Joachim Sandstrom

Assuming a paid member-only forum. Posted Social Media links shouldn't and wouldn't work for the guests using them. We obviously don’t want to grant read-rights to all the content, just chosen posts. Since there aren’t privileges on the post level, but on the forum level, we could make the chosen posts visible for guests by copying them to a separate dedicated open-to-guests forum. We don’t want to move the posts since this would drain the paid forum. But since there is no copy function this workaround does not work. All workaround proposals are welcome. /Joachim

Is it possible to copy, not move, a post from one forum to another? (We haven't found any solution on this in the IPB guides or in the support forum.) Such functionality would open up for a solution.

Hi. We are running a members-only community from which we would like to share individual topics or posts. Possible implementations: 1) Member could share her individual topic/post on social media. Guest following link back access just that specific topic/post 2) Member -"- other member’s individual topic/post -"- 3) Moderators managing 1 and 2 above for topics/posts of their choice Has anyone solved how to do this, or has any ideas on how to - without adding 3rd party solutions? /Joachim

Hi! We have a hard time understanding the default design level of the IPB emails. According to us, it is not remotely close to the professionality of the rest of the IPB. (Hats off for the latter). Like the enclosed confirmation email, where we have added a top brand image that is equal in size to the email to add some kind of overarching design structure to the email. But the email in itself looks... not good. 1) We count to seven (7) different combinations of fonts/size/colour in this email having just about 100 letters. 2) A visual structure hard to identify. Some text here and there, to the left and in the middle. A few gray horizontal background blocks to... what? 3) The last time we saw inverted text (e.g. "Set Password" below) was when programming in Pascal at uni. That was during the mid 1980s. We understand that there are a lot of customers who want to invest resources in customizing their emails to their look & feel. But there are certainly a lot of customers, like us, who prefer to stick to a SAAS "buy-standard-run-standard strategy". It can not be a good business strategy to derail customers off such a strategy through a bunch of seemingly design-wise forgotten emails. Documents that are some of the first impressions the third party customer gets from a community. As you know, first impressions last. We propose A basic - but up to date - default email design. It would be the way to go to satisfy both the customer strategies mentioned. //Joachim Sandstrom

I know that this question has been discussed for years. But with years follows new thoughts and changes in the world around us. I think that e.g. Matt’s input (below) from June 2020 as a reply to a post concerning the app poll of 2018 could do with an update. So, a few questions on that: Matt mentioned in an app related post in 2020 that the IPS direction was a ”native app”: ”I'm not against doing more with PWA in a future version, it's just that we do not think that Apple will invest much time in their PWA system anytime soon, so for a fully mobile experience the only logical choice is a native app so that is where we have put our development resources.” https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/446733-mobile-app-progressive-web-app-pwa-for-ipb/?do=findComment&comment=2822578 I note in the same post that Matt’s argument for the native path was Apple’s lack of PWA investments. In IOS 15 (and similar in a parallel Safari version) Apple has improved its WPA support. https://www.ithinkdiff.com/safari-ios-15-4-pwa-support-70-additions/ a. I am not a techie and can’t judge the importance of Apple’s PWA improvements in relation to IPB. So I ask, given these changes what is IPS's current strategic standpoint on the PWA vs. native app question? b. I have noted that IPS does not favor public deadlines. But maybe you could share some kind of yearly preliminary high level roadmap, indicating what the customers could expect from the app strategy under question a? It would help us in answering our customers’ questions in a professional way. Cheers, /Joachim

Hi. Location-based advertisement distribution (also known as geotargeted or geotagged advertising). We are planning to run an international site financed by affiliate ads. Due to the lack of location-based ad distribution (e.g. ads relevant in the US shown in the US only, ditto South African in South Africa etc.), we either have to: - Promote just brands with full global coverage (limiting), or - Promote regional brands that are irrelevant to a significant number of visitors (dead ad space) It would be great to be able to define a location-based distribution of the ads to greatly improve ad efficiency. Cheers, /Joachim

Hi. Please add a way to efficiently import a list of words and their explanations using e.g. an XML file. Like what is existing today for Word Filtering. Cheers, /Joachim

This misalignment of the blocks is described by the IPB support as "Currently intended, not a bug." Every customer that has other intentions has to do "customization of their theme". I am sure that this design has served the communities well in the past but proposes an intended alignment of the blocks to cope with the design trends of tomorrow. Cheers, /Joachim

IPS, please fix it. It affects your brand and your customers' community brands negatively. Let alone the loss of community revenues plus admin and support resources better spent elsewhere already mentioned above.

