Pavel Chernitsky

I'm sorry, but that's just a ridiculous statement... firstly because I'm running an automotive community, secondly because I myself dabble in gaming a bit and know for a fact there are no more "gamer" trolls than any other random kind, and lastly because the tendency to troll has nothing to do with one's hobbies, and everything to do with their nature, mentality and upbringing. 
Also, you don't have to agree with the need for anything, but dumbing it down to basically "It shouldn't be a core part because some admins are dumb and will ban family members using the same computer, and gamer trolls will find a way to bypass it" is actually pretty insulting to me. should we not have any way to enforce rules or laws just because some people find ways around them? Should we ban the selling of kitchen knives because a moron once stabbed himself in foot with it? that's a very simplistic and "turn the other cheek" kind of thinking if I'm being honest. I think admins should be given the maximum amount of tools to help them deal with "law breakers" and make their jobs at keeping the communities they are in charge with as much within the communities guidelines as possible.
 
I get what you're saying, that is an easy metric to look at, but I don't think it's the only - or even the best - one to consider.
firstly, because that plugin is fairly expensive as far as marketplace plugins go for small one-man-show communities, and for larger communities who have an in-house dev (or dev team), they'll just have them write a similar plugin that perfectly fits the community's needs. Secondly, I'd say there are a fair few admins who just don't think of that option, I haven't until we've installed it on the previous forum software we used...
Also, when I say "niche" I don't mean "small numbers" but "small role. If we're looking at it conceptually, a duplicate user detector is - as I see it - the basis for the community's entire rules/warning system, and you got to agree that's a pretty important chunk of the system (or of a community in general, virtual or IRL). When you don't have a way to enforce the "punishments" you've given, why give them at all?

After much search, very confuse, such frustrate, wow, I have no other option besides asking/suggesting it here: Is there any way, or can you add a way, to change the default font size with which the forums are displayed? The fonts are just too small to be comfortably readable, especially on the mobile interface. this could be an ACP site-wide setting or a per-user-by-user choice.
Ctrl+mouse wheel isn't a solution since it enlarges everything - including avatars, menus and everything else - which is actually properly sized. and also there's the issue of not having mouse wheels (or a Ctrl key) on phones nowadays...
Send help. please. 

I'm very reluctant to say, and it genuinely saddens me to say that, but I just think the IC team doesn't care about the "small client" anymore.
since a few months back I've been getting a feeling that IC have had their sights set on some goal (financial, if I'm correctly reading between the lines) and they don't let feedback get in their way. I (and it seems like quite a few different community managers/owners) have been having this feeling since the "Zapier's gonna only be for CiC clients" blog post.
Feels like something was "switched on" and the devs' responses to feedback suddenly changed. 
I myself started a couple of threads about this issue, both were commented on (one of them after having a private conversation with a team member) with something along the lines of "yeah, that's great" or "pretty" and nothing more was done.
Here's an example - a poll that ended in a landslide, and NOTHING was done besides some - excuse my french - asinine comments that COMPLETELY ignored that main issue and only acknowledged some side remarks made in other comments. 
And another one, where honest conversation was exactly what you said - constructive, sincere, and in good faith. Besides the mandatory "yeahhhh dude, we totally get you", pretty much nothing was done to address concerns that were brought up.
Lately another line in sand was crossed with an e-mail sent to clients basically saying they're going to pawn off support to the community forums, sorry, I mean they're "keen to invest in our community support by asking that your first point of contact for support as an active license holder be in our new support area on our forums." because "Creating a strong support community backed by our support technicians will result in a more detailed and richer set of answers."
I, for one, am on starting to give up any hope that taking any feedback that isn't "that's great!" into consideration is anywhere on IC's roadmap. It's unfortunate especially since we switched to IC from VB for exactly those reasons after years of VB "knowing better" and making their platform more and more frustrating to use. I'd hate to see IC go down the same path. 
Big sad.

Same here. It's not as bad as it was, but it still doesn't come near what we had on VB.
*I've PM'd you with more details. 

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.

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.

 

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?
 

Bumping this up from purgatory seeing as there was no changes made in this regard.
The "search by author" tool is an invaluable tool large, active communities.
We moved our community from VB, and I - Both as a user, a moderator and admin - have been using this feature on pretty much on a weekly basis.

Here are a couple of examples as to why this feature is needed, both from the community member's POV, and also from that of a moderator:
1. A member (Let's call him Bob) PMs me (or another mod) saying another member (say.... Mike) is constantly harassing them in a thread. said thread happens to be 549 pages long and has been running for the past 5 years. Wanting to check Bob is truthful and to see if Mike really is harassing them, I go into search and look for "comments/posts in this thread by Mike". I see mike only said Bob was incorrect once, I Tell Bob to go do something more useful with his time.
2. A mod (josh) tells me he keeps seeing this one girl (Amanda) constantly posting cars for sale on our Buy/Sell forum, So she's probably a dealer posing as a private seller (If you fail to see the problem, This is illegal here in our country). I then go to the search and look for "threads posted by Amanda in the Buy/Sell forum" and see she posted 64 cars for sale in the last six months. we ban Amanda's ass and send her packin'.
3. A member (Mindy. No, I don't know what's up with the names. Those are just the ones that came to me.) notices another member (James) is trolling the hell out of a technical help request thread opened by a brand new member (Harry). Fearing this would make Harry leave and wanting to be a helpful community member, Mindy searches "Posts in this thread by James", and reports the latest comment attaching the entire list of trolly comments. James is then shows the proverbial door and recommended to not let it hit him in the tushy on his way out.

Now, Can we have it back please?

I'm very reluctant to say, and it genuinely saddens me to say that, but I just think the IC team doesn't care about the "small client" anymore.
since a few months back I've been getting a feeling that IC have had their sights set on some goal (financial, if I'm correctly reading between the lines) and they don't let feedback get in their way. I (and it seems like quite a few different community managers/owners) have been having this feeling since the "Zapier's gonna only be for CiC clients" blog post.
Feels like something was "switched on" and the devs' responses to feedback suddenly changed. 
I myself started a couple of threads about this issue, both were commented on (one of them after having a private conversation with a team member) with something along the lines of "yeah, that's great" or "pretty" and nothing more was done.
Here's an example - a poll that ended in a landslide, and NOTHING was done besides some - excuse my french - asinine comments that COMPLETELY ignored that main issue and only acknowledged some side remarks made in other comments. 
And another one, where honest conversation was exactly what you said - constructive, sincere, and in good faith. Besides the mandatory "yeahhhh dude, we totally get you", pretty much nothing was done to address concerns that were brought up.
Lately another line in sand was crossed with an e-mail sent to clients basically saying they're going to pawn off support to the community forums, sorry, I mean they're "keen to invest in our community support by asking that your first point of contact for support as an active license holder be in our new support area on our forums." because "Creating a strong support community backed by our support technicians will result in a more detailed and richer set of answers."
I, for one, am on starting to give up any hope that taking any feedback that isn't "that's great!" into consideration is anywhere on IC's roadmap. It's unfortunate especially since we switched to IC from VB for exactly those reasons after years of VB "knowing better" and making their platform more and more frustrating to use. I'd hate to see IC go down the same path. 
Big sad.

Coming back to do the updating 🙂 
Looks like PayPal suddenly decided that the fact our company's registered name isn't the same as the website's address so they made us jump through some bureaucratic hoops proving we are who we claim we are (after having no issue with it whatsoever for more than a year 🤷‍♂️
Anyways, a few documents later (and literally zero confirmation from them) we got it fixed and are now swimming* in sweet sweet monies again. 
 
