Brian Garcia

On 11/3/2023 at 7:02 PM, Joel R said:

This is serious / not so serious - why not make everyone a Community Expert? Like, upon their first helpful post, they get an automatic invite. What's the actual harm in the long run, if the platform automatically removes / recalculates / kicks them out in a Game of Thrones shakedown? 

Conceptually in terms of a member lifecycle, if a user joins brand new (so there's no past history upon which to make a decision on their expertise), you need enough involvement - whether that is time, posts, engagement, helpfulness, whatever - to make an assessment anyways.  I see this feature allowing community managers to sidestep that assessment (since it's not automated or tied to group promotion) and potentially accelerate the user journey to expert.  How fast can you accelerate users to Expert? Why not accelerate users at their first sign of helpfulness? 

(Note to everyone: I'm not actually recommending this tactic in the real world. This is meant to be an extreme example. If all it takes is a badge and an email with two emojis to turn your users into experts, your community probably shouldn't be using experts anyways.) 

That's not how Facebook does it though.

I was always convinced internet @Charles was an AI bot.

I think you have it backwards, seems like your site is still running PHP version 7.3. Can you ask your host and confirm you are on PHP 8.0? I thought you were running PHP 8.0, but I could be wrong and best for your host to check.

That's why I am confused on your error.

I tend to try and transfer one folder at a time to Filezilla. So upload admin first, and then api, then applications. If I do it all at once the server times out and I get incomplete uploads. That could be the case.

On 5/7/2023 at 1:13 PM, teraßyte said:

There should be an error_log file on your server (or maybe visible from your control panel; depends on how the server is configured). See if there's anything logged there.

If you can't find the file, try asking your hosting for its location.

 

I see Marc also mentioned:

Maybe IPS will be able to have a quick look themselves since they have your FTP access.

12 minutes ago, CaptJeff said:

When I go to hotairballoonist.com/forum/admin I get a page that looks like this.

The error area on this page says this.

TypeError: array_keys(): Argument #1 ($array) must be of type array, null given (0)
#0 /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/system/Theme/Theme.php(622): array_keys(NULL)
#1 /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/system/Dispatcher/Standard.php(54): IPS\_Theme->css('framework.css', 'core', 'global')
#2 /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/init.php(938) : eval()'d code(51): IPS\Dispatcher\_Standard::baseCss()
#3 /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/system/Dispatcher/Admin.php(89): IPS\Dispatcher\chatbox_hook_loadJSandCSS::baseCss()
#4 /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/system/Dispatcher/Dispatcher.php(110): IPS\Dispatcher\_Admin->init()
#5 /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/admin/index.php(13): IPS\_Dispatcher::i()
#6 {main}

 

Here are the error logs from the server.

[07-May-2023 14:23:44 UTC] PHP Fatal error:  Declaration of IPS\cms\_Fields::displayValue($value = null, $showSensitiveInformation = false) must be compatible with IPS\_CustomField::displayValue($value = null, $showSensitiveInformation = false, $separator = null) in /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/applications/cms/sources/Fields/Fields.php on line 1304
[07-May-2023 14:23:47 UTC] PHP Fatal error:  Declaration of IPS\cms\_Fields::displayValue($value = null, $showSensitiveInformation = false) must be compatible with IPS\_CustomField::displayValue($value = null, $showSensitiveInformation = false, $separator = null) in /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/applications/cms/sources/Fields/Fields.php on line 1304
[07-May-2023 14:24:02 UTC] PHP Parse error:  Unterminated comment starting line 1036 in /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/system/Http/Url.php on line 1036
[07-May-2023 14:24:06 UTC] PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined method IPS\Output::getNoCacheHeaders() in /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/init.php:1158
Stack trace:
#0 /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/init.php(1090): IPS\IPS::genericExceptionPage(NULL)
#1 [internal function]: IPS\IPS::exceptionHandler(Object(Error))
#2 {main}
  thrown in /home3/classln8/public_html/hotairballoonist/forum/init.php on line 1158

 

These errors are because you haven't finished the /admin/upgrade/ I believe. We are still trying to figure out the blank page you are getting when you run it. Ignore what you see until you finish the upgrade.

Can you pull that error log that terabyte suggested again?

That's good you meet the server requirements at least. Just wanted to get the obvious out of the way.

Can you check your error logs again for new errors? Once we get passed that we can re-run the upgrade script to see if it'll proceed.

Can you post the error logs again please? Did you ever restore the backup from the first try and disabled any third party plugins?

Did you make sure your server was good before trying to upgrade?

Looks like you need to continue the upgrade. What happens when you go to /admin/upgrade, can you continue it or is there an error?

Looking forward to testing this out!

15 minutes ago, Jim M said:

Now were Priuses ever "cool"? C'mon, Brian... 😄 

Haha. True, that! I was trying to be nice. I never really thought Xenforo was cool either!

I wouldn't jump ship just yet, Invision has a lot of cool things they are working on. XenForo is like an old Prius, it was cool when it first came out, but now it lost the appeal but still serves a purpose. You need to think long term for your community. Invision has remained the most consistent community platform provider out there.