Hi Stuart. Thanks for your answer. Should I interpret what your say about IPB’s payment processing as that it should work with ”Delayed Notification Payments” as is?

Hi. To increase conversion rate, please add support for this quite common method of payment at least in Europe. Technicalities related to the Stripe setup described here (chapter 4): https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/fulfill-orders#delayed-notification It’s unclear to me at this stage if other payment providers offer similar methods that should be considered as well. Have a great day. /Joachim

Hi. The move of the support request process from a quite customer convenient mail process to a less so Client areas process might have been done on IPS internal efficiency grounds. But why does this paleolithic editor, lacking even the option to add the ever so crucial screenshots? Yes, I understand that I can await the rebounce mail and add the screenshots there, but why such an awkward process? Could we please have the functionality of the standard rich editor with the ability to add enclosures including screenshots, please. Thanks for an in general good SAAS. Have a great day. //Joachim Sandstrom

Many thanks! Have a nice weekend /Joachim

Hi. We are doing business within the EU where business sales are taxed according to a different process as compared to consumer sales. Somewhat simplified we have to collect the sales tax for consumers but not for businesses for whom we every month report the sales to the government. Thereafter the business customer pays the tax by themself (a k a "Reversed charge") in their EU country. Our target group is business only. In IPB "Consumer" is the default option and according to several months of tests, quite easy to miss. There you have the root of the problem in a nutshell. If the business customer does not change the default setting we will incorrectly add a consumer sales tax (around 25 %) to the invoice 1) If noticed: => Requirement for a time consuming, expensive, and brand-damaging refund, from the buying company 2) If unnoticed: We have to involve ourselves in the EU consumer tax process implying reporting every such consumer sales, either in the buyers' EU country (there are 27 of them all having different sales tax processes) or through a special EU system (MOSS) that is supposed to ease the pain a bit. Just a pain. A way to avoid these potential hassles would be to add a simple configuration option to IPB ACP. The radio button version is enclosed... ( ) Site is for consumer sales only ( ) Site is for business sales only ( ) Site is for both consumer and business sales ...where the option chosen then hides the non applicable option in the registration form. Easy to design, implement test and maintain - we think. Have a great day. /Joachim

We reported the same issue in a support ticket on March 16 2021 (subject "Subscriptions. Business name filed hidden". Misspell excuse hereby submitted :-). We are EU based, and since our target group is global this bug effectively stops us from going live. Underlining this in the ticket we got this swift response a couple of days later: (Quote) Hello, Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. I have investigated the issue you reported and the problem appears to be a bug in the current release of Invision Community. I have submitted a potential solution for the issue described here and upon review by the development team the fix should be included in an upcoming release of Invision Community. Unfortunately, at this time I am unable to say exactly which release this fix will be included in. We do apologize for the trouble. Thank you again for letting us know, and don't hesitate to let us know if you run into any other problems! -- Daniel Fatkic Invision Community Support (Unquote)

I am sure the EU bureaucrats made a shiny roomy exception for the data needed for The Colossos, also called GDPR. But still, this animal is what everyone doing any Internet based business in the EU cope with.

