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?

Any thoughts on the matter from the @IPSStaff? (Here's another idea, allow tagging of user groups, but we can leave that for a future version) 🙂 

@Morrigan I'll say it again - you DO NOT take any action based only one the fact that two people use the same computer. We've had dozens of members from the same families that were constantly popping off as duplicates and it was ok. BUT, when you ban a user, and 20 minutes later a NEW user is registered from the same device and starts acting abnormally, it SHOULD raise a flag, and you - as a community manager - need be aware of that so you can keep an eye open for that.
It is NOT an automatic ban hammer, it IS a tool to help draw admins' attention, the community manager NEEDS TO use their brains before banning people flagged by the feature.

I agree, but I think that there are integral things and features that a software company should include in its product. 3rd party developers are a very important part of such a large scale product, but I don't think it's a good idea to solely rely on them for what needs to be a core part of the product.
3rd party devs can do different variants of existing things (themes, and various ways to show announcements are a prime example for that) or niche products that provide a solution for a very narrow and specific use case. Because, like we saw here, a 3rd party dev can decide to take their app down and that's it, if you need it, you're screwed. Or, they WILL eventually stop providing support or not be able to adapt their app/plugin for a new version. If I have something to fall back to (like, say, the default theme), it's manageable. If it takes away a major functionality that I cannot replicate even closely with the default tools, that's a big no no. 
Just to be clear, I'm saying any of that out of disrespect for 3rd party devs. I think they (you) are a vital part of any program and should be embraced. I'm talking from painful experience with VB and phpBB over the last 18 years where you would one day use a plugin and all your users love it, and the next day it's not supported because of incompatibility with the new version, and the dev is nowhere to be seen and not answering your emails, and your users hate you because "you took away a feature".

There's no problem with any of those situations.
Let me reiterate, I don't mean that this system should auto-ban or perform any action. It should notify the staff that "It looks like person 1 and person 2 are using the same computer", And if by chance one of those person has already been misbehaving/moderated/banned, you can - at least - keep your eyes open on the the second person. 
Without such a system, the entire warning system is nothing more that you asking problematic users very politely to play nice. But if they don't want to, they just open a new account. It's basically a rule-keeping system that only works on rule-keeping people.
 
We have recently moved our community from VB to IPS, and we've had a good increase in traffic and registrations. However, we have been recently "under attack" by a few toxic trolls, who we have banned. Now we have new topics opened by newly registered members, some of which look borderline troll-y. How can our moderators know which of those - if any - are legitimate topics and which were opened by one of those trolls' new accounts? Currently, We have NO way of knowing (The ip tools are useless in a community our size, I have yet to see an ip that had was used by only one user).

Yes, THAT!
Also, when clicking one notification and going to that content, other notifications should remain as unread. otherwise you have to open all of them at once in different tabs, and can't leave one or more notifications to handle later (i.e a user reported a post and you can't deal with it right now, or someone posted in a thread you're following and you want to read later). Right now, morons with bad memory like yours truly, are in danger of leaving something for later and then forgetting about it.

So here's the story:
We are setting up a few premium membership subscription plans but a big chunk of out traffic are people who will visit the site one time or a few times during a certain time period and will probably won't return afterwards at all or at least for a long time. We've already set-up two automatically renewing subscriptions, and an open-amount donation.
What we want to do are two things:
1. make a "one time pass" that will last a set amount of time and once the it's up it won't renew and revoke the privilege it gave (no ads). I've tried setting up a non-renewing subscription, but I can't find where to define an expiration period. I don't want to have a self-renewing subscription that won't process payment since I don't want to harass people with "Renew your subscription" spam, I just want it to be "buy - have for X days - end - never hear from us again". Hopefully I explained myself properly.
2. since we only have two subscription plans and one donation campaign (not including the above one), it already looks pretty scattered and "spread too thin" and I want to be able to "put" the one-time pass on the same page as one of those two. If throwing all of them into the same page is possible (not by using blocks, it looks kinda meh) it would be awesome.
Thank you, Stay awesome.

Fairly few people know about the cookie thing, and we've had had a cookie-based tool on our previous platform and it worked very well.

Banning, blocking and moderating problematic users is all well and good, but if the user decides to open a new account and the site's admins can't detect it as a duplicate, all those tools are pretty useless.
I saw that through the years there have been a few plugins developed by the community, but I think that this should be a built-in integral functionality of the suite. Also the plugins are currently not available for purchase so I'm salty 😄 
What do you guys think? Should we have a built-in tool to help us find and intercept trolls and toxic users? Especially given how fairly simple is should be to implement (makes a cookie and then checks for it).

