Matt
Management
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Everything posted by Matt
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Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it. Don't say it.
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This is a great question, so I asked it on Twitter to get some advice from some experienced community managers:
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I love how clean this looks @SjorsK
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I would say that bulk emails are very different from a targeted post-registration drip campaign but I appreciate that in your part of the world, companies are actively being handed fines for non-compliance while the rest of the world shrugs.
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My understanding is that you can send emails related to the service they signed up for. It's when you start sending them adverts for other services that you are on shaky ground. Sending a sequence of welcome emails and guidance how to use the community is fair, and I cannot see how this would be deemed "illegal". We work with brands in the EU who have whole departments dedicated to legal and they have no issue with a welcome email sequence.
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Welcome to our May developer's update! May has been a bit of a whirlwind as we worked through the cloud platform feature set along, the backlog of existing issues reported to us and a new feature coming to all platforms. Along with the usual bug fixes in the backlog, we also worked on a few popular requests, such as adding hCaptcha as a new CAPTCHA option. We've seen this battle spam bots much more effectively than the existing methods, so if you're being hit by a lot of spam, consider upgrading to 4.7.0 and enabling hCaptcha. Jordan announced the new alerts feature here. It's a new way to reach out to members (or entire groups) and ensure they read and act on the alert. Many configuration options make it a very flexible feature useful for one-off alerts to a single member. It can also be used as a welcome message as part of your onboarding process. Invision Community 4.7.0 (also known as the June release) will have tentative support for PHP 8.1. While we have tested the core apps extensively, you should check with any third party developers to ensure their apps are PHP 8 ready. We intend to move to PHP 8.0 as the minimum version later this year (and our dev team is excited about this, they can't wait to use mixed return types, which is as exciting as it gets for us most days). Here is the full change log for the June release. Core - Added alerts functionality. - Added hCaptcha support. - Added a setting to exclude groups from search logs. - Added support for PHP 8.1. - Increased minimum PHP version to 7.4 and recommended version to 8.0. - Added a solved/unsolved filter for activity streams. - Changed Marketplace search to 'AND' mode for more accurate results. - Changed 'member download' to output comma-separated values instead of tab-separated values to be consistent with member import. - Changed the poll behaviour to allow everybody to view the poll result of closed polls. - Improved the email editor to show the full email name while editing it. - Updated CKEditor to 4.19.0. - Moved the stream subscription links to an own menu item. - Fixed an issue that may prevent attaching audio files to content. - Fixed a minor typo in the forms.css template. - Fixed upload area not showing on minimized editors for guest users. - Fixed an issue where post counts were incremented even when a new item was held for approval via the profanity filters. - Fixed an issue where filters and sort options do not persist between deleting members in the Admin CP. - Fixed an issue where sitemap may show entries from offline applications. - Fixed an issue where support account may show as the latest registered member. - Fixed an issue where the upgrade process would fail to finish because of duplicate DB queries. - Fixed an issue where the default streams had a broken time period. - Fixed an issue where widgets may not be available even with enabled apps. - Fixed an issue where status updates where appearing as search results even if the user had no permissions to view profiles. - Fixed some issues with the online status indicator in account settings. - Fixed an issue with deleting bulletins when deleted remotely. - Fixed an issue where clicking on the reorder-menu link in clubs can add multiple reorder icons. - Fixed an issue where managing Widgets via the AdminCP > Applications > Dev Center meant that Yes/No toggles could fail to work. - Fixed an issue where the block submission filter failed to catch loose matches when in the middle of a word and/or using non latin characters. - Fixed an incorrect link on a modal popup when trying to follow a member when the member hasn't configured their preferences. - Fixed an issue fetching Clubs via the REST API when they have custom fields. - Fixed an issue when viewing a list of awarded badges if one was earned by a rule in a deleted application. - Fixed a missing `</ul>` in the poll template. - Fixed an issue where the 'approved content' notification (and any newly added notifications) might not have valid default options until edited via AdminCP. - Fixed missing padding