, I didn't realize it worked on registration as well. We have had to resort to denying registrations from a particular country because of the amounts of registrants creating accounts to post spam on the community (not contact form, actual posts) originating from those locations. They all are created by humans. I'd be interested to see if we lifted the country restriction and put this in place instead to see if it would catch it. They rotate amongst a number of the country's mobile providers. I assume it's people working in farms.

It would be really nice if notifications remained unread until clicking them individually.

Are you all certain the spam is coming via the form rather than emailed to the community account? We have thousands of messages inbound in contact us and the only spam we see is targeted stuff intentionally sent to us by someone trying to market to us.

Is it possible out of the box or with this application to tag posts? Did you mean threads? We have wished for post-level tagging.

I'm sorry to tell you that @Spanner passed away unexpectedly a bit ago. You may find that another developer may be able to help you with a replacement resource. Check out the Providers listing: https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers/ @Jordan Invision: maybe a note on Spanner's support threads and/or Marketplace entries might be useful.

How does one remove stored access information from the client area? While your discussing, access to that information should require an additional auth check, similar to when accessing sensitive account info in account settings.

It's the locale.

This is a great idea! We don't use clubs, but surprised this is not an out of the box feature!

Look for tasks in the table name, likely core_tasks.

Share for future time travelers!

Consider that IPS may have administrative and ssh credentials stored for your sites.

Adjust the locale. See: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/459707-why-does-commerce-insist-on-imperial-measurement/?do=findComment&comment=2839264

I can appreciate that the challenges you face as a forum administrator are the not the same as mine. I can appreciate that your philosophies involving community building are different than my own. I can appreciate that we can agree to disagree on what we each find valuable in our roles and from our own perspectives. I'm hopeful that through the time and energy I've shared here adding my thoughts for how what started out as an ask for a checkbox and solicitation for feedback from the community from someone who's thoughts and insights I respect, have helped developed that story into a more universally beneficial potential feature for other communities that use the IPS platform. At the very least, it helps highlight a deficiency in the out of the box ways we engage as managers of a platform with our members. I respect the kind and considered feedback that has been shared in this thread by others. I know that for some people, when they find themselves in situations where things feel very much out of control, we can sometimes look to control the things that remain within our grasp. I sense that this software is very much a part of who you are, and I understand that you are a fierce proponent for your opinions. I respect that passion you have to share how you feel, and I hope that as we work to identify opportunities and innovations in this shared commercial product we all benefit from, that we can find ways to listen more, to see things from the perspectives of others, and to not feel attacked when someone holds an opinion different than our own.

Just reviewing how we got to where we are, seeing @Joel R's post, and noting that I agree completely. This concept of engaging with a member at what he terms the point-of-action is the same ask I'm making here. My ask is that in addition to per topic or per forum that it also be available per usergroup and per individual user as well. I'd like to see the ability to have multiple for a given end user, exactly like announcements and thread messages can stack today. A brand new member may have messaging helpful to someone getting the hang of things, while people in special roles may have messaging related to their function or role within the community, and general messaging for a particular thread or forum level might also be visible by that one user.

@Morrigan, the comments in this thread that I have offered are a modified way of thinking of Jordan's original request. Jordan wanted to tell his members something at the time they were composing their posts. He wanted to inject a message into the flow of adding user-generated content. Right now, IPS offers a few solutions out of the box where you can set expectations in advance of a person composing a post: You can create a page of guidelines, which is accessible via a link You can create "forum rules" specific to a particular forum which are viewable by clicking a link You can create an announcement. This can show content at the top of the page or link to content You can create a thread message. This can show content at the top of a given thread In all of these solutions, out of the box, the expectations are far removed from the real estate of the post entry box. Most require extra navigation to get there. The onboarding process for a new member isn't fantastic. People come in all sorts of varieties, with linguistic, comprehension, and neurodiversity that can make "reading the room" a challenge. The solution I'm proposing, taking Jordan's ask a bit further, tries to address the perceived need he has--to deliver a message to a person at the moment they are creating content. I can think of many different reasons why different communities may want to deliver different messages to different members posting in different areas of their community. These messages can be of any topic imaginable. They might include positive messages of encouragement, they might include expectations for engagement ("don't forget to tell us what version of our product you own"), they might remind someone to instill the values of the organization in their thoughts as they share them. IPS offers a few more solutions for people that struggle with the four options above: Moderators can directly communicate with a member using email, private messaging, support requests, etc. Moderators can send a warning to a member Moderators can pre-approve messages posted by a member Moderators can restrict a member from posting This proposed solution sits in-between. I agree with Jordan on the principal that we should be able to deliver a message to an individual member, members of a usergroup, people posting in a particular content area (i.e. a specific thread, a specific forum) a message or series of messages that we, as administrators, think are important. What those messages contain or why we'd share those messages, or what level of toxicity doing so might introduce into the communities you involve yourself with are out of scope of the discussion about whether or not I would find value for my community in such a feature set. I hope that helps clarify the goal. Agreed.

