SheffieldForum

Thanks. That worked.

As I'm signed up for Beta updates, it doesn't allow me to run patches or security updates without running the full updater for the Beta.

As this has security updates, is the Beta now recommended for production sites on cloud?

Came here to post about this. I noticed it happening where embeds are attached to the post, but that could be coincidence. I tried a post several times with a Facebook embed and it just wouldn't submit. Removed the embed and posted some random text and it posted, then I edited the embed back in.

At the moment there's no way to link a calendar event to a saved venue through the REST API. Marc has confirmed this in Feature Support. The API already knows about venues. Event responses include a venue object, and venues can be listed, created and edited through /calendar/venues. Only setting the link from the event side is missing. What I'd like added: 1. A venue parameter (int, venue ID) on POST /calendar/events and POST /calendar/events/{id}, working the same as choosing a venue in the event form. Sending 0 would remove the link. 2. Ideally, a venue filter on GET /calendar/events, so integrations can list events by venue. Why it matters: - Venue pages: each venue's "Upcoming Events" block stays empty for API-created events, so venue pages can't show what's on. Likewise each event posted via the API is orphaned from it's venue. - Structured data: events linked to a venue output location.name in their Event schema. API events can only send a location, so Google Search Console flags every one as "Missing field 'name' (in 'location')". - Scale: we import hundreds of local events automatically each week, so linking them by hand in the edit form isn't realistic. It looks like a small addition, since the venue relationship already exists in the data model and the front-end form. It would go nicely alongside the image upload support requested here. Thanks!

Thanks, I've created a request:

I did post in another topic here, but thought I would check if I am doing things right at the moment and are wrogn about this. I am adding events via the API. I also have a number of venues saved in the Events applications. I am able to create/update events and create update venues via the API. However, I can't seem to add the saved venue to the event (or vise versa) via the API. So the events are orphaned from their venues and and venues are ophaned from their events. Is this actually possible via the API? Am I missing something?

Agree with the OP. Also, adding another related calendar REST API gap to this thread. POST /calendar/events and POST /calendar/events/{id} have no venue parameter, so there’s seemingly no way to link an event to a venue through the API. The API clearly knows about venues: the event response already includes a venue object, and venues can be created and edited through /calendar/venues. Only setting the link from an event is missing. This matters for SEO. Events linked to a venue output location.name in their Event structured data. Events created through the API can only send location, so they don’t, and Google Search Console flags every one with “Missing field ‘name’ (in ‘location’)”. We import local events automatically, so linking hundreds of them by hand in the edit form isn’t practical. Could a venue(int, venue ID) parameter be added to both endpoints, please? It would be a small addition and would sit alongside the image upload support requested above.

Thanks Marc, I don't seem to have a patch in ACP, only an update to Beta 2 (which I believe isn't ready for production sites yet?).

I'm experiencing an issue with Invision Community 5.0.20, where advertisements configured to repeat at regular intervals only appear once, rather than repeating throughout the list. This affects both: Forum view, between topic rows Topic view, between posts ConfigurationThe advertisements are configured as follows: Setting Value Advertisement type Supply HTML Code List Position At regular intervals Show this advert after every 3 items Repeated Unlimited Maximum number of impressions Unlimited Forums All The expected behaviour is for an advertisement to appear after every three topics (or posts), repeating throughout the page. Actual behaviour: The advertisement appears once after the third item, but does not repeat after subsequent groups of three items, even where there are plenty of further topics or posts on the page. Troubleshooting carried outI've performed several tests to isolate the issue: 1. Removed third-party advertising codeTo rule out an issue with our third party header bidding code, I completely replaced the advertising code with a simple static HTML test banner: <div style="background:#ffcc00; color:#000; padding:20px; margin:10px 0; text-align:center; font-weight:bold;"> TEST ADVERT PLACEMENT </div>Result: The yellow test banner appears after the third topic, but does not repeat anywhere else in the listing. This suggests the problem is with placement insertion rather than the third-party advertising provider. 2. Tested fixed-position placementI changed the advertisement's List Position setting from At regular intervals to Fixed position, specifying position 10. Result: The yellow test advert correctly moved to appear after the tenth topic. This confirms that the software can insert the advertisement at different points in the listing. The problem appears specific to the regular-interval repetition functionality. 3. Tested on the default themeAll tests were performed using the default, unmodified Invision Community 5 theme. Result: The issue persists, ruling out custom theme template modifications. 4. Checked the rendered page HTMLUsing browser developer tools, I examined the advertising elements generated on the page. The initial advertisement is present in an ipsData__item--advertisement element, but no subsequent repeated instances are generated further down the topic listing. This further suggests that the repeat placements aren't being output by software, rather than being hidden or failing to load. 5. Confirmed the issue also affects advertisements between postsThe same behaviour occurs when using the Topic view, between posts placement. Advertisements configured to repeat at regular intervals appear only once rather than repeating throughout the topic.