Banning, blocking and moderating problematic users is all well and good, but if the user decides to open a new account and the site's admins can't detect it as a duplicate, all those tools are pretty useless.
I saw that through the years there have been a few plugins developed by the community, but I think that this should be a built-in integral functionality of the suite. Also the plugins are currently not available for purchase so I'm salty 😄 
What do you guys think? Should we have a built-in tool to help us find and intercept trolls and toxic users? Especially given how fairly simple is should be to implement (makes a cookie and then checks for it).

Banning, blocking and moderating problematic users is all well and good, but if the user decides to open a new account and the site's admins can't detect it as a duplicate, all those tools are pretty useless.
I saw that through the years there have been a few plugins developed by the community, but I think that this should be a built-in integral functionality of the suite. Also the plugins are currently not available for purchase so I'm salty 😄 
What do you guys think? Should we have a built-in tool to help us find and intercept trolls and toxic users? Especially given how fairly simple is should be to implement (makes a cookie and then checks for it).

Banning, blocking and moderating problematic users is all well and good, but if the user decides to open a new account and the site's admins can't detect it as a duplicate, all those tools are pretty useless.
I saw that through the years there have been a few plugins developed by the community, but I think that this should be a built-in integral functionality of the suite. Also the plugins are currently not available for purchase so I'm salty 😄 
What do you guys think? Should we have a built-in tool to help us find and intercept trolls and toxic users? Especially given how fairly simple is should be to implement (makes a cookie and then checks for it).

OK, so after a couple of days running the new rule and getting no complaints, I think we've collectively figured it out.
-Like opentype suggested, I've completely removed the 150 post restriction.
-Then, I set up a rule where every member who hits 150 posts (If I have to type "pieces of content" one more Imma kill myself) they automatically get added to a secondary group that gives them permission to post in the super-special-exclusive forum.
-lastly, I went into a random member's profile in the ACP and clicked the content count drop down.
- from there, I clicked "recount" and "Recount for all members".
It took a bit of time to procces in the background (~140K members), which did not affect performance at all, and after that we were done - the secondary group grew by the exact amount it should have, and now all is well.
 
Thank you all for your help!

Duuuuuuude, that just worked. So simple. I guess I had a (very) bad case of tunnel vision so I couldn't even step back and think of it from another direction.
Thanks!

After talking to support and coming up empty handed, I turn to you. Maybe some of you came across something similar and found a solution or workaround.
We have a forum that only members in a specific secondary group can post in. Users are manually added to this group at moderators' discretion. We've now decided to allow every user with 150 posts and more to automatically be allowed to post in that forum. 
However, after doing that, members in the secondary group (who were manually added) that DON'T HAVE 150 posts, can't post in the forum, even though all appropriate permissions seem to be set up correctly. 
Is there any option to allow a certain group to "bypass"  the minimum content rule and just have anybody in that secondary group the ability to post in the forum.
I would have used a group promotion rule, but that function does not work retroactively, and thus users who already "apply" for the group promotion rule, don't get the promotion.
Thank you.

WHAT?! I read all your guys' posts about the 4.5 release (Also being so very much excited about it. when do we get it? when? WHEN?!?! I NEED IT!!!). how the mighty F did I miss that?!
Thanks! Going to read up on that. Keep up the incredible work, you beautiful, beautiful, people you. ❤️ (<-totally platonic heart emoji)

This language string is using another string x_members for the member/members pluralisation, so once you translate x_members it should work correct 🙂

Can we get an ACP option/toggle to open ALL links in posts (including internal) in a new tab? I won't even ask for a new toggle. you can add this to the "open External links" thingy to like a drop down or sumthn' 🙂  
* Don't suggest middle/Ctrl clicking. Humans are dumb and don't know/remember this feature's existence.
Yay? Nay? I vote yay. please?

Can we get an ACP option/toggle to open ALL links in posts (including internal) in a new tab? I won't even ask for a new toggle. you can add this to the "open External links" thingy to like a drop down or sumthn' 🙂  
* Don't suggest middle/Ctrl clicking. Humans are dumb and don't know/remember this feature's existence.
Yay? Nay? I vote yay. please?

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?

WHAT?! I read all your guys' posts about the 4.5 release (Also being so very much excited about it. when do we get it? when? WHEN?!?! I NEED IT!!!). how the mighty F did I miss that?!
Thanks! Going to read up on that. Keep up the incredible work, you beautiful, beautiful, people you. ❤️ (<-totally platonic heart emoji)

Can confirm fixed.
Thanks Adriano!

Sorry for the late response.
It was the "restricted replies" plugin. I've talked to the Dev and he's working on fix, and I'll come back here and post once he figured it out.
Thanks for the help.

Oy, Going to have foot-from-mouth removal surgery 😓
Please lock, delete, and throw this thread into the nearest radioactive waste disposal site.
Thank you.

Got to say I feel kind of bad for giving you the impression I don't know how to zoom in and out on a website 😂
Also: