CoffeeCake

17 minutes ago, arnabc said:

but are uniformly broken in much older posts.

These background processes run in reverse chronological order, so newest things are converted first. If after all the background processes are done, you might need to consider the above things.

8 minutes ago, Stuart Silvester said:

We have made some optimizations for 4.6, mainly disabling Redis data being encrypted by default.

15 hours ago, Fast Lane! said:

Pagespeed is a big area of work for IPB.  The overhead is HUGE for each page load.  Css and js for the entire site is loaded for every page (but can be cached). DOM structure is massive.

I'd add that WordPress is likely not a requirement to integrate, and that you can probably just bring in a standalone LMS that would use OAuth with IPS. WordPress is the ultimate hack. 🙂

We turned off "Redis to reduce MySQL overhead" in our testing 4.5 and before upgrading from 4.4. It was significantly slower when logged in. Maybe we have something not optimized correctly. We did not have that issue with memcached, which is what we were using in 4.4.

5 minutes ago, Charles said:

Yes, the Support button is on every page in the client area in the lower right.

Is it like nails on a chalkboard when you go to the IPS homepage on mobile and the little sales chat bubble overlaps the cute little animated circles of products, but not fully, so you're not sure what it is? Then that sales chat bubble becomes a support chat bubble, but only in the realm of the IPS install that is the client area and no where else, without any clear visual indicator that you're somewhere different now?

Is there a way to interact with it in a larger viewport? It's a pretty tiny window on desktop. Was the clashing blueish purple color chosen intentionally to take a jarring departure from the rest of the color language here? Is that the only option Help Scout provides?

Is there a reason it asks which of one channel I prefer? You can have any channel you'd like as long as it's email. Maybe priority support purchasing people get two channels? Maybe that's a place to insert an upsell? Your boss thinks they're more important than anyone else? Want to chat with us in real time? Buy a priority support license!

5 minutes ago, Joel R said:

who used to sell lifetime / perpetual licenses and then promptly told clients they would no longer honor those licenses.

I'm wary of lifetime purchases for anything. It's a money grab and unsustainable. Your costs will continue in perpetuity for as long as you operate your site, and the expectation of the purchaser will likely be that they'll never pay another cent to use the thing for the rest of their lives. What provisions do you have in your contracts for fulfilling your potential obligation to provide your service indefinitely?

I assume IPS did this at a more immature stage in their existence and learned some important lessons. I hope they made it right for their customers when they had that realization in some way. Let's hope.

You should have the option to do whatever you'd like though, and I fully support a one-time purchase that puts you into a group indefinitely. This is a useful concept if you removed the word "lifetime" and simply stated for a fee of $X, you get access to Y with no time-based commitments.

Subscriptions, as a concept, are linked to intervals of time. You pay $X for access to Y for Z interval, and you have the option to renew or not.

There needs to be more cohesion in your ability to give equal weight to the subscriptions and the single time purchases, and setting these all up as products is likely the best way to go. There needs to be logic to prevent your scenarios surrounding purchasing both the single time and subscription products. This whole thing is configured and presented from the mindset of someone worried about the internal logic, rather than from the perspective of the customer experience. Your marketing and the customer's thinking are: "Do you want X for Z time for $Y, or X until the sun consumes us all for $W?" A developer does not a user experience designer make.

The ability to have multiple durations of time for a single thing and do it smartly is an opportunity for improvement.

Are you referring to storage configurations (System > Overview > Files)? I believe all of those items need to be accessible via the web via some URL path unless they're being served directly via the database. That path may be S3, or some custom URL, or something living within your web root filesystem.

How that path makes it to your web server is defined by your web server configuration. You could have files stored somewhere other than the root of your web host. Maybe you have your web site at /var/www/html, but you have a secondary drive installed at /mnt/drive2. You could put files at /mnt/drive2 and then map that path via your web configuration to something like www.example.com/path that lives at /mnt/drive2.

What are you trying to do?

Another option!

3) If you don't like the option in #2, use rewrite rules to serve your home page for requests made to the root of your domain, and send everything else to IPS.

On 1/25/2021 at 1:35 PM, Zaretta Hammond said:

Unknown column 'session_cookie_key' in 'field list' (1054)

The error message shows that the database schema is not what the code expects it to be. It is trying to write to a column (session_cookie_key) that is not there. This indicates that one or more of the following things is happening:

• The source code on your site is not correct. Download and replace all of your files on your host with known good copies from the Client Area, or with the versions that existed before the upgrade.
• The database on your site is the wrong version. Restore from backup.
• You have some sort of nasty database corruption. Restore from backup.

   

The search engine (elasticsearch or the built in SQL one) should be able to return the ID (post ID, thread ID, page ID, database record ID, etc.) and entity type (post, thread, page, product, etc.). That should be enough to enable things like create a list of entities and their IDs with which to take action on (select to move, hide, delete, promote, whatever).

Something needs to listen to and respond to that action, and that's probably where the engineering challenge lies.

13 minutes ago, Joel R said:

I wonder, however, if IPS is going to have the same technical challenges as other requests from the community to make the Activity Stream interactive.  

There may be engineering challenges. Some of those challenges are probably larger than others (editing content inline vs. selecting content for action). To be clear, I lump the concepts of activity streams and search into the same pile.

Places to think about:

• Activity view on a member's profile (Use case: reviewing all of a problematic member's recent content contributions for issues)
• Search results (Use case: words, phrases, or other ways to parse out content in the advanced search parameters as a filter for content that requires further investigation or action)
• Activity streams (Use case: reviewing a time-based window of submissions matching some set of criteria for issues)

While things like moderation approval are tools we sometimes use, it's only a tool in a larger toolbelt at our disposal. We simply can't monitor all posts in real time due to the throughput of our community, and even for those instances where we do review things in real time, there are moderation issues that are brought to our attention after the fact, for which the three places above become important tools to use.

Right now, it's a lot of opening links in a new tab, and it's functionality we had prior to coming to IPS from vBulletin (though I think some of it we may have added in--I don't recall). For certain we were able to select threads across multiple pages in a forum, posts and threads from search views, and make inline content edits in lists of most recent submissions in our vB3.8 environment.

8 minutes ago, Pavel Chernitsky said:

Could you list some of steps you took in trying to regain the lost traffic and how much effect (if any) they had?

Our biggest efforts were before we converted. We anticipated the problem because many others had posted about it here when we were evaluating IPS. We spent a lot of lead time finding every URL path we had in our vBulletin install (all of which was customized by us for SEO purposes), and crafting rewrite logic to keep existing links working beyond the standard ones the converter addresses with permanent redirects.

We wanted to make sure that any existing URL in search engine indexes would continue working and take you to its new home. This is probably not an issue for a community that had standard vBulletin URLs, but it was for our modified ones.

Things improved somewhat but not back to pre conversion levels. It was a tradeoff for us though--we had our list of requirements, and IPS checked off more than the other solutions, especially the ones that were ranked highest by us. Had we gone with some other solution, we don't know if we would have had the same SEO impact, but here's hoping to needed changes and improvements in this arena for out of the box behaviors.

vBulletin was no longer sustainable, and our community had outgrown the capabilities of the software. Their position was that our community was too large for their version 5, and we were not interested in maintaining and iterating upon version 3.8 in perpetuity.

11 minutes ago, Joel R said:

You notice problematic content directly via the Activity Stream, and you need to moderate it immediately?

This one. If moderators see content, by design they should be able to address the content. Jumping through hoops to go to some other place to deal with issues is maddening.

Maybe in the activity stream, you see that someone posted a wry shirtless smile thread in the nothing but fornlorn pouts forum. Maybe someone made a massive typo in a thread title, or you just really want to add a bunch of 💯 emojis to the post itself, because that's the culture of your community.

Maybe you're searching for every instance of some verboten word or phrase, like "parler" or "fully dressed" and would like to select every resulting post and delete, hide, or burn them.

See content, act on content.

1 hour ago, Matt said:

some fairly poor results

12 hours ago, cristian romero garcia said:

Is there some possibility to block users by the device's unique identifier UUID.

No, not in the sense you're thinking of. When a game is installed on a device, it has access to information about the hardware that it can use in this capacity, but there are limitations on what is available via a web interface.