on the AdminCP file locations modal. - Fixed some UX issues when revoking an OAuth access token. - Fixed an issue where non-image attachments inserted via the editor may not download. - Fixed a missing language string in member history when spam defense system applies moderation to a new member. - Fixed an issue with 'solved' push notifications linking to a non-existent page. - Fixed an issue with the Zapier Extension when PHP was running in CGI mode. - Fixed an issue where rank progress would still show in profiles when no ranks exist. - Fixed an issue using the ban filters in member group promotion rules. - The Editor Preview Button was removed from ACP Editors. - Removed the deprecated FX Country code from the Geolocation class. - Removed the ability to rebuild existing attachment thumbnails due to an incompatibility with content attributes required for lazy-loading. - Removed the SQL Toolbox. Forums - Improved the fluid-mode per forum filters to remove a page reload, and to reverse the filter checkbox status to make it clear which are being viewed. - Fixed an issue where checking an archived topic for new replies when you ignore other members may always show a 'new' post has been created. - Fixed an issue where top posters in the topic statistics section may show in the wrong order. Gallery - Fixed an issue with the followed Gallery Images page. - Fixed an issue with rebuilding thumbnails on legacy communities where the original image may no longer exist. Pages - Added the missing `__indefart_cms_page` language string. - Added copy buttons on the modal that displays the HTML to copy to embed blocks elsewhere. - Improved search indexing speed of comments when Elastic Search is used. - Fixed an issue where sorting by a numerical field could duplicate the option with an incorrect label. - Fixed issue with 'image upload' block carousels not working in the sidebar - Fixed an issue where custom Yes/No fields when used as a database filter were ignored when further sorting. - Fixed an issue where categories could have broken breadcrumbs. - Fixed an issue where entering a blank value for a required decimal field would save the value as 0. - Fixed an issue where using a Yes/No field as a database filter may cause the custom sort form display to not allow toggling of the Yes/No field. - Fixed an issue that allowed duplicate template group names in some circumstances. - Fixed an issue where who's online widget blocks would throw an error while creating or editing them in the ACP. Converters - Fixed an issue rebuilding some profile photo images. - Fixed an issue where vBulletin `[video]` tags would not be parsed if the video ID contained a hyphen. Commerce - Added ability to require an active subscription to use community. - Added support for Stripe - Apple Pay Domain Verification Files on Cloud. - Improved Subscriptions including up/downgrading to other subscriptions and offering limited free subscriptions. - Improved performance when updating a large number of existing purchases. - Removed deprecated Amex Express checkout options. - Fixed some issues that can occur when requiring a subscription or product to be purchased during registration. - Fixed an issue where a card would not be auto-billed if the customer did not have an address. - Fixed a niche issue where a renewal invoice (for manual payment) would not be generated if a PayPal Subscription was cancelled on an active purchase. - Fixed an issue where account credit would not be used for an invoice if the credit remaining was the exact value of the invoice. - Fixed an issue calculating the next renewal date when upgrading between Subscriptions that may use a different renewal period (i.e. monthly vs annually). Calendar - Fixed an issue where the day view wouldn't show todays events when it's being used as the default calendar view. Downloads - Fixed an issue where change logs may show the wrong published date if the file description had been edited since the last update. - Fixed an issue where creating a downloads category with the "Keep previous versions?" Setting being disabled would result in a DB error. Platform - Added real time and historic trending data in sidebar blocks and leaderboard. REST, Webhooks and Zapier - Fixed an issue where the 'hidden' content item filter would be ignored for any content type except topics. - Fixed an issue where the date parameter for the 'Edit a topic' endpoint was not updating topic/post post date. Key points for developers are as follows: Added PHP 8.1 support; however, we have silenced deprecation errors for core applications and system directory as we work through those in the following releases. Updated Whoops to 2.14.5 Fixed an issue where managing MFA in the Account Settings would result in an IN_DEV CSRF key warning. Fixed an issue where you could not pass variables to the {hextorgb} theme plugin. Fixed an issue where creating or editing a forum with IN_DEV being enabled would return an error. Fixed an issue with ips.ui.infiniteScroll.js when using FURLs. Fixed a syntax error in the core unsubscribeStream.txt email template. Member filters will only be processed/visible for group promotions if they have a matches() method. That's it for now; see you on the forums!It doesn't solve the data privacy issue and I'd rather put energy into APIs to make it easier to integrate with third party