Pavel Chernitsky

On 1/22/2021 at 3:49 AM, Joel R said:

As a general best practice for all communities, once you hit a certain size, you may want to totally remove downvote.  Or at the very least, to adjust the downvote reputation to be neutral (+0), so it doesn't actually reduce anyone's reputation.  Leaving downvote reputation is asking for users to show the ugly side of humanity.   

15 minutes ago, Matt said:

I definitely recommend disabling downvoting unless you have a very focused and trusting community.

Naaaa Downvoting is GREAT! 
We have it enabled in a fairly large (in our country's scale) community with around 16-20K content items being posted monthly.
When we enabled it, we opened a sticky thread warning people to use downvotes responsibly and only in cases where truly needed, like for "advice" that can cause injuries or monetary damage or for just boring, crappy, content. We've even called them that - "Bad Idea" and "Boring". 
Those were enabled together with positive and neutral reactions, three of each.

Our mods questioned the decision giving the same (solid) reasoning you guys did, but ultimately after having this system run for almost a year, negative reactions account for only 1.4% (Bad Idea) and 0.3% (Boring). Furthermore, after the initial buzz and some misuse, members who were doing it were issued PMs asking them to stop and explaining the importance of using the negative reactions wisely and sparingly, and explaining the implications of over-using downvotes can have on the community (those were very few members, and you can obviously Copy-Paste the PM). 

Eventually, the community rights itself and irons out the few and minor cases of downvote misuse. Users who deserve mostly high reputation get it despite the occasional downvote. It also works the other way around, for pointless babbling users who have a tendency to just waste everyone's time. And since there are very few of those, they "feel bad" and try to right their ways and get back on the community's good side. 

Those are my two cents.

P.S, there is another cent - you should try disabling all or at least all non-neutral reactions in a casual/offtopic/banter forum. Because from what we learned - they attract some of the most active members, both in term of posting and reacting. they tend to sort of break the "normal" scoring system because they get positive reputation without actually being "useful" to the regular community, and can appear to be more knowledgeable than they actually are.

Thanks for all the great feedback and replies 😅

So I've just got access to our website's Google AdSense account and started to look at ancient reports. Doing so, I've noticed something pretty odd...

We've migrated our community from VB to IPS on march 2020, and activated Google's automatic ads and all the built-in seo enhancements IPS offers.
Being that we migrated from an old, non-reponsive, slow, and pretty much all-round crapola website from a time "I'm not even sure they had the Google" to a clean, sleek, responsive and up to date one, you'd expect pretty much all the associated metrics would go through the roof.

However... looking at the graphs I see a SEVERE drop on almost all numbers. Pageviews have been cut by more than 2/3 (from an average of about 3.3-3.5M to barely breaking 1.5M a month), Visitor numbers dropped 15-20%, from 550-600K to 400-450K and bounce rates doubled, from around 32.5% to more than 68%.
Consequently (or maybe completely unrelated), Google ad revenue took quite a dive and dropped ~20% when accounting for exchange rate or ~33% raw numbers (not blaming IPS for the devaluation of the USD, of course). That, while ad impressions rose from 3.5-4M to 5.5-5.7M.

Now, I know, 2020 isn't exactly a good year to judge anything or compare anything to, but I can't shake how massive the numbers are and how closely the change follows our migration.
The question, then, is - for you who migrated from a different platform to IPS, how - if at all - did it affect your traffic. Did you see more (or the same amount of) visitors? did your new-returning users composition changed (we now have slightly more new ones, but it's negligible)?  If it did adversely affect your traffic, how long (if at all) did it take for it to return to normal numbers?

Go into the members panel in the ACP, click the cog in the search bar, have it search for members with a 0 content count.
when you get the results, click the "Banned" button above the results table. 
From there you can prune the members found, or move them to another group (which if you delete, may(?) delete the users. I haven't tried it so I don't if it deletes all the users or just the group itself).

I'm sure if it'll do the trick, but at least it'll allow you to round all the banned users up and then probably have an easier time doing what you need with them.

screenshots for your convenience (the things you need are marked red; member names deleted for privacy):

I LOVE(!!!!) IPS's widgets/blocks thing. They're so easy to use, intuitive, give you the ability to show flexible information literally within three clicks, and all that. I'm sure everyone is well aware of how freakin' awesome they are.

BUT, and that's avery big but, at the same time, they are so stupendously limited. if you want a block on top, it has to be full width and predetermined height. you can have it either on the left or right - not both. you can't change the height, whether it's in the side bar or the the main body.

And it drives me mad. I mean, you can change the Pages app layout to two of three columns, you can make a WYSIWYG block, a text one, and even an image carousel. why not have the ability to add two or three blocks in the same row? or even allow to just drop more and more block and have the ones already there automatically get narrower? and maybe even manually adjust the height of a block/row of blocks? This will give community managers SO MUCH more power to be able to "push" things they want to their members without having to push other important things to far down the page. 

Everything is originally from he marketplace. We have done no custom development.
It does, however, seems like the issue has been cause by something that happened during the update and has been resolved.

