Everything posted by Matt
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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.
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I don’t want to lose you, or anyone as a customer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 🙂
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Technically, 4.6.13 Beta 1 exists but it was just an internal build to test some stuff out here.
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That did also cross my mind to be honest.
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You’re hired! I learned by fixing others code and figuring stuff like this out. Glad to hear you’ve got it sorted.
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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.
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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?
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I'm not comfortable with the term 'cheapskates'. The self hosted version is not a budget product and neither is it inferior.
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Assuming you have a localhost environment suitable for it, yes 🙂
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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.
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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
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This is fair feedback, thank you. We can do better at how we present the news of new features to make it clear which platform and level it is for. I understand how this can cause friction and I should have been more aware of that.
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I really liked the Pages suggestion honestly. It's just that it's a complex area of code that we have earmarked to refactor at some point, so it's not something we'd consider before then.
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A good number of their community managers and team read these forums and follow our blog. They tell us this a lot. 🙂 As mentioned before, it's not that simple. The architecture we have isn't open and to bring transcoding to all platforms isn't as simple as saying "and now plugin your endpoint here". AWS doesn't have a service where it accepts uploads, puts them in a queue, visually displays processing in progress, processes the queue, transcode it into multiple formats including streaming, move it back into the community's bucket, update the queue system to tell the UI to remove the processing information and start streaming the video. All that is proprietary code we've developed for our cloud platform.
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These are good suggestions but most of them require a good amount of framework refactoring to make them possible. Also none of those topics had any traction from a single other Invision Community owner voicing that they wanted the same thing. Fair point and noted, thanks 🙂
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https://community.sigames.com/forums/ SI Games are a London games publisher for SEGA best known for Football Manager. We're leveraging AWS S3 bucket transcoding using a custom set up developed by an AWS vendor. The costs associated with transcoding video into a streamable format isn't something we can bring to the other plans.
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We are fortunate to work with some of the worlds biggest brands, such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel, etc. Working closely with the community managers from these brands allows us to really understand the tools needed to manage and moderate at scale. A lot of the features that have been added over the past few years to all platforms have been driven by these conversations in addition to feedback left on our community. As a company that creates a community platform that can be used from the smallest of new communities to managing thousands of posts a day, there will be some features that we announce that will not be of interest to you. It's absolutely fine to skip past these announcements. We are not going to stop talking to all of our customers when announcing new features.
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We do not have any separate forums for our cloud platform customers. All the forums you can see as a client are all that exist.
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The following languages are supported: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. We are not going to build a simple API because as explained above, pushing and pulling data from AWS services is only a tiny part of the architecture.
