Gary Lewis

For all that may be watching this, Marc is investigating in the background, as am I. And I found one more data point that may be worth other Invision Cloud customers checking, which I've shared with him. Our Google Search Console Performance graph shows a very abrupt drop in Google impressions and clicks around May 4–6, months before the August bot-mitigation incident we've been discussing. Impressions went from roughly 2,000/day to almost nothing and have never recovered. Search Console shows no Manual Actions and no Security Issues. I'm attaching the graph. If anyone else here runs an Invision-hosted community, it might be useful to look at your 12-month Search Console Performance graph and see whether anything similar happened around early May. I'm not saying this was an Invision-wide event. I'm trying to determine whether the timing is unique to our community or shared by others.

Sorry, I missed that. But I have now responded to the ticket as well.

Hi Marc, Yes, please pass this on. I agree that the TameTheBots test Chris ran may have been classified as an AI bot. We used that only to demonstrate that Invision's Cloudflare layer is returning a 403 challenge to some automated traffic. But that is separate from the original issue. The 171 examples I supplied came directly from Google Search Console's Crawl Stats report for bullnoseforum.com. Google identifies those as Googlebot crawl requests, and reports that they received "Other client error (4XX)" responses. Cloudflare's current documentation also distinguishes crawler behavior by purpose and notes that some crawlers may have more than one behavior, including Search and Training. So an "AI bot" classification in Cloudflare does not by itself establish that the request was unrelated to legitimate search crawling. So the question is not whether the TameTheBots request was an AI bot. The question is why Google's own Search Console records legitimate Googlebot requests receiving 4XX responses from the forum. Please do pass this on for further investigation. Thanks, Gary

Hi all, Looking for anyone else seeing this, or who has already solved it. The problem: Google Search Console shows severe indexing failure on our Community in the Cloud-hosted forum, bullnoseforum.com. Google knows about roughly 39,000 URLs, but currently only 2 are indexed. Crawl Stats shows about 84% of Googlebot requests over the last 90 days failing with “Other client error (4XX).” This is not new. Invision Support has confirmed that automated traffic was temporarily blocked during platform instability in late August, and our Search Console data shows very large failure spikes in late August and again around September 1–4, with failures continuing through at least September 15. What we have ruled out on our end: Our own Cloudflare account is DNS-only, not proxied. Bot Fight Mode is off, there are no WAF or rate-limiting rules, and there are no Security Events because our Cloudflare zone is not in the HTTP request path. In Invision AdminCP, robots.txt does not block /forum/ or /topic/; there are no per-page noindex overrides; live pages do not return an X-Robots-Tag; there are no banned IP addresses; and the login, posting, and registration protections do not apply to ordinary anonymous page requests. What we found directly: A third-party fetch/render test against one of the affected URLs returned HTTP 403 with cf-mitigated: challenge and Cloudflare’s “Just a moment...” challenge page. Since our own Cloudflare zone is DNS-only, that challenge is coming from Cloudflare in front of Invision’s hosted infrastructure. I realize that test is not Googlebot itself, so by itself it does not prove Googlebot is being challenged. The unresolved issue is that Google Search Console itself records real Googlebot requests to ordinary public forum and topic URLs receiving 4XX responses. One example: September 15, 2026, 3:26 PM PT https://bullnoseforum.com/forum/23-for-sale-trade-or-free-to-a-good-home/ Search Console records that Googlebot request as “Other client error (4XX).” What Support has said: We were initially told that automated traffic had been blocked during the August platform instability and Google may have been caught temporarily. We were later told that AI bots are blocked but Google is exempt. Most recently, Support stated that “we do not block Google search bots to any degree on our platform.” That leaves us with a contradiction we have not been able to resolve: Google says Googlebot is receiving 4XX responses, while Invision says Googlebot is exempt from its bot blocking. There is also a recent Cloudflare change that may be relevant to failures from September 15 onward, although it cannot explain the August failures. On September 15, Cloudflare changed its handling of mixed-use crawlers such as Googlebot. A Training setting of Block now blocks those crawlers for search as well, while the new Disallow AI Training setting is intended to permit search crawling while refusing AI training. Has anyone else using Community in the Cloud checked Google Search Console Crawl Stats and seen a similar pattern of 4XX failures? If so, did you determine what was generating them? And have you gotten it fixed? We are essentially non-existent to Google. Thanks, Gary

And I should have said I'd be happy if both menus stayed, but can live with just the one that we've drilled down into.