Hi. Also from a European union standpoint I generally agree with Julia about the cookie consent process, and the urgency in which this legal requirement has to be addressed by the IPS. I had this conversation with the support in September 2021 and was recommended to submit our issue here. It is hereby being done. Since at this moment the IPB is not compliant with the cogent (non-optional) EU GDPR law applying to all countries within the union, everybody using this functionality AS IS towards European customers (also from outside the EU) are risking to go to court where heavy fines are at stake. Quoting the EU, two fine tiers are available: "Up to €10 million, or 2% annual global turnover – whichever is higher. Up to €20 million, or 4% annual global turnover – whichever is higher." A quote from my support conversations describing the GDPR issue: (Quote) But from a legal point of view I find the fact that IPB doesn't keep track of the user acceptance quite worrying. I know that Invision has worked hard to make the IPB EU GDPR and EU ePrivacy Directive compliant. But not storing the consent would make the IPB not fully GDPR compliant. Below is a quote from the relevant EU documentation: https://gdpr.eu/cookies/ ". To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must: Receive users' consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies. Provide accurate and specific information about the data each cookie tracks and its purpose in plain language before consent is received. Document and store consent received from users. Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place. " Bullet three is what directly affects the subject of tracking/storing consent. Bullet four overrules(!) our wish of stopping non-concenters to use the service, but without consent just strictly necessary cookies is allowed according to bullet one. So other cookies must then be inactivated by the PB . Are cookies inactivated by the IPB for non-concenters today? While we are at it, where in the IPB are the quite detailed information requirements of bullet two being met? I am sorry that I have to put you through these questions. But these are questions that we might get from our quite qualified target community group. We then need to be able to answer them. If it was up to us, GDPR would not have been as paranoid as it is. (End quote) We are neither builders of GDPR compliant sites nor lawyers, why we can not exactly tell you what functionality is needed to comply, even less so how to implement it. But since a few years have passed since the GDPR was implemented, there should be quite a pile of best practices to profit from out there. Please get in touch if we can be of further assistance. Kind regards Joachim

Visual design To be up to par with similar documents being communicated to customers elsewhere in our digital world, the document templates (commercial and non-commercial) needs a modernization refresh anno 2022. Admin customization All needs are not created equal. So an ability for the non-programmer Admin to easily customize these documents, e.g. through a WYSIWYG editor as today exists for the commercial documents, or in some other way, is needed. I understand why Invision prioritized the commercial templates with its legal requirements and implications when implementing this. But that is now a while ago, as I understand it.

That would be great to have if you want to share it! /Joachim

A humble recommendation concerning zero invoices. Sending a zero invoice to confirm and document the free trial agreement - including the customer's important acceptance of the communities Terms & Conditions during the trial - I would say is the way to go. I would also expect that there is a law somewhere in the world that makes such zero invoice agreement documentation mandatory. That is speculation, though.

Hi Daniel. Thanks for your answer. What you propose is what we thought already existed in the stock registration form. A VAT number field that is checked against the EU VAT number register (if configurated for EU VAT in the ACP). So a couple of questions 1) Could you please clarify the difference between the stock VAT functionality and what you propose? 2) How does your proposal mitigate consumers registering as "Consumer", thereby not being objects of any VAT number checks? Have a nice evening! /Joachim

Our market segment will be businesses (B2B). We do not want to mess with an occasional European consumer's EU VAT procedures. To our knowledge, there is no way to configure IPB to just accept registrations by B2B customers, i.e. customers having a valid VAT number. The B2C option is even the default option, causing us a potential administrative VAT mess. We have a few ideas of screening options, like adding a custom field asking if the registrant has chosen "Business" and added its VAT number. Or, by adding a second VAT field and asking for a repeated input, where it might then be possible to check for a null value using an Anti-fraud rule. But rather clumsy, far from non-waterproof solutions thought. We think there might be more graceful options in the hands of all of the skilled community builders like you. All proposals are very welcome!

I suggest that anonymous posts are made possible to edit and delete by the one posting them. As of today these posts are anonymous also for submitter, unnecessarily excluding some use cases where you want to be able to maintain a post even though it has been submitted inkognito. E.g. jobs application, when you left something out in a post or where you regret what was said etc. Since admin is already today able to check who has submitted a post the database connection to the submitter still exists, so it is just a matter of opening up for editing.

Hi. I am trying to find other placements of ads than are offered by the other IPB ad configuration options, and have tried to implement the Manual Ad Placement. But I am not getting any result when saving the changes to the template, according to how I interpret the recommendations in the related IPB guide. If you did get this to work, could you please share an example of how you place the... {advertisement="KEY"} ...in your template code? Thanks!

Thanks. Looking forward to look it into its eyes, and then put in the pillory.