My guess is that the issue you see here is that this is forum software that's had a bunch of things added onto it over its lifetime. It follows the legacy footprints of the tabular nature of forum software that came before it, and hasn't quite departed that in its default theme. Think about how other discussion/forum solutions look that have gained some traction, such as Discourse? An honest, and valid assessment of the out of the box functionality and the overall look and feel. This, coupled with very small number of themes that can be purchased when comparing at what's available for something like Wordpress, and there is certainly a barrier to achieving the look and feel you might be after and might be much more easily attainable using much more popular software like Wordpress. Where IPS' strengths are lie in the community management space. Does your organization need a community or a web portal or both? Unless it's in the "needs a community" or both category, this platform probably isn't the best choice. Go with what the powers that be are telling you. Could you pixel for pixel replicate something that might take a few mouseclick installs in Wordpress on IPS? Absolutely. Could you do it better? Yes. Will there be more effort involved? Yes. I'd encourage you to think about what your requirements and end goals are and then evaluate the various options out there to see what checks off the most boxes for you in the short and longer term. What resources are available to you? What's the budget? Consider how you might leverage a mix of platforms, such as IPS for the forum functionality and Wordpress for the static content if it makes sense to do so. Plenty of folks do this. You'll find the opposite situation to be the case when you find strong contenders in the content management space. They lack in the discussion areas, but excel in the presentation. Out of the box, IPS Pages/database content isn't going to look pretty. It's going to be functional, and you can theme and extend it however you'd like.

Reposting here, for the kids not in the cool club: Can Jordan Jig It? In this weekly series, Invision's own Mr. Invision, @Jordan Invision, takes a deep dive into building real-world solutions using nothing but two sticks of gum, a paperclip, VS Code, and the IPS documentation and developer guides. There's no better way to improve your documentation than to ask someone to use nothing but it to solve the world's greatest problems. We'll gather up a list of commonly asked user stories and challenges, he'll walk us through the process, include step-by-step guides on how to achieve the end results, and find and correct the documentation gaps that inevitably exist.

If you don't like a feature, keep it turned off. We can do better than discredit the perceived use cases of others as irrelevant or silly or ignorant when they don't apply to us, can't we? Would having a thing you don't use and you keep turned off mess up your day that badly? It's great that people with all sorts of backgrounds and thoughts can commiserate here, yet how about we keep it focused on not crapping on things we don't personally want? Maybe this isn't the best outlet for that?

I'm suggesting it be more like a blank box in which words decided by a community's administration could be placed and that they'd see in the context of composing a new post. Maybe it has an I agree button. Maybe it has words that say something like: this is a thread for furry characters only. Don't forget to include your fur color when posting.

Sometimes it's good to take a break and disconnect for a bit, @Morrigan. Thinking of you. Noting that the suggestion for a preemptive message is a blank canvas upon which each community can define what is directed therein. Jordan thought of it in terms of kindness, yet it's just like the ability to add an announcement or thread message or warning.

Ok, imagine I'm on a public computer, or am borrowing someone's computer, and need to log into IPS to update a support request. I log in, update my ticket, and then like a responsible person, click log out. I then get on a train home, six hours away. No internet service, because it's like mountains and stuff. Meanwhile, someone else jumps on the machine I was using, goes to IPS, and clicks the sign in button, and without providing or knowing my username and password now has access to my IPS account, license, and identity. This isn't a tricky or abnormal situation. Log out is not appropriately logging out here. I don't know if it's a problem with IPS in general and impacts other communities, or however the multiple communities under one domain situation IPS has rigged together here is setup, but this is not a good thing.

Close. I'm not suggesting changing the out of the box behavior. I'm suggesting the addition of a needed administrative configuration. If the administrator has modified the settings in a given application to select the default application context, then do that. Here, it would make sense that Marketplace search search Marketplace things. At someone else's community, they might use downloads differently... and maybe they'd want pages and downloads to both be included by default. This should be a setting at the application level (ACP > System > Applications > Gear icon > Default search context. Out of the box, it's set to "Everywhere" but an administrator can go in there and say for this application, search these contexts by default. This would be especially useful for third-party things, like say Adriano's Movies application on a community about general discussions. Maybe you'd like to search for a film, and you're on the movies homepage. If I ran that application, I'd want the context to be the Movies application by default. But! Maybe my entire community is about movies, so instead I'd want the search to look everywhere by default because there may be threads about the same movie as well as the entries in the third-party app.