Well, I guess I didn't ask that correctly and confused everyone. But I've learned a lot and taken a different direction so want to restate the problem. We've quit trying to do this via CSS and are now trying to do it via menus. What we have is three top-level menu items: Forum as a sub-menu with other forum-related stuff under it, like an About page, Activities, and Browse Library as a sub-menu with other library-related stuff under it, like a different About page, the start of a database to serve as "card catalog" to tell people where to go About Bullnose Enthusiasts - a page with nothing under it. This works, but when we click on something in the dropdown below either Forum or Library both Forum and Library go away and all we are left with is About Bullnose Enthusiasts and an empty More. It seems like we are doing something incorrectly as we expected at least the menu section we are in, either Forum or Library, to show - if not both. Can anyone tell me what we are doing wrong? Please?

@opentype - Thanks! We will give that try. It'll just be a page title and URL. There will be three fields, with the 3rd being metadata, but I'll have to enter that later.

Thanks

We’re using a Pages database as a card catalog and need to seed a few hundred records from a CSV (Title, URL, & metadata). We don’t need a new content app — just a bulk importer. Is that something you’d consider building, and if so, what would be the ballpark cost?

@Cedric V Does your Community Items allow CSV file import into a database? As said, we have ~950 pages on Weebly and it would be nice if we didn't have to manually enter all that info manually.

Is it possible to import a CSV file into a database on V5? If we go with Pages we will have a hybrid environment for quite some time with both Pages and Weebly since we have ~950 pages on the latter. So we are considering building a "card catalog" that will list all the pages, regardless of where they reside, have some metadata so users can search, and a URL to get them to it. But it sure would help if we could import a file.

As you know, we’re working with a trial of Invision Community v5 Pages as we are considering bring a portion, if not all, of our huge Weebly website over. And are intentionally trying to separate navigation between Pages (reference/library content) and Forums (community content) so it looks like our forum is standalone from the "library" on Pages. On desktops we’ve successfully controlled menu visibility by app context (Pages vs Forums) using theme CSS. However, we’re seeing inconsistent behavior on mobile and tablet iOS devices, and before making architectural decisions I’d like to confirm what is and is not supported by the platform. What we’re observing • iPhone (Safari and Chrome): When viewing Pages content, the hamburger menu still shows forum-related items (Activity, Browse, About), even though those items are hidden via CSS elsewhere. • iPad (portrait and landscape): When viewing Pages content, the “More” menu appears but is empty. This is probably because the items that would normally populate “More” have been intentionally hidden via CSS; however, the responsive menu still renders the “More” container itself. We have not yet tested Android devices, so we are not assuming identical behavior there. Questions In Invision Community v5, are the mobile hamburger menu and tablet “More” menu rendered from the same theme/DOM layer as desktop navigation and therefore intended to be fully controllable via custom CSS? Or are the mobile and tablet navigation elements generated by responsive or device-specific logic that is not designed to be selectively modified or hidden via CSS on a per-app (Pages vs Forums) basis? Is it supported to hide or alter mobile and tablet navigation items based on app context using CSS alone? Is the behavior described above on iOS (persistent hamburger items; empty “More” menu after items are hidden) considered expected behavior or a known limitation of responsive navigation in v5? A clear explanation of what is and is not supported across desktop, tablet, and mobile would be very helpful, as this will determine whether we attempt to present Pages content as visually standalone on smaller devices or accept unified navigation there. Thanks for the clarification. Gary

Thanks, Cedric. I'll check it out.

No, I don't think you told me. I'm interested, but am not sure how it fits. Our documentation/libary isn't community-sourced. I've created the ~950 Weebly pages over the last 10 years, keeping them pretty much to Ford-sourced documentation. So the "card catalog" will determine whether the user is going to a document on Pages or one on Weebly, and that is something I'll set up. I've read what you have on the page, but it seems mostly targeted for community-sourced things. Right? Maybe I'm missing something?

Ok guys, thanks. Here's more background and then the plan to try this afternoon. I currently have an Invision forum and a huge documentation website on Weebly - both for Ford's 1980 - 86 light trucks. But the documentation site serves all owners of those trucks across all forums and Facebook pages, not just our forum on Invision. So we'd like it to stand alone - at least visually if not actually. We've come to realize that Weebly lacks tools that would help the documentation effort, like the database function which Pages has. But Pages doesn't have some things that Weebly does, like picture galleries. And no one has a migration tool to move a Weebly site. So we are looking at a hybrid, with some of the documentation on Pages and some on Weebly, and a database (we call it the card catalog) on Invision that sends the user to the right document, whether on Invision or Weebly. Over time we'll probably manually migrate some Weebly pages to Invision, and most new documentation will be done on Invision - save for picture galleries unless or until Invision has that capability. But the "separation" is the issue. As said, we got it working via CSS looking at navitem id, but that is fragile. So now we are looking at using the URL as it appears to be fairly straightforward and stable. Comments? Better ideas?