apps and code.Honestly, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of third parties directly executing SQL queries on customer databases. If it all goes wrong, we have to dig out back-ups to fix it. This is not a slight on anyone's abilities, I've deleted an entire table of customer tickets with a mistyped query. It happens. We are not going to create a system where third parties have access to the client databases. There is no audit trail for what actions were taken. When our team need to access a cloud site, we complete a reason form which is stored to form part of an audit trail so we know exactly what was accessed and why. We also have to access via a fixed IP address VPN so there is a data trail. We take our cloud customer's security and data very seriously. The SQL toolbox should have been removed a decade ago in all honesty. As we move forward with our cloud platform, more and more SQL tables will be stored centrally and not exposed to the client in any case, meaning admins won't have access to all the data the community uses which could case a lot of confusion. (Edited later to add:) In terms of what to do with debugging, I do sympathise. I generally made prodigious use of the simple \IPS\Log::log( json_encode( $data ), 'argh_send_help' ); logger. I have also in the past used \IPS\Db::i()->select(...); in combination with \IPS\Log::log() to inspect a single row of data.I don’t want to lose you, or anyone as a customer.There are no hints between the lines. There are no secret manoeuvres or plans. I am just stating what is happening and why. This does not mean that we do not value our existing customers or respect the loyalty that has built the foundations of Invision Community.We did actually start by offering a free version way back in 2002. Honestly, I don't think people really want a collection of PHP scripts in a zip file for free when they can start a Discord for free and skip having to get a host, learn how to administer it, learn how to FTP and CHMOD and create a new database and on and on and on and on. There are plenty of free forum scripts out there that are largely dead which proves this. We've all moved on. I remember the early days of the internet fondly but it's all in the past now.We've lived through a lot in the past 20 years, so we're well versed in moving with the times and I want to make it clear that we're in a very strong position as a company due to us diversifying years ago. In terms of self-hosting, it is just a shrinking market as shown by this graph showing self-hosted income only. As you can see, it's roughly a quarter of what is was back in 2015 and also where we are now is not a surprise to us. If we halved the cost of self-hosting licenses we would definitely see a bounce in sales for a short time as existing customers picked up second licenses to experiment with other community ideas and we may even pull in a few customers currently using a competitor but not completely happy with that platform but it will be a short lived bounce and not a sustainable increase over time. After a few months, it'll likely return to where we are now but with a significantly increased support burden on half the income. This is something we're discussing for existing license holders.
Here is the biggest barrier to that: there aren't many people to sell to in our market now. Forums have a significant place in a community strategy and we help many migrate from different platforms to us but rarely do communities start on forums now. They start on social media, free tools such as Discord or Slack, or even the new glut of community / creator platforms that start from $9/month. The days of selling low and stacking high are long gone. We just continue to evolve with the market, the same as we always have. We have gone through a cycle of hosted platform updates and new features, this cycle is just about done in terms of development (but not everything has been announced). You will see features coming to all platforms being released soon enough.We removed it because it's a really dangerous feature that really doesn't belong in a modern community platform. If you want a light weight SQL tool (which is way more comprehensive and feature-rich than our simple tool) then definitely check out Adminer. It's a single PHP file. I use this when working with self hosted clients. It takes seconds to upload and log into. Just remember to remove it when you're done. No need, just upload the single 450kb Adminer file and log in using the conf_global details. It's what I do. 🙂Technically, 4.6.13 Beta 1 exists but it was just an internal build to test some stuff out here.That did also cross my mind to be honest.You’re hired! I learned by fixing others code and figuring stuff like this out. Glad to hear you’ve got it sorted.DM me the plug-in name. If I get time tomorrow I can check it out and see if I can find the issue if it's a small plug-in. I bet it's something simple to solve.Other than us announcing new features for higher platform tiers that may not suit your own personal budget or needs, what else do we do that makes you feel unwelcome?I'm not comfortable with the term 'cheapskates'. The self hosted version is not a budget product and neither is it inferior.Assuming you have a localhost environment suitable for it, yes 🙂Hi all! I wanted to let you know that we've just released 