Pavel Chernitsky

So, the "communities" app has been out as a beta since september - that's more that 5 months now. But since it's launch there were no updates on it regarding when to expect it to be "stable", we've had a completely "game breaking" bug with it (screen turns white once you log in) and there has been no fix, ETA on a fix, or any communication on the matter since our ticket was closed with a resounding "It's a beta". Having an app that can push notifications to members' mobile devices was one of the major reasons that made us choose to move our community to IPS instead of other platforms. And for quite a while it feels like we're being toyed with. Can we get some answers, updates, ETAs, or any kind of information regarding that very central and meaningful part of the service you guys are charging good money for? Or are we just going to stay in this loop of you making promises, us spending money, and then endlessly waiting for an implementation that never comes?

Yeah, I was thinking to maybe allow users to view the stream passively, and allow whoever wants to interact using voice (instead of writing their question) to join the "meeting" seamlessly without leaving the tab. But I'm coming to understand that this is beyond the scope of simply "embeding it into a post" and is [an understandable] security restriction. We'll probably just add a link to let people join via the native interface (Zoom's or whatever they choose to use) and simultaneously stream the talker and other participants "passively".

I've been playing with it for a bit more time, and straight-up embeding a meeting doesn't seem to work because in the apps I tried, you need to be "admitted" into the meeting in order to view the stream and until then you can't really "see" session - so an iFrame just gets a "can't connect" message. Looks like we're either going to have to get something custom made and can get around the admittance issue, or go the one-way stream + forum-based chat route.

Our first priority is to let people join the conference, so we'd prefer to use Meet/Zoom/Teams. I was playing around with it and thought about maybe using an iFrame to just "stupid" embed the view/display. If none of that would be possible, I've found a way to embed a Facebook live video feed, albeit a VERY delayed stream (a few dozen seconds).

We have someone who wants to have a live video stream/chat with our community and we're trying to find how to best get this done. The plan is to open a thread in advance where members can ask questions, and at a pre-schedueled time, said someone will "reply" in the thread with a live video stream/chat/conference where they will address and answer the questions that were asked. At the same time, members can of course keep posting in the thread and said someone will read them and reply via the video. Having members be able to join the video is an added benefit but not necessary. The particular platform used for this isn't as important, it can be Zoom, Facebook Live, Google meet, Microsoft Teams or whatever. what we need to do is be able to embed it in a forum post. Is something like that possible? whether built in, via an existing plugin or one that will need to be custom made?

The idea originally came up regarding blogs, yes. But I don't anyone would mind if it was to be expanded to other regions of the suite. Granted though, I didn't look nearly as deep into the stats I'm able to see or present to content-creating-members in the pages app so it isn't my main concern at the moment. Regarding the screenshots - that's exactly where the idea came from. If you look at the again, you can see that you have the "views" metric shown in two places - a total number of views on the blog's top banner, and WITHIN every blog post. As I showed on my snip of Jordan's blog post - There is NO individual post number on the post's "cover", forcing you to go into each post only to see how many views it has. Which is pointless extra work, since the data obviously exists... From there, as I stated on the OP, we've developed the idea further and came to what I wrote. Yeah, I remember the guest views thing from another thread. I guess that since there is no better solution, or at least until you get one up and running, it'll be better than nothing. Also, I don't think the numbers HAVE to be able to see those stats, but rather the blog's owner. They can then decide whether or not to have a block showing those stats (they can do it themselves if the option exists - I can't remember. Or they can ask a mod/admin with permissions).

It was supposed to be there, but I ran out of space... 🙂 Regarding other analytics... Honestly? Anything the software can "read" - where users came from, where did they go after, time spent. I don't know what else... Those are all the thing I know 😄

Being a fairly large community with quite a lot of traffic (in our country, relative to other site/communities in our niche) we started encouraging members to use our site as a platform for their own independent content. So herein lies the question - we have statistics for forums, for clubs, even for the gallery. Why not have statistics for blogs? I've looked for plugins but there aren't any. something like a youtube creators dashboard that will allow members who have blogs to view simple stats like total & average post views, total & average comments, view trend graph (hourly/daily) high/low activity hours and such, that way they make better informed decisions about their content. such simple stats can be extrapolated and used to learn when to post, what to write about or how long should the posts be etc. feel free to add those statistics to If not, or at least in the meanwhile, we'll settle for a view count on the post "blocks" for now. Thank you for reading this, and for totally agreeing with everything I wrote and working tirelessly to implement every single feature I've requested (and more) as soon as possible. I've even added a design idea for the icon. you're welcome (No. of course I'm serious):

Well, crap. BTW, I've finally sat down and edited the Warning-Points-Action thing so the system's somewhat reasonable: All the sums in here need to be accumulated within one month. Also, using @Adriano Faria's WONDERFUL "Change Group After Ban Member via Warn System" Plugin, we're restricting moderated users from posting in our 'Off-Topic' forum (which is restricted for more "veteran" and rule abiding members), an Incredibly useful option that for some reason is still not shown in the plugin's description ahem ahem 😄

We had it in Hebrew so it wouldn't matter even if you did 😄 Speaking of which, Is there a way to be able to send those no-point warnings without forcing members to acknowledge them while keeping that requirement for "pointed" warnings? i.e not disabling the "Users must acknowledge issued warnings before posting again?" option.