*the phrase "swimming in money" does not refer to actual moving through a body of water but instead refers to re-activating our few thousand dollar a year income 😂

Thanks Stuart, and yeah, that's what we up with while looking into the issue - That basically they have all the control over the billing process and we have none. That wouldn't have been a problem if they at least gave some info as to the reasons of the billing failing, but they don't really do that either...
Anyway, we're talking to them in order to get to bottom of this and get if figured out.

I'm very reluctant to say, and it genuinely saddens me to say that, but I just think the IC team doesn't care about the "small client" anymore.
since a few months back I've been getting a feeling that IC have had their sights set on some goal (financial, if I'm correctly reading between the lines) and they don't let feedback get in their way. I (and it seems like quite a few different community managers/owners) have been having this feeling since the "Zapier's gonna only be for CiC clients" blog post.
Feels like something was "switched on" and the devs' responses to feedback suddenly changed. 
I myself started a couple of threads about this issue, both were commented on (one of them after having a private conversation with a team member) with something along the lines of "yeah, that's great" or "pretty" and nothing more was done.
Here's an example - a poll that ended in a landslide, and NOTHING was done besides some - excuse my french - asinine comments that COMPLETELY ignored that main issue and only acknowledged some side remarks made in other comments. 
And another one, where honest conversation was exactly what you said - constructive, sincere, and in good faith. Besides the mandatory "yeahhhh dude, we totally get you", pretty much nothing was done to address concerns that were brought up.
Lately another line in sand was crossed with an e-mail sent to clients basically saying they're going to pawn off support to the community forums, sorry, I mean they're "keen to invest in our community support by asking that your first point of contact for support as an active license holder be in our new support area on our forums." because "Creating a strong support community backed by our support technicians will result in a more detailed and richer set of answers."
I, for one, am on starting to give up any hope that taking any feedback that isn't "that's great!" into consideration is anywhere on IC's roadmap. It's unfortunate especially since we switched to IC from VB for exactly those reasons after years of VB "knowing better" and making their platform more and more frustrating to use. I'd hate to see IC go down the same path. 
Big sad.

Hey Jordan, thanks for being open and reacting positively. 
However, I've written my thoughts on the matter quite a few times already. In the thread about Zappier integration being offered for CiC clients only (Which changed later, so that's awesome), On this thread, and in the one the started myself and PM'd you.
I know you probably don't have time to read through all the comments being posted in these forums, but since we've already discussed them, they should be fairly easy to locate. 
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as prickly or just a plain a-hole, but I've got to say, I kind of lost hope... I wrote my opinion on this topic multiple times to multiple people, and it seemed to have very (VERY) little, if any, any effect. And i'm not even talking about actual changes to the software, but at most situations I didn't even get as little as a professional, straight forward explanation. I'm not criticizing your guys' choices, only the way you communicate them (if at all), and the fact that instead of being transparent and upfront with motives and specifics, you're having to constantly put out fires and apologize because "this wasn't the intent". 

I see what you're saying. I really do. But I also disagree with a lot of what you said.
Unfortunately I don't have the tools nor the reach to have a bigger sample size of people, but I think that seeing such a result should, at least, urge IPS to have a closer look at the divergence of opinions among a larger group of clients and keep those of us who are active here in the loop. 
regarding that this does or doesn't make sense as a default feature, I'd accept it if it were something that was asked to be added, but we're talking about something that was an integral part of the system, and in trying to upgrade it (which I really appreciate) they inadvertently downgraded the usage possibilities for some communities, and limited the ways in which members' credibility can be quickly assessed by new members and/or guests. In other words - before the change you had three metrics to judge members: Post count, pips, and reputation (which can be positive or negative, so the member's posts are judged by the entire reader base). now you only have the post count, which may or may not give an idea as to how knowledgeable a member is; and achievements, that can only be "added" (meaning even if say something incredibly dumb, your "rank" can't be lowered).
When this is the case - i.e. having a feature limited (even if that were not the original intent) I'd expect to at least be given a long enough heads-up. Like was done with the BBcode deprecation - we started doing our research into switching to IPS in mid 2019 and it was already mentioned in the ACP, while you still can enable it to this day. 
Moreover, the reputation system as a whole is still fully operational, and is still shown, the score has just been hidden behind an extra click/hover - making it naturally accessible only to those who know where to look. 
Regarding being given a workaround, I've touched on it before (can't find where exactly). Workarounds and third party addons are great, but they can't be used as replacements for core features. especially ones that were present prior. You can't "count" on a 3rd party dev to keep updating their plugins indefinitely and you can't edit more and more chunks of the code only to be needed to revert everything if you have a support request since IPS don't cover customizations in their support scope. Plus, let's not forget that css edits can and do break the entire design after major updates (we had to revert almost all our edits moving from 4.4 to 4.5).
 
