Como

Hi,

I need to delete a huge number of spam accounts. At our old website, they were contained with some unique measures. But I now have to deal with them at IPS.

I intend to delete all zero-post accounts older than six months. But before I do this, I wish to double-check my settings. I am new to IPS - I need to be sure of not messing this up!

I assume that I:

1. Ignore everything above the 'Joined' parameter
2. Select a suitable date range in 'Joined'
3. Posts: Exactly | 0
4. 'Allow bulk emails?' Do I set this to 'either'?

I then ignored the 'Converter' section.

Then 'Search'

I assume I now select 'Prune all members found' - yes?

I just need someone from the team here to confirm my parameters 1-4 before I prune the accounts.

Oh. And is there a upper limit of accounts I should 'prune' in one go (in Cloud)?

Thanks.

Thanks, Marc.

It's OK. I think I see what's going on. One Page document is in the wrong container. But is located in the correct container in the menu manager.🤐

Apologies. I'm doing that many things (we've migrated and am changing just about everything before we reopen). It was must have been something  else I deleted and misremembered. Let me try this again.

In Pages, I have a document (container) which would redirect to a child document at our old server. So, there are three pages, and three menu items at IPS too. However, only two appear in Pages and there is no (accessible) content in the container document in pages. I have no idea where the contents of that other page is located?

The problem, for me, is that I did not handle migration. I did not add the content with at our cloud forum - it was imported. So, I cannot retrace my steps.

The webpage persists, and there is no notice about it being deleted. But it does not appear in Pages in the ACP.

Where is 'deleted content' displayed?

I deleted a Page, but it persists in the menu. I assume I must also delete the item from the menu manager - yes?

But the odd thing is, the Page content persists when I visit the page from the menu. It is definitely no longer listed in Pages. What am I missing?

It is not a caching issue (I am logged in and it has been an hour or more since I deleted the Page).

Any news of when the update will be approved? I thought this was a great addon - I bought it just before the announcement from IPS about the change in account deletion processes.🤐

By the way, I totally agree with your logic of your active warnings caveat. For years, we have had a member-request deletion process. We'd always comply except in cases where there was a possible ban under discussion. In those (very rare) cases, we'd finish our determination. If the account was banned, it was not deleted.

Oh, and what of these?

• Allow Admin CP logins?
• Allow front-end logins?

I assume both normally should be allowed. Yes?

Great, Marc. Just what I needed!

Hi.

We have just finished converting our SMF forum over to IPS and I received a warning about usernames being as login credentials. I intended to change username to email address as the credential, but I have no idea what is meant by 'standard' and 'converter'. Further, I have read various threads here which indicate potential problems with these settings. Please advise before I make changes.

Thanks.

Well, thank you for that, @Markus Jung Another setting I missed. This (along with the ability to search blog titles in ACP) helps move the needle to making Blogs acceptable enough for us to use.

I think we will still investigate creating something using Pages, but we can try out Blogs in the meantime and see how it goes.

Thank you all for your patience.

3 hours ago, Markus Jung said:

What do you mean by “managing”? On my site there are 1500+ Blogs, but I don't have to manage a lot. I have set up categories for the blogs and move new blogs to the right one, if the blogger does not do that himself correctly. The blog owners can moderate their blog comments etc. themselves. 

More of an issue are the categories of an individual blog, as many users create a new one for every entry. 

And I like it that one user can have more than one blog. 

I am coming at this with no experience of managing a IPS forum, and no experience of managing a multi-user blogging environment. I was just expecting something more straightforward for a community where ordinary members are free to start blogs. This feels messy and confusing (both for admins and members).

Yes, I had noticed that members can create categories on the fly, and are practically encouraged to do so.

Multiple blogs will not well for us. And I see no utility (for us) in having a sea of categories. I might have to have someone create a solution for us based on Pages - I'm not confident I could do it myself.

I appreciate the responses everyone. It seems I am trying to fit a square peg into a round whole.

3 hours ago, Jim M said:

You either would know the name of the blog or the user/author.

Then if you know the user, you can just go to their profile and see their blogs there.

If you don't know any of these, well, I'm afraid, we can't really help you find something which is completely unknown 🙂 .

Certainly, I may be missing stuff. I've not yet seen the blog system in proper action. I need it to operate in a very simple way, and for it to be simple for members. One member, one blog. But this does not seem possible - bloggers can create as many blogs at they wish.

Looking at the list of test blogs in ACP, I am rather at a loss as to the utility of that list (for me). But I assume it is there for good reason. The Guide information is a bit thin, and I note that the 'Tips & Case Studies' section is empty.

I am not meaning to complain. I'm expect that Blogs work very well in certain situations. I'm just trying to work out how I can make them work for me, in an environment where all members are encouraged to start a personal blog, with as little friction as possible and with a simple UI (with minimal options).