I don't think those are related. the disappearing plugins thing is pretty old, while the notifications only started acting up after the 4.5.4.2 update. HOWEVER, it looks like we've figured the notifications out. Something (no idea what, I'm not the one who fixed it and not the technical authority on our website) was getting the notifications sending stuck and not completing even after hitting 100%. So the queue very quickly got to several hundred tasks and was dispatching the notifications a good few hours or days late.

The fix was applied last night and so far it's going good. But I want to let it run for a few days before being we can be sure it's good.

I know, me too. That's why I started the thread, to see if someone else has encountered it or if I should go get my brain checked for multiple personalities.

We have received multiple reports of multiple notification types acting erratically. I myself have seen this happen as well. Users and moderators are reporting on Pop-ups for months old PMs they have already read and replies to, Notifications in the notification panel for posts they've already viewed, and clicking on notifications takes them to a many posts before the one they were notified about. so far those are the three "errors" I've been told about, might be there are more.

does anybody else encountered this behaviour and/or are the Devs aware of this?

It's the "Reply To Own Topics" plugin. But I've had it happen with other ones too (can't recall which).

Yup, it only shows the latest "installed" entry. But it was definitely installed, since the marketplace let me install it without purchasing (meaning it was already purchased) and I don't have the files on my computer (meaning I didn't download it).
weird...

I've noticed it before, but passed it off as a mistake or hallucination, but seeing it now again, I have NO doubt - I have plugins disappearing on their own. 
Nothing was uninstalled, nothing at all was done, yet they disappeared.

Anybody else had this happen?
 

Great! Just updated and can confirm it's working flawlessly. 

Thank you again.

Awesome. Thanks, man!

@Paul E. I actually think @Adriano Faria's idea is a bit easier to implement and I don't see how it would effectively function differently if you move the user to another group. Plus, since moderation is usually time constrained, if you move a moderated member to another group, you're also going to have to move them back when they're out of moderation. 

@Adriano Faria Wow man, that was quick! Cheers! Does that also prevent the user from replying to topics or just post new ones? Because i think preventing them from replying is also important. I don't think it needs to be a separate setting - just one to prevent posting completely. If a member is in a "time out", they should be in a full on time out.

1 hour ago, Paul E. said:

netizens

LOL, netizens. Love it 😁

And I don't deserve the credit, it's our moderators who said that VBulletin had a similar feature/plugin/addon. I have no idea since I wasn't the community manager for the site at the time we were on vb. I was being busy hating it and pushing to move to IPS.

Yeah, thanks. that's the plugin I was talking about. I have it installed. I was asking if there is one that does the same thing for moderated users, not banned ones.

Drats...

I know there's an app/plugin that moves banned people to a specified group. Does anybody know of something similar for moderated users? I did a search but since I had more than a few time where it didn't find something I know exists, I guess I'd rather ask. 

Thanks, But it's not exactly what I meant.
What I wanted to do is restrict the ability to post at all (hide the comment box) only in a specific forum (or forums), while they can still post in all other forums they have permission to post in (after approval by a mod). Sort of like remove the post permission from selected forums for the time they're being moderated. 

A few of our moderators threw an idea at me and also said that it was possible when we were using VB, so I'm asking to see if it's also possible on IPS.

Is there any way to block a member who's content currently needs approval (because of multiple warning) from posting in a certain forum/s? We have one forum that is basically just banter, and posting in it is reserved for long(er) time members who abide by the community rules and basically are good guys. So as a penalty for breaking the rules multiple times we'd want to just outright revoke the right to post there. is there any non-manual way to do that? 

*members who are allowed to post in that forum are obviously in a specific secondary group, so all that needs to be done is remove them from it for the duration they are being moderated. 

Hey, I've just updated the plugin to the latest version and see you've turned it into an app with the settings being in a separate place (as shown in the thumbnails), but the description (in the marketplace) still points to Plugins -> Dead Topic Protection -> Pencil. So it took me a while (longer than I'd like to admit 😄) to go and look at the thumbs and find it. So I guess you might want to update the description. 
 

*I'm posting it here and not via PM to maybe help other blind idiots like yours truly who might have trouble finding the settings after updating.

I don't really know SQL, and by "don't really" I mean "really don't". Even if you gave me the query, I wouldn't be sure where to paste it.

Before starting to brute force the issue like a moron, just wanted to see if there is an easy way to move multiple members from one group to another. I've around 100 members to move - they're all in the same group now and will be in the same later. There are no criteria by which I'm selecting them, all are selected manually (those were business accounts and some stopped paying, we need to move them to a "ex-business" group).  

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help.

Edit: Found this plugin but I didn't quite understand if it answers my need... 

20 hours ago, bfarber said:

If you need something more detailed or accurate, you may wish to use something like Google Analytics (which our charts are not intended to replicate or replace).

We of course use Google analytics, but I really liked how that single piece of info in available from within the ACP and visible every time I go there. Also, Google can't show members vs guests, which I think is one of those pieces of info that once you know - you always NEED to know 🙂 
Edit: forgot to say that Google analytics is also "helped" by the fact it's as easy and fun to use as a breaking wheel.