Andy135

I just got the same error when I ran the upgrade process today. As you can imagine it raised my blood pressure somewhat 😬.

The site seems to be available now and running the upgrade process - fingers crossed it's nothing to do with the upgrade itself....

12 minutes ago, Charles said:

Is anyone still having this issue?

Still down for us I'm afraid.

Still offline unfortunately. Is this an Invision issue or AWS?

We're on the cloud service and our site has been down for around 15 mins, which is an eternity for a forum as we all know. Is there a known issue and anticipated time to fix? Anything we can do as end-users?

Thanks Jim - that makes total sense now. Appreciate the effort and insight you shared on this.

Is anyone else seeing their Activity Stream block missing today? Ours has unexpectedly disappeared. I can see it using the block manager which suggests it requires configuring - even though it was already configured and working fine beforehand. I've tried re-editing/configuring the block, and I've tried uninstalling then reinstalling the block but it still doesn't seem to work. Any suggestions?

FWIW we're on the cloud platform.

5 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

I'm having a think about adding an IP address check to this one...but again, IPs can be changed.

 

So instead of showing "site offline" to a user, you could show "site offline" to a guest IP? If so, that would be very helpful in this case.

1 hour ago, Charles said:

I am curious why you would be concerned about someone who is not logged in viewing your site. At that point it is publicly viewable and everyone and everything (like search bots) can see it by design.

As @Nathan Explosion has found, the back-story to this request can be found here. Quite a specific use case, but clearly for the user in question it would be very welcome to know that they can communicate freely without fear of their comments being used against them offline.

33 minutes ago, CoffeeCake said:

It seems that if this is a concern for your community, you might consider registration (and being logged in) as a requirement to view content.

While it's noble to want to prevent someone malicious from seeing content that another person is posting, you'll find that short of controlling who can register and who can see your content, you will not be able to achieve the level of restriction you're seeking otherwise.

Agreed - however my concern over this suggestion is the potential impact that locking down our content behind a registration-wall would have on our SEO ranking. Our community won't continue to grow if we're not easy to find.

For additional context, our community began life behind a registration-wall on a different platform and the founding members agreed that taking the forum out into the open was the right thing to do for the long-term future of the community. Hiding our content again would feel like a backwards step, and whilst we want to support the member in question, we can't put their needs over the needs of the community at large... which is why this feature request came to mind - seems like a good solution to help protect our members in specific cases like this without negatively impacting the visibility of the community.

42 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

I've just found the bigger picture...

 

Yep, that is the backstory to this feature request. I realise this is an edge case, but in this instance it would be super helpful for us to be able to block a guest IP.

2 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

If you ban the ip addresses they will not be able to see any content at all. However, you should note that it is very easy to change ips, so this method is not very effective.

According to the reply I was given this morning from the IPS helpdesk, guests can still see everything even if their IP address has been banned. The reason I raised the helpdesk query was that I noticed the guest IP which I had "banned" was still looking at different topics even after I had added a Ban Filter for their IP.

45 minutes ago, Miss_B said:

You can do that at Ban Settings->Add Ban Filter. And select Ip Address for the Ban Type list.

I understand that this doesn't work for guests/non-members. They can still see all content?

43 minutes ago, opentype said:

I don’t think guest IP bans will solve your problem. 

Given that the stalker in question isn't tech savvy (the member knows who the stalker is IRL), an IP ban will "probably" be enough to have them get bored and move off our site. Agreed that it's not a silver bullet for all bad behaviour, but in this case it might just be enough.

27 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

Use your firewall.

We're hosted on the Invision cloud service. Not sure we have the ability to do that?

I understand that there is currently no way to block a guest IP address from viewing forums, which feels out of step with the ability to block registered members who then see nothing of the forum content, so here's a request to add functionality to block guest access by IP address.

And to build on my OP, can anyone share how to ban/block an IP from viewing the site completely? Even they have never signed up as a member?

4 hours ago, Ocean West said:

if your user provided you with the their IP you may be more successful if you block it at the server level. in IPS you can block ranges using a wild card * to block octets 

 

That's just it. We don't have their IP so need to deduce it from their time spent on our site.

One of our long-standing forum members is being cyber-stalked across various social media sites and forums, including our own.

I'd like to prevent access to our site by banning the stalker's IP address. Is there a way to review a list of guests plus their IP's over a specific date range, so that I can identify the correct IP to ban, rather than eye-balling the online users page until I see a guest from the location we have in mind? I can't see anything like this in the AdminCP (unless I'm just not seeing it, which is entirely possible). Our site is on the Invision cloud.

As the title suggests, would love for the cacheExpiration value (defaulted to 24 hours) on the forum statistics widget to be configurable by an administrator in a future release, just like it was prior to 4.6.0.

The current 24 hour default setting rather renders the Forum Statistics widget a bit pointless if it's not percieved to update in "real time". I can just imagine the PM's from my users... "Why don't my posts count towards the site total?"

12 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

The comment that you made about editing the file kind of gives the indication that you may not know how to create a plugin - if that is incorrect, and you can create a plugin, then hook into \IPS\forums\widgets\forumStatistics and modify the $cacheExpiration variable that way.

However, as you've now said "Our site is on a cloud-based subscription" then I'm guessing that means IPS hosted...so editing the file and also creating the plugin are out the window unfortunately.