That's actually not very good when you're serving advanced users (community manages/owners) and not trying to appeal to the average Joe. Apple are making products that are designed to be straight forward and easy to use, and are selling them to the end customer. Community members aren't IPS's clients. Community managers/owners are. So they should have a strategy more akin to WordPress - giving their customers as many tools and flexibility as possible, and allowing them to tailor the best solution they can for their community. 
Firstly, they did not revolutionize anything through their products, but rather through making them accessible, "Dumbing them down" and marketing. Having said that, building what people wanted (smartphones were just starting to gain traction in 2005-6) is exactly what they did and exactly what made them big. Stopping to do so, slowing down innovation, sticking to their "bigger picture" strategy and "ignoring the competition" is what made them drop in position. Lo and behold, launching the M1 devices (in response to a growing criticism of performance) practically made them jump back to first place when recommending a laptop. 
Thinking you know better than your clients, especially when those clients are advanced users, professionals and even business owners, is - IMHO - a very bad practice. 

I'm very reluctant to say, and it genuinely saddens me to say that, but I just think the IC team doesn't care about the "small client" anymore.
since a few months back I've been getting a feeling that IC have had their sights set on some goal (financial, if I'm correctly reading between the lines) and they don't let feedback get in their way. I (and it seems like quite a few different community managers/owners) have been having this feeling since the "Zapier's gonna only be for CiC clients" blog post.
Feels like something was "switched on" and the devs' responses to feedback suddenly changed. 
I myself started a couple of threads about this issue, both were commented on (one of them after having a private conversation with a team member) with something along the lines of "yeah, that's great" or "pretty" and nothing more was done.
Here's an example - a poll that ended in a landslide, and NOTHING was done besides some - excuse my french - asinine comments that COMPLETELY ignored that main issue and only acknowledged some side remarks made in other comments. 
And another one, where honest conversation was exactly what you said - constructive, sincere, and in good faith. Besides the mandatory "yeahhhh dude, we totally get you", pretty much nothing was done to address concerns that were brought up.
Lately another line in sand was crossed with an e-mail sent to clients basically saying they're going to pawn off support to the community forums, sorry, I mean they're "keen to invest in our community support by asking that your first point of contact for support as an active license holder be in our new support area on our forums." because "Creating a strong support community backed by our support technicians will result in a more detailed and richer set of answers."
I, for one, am on starting to give up any hope that taking any feedback that isn't "that's great!" into consideration is anywhere on IC's roadmap. It's unfortunate especially since we switched to IC from VB for exactly those reasons after years of VB "knowing better" and making their platform more and more frustrating to use. I'd hate to see IC go down the same path. 
Big sad.

Hi @Matt 
I've followed along with the guide and it seems to only show the titles (on "content submissions) to staff, regardless of the option chosen. 
Also, as you can see in the screenshots, I've moved the title upwards in the block, can you tell me where I need to put the css text in order for it to show directly under the username?
Thanks. Below are screenshots of the issue.
The Option + Formatting setting:

 
Admin view (With title outlined):

 
Regular member view:

 
 

Sure thing. Will do.