I know, right? I know, right? You hit that one on the head. I've pretty much just copy-pasta'd the system from what we had in VB, and since we're not issuing a whole lot of warnings with points and generally just using the warning system as an anonymous on-way PM system from the mods to members who step out of line, I never really had time to dive into the workings of the warning system. But for the past month or so our country got back into a 3rd lockdown and people seem to be slowly slipping out of sanity and we've had to moderate and even ban a few members recently. So I figured I'd better know how the damned system works, and this time is as good a time as any 😄

I've went through the warnings and restrictions guide but couldn't find the answer I was looking for. When a moderator issues a warning that has points attached to it, those points have an "expiration date". However, when you set up an action - this action ALSO has an "expiration date". So the question is - what "wins"? For example: We have the warning system set up so that if you get 3 point, you're getting moderated for 2 months. Matt got 3 warnings within 30 days. Each of those warnings had 1 point attached. Each point "expires" after 30 days. But, by the time matt got his 3rd point, his 1st point was about to expire after one week. Does he still get moderated for the entire two months? is the restriction lifted once the member "doesn't reach the needed point total"? whatever the answer, what's the best way you've found to be able to set up both a threshold for a short duration sanction and for a longer duration one?

Got it, thanks. We're trying to find some way to get this to be automatic because we're lazy af but at this rate I'm not sure we'll be able to...

Thanks a lot! But I think I must be missing something - does this method works automatically? And if it does, how is that part set-up? Because if it doesn't, I think (haven't really tried it yet) this could be done more easily somehow using a subscription with different initial and renewal prices, no?

Wow, thanks man! 😘

Hey, does anybody have any idea on how to implement this (or something similar)? @Jordan Invision maybe?

Of course we have, but that kind of defeats the point of this thread - which is solving IPS's issues if there are any. Not to be a overly rude or anything, but that advice is pretty much the same as "have you considered other community platforms"...

Thanks, could you maybe elaborate on the credits "method" and tell me the process in broad strokes? I've been playing around with the referral system, but it looks like you could only make this work for purchases and not registrations. Also, if any of the plugin makers have a good idea - I'd love to hear it.

Members = people who are logged in. Guest = members who aren't logged in OR don't have an account. Visitors = members+guests. Also, when you say "guest and member chart" are you talking about what is found in 'ACP->Statistics->Users->Online Users'? Because if you are, do note that this is NOT an actual traffic chart and if you sum up the numbers you WILL NOT get the number of visitors your site has, as explained here.

TL;DR: How to best give one month of subscription to a referrer and referred and then cancel it if they don't renew? *My head is kind of all over the place so if something isn't properly explained, please ask and I will elaborate. This is super important (make or break situation) and I have to get it figured out. Ok, so: I want to try something out, but the plethora of options and possible ways to approach it got my head spinning... WE have a bunch of subscriptions running right now and I want to use them in order to encourage referrals AND subscription purchases. What I want to do is, when someone registers, if they were referred to our site by someone, I want both of them to get a free month of one of the subscriptions. This can obviously be done manually by adding both of them to a subscription plan and removing them a month later, but that seems too dumb, and also won't achieve the second half of my goal - retaining the said new user as a paying customer. What I want, is a way to add both the new and the existing user to the subscription for no charge, and send out all the emails as if they bought it, but NOT to automatically charge them the renewal fee. The goal is that if they don't renew the subscription, it just gets canceled. I saw there's an option to give "Credits" (I guess you could make it automatic), but I pretty reluctant to use it since I want to make the process as seamless as possible for the end-user and not have the first thing they do in a new website is give their address/c.c details/go through a purchase process.

Hey Jordan, As Paul said, we're using Google AdSense's Automatic ad system.

Sounds pretty much exactly like what we had, minus all the preparation and generally smart things you did 😄 Yeah I don't think it is... our website loads and navigates pretty quickly, and scores mid-70s in desktop pagespeed insights. Mobile IS much much worse, but I think since there is an app that hopefully somehow will get out of beta and be fully functional, you want to get people to use it anyway.

I was actually talking about the other way around - people getting to much positive reactions for thing not directly related to the community's "theme". For example, for us it's cars, but you can have a heated political discussion in the O/T, and one user who is like super-duper charismatic and eloquent, can get a few hundred of even thousand points they "don't deserve". If that user then comes to the "pre-buy consultation" forum and advises someone that all american cars are trash - they might be taken seriously, even more so than someone who only got a few hundred rep-points, but did it by being useful and actually knowing things about cars. As I said, this only happened a handful of times (I want to say less than five, but my memory is very meh) at the very first few weeks after enabling the reputation system so I blame it on not knowing how to properly use it. After sending out the PMs, as I mentioned - negative reactions take up only 1.7%. I think I saw a plugin/app for that. Lastly, people are dumb. Some more than others, some more frequently and some more intensely. Sometimes, they need to be told that. Everyone is stupid at least once in a while, and if you don't know you're being stupid, you don't know to not repeat it. *ALSO! Ignore every single word I wrote in this thread if the average age of the members in you community is - or is close to - teens/20's. Those are the worst 😂

Thanks for the detailed reply. Could you list some of steps you took in trying to regain the lost traffic and how much effect (if any) they had? Also: It isn't, it's gotten 20% worse. We're not really doing any SEO.

That's how we do things. Pick them up, then THROW THEM DOWN ON THE FLOOR AND BASH 'EM ON THE HEAD WITH A FOLDABLE PICNIC CHAIR 🤣 Also, please make it happen. I WILL* name my next child after whoever pushes this to the top of the list. *Not really. Just making empty promises I have absolutely no intention of upholding.