4.7.0 Beta 1 and I wanted to run though some of the highlights on the release notes page. We recently released a cool little feature to enable you to consolidate a forum and all sub-forums into a single list of topics, much like the global fluid view mode. We took onboard some feedback and made it a little more efficient and also reversed the checkboxes so they are ticked by default as some reached out to let us know it was confusing loading a page with content and unchecked boxes. We also added the new URL parameters into the default robots.txt to avoid Google and friends adding faceted pages into its index. This week, @Daniel Fadded hCaptcha as a new CAPTCHA method to be used on the contact us form, guest posting and other areas a captcha is used. hCaptcha seems to be a more robust method to keep those pesky bots out. You will need to sign up to hCaptcha, but it's a short registration process and they have a free tier which should be all you need. One of our enterprise clients mentioned that bots and guests are searching for random things which makes analysing the search trends difficult, so we've added a feature to allow you to omit member groups from adding to the anonymised search logs. Another popular piece of feedback was to add 'solved' and 'unsolved' filters to the activity stream, and @Andy Millne did just that for 4.7.0. Elsewhere, @Stuart Silvester improved the speed at which Elastic Search re-indexes the site (useful as 4.7.0 needs a re-index due to the new solved filters). Our master API person @Daniel F made some improvements to the Zapier integration for this release. We have raised the minimum PHP version to 7.4, but we do recommend 8.0. We are still working through 8.1 compatibility. Our cloud platform has new architecture to remove a lot of existing if( \IPS\CIC ) code that you may have seen in our codebase. Moving all cloud functionality into its own area means that those on the self hosted platform won't have to run these checks constantly in the code. We chose to name this release 4.7.0 because of the PHP minimum version changes and the cloud platform code consolidation. Let me know if you have any questions on this next release.All platform key changes: New Alerts feature Improvements to the fluid mode per forum view hCaptcha added as a new CAPTCHA option for use on the Contact Us form and when accepting guest posts Ability to only log searches from specific member groups Based on client feedback, we implemented the ability to log searches for specific member groups. This is especially useful if your search results stats are skewed by pesky spammers. Now, you can filter that data out. Three Improvements to Spam Management Improved spam defense in 4.7 with hCaptcha New solved/unsolved filter for activity streams You can now sort through and stay up-to-date on any solved/unsolved content items by setting up a custom activity stream. This is particularly useful for community support forums where clients and members are searching for solutions to questions that have already been answered. Or, perhaps a developer is in search of questions or problems that are unsolved. You can create a more granular search by inputting more information, like ownership, time period and more. Speed improvements when rebuilding Elastic Search indexes Fixed an issue where the ‘hidden’ content item filter would be ignored for any content type except topics. (In notes below) Fixed an issue where the date parameter for the ‘Edit a topic’ endpoint was not updating topic/post post date. (In notes below) More flexibility when creating webhooks and triggers (continual improvement upon every release). Fixes and improvements to our Zapier integration No-code automation with Zapier Self-hosting platform key changes: PHP minimum version increased to 7.4 Support for PHP 8.1 Cloud platform key changes: New product architecture to consolidate existing cloud functionality and to provide forthcoming features [BETA] "Real time" notices when others are reading and replying to the same topics as you Who’s Typing: We just implemented a live Who’s Typing feature into our own community. If you're quick, you’ll see a member typing a reply in real time when going to submit your own reply at the form located near the bottom of the topic. Who's Viewing: We implemented a live Who's Viewing feature into topics on our community as well. This may sound familiar to you - we already created a "Recently Browsing" block that shows what members are viewing a topic, however that block was a snapshot over a small chunk of time. The new Who's Viewing feature shows what members are viewing a topic (and when they leave) in the present moment. [BETA] Image processing and moderation We've improved our native search by automatically informing the platform to look for items featured in photos. In this example, a member posted a photo of an apple in a topic. Another member searched for the word "apple.” The platform found his image of an apple. The new smart learning technology will identify as many keywords as possible in an image to make searching faster, more efficient and accurate. [BETA] Sentiment analysis data collection AI that scores a topic based on how positive, neutral, negative or mixed the replies are from members. For example: Sentiment: [99.5000] Positive | [0.0000] Negative | [0.5000] Neutral [BETA] Trending content