To add, search is just for the title. So, if I do not know the title of the blog, that's not useful.

And, I just realised that bloggers can create multiple blogs (and I do not mean multiple entries for a blog). I am no blogger - so maybe I have unreasonable expectations - but I find the UI unintuitive.

Well, we are not quite live yet. But we cannot launch with blogs for members - it will have to be dropped. The UI is too confusing, and members will have options which make no sense for us. One member, one blog - is this not possible?

Actually, I missed the search box until now. That helps.

I think I will still investigate using Pages.

Thanks.

I appreciate the responses, Marc (and Jim), but that's not really the problem. The problem is that managing hundreds of blogs (or more) in the ACP is impractical because of the way it operates and is organised. Unless I am missing something, there is no ability to filter or search for bloggers in the ACP list. To be frank, that seems like a rather large oversight. I, surely, cannot be the only person who seeks to have a large number of bloggers.

If I can manage to set up some form blogging for members through Pages, I do not yet know if they will be organised better in the ACP either. Will I end up in a similar position?

Hi Mark,

I will look at at creating a group blog - but I am unsure what that really means. But, presumably, it will operate counter to our intention to allow members to operate their own blogs with their own list list and history.

Yes, we are looking at Pages too. But it appears to be quite a steep learning curve.

Thanks.

1 hour ago, Jim M said:

Members can only create categories within their blogs, they cannot create master categories that you see in the ACP.

Moderation and guidance just like anything 🙂 . You may have a rouge few who want to create a lot of blogs and sub-categories beyond your intentions. I would say most will fall in line with and just moderate as you see fit.

On categories: I see, I think. But this still leave the problem of en entry for every blogger. I am not sure how we will manage that if there are hundreds or thousands of them.

Moderation is not the issue - it is the potential number of blogs.

Hi Jim,

Well, we are intending to allow most members to create blogs if they so wish.* And, unless I am mistaken, there is no way to restrict members from creating categories. Given those two constraints, is there a practical way to manage (potentially) thousands of blogs and categories?

* We are in the middle of migrating platforms. On our SMF forum, members have their own personal threads (more than 2,000 of them), which are very popular. IPS Blogs are intended to replace those very limited thread-blogs. But we did not anticipate this logjam in the back-end.

Maybe I am missing something, but it appears that each new blogger creates another entry in the ACP blog area:

ACP -> Community -> Blogs -> Blogs

I am intending to allow all members (perhaps not very new or low-post count members) to create a blog. But each new blog will create an entry in the ACP. We could easily end up with hundreds or even thousands or blogs and categories. I am not sure how we are supposed to reasonably manage that many entries. Does anyone have suggestions or workarounds, or perhaps reassurance (that I have misunderstood something)?

Or maybe there is a helpful application or plugin I have failed to locate?

Thanks.

For anyone else new to Invision,  and would like to style the Registration button differently to the Primary Button Color, I added some custom CSS to achieve this.

ACP -> Customization -> (Appearance) Themes -> (Edit HTML & CSS) </> -> Custom CSS (tab) -> (don't forget) 'Save All'.

/* Registration button */
#elRegisterButton {
  background: #fff;
  color: #000;
}

Illogical/Inconsistent Taxonomy and Structure

Case 1:

Forums

• Category 1
  • Title 1
  • Title 2
  • Title 3
• Category 2
  • Title 4
  • Title 5
  • Title 6

Case 2:

(When I click Category 1)

Category 1

• Forums
  • Title 1
  • Title 2
  • Title 3

In Case 1: 'Forums' > Category > (forum) Title

In Case 2: Category 1 > 'Forums' >  (forum) Title

The ability to drill down into a category link this is of dubious utility - perhaps it could be dropped. Though, the use to be able to reference (and link to) a Category can be useful and should be retained.

If the ability to drill down into a Category is retained, I suggest dropping 'Forums' and instead list the Category title above the list of (forum) Titles so that it is structurally consistent with the main index page. Or, if 'Forums' is retained, at least place it at the top to be consistent with the main index page.

I'm logged in.

Edit: Actually, I think I might have logged in since I tried the changes earlier. So double checked. That seems to be it! I just tried again now - it was caching issue. Urgh.

Thanks.

This gets stranger. I disabled the feature (and copied this across to other forums). This worked. I then tried to set the new color (to all forums). Strangely, the category I was working from changed to the new color, but all the other categories and forums changed to the intermediate color I had before today. Some of those other forums did have new color when I attempted to update the color earlier (each individually set).

I had cause to change the color again. And, again, the color will not copy across to other categories and forums. It worked once - when I last posted to this thread - and only once. I've tried selecting 'all', and setting the target forum individually. I click 'save' and then 'save' again on the main page.

This is with a cloud installation, the most current version.