As @bfarber pointed out, there are solutions in the Marketplace that look for signals to approximate what you're seeking--identifying and restricting multiple accounts by the same member. Yet, a determined, smart end-user will find a way around whatever mechanisms you take. 

From a built-in perspective, you can see members that share a given device however there's no view to go from device to associated members. Instead, member to associated device, to other members with the same device in the ACP.

Viewing it from the device perspective would be a welcome opportunity for improvement.

Eat the dog food!

Steps to go insane (option A):

1. Open thread with 538 pages.
2. Navigate to page 46. Check the box for the second post on the page. 
3. Navigate to page 302. Check the box for the 15th post on the page.
4. Navigate to page 484. Check the box for the 7th post on the page.
5. Destroy the guide above and go eat dinner.
6. Come back, content with deliciousness.
7. Look at page 538, see an awful post from a racist spammer, check the box on the post to delete it.
8. YOU HAVE FOUR POSTS SELECTED, AND NO OPTION TO CLEAR PREVIOUS SELECTIONS. EVER. THIS WILL HAUNT YOU FOR THE END OF DAYS. OR YOU DELETE COOKIES.
9. Evaluate all of the decisions that have gotten you to this point.

Steps to go insane (option B):

1. Open forum with 400 threads.
2. Check three threads on the first page.
3. Navigate to page 2, check four threads.
4. YOU HAVE FOUR THREADS CHECKED, YOUR PREVIOUS THREE CHECK BOXES MEAN NOTHING TO US, ENJOY MAKING DECISIONS 25 THREADS AT A TIME.
5. Maybe have desert to make up for being put through this.

Hi @Adriano Faria,

FYI, the button to add a member note from the ACP when looking at the Member's tab is not working. Pressing the "add note" button in the ACP > Members > Specific member > Member Notes tab results in a "page not found" popup error.

Yes, absolutely adversely affected traffic when we transitioned from vBulletin to IPS. We were going from a very optimized vBulletin SEO strategy that we had developed over many years to default IPS, and there was a definite hit across all measures, similar to what you're describing. We took a number of steps (many many rewrite rules) beyond the out of the box IPS URL conversion strategy to ensure that previous URLs ended up, as much as possible, to the new path in IPS. We did our conversion in 2018, and did not have the factor of pandemic. Our research at the time indicated that this was the report of a number of communities making the switch to IPS, and we tried to address as many of the issues as possible in advance.

I think, overall, SEO is a large opportunity for IPS, and hopefully the IPS team is actively working on addressing those opportunities. There are lots of improvements to be made from the default, out of the box functionality, starting with optimizations in rendering speed, lazy loading, improvements in the ability to customize the FURL system at the root application/plugin level (i.e. change "forums" to "whateveryouwant" for both built in applications and third-party applications), and other things.

Pageviews are likely not a fair measure, especially if you're using ajax loading to navigate between pages--as long as your ad performance is good, and your organic search rankings aren't dropping. Our significant measures were unique sessions and ranking in search.

@Adriano Faria, the application apparently also executes a call to the web site in question from the server upon submission, and if the site does not respond with a 200 status code, the URL is returned as invalid. Would you please consider adding an option to turn off this behavior? We'd like for our servers to not try and hit external addresses, and some addresses return different result codes intentionally. We'd rather verify that the address is correct from a manual moderation standpoint.

This also exposes our internal infrastructure by allowing link submitters to get the IP address of our servers which are hidden behind load balancing proxies.

@Adriano Faria, when setting "Display author of submissions" to false, the avatar of the latest submitter in mobile view, and name of author in desktop view still appears in a nested subcategory view.

For example, create category "A" and then create two child categories "B" and "C". When looking at category "A", the author information is visible in the "Subcategories" table.

On 12/31/2020 at 7:41 PM, Paul E. said:

The sorting on the table that appears in the ModCP and in ACP, is all sorts of jacked up. Nothing makes sense and going through pages of duplicates to find if a person is impossible at the number of entries we see. It appears to be sorting by Member ID rather than display name when sorting the member column.

It would be nice to expose the alts at the member profile level, in both ACP and front end site, so you could look from the person rather than seeing if they have a match in the table.

@CodingJungle, the ability to sort is still based on the member ID and not member display name with the latest release. Is this something you have on your radar to address?