I was under the impression this was coming to Creator Plus too? 😫

Thanks Marc, I did pass this as a ticket too (again, a reply to the same June/July problem ticket).

To piggy-back on this topic, hopefully before anything breaks again! I’ve checked Google Analytics today and again found very large traffic spikes that look like a bot/scraper the last week or two. On the worst days we logged around 200,000 extra sessions a day. The fingerprint, if anyone wants to check their own site: in GA4 the sessions are almost all Direct, Windows, Chrome, screen resolution exactly 1920×1080, coming from 150+ countries (mostly the US, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico), one page per session and no engagement. That looks like headless Chrome running through a residential proxy network. It runs GA4’s JavaScript, so it shows up as “real” traffic. Even on quiet days around 10,000 sessions carry the same fingerprint, so there seems to be a constant background crawl that ramps up periodically. What it’s hitting: almost entirely member profile content tabs, working through every member and every combination of content type and sort order, e.g. /profile/[user id-username]/content/?type=forums_topic_post /profile/[user id-username]/content/?type=gallery_album_item plus the ?sortby= variants. On 14 October about 87,000 of roughly 90,000 landing pages were URLs like these, each hit once. What I’ve done so far: turned off guest permission to view profiles (ACP > System > Site Features > Applications, expand System, click the padlock next to Profiles, untick Guests). The bot will presumably still request the URLs, but it now gets the error page instead of member content. I did that this morning and the "Sorry you do not have permission for that" page is by far the number one top page in our Analytics Realtime report. I’ll report back on whether it gives up or moves to anything else. For the Invision team, a few questions/suggestions: As we’re on Invision’s cloud hosting, is there anything you can do at the Cloudflare level? For example, a managed challenge or rate limit for guest requests to /profile/*/content URLs with type= or sortby= parameters, or using Cloudflare’s bot scoring to challenge headless Chrome with this fingerprint. Because it seemingly rotates through residential IPs, blocking by IP or country won’t work, but a rule on the URL pattern plus bot score should. If it’s hitting us this hard, it’s probably crawling other cloud customers too(?), so an edge rule may help everyone? Could the profile content tab’s type and sortby combinations be rate-limited for guests, or marked noindex/nofollow? They create a near-infinite set of URLs for crawlers. Would a separate permission for the profile content tab (as opposed to the profile itself) be possible? Happy to share more detail if it helps anyone.

There's also a secondary point that the social algorithms actively hate automatically posted content, so it gets devalued in the algorithm and your followers don't really see it (which cripples your long term engagement too because all your signals you are sending to the algorithm are thatyour followers aren't engaging with your content which causes a spiral of the algoritihm then just not showing your stuff in the feed in the first place). It's always best to post manually to platforms (and, where possible to tailor the content to that platform). Yes, it's an extra step of work, but it is worth doing if you rely on social traffic from your own pages.

The way I see it is that Opensearch is like a third party integration you can add. It isn't included in the base software (except at Enterprise level). You can enable it, but need your own Opensearch server to do so. Consider it like adding the Google Maps integration, or Sendgrid, or Zapier, etc. The ability is there in the software, but you need to configure your own accounts and setup with those operators to be able to integrate them with your IC5 instance. I think that's what the replies to you are saying. The feature is an additional thing you need to set up (and pay for where applicable) yourself to be able to integrate and use.