Happy to put something together for you, if you want?

You have PM. 👍

40 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

What I am saying is that the widget now has a 24 hour cache expiration - I'm not tying it to any other change (you can, if you wish, but I am not)

Widget files are stored in the applications\<application>\widgets folder on your installation - up to you if you want to manually modify the file, but I personally wouldn't and instead I would have looked at modifying it using a plugin instead (probably not an option for you)

Our site is on a cloud-based subscription and I don't seem to have that folder so can't find the widget file.

Curious to know why you think a plugin wouldn't be an option for us?

48 minutes ago, opentype said:

Are you guys sure that this behaviour started after your changes? And how are those changes made anyway?
I wouldn’t be surprised if those values were always cached and your action didn’t change a thing regarding the updating. 

Here's where I changed the format from "short" to "long". I can't be 100% certain that it wasn't refreshing as expected before changing the format from short to long, given that the short format doesn't show individual post increments so naturally would take longer to show an increase in post count from X.2k to X.3k posts, for example.

And the block cache settings are set to reload every 4 minutes. 

48 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

*whistles*

/**
* @brief	Cache Expiration - 24h
*/
public $cacheExpiration = 86400;

*whistles*

@Nathan Explosion, that's both helpful and not, all at the same time.

What I think you're saying is that with the introduction of the new "short" format post count there is a global cache expiration setting which overrides the ACP cache refresh setting (below), and it's the global cache expiration that now needs to be adjusted once the post count format has been changed to "long"? If I have this right, can you show us where you found that snippet so that we can adjust it to a duration that makes more sense for long format post counts please?

On 6/25/2021 at 7:30 AM, Ody Mandrell said:

Hi,

What could be the reason behind the non-updating comment counter in the forum statistics block at the bottom of the main page? I rewrote the short format of the post counter to a long format, then this error occured.

I did the same as you and I'm also seeing the same issue. Changed the Forum Stats block from short to long format and now it doesn't refresh when the cache refreshes (ours is set to refresh every 4 minutes). I can get it to refresh if I edit and re-save the block, or if I delete and re-install the block using the Block Manager.

Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this? Please don't say revert back to short format post and topic counts 😬

On 6/27/2021 at 5:25 AM, Dexter_X said:

Hi, 

The reputation system is still "alive", it is just not displayed anymore in the author's pane (left side of a post). We've restored it back by modifying the template in the theme. It is a little "tricky" because there is two places where you need to do it in your theme forums/front/topics/postContainer template file : 

. to restore reputation badges/levels, around original line 110, add the following code after the </li> :

{{if $comment->author()->reputationImage()}}
    <li data-role='reputation-image' class='ipsPadding:half'>
        <img src='{file="$comment->author()->reputationImage()" extension="core_Theme"}' title='{{if $comment->author()->reputation()}}{$comment->author()->reputation()}{{endif}}' alt=''>
    </li>
{{endif}}

so you'll obtain something that looks like this, considering surrounding code :

        </ul>
    </li>          
{{if $comment->author()->reputationImage()}}
    <li data-role='reputation-image' class='ipsPadding:half'>
        <img src='{file="$comment->author()->reputationImage()" extension="core_Theme"}' title='{{if $comment->author()->reputation()}}{$comment->author()->reputation()}{{endif}}' alt=''>
    </li>
{{endif}}
{{endif}}
{{if $comment->author()->member_id}}

so, it is important to place the new code after both </ul> and </li> ending the counters line.

 

. To restore the reputation counter, add the following code around original line 96, just after the <ul class="ipsList_reset ipsType_light ipsFlex ipsFlex-ai:center ipsFlex-jc:center ipsGap_row:2 cAuthorPane_stats"> :

<li data-role='reputation-badge'>
    {template="reputationBadge" group="global" app="core" params="$comment->author()"}
</li>

so you'll obtain something that looks like (considering surrounding code) :

<ul class="ipsList_reset ipsType_light ipsFlex ipsFlex-ai:center ipsFlex-jc:center ipsGap_row:2 cAuthorPane_stats">
    <li data-role='reputation-badge'>
        {template="reputationBadge" group="global" app="core" params="$comment->author()"}
    </li>
{{if isset( $comment->author_solved_count )}}
    <li>

 

Save your template file, reload your topic : job done !

20 hours ago, Genestoy said:

Just tested and works fine in this location

			{{if $comment->author()->member_id}}
    				<li data-role='stats' class='ipsMargin_top'>
                <li data-role='reputation-badge'>
                      {template="reputationBadge" group="global" app="core" params="$comment->author()"}
                     </li>                      
 					<ul class="ipsList_reset ipsType_light ipsFlex ipsFlex-ai:center ipsFlex-jc:center ipsGap_row:2 cAuthorPane_stats">
                     	<li>

 

 

Thank you @Dexter_X and @Genestoy. Both of these adjustments worked great on our forum. No longer having Reputation count on the author pane was frustrating for some of our users, but now they have it back. Appreciated.

Thanks from me also. Worked perfectly.

I know this is thread is a little dated, but now that our site is on 4.6.0 I thought I'd share our "workaround" for Rank icons. We found them too obtrusive so we simply used a blank/transparent .png file to remove the Rank icon altogether. Not ideal, but until (or if) they become user/admin selectable then this was the least-worst option for us.