Matt

City TRABZON /Uzungöl - TURKEY

Yes, I'm sure the others are due imminently! They are normally out every year.
My main community is about a very dark 90's TV series, serial killers, criminal profilers etc and my members still love the Xmas themes even though some are probably bit too cute for my community, something for everyone though and I've never seen anything top them. Sometimes I've combined with the falling snow plug-in.

It's been tradition for over a decade to install a seasonal theme, actually seasonal themes on my forums from IBTheme.com.
They range from cute snowmen to traditional colours, but no photo backgrounds, all hand drawn style.
https://www.ibtheme.com/forums/

 
 

Naturally, the gifts are themed to the theme of the community, which is travel. You have gifts bought from all over the world, you get stylish books with nice pictures, bottles of wine, etc, etc. With a few exceptions the gifts are very thoughtful and nice. And the gifts can be very personal too - you can understand a lot for someones personality if you are active in the same community. One example - someone was raving about some pancakes he/she ate somewhere around the world, another member said how she used to make great pancakes, but she doesn't have a pancake pan since she moved to a new apartment...her secret santa gift was brand new pancake pan. So yeah, it can be very fun and entertaining for the members themselves, but also for the community as a whole. 
Its a bit tiresome to organize, but you don't need to push it more then needed 🙂 Member interviews can be alienating (tried that too, unrelated to secret santa), because many people prefer to be closed off online, which nowadays is understandable. Or at least they prefer to be open on their own terms, not being forced by an interview. If you have a tight fun community, things will work themselves out. 

That's a great idea! I think tangible items are a great way to activate communities with offline engagement.  
I'm not sure how in-depth you go with your guidance on the secret santa, but i encourage you to try to connect to an emotive experience -- for example, to relate it to self-disclosures throughout the year (like member interviews) so the gifts are more personal, or to do a community theme for the gifts so it's a tribal experience.  

Something we do each year is Secret Santa between members. Yes, with real gifts, mostly with a symbolic value, like 15$ recommended value. It adds greatly to the holiday spirit. You might think that there will be many people trying to cheat and get a present without sending one, but we had only 1 such case for all these years and more then 100 participants per year. 
I highly recommend it. 

Scunthorpe.

Madagascar

 

Used to live in Hong kong > nice place but not for too long, Sydney > amazing city, now in Paris > love the city too even if i miss Sydney Beaches :)
New York would be my next move (if i had to move)
 

This is all quite topical for us because we've just passed one year of a five-year plan to get our affairs in order such that we can move to the hills of Slovenia. We need to feel that we'in the middle of nowhere and the fact that Slovenia is a mini Europe (Alpine mountains, lakes, coast on the Adriatic) means that we can always drive to a "holiday destination". And it snows in winter, which is perfect!
This is the house we saw which made us think "let's do it!" OK, it will have sold by the time we're ready to move but it's more than whetted the appetite! Look at all that isolation!

We did a bit more searching on a holiday last summer between Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia and realised that property on the Croatian side of the border seems ridiculously cheap. Since my better half is already very good at Croatian (she watches Croatian comedies and laughs at all the right parts), we may revise the plan and go to the north of Croatia instead.
We're on course with all the goals we've set ourselves to make it possible. The one important thing is that I need to have a job where I can work remotely once we go there, since she'll be giving up work after 20 years of stress, so if you're looking to expand the support team ... 😉
 

Moscow. I love cars traffic 😋

We are knocking around ideas for 5.0 thanks to PHP's improvements in this area. It's too large a change for 4.4.

Good job ! :)
 

Very nice under the hood improvements!
Btw: What is this questionsmark for that we can see in the screenshots (bottom right corner)?

I've solved all the new features speed improvements using pagespeed module with Redis, on the high 90% in PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix and all "A" in webpagetest. It's nice to see all these improvements addressed..
Some suggestions
Create different size avatars instead of using a 200x200 image on a 34x34 placeholder, there are CSS's that dynamically resize the originals, at the expense of bandwidth.
Articles images have the same problem, if I choose a 1000x1000 image, on the record list every article will download the ORIGINAL image and resize it with CSS... huge bandwidth usage.
Reduce the DOM tree...it's huge 
Saludos

With the overhauled PageSpeed Insights data and scores based on Lighthouse, where does PWA fit into IPS's roadmap?

We've announced the inclusion of application manifest functionality in 4.4, which lays the groundwork for future enhancements
 

great job…. 🙂

Just to note, we decided to go ahead and support lazy loading for external embeds like YouTube too for 4.4. Most embeds (Facebook, Twitter etc.) already lazy loaded because they routed through a local URL, but external embeds will also lazy load now. You're welcome, @Mr 13 🙂 

Thanks a lot, that's a very good news.

Yep, more templates is on our short list for a major Pages update coming fairly soon.

Do you think about improving the way the fonts are loaded? It's very unpleasant to watch empty rectangles until ...
Apparently you should also look for a variant of fonts awesome at your choice of administrator, or minified version of the fonts awesome.
This would reduce the size of the downloaded file and accelerate the uploading of fonts awesome.
It would also be a good solution when installing or upgrading, if an administrator chooses which flags to use and this to save a file as a custom_flags.css. This will greatly reduce size the downloaded flag.css file

@Matt It would be cool to see 4.4 on here now so we can see/test the improvements.
Curious, why does IPS have their javascript inserted in the <HEAD> when end of </BODY> is much faster?
 
 

Two clarifications provided by IPS:
1. Lazy load content will apply to all user generated content, from gallery images to uploaded cover photos.  
2. If you're self hosted and would like to take advantage of the Brotli compression, you'll need the php extension
https://github.com/kjdev/php-ext-brotli

GREAT !!!!