We have several Clubs with forums enabled (as well as native forums through the Forums app) on our site and I would love the ability to reorder them manually on the main Forums app page (or to have them appear in order of recent activity). Currently Clubs Forums appear under the nests of native forums made through the forums app, in a section headed 'Clubs Forums' but don't appear in the list to reorder in the Forums app like you can the native forums. It would be nice if the clubs forums appeared here to sort, too? Instead they only seem to appear listed in the order of creation from oldest to newest(?) on the main Forums page. There is an option in the Clubs settings for "Default sort on Clubs home page" but this does not translate to the main Forums app page. Another solution would be perhaps to mimic the selected behaviour of the Clubs home page to the main Forums page too? Sorry if that seems confusing because of all the mentions of Forums(!). Basically, where forums for Clubs appear on the main Forums app page, I want to be able to change the order of them, which doesn't appear to be an option currently.

The Favicon is unreliable on my site and sometimes shows, sometimes (mostly!) is the exclamation point. This definitely changed since the bot attack several weeks ago. I've tried removing and reuploading the image, trying another file, clearing caches (local and site) different browsers (though mainly use the latest Safari on the latest Mac) and it still reoccurs. I am on cloud.

This is great! It would be nice to have better email analytics along with this. We can see all 'bulk' sends and clicks, but not much beyond that - open rates would be useful (an overall figure at least, but it would be great to individualise it to be able to say 'user [xxx] opened'), clicks per link, etc. Full tracking.

Can confirm this is happening for my site too, across numerous URLs. I suspect this may be due to attempted crawls of URLs during last weekend's DDoS attacks? Requesting recrawling/validating the fix seems to work for some of them.

Thanks for the hard work Matt and team. Hopefully a resolution soon!

Yes. My site is fully down, and has been for about 8 hours. I did get an initial response to the ticket, but nothing for seven hours despite a couple of polite chases in the ticket, which is disconcerting. I am sure the team are working hard to resolve it. And notice it is a holiday for them in the US too, so there's limited support this weekend 😬! But hopefully there's some resolution sooner rather than later as I'm getting constant complaints from users and we could do without losing the site for the whole weekend, these several hours have hit us hard so far. As an aside, I did check the status pages before submitting a ticket this morning, but I'm not sure how accurate it is for the EU as the uptime detector seems to suggest the platform has been down for the last couple of weeks?

Claude and Gemini tell me they are blocked from accessing pages on my site. ChatGPT is more hit-and-miss. It sometimes reads it, sometimes doesn't.

I know I am probably in the minority here, but I would like to see us have a setting to actally ENABLE specific AI bots to our sites if we wish. There's a few reasons, but mostly that AI answers are here to stay now, and with the decline of SEO results we need some visiblity in AI results. We're basically at the position SEO was in very early on and there was lots of 'Google is stealing our web traffic' type alarmist rhetoric back then, with lots of people blocking search engine crawlers from their sites. But those who got on board early with allowing crawlers benefited the most and quickest early on. SEO is slowly dying, forum traffic in general is reducing... and we're actively blocking the replacement (as much as it isn't in a completely ideal place yet). Plus, for us as a ~25 year old community with millions of posts and topics, lots of it used for historical research and cited in peer reviewed studies, etc, I feel that for communities like ours it is important to be an authoritative voice and included in those conversations. We're not in it only for the money (yes, of course that's nice), but I feel more of a custodian of a quarter century of social history (as well as the historical discussions well beyond our operating period) that should be referenced. In fact, it is an operational risk for a site like mine to not be referenced in future outputs, and without being an authoritative voice in future we may not be able to operate to our full potential in a few years. Again, I appreciate this may not be the majority view(!), but I do think we should be allowed the ability to enable it for our specific sites should we choose.

Thanks Jim, I assumed that would be the case.

As an update: I believe you can do this through Apple for Business, but only for Apple devices/emails. You still need the SPF/DKIM/DMARC set up - but that seems to be it? The URL to set up Apple for Business: https://business.apple.com/ Is there a way for Cloud customers to do this, I wonder?