Hey Jordan, thanks for being open and reacting positively. 
However, I've written my thoughts on the matter quite a few times already. In the thread about Zappier integration being offered for CiC clients only (Which changed later, so that's awesome), On this thread, and in the one the started myself and PM'd you.
I know you probably don't have time to read through all the comments being posted in these forums, but since we've already discussed them, they should be fairly easy to locate. 
I'm sorry if I'm coming off as prickly or just a plain a-hole, but I've got to say, I kind of lost hope... I wrote my opinion on this topic multiple times to multiple people, and it seemed to have very (VERY) little, if any, any effect. And i'm not even talking about actual changes to the software, but at most situations I didn't even get as little as a professional, straight forward explanation. I'm not criticizing your guys' choices, only the way you communicate them (if at all), and the fact that instead of being transparent and upfront with motives and specifics, you're having to constantly put out fires and apologize because "this wasn't the intent". 

I'll answer this, and hopefully it'll get the other question answered as well, at least to some degree.
The Discover feed, in my (and a big chunk of our users) opinion, is too overwhelming and throws too much information at you. Posts or threads alone are ok, both - that's a bit too much, and then adding in reactions just makes it a bit, well, much. Moreover, if one thread has a few posts posted in it in close proximity - it takes over the feed and if you're not interested in this particular topic, you may find yourself feeling like "I've got nothing to read".
For that reason, we've set up two more pages in addition to the discover feed - one that shows new posts, and another that shows new threads - that way you see every thread only once, and you don't get flooded with multiple instances of the same thread. This is where the "Thread feed" widget lived, basically alone (together with the hot topics widget and another unrelated one) and acting as pretty much it's one page. seeing which threads were updated since your last visit is obviously useful if you visit that page often.  

Sure thing. Will do.

Hey @Jordan Invision Please pass along my thanks to the team and congratulate them on a great job, both on running through the beta process at a good pace (unlike the app 😉) and still managing to push an enormous amount of features, fixes and improvements. It absolutely cannot be taken for granted. 
We're itching to upgrade but since we didn't take part in the beta we're still unable to do it without it being a small pain, so we're putting it off at the moment. Do you guys have a target date for a full release or will it be taken step-by-step like you did with the betas?

Hey @Jordan Invision Please pass along my thanks to the team and congratulate them on a great job, both on running through the beta process at a good pace (unlike the app 😉) and still managing to push an enormous amount of features, fixes and improvements. It absolutely cannot be taken for granted. 
We're itching to upgrade but since we didn't take part in the beta we're still unable to do it without it being a small pain, so we're putting it off at the moment. Do you guys have a target date for a full release or will it be taken step-by-step like you did with the betas?

Hey @Jordan Invision Please pass along my thanks to the team and congratulate them on a great job, both on running through the beta process at a good pace (unlike the app 😉) and still managing to push an enormous amount of features, fixes and improvements. It absolutely cannot be taken for granted. 
We're itching to upgrade but since we didn't take part in the beta we're still unable to do it without it being a small pain, so we're putting it off at the moment. Do you guys have a target date for a full release or will it be taken step-by-step like you did with the betas?

Yeah, I know, great title, right...? I just don't know how to better explain it.
Our community has the "Users must acknowledge issued warnings before posting again?" option ticked, because we're very strict in regards to following our community guidelines and rules. However, we've also set up one of the warnings as an no-points anonymous management message to a member for times when we want to tell a member something like "we've edited your thread's title" (ahem ahem... 😛) and don't want them to be intimidated by the "YOU'VE BEEN WARNED, BOY!" popup and the "you must acknowledge..." banner (which some new member just miss altogether and send support requests saying they can't post).
Is there a way to have one (or some) of the warnings not require acknowledgment, or have it a per-warning toggle?
If there isn't, can you make it so? 

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?