8 minutes ago, David N. said:

If it's for a serious amount of time, then yes. However as I said earlier I've never experienced anywhere near 6 hours of downtime in 20 years of using various hosting companies. 

I think as technology grows there are more points of failure. Reddit was down for me last week and I think Facebook had an outage not too long ago as well. Your 20 year old community was probably running a basic LAMP stack. Outages happen and they suck, but I am looking forward to some of the cool new features that a self-hosting wouldn't be able to do easily.

Here's to uptime!

On 3/22/2023 at 4:30 PM, David N. said:

6 hours of downtime is simply unacceptable. I'm a huge fan of Invision, love the amazing software they develop and maintain for us. But when I pay 150/month for a hosted service, I expect more. In 20 years of being self hosted on inexpensive shared hosting services, I've never had more than a few minutes of downtime at a time. 

The fact that Invision relies on AWS and that the issue may lie with AWS is irrelevant to us, the customers. As a professional, if I can't deliver a service to my customer because Invision is down, I can't charge my customers. If my forum is down, I can't earn revenue from ads. I can't just tell the customers (or the ad network) "it's not my fault, the software cloud service I'm using was down" and continue to charge them the same amount. I have no choice but to take responsibility and suffer the loss in revenue and reputation. 

Invision should  take responsibility here, offer $ compensation to paying customers, and deal with whatever service providers they use on their own term. As Invision customers, that's not our problem. 

Is there somewhere in the terms of the cloud service that states 100% uptime? Do you call your internet provider and ask for compensation when it goes down as well?

If this was a consistent pattern of downtime, I would be upset. However, this is the first time my community has gone down and I understand it happens. The way I see it, I am paying for a service and if it continues to go down I have the option to look else where. For my internet provider, I don't have any other option 🥲.

Hard to foresee unexpected downtime...

Great! There are some hosts that provide automatic conversion service to .webp, it's server side. Some CDNs, too like Cloudflare can do this. Would love to see that as an added perk for a cloud user.

Would love to see .SVG support for the site logo next.

10 hours ago, marklcfc said:

I'd say the majority of users still don't even know it exists though which doesn't help

A good opportunity to educate your users then.

Thanks for the update. Kayak season is upon us... hope though that Olivia let's me out to play once in a while :).

1 minute ago, Grafidea said:

The problem was solved, only deleting these directories from the database solved the problem.

Glad you resolved it, thanks for providing an update on how you fixed it.

(disregard)

Beautiful!

I will explain to you why. I have a Facebook group of almost 7k members. They make it very difficult for me / almost impossible for me to mass message all of my members. I make an organic post and still the reach is barely 10%. Facebook a few months ago introduced the @ everyone tag. At first the reach was about 60-80%, but they have throttled it back down again and I am only get about a 30% reach. Tagging everyone just creates a notification in the Facebook app along with 50 other distracting notifications.

A big reason why I am trying to funnel my members into my Invision Community is that I can get a better engagement rate with them. Having native iOS notifications outside of the noise is huge.

Facebook group members need to realize they don't own any of the data in their group, you're just an admin in Facebook's toy box. Invision actually lets you own the data which is important to me.

@Charles Does this integrate with Clubs? A lot of online courses will have a special Facebook group for after taking the course. That could either be a private forum or a private club.

It's probably asking for too much. But, a way to generate a certificate of some sorts could be cool. Think LinkedIn Learning, a way to share it too across social channels.

Thanks for the update, @Olivia Clark. We appreciate you handling Charles & crew, I mean doing what you do!

On 3/8/2023 at 1:12 PM, Charles said:

This is one of those behind the scenes improvements that you do not know happen but we still like to tell people about.

All media that is uploaded to your community (images, videos, any sort of files) is now automatically replicated to a write-only backup within 5 minutes of upload. This means that backups of your media are basically continuous now.

This part is not new but as a review.... For databases, we have two levels of backups: daily and weekly. Our daily snapshots are for catastrophic recovery and are extremely robust as they are replicated internally. The weekly backups are what I call "convenience backups" which might sound strange but let me explain.

The weekly backups are not as robust as the daily snapshots but they are more easily restored. This allows our team to easily diagnose issues, assist you with recovering accidental deletions/configuration issues, and compare today to last week/month (we store several weeks for recovery purposes before old backups purge). We find having these two types of backups lets us be more agile in restoring service for both "major" events and "whoops" events.

As always with Invision Community, your data is your data. At any time you contact support and we can send you a full export of all community data for your archives.

I really appreciate the "your data is your data". I moved away from Facebook because simply I did not own the data, nor do they give admins much control... I have a group of 7k members and only a few months ago did they allow the @ everyone tag to actually reach your members. Which still only comes out to about 10% of my audience.

Heard nice things about the theme designer.

On 3/9/2023 at 6:01 PM, Charles said:

When you say integrate with Events how would you see that working?

Perhaps this is more of an Events function. Paid courses would just have an event associated with it. I could also go into the Calendar find a beginner course and purchase it. That would add me to the RSVP list and also give me access to the online material. It's almost a full-circle.