Nils

I don't think Cloudflare is the problem here. The reason that IPS activated Cloudflare in the first place was probably that they were being targeted by DDoS attacks that they could not cope with on their own. So the site would probably be down a lot more without it...

I agree that a pluggable editor would be nice to have, but for the moment I think the most important thing would be to make the non-CKE editor more useful. I would rather have a nice text-only editor in 3.4.2 and a pluggable editor in 4.0 than a half-working text-only editor and a half-working pluggable editor in 3.4.2...

I have already mentioned this in another place, but I just wanted to reiterate this here:

 

There really needs to be a changelog for every version that details what has been added, changed, fixed and removed, and most importantly what the breaking changes are and if there are known issues. The bugtracker and the few superficial blog posts that usually get posted are really not adequate for this purpose. Almost every other software I am aware of, both free and paid, does this, and for good reason!

 

I realize this may mean a little additional work on your part, but the lack of a changelog is a huge inconvenience to a lot of your users. I often had to resort to just do an upgrade and then see what issues crop up and what new changes I see on my forums, which is just a horrible way of doing things!

Since I upgraded my forums from 2.3.6 the overwhelming amount of negative user comments has been about the editor. I regularly get reports about posts getting completely destroyed when editing them or them not displaying like they should. These problems did not occur with 2.3.6. This is a major issue, since writing posts is the whole purpose of a forum. Users may be able to accept their post getting lost once or twice, but after the third time they will probably just give up and go somewhere else.

 

Now, being a developer myself I realize that this is not necessarily an easy problem. There are a lot of edge cases, there are a lot of different requirements. But the editor is one thing where "works 95% of the time" is just not good enough.

 

I find it thus very hard to justify how Invision keeps adding new features to IP.Board that are nice to have but not essential (as in 3.4), while such an important component is still not working right. I would be very happy if you could just produce a single stable version for once, without adding a ton of new features that introduce new bugs in every new version. So instead of rewriting the whole editor module for 3.4 (which as we can see introduced a whole new set of issues), why is there still no 3.3.5 that fixes bugs in 3.3.4 that have been reported months ago?

 

What I think should be done with 3.4 and above:

• Bring back a simple text-only editor with BBCode (or even simple HTML) buttons, like in 2.3.6. Make CKE the default, but let power users change the default both per-user and forum-wide. This will at least give us a reasonable alternative to CKE. The current "light switch" editor is just ridiculous.
• Keep supporting BBCode for custom tags.
• Come up with better testing procedures, including usuability testing. This is obviously not working right, considering the amount of negative feedback that arrived pretty much as soon as the new version came out.

One place where that message is still not being shown is on the "posting permission denied" page for users with a posting suspension. Instead, they just get a generic "you don't have permission to post" error page when they click the button. Maybe that is what you meant?

I would definitely like to have the ban reason being displayed there as well!

Doesn't the fact that this topic has been posted multiple times already tell you a lot? This is obviously something that a lot of people care about.

I do report bugs to the tracker, but the problem is usually not that these bugs aren't known - they are just not getting fixed, or not quickly enough.

For example, the aforementioned issues with custom bbcode  - which breaks a lot of important functionality in my forums - will only be fixed in 3.3.3, so all I can tell my users is "it's a known bug, it should get fixed some time, don't know when". This is just not enough for something that has such an impact. I had to remove all custom bbcode buttons from my forums for now, just to prevent people from screwing up their posts.

Other things, like the complicated pasting as text and weird behavior with URLs will get marked as "Not a bug" even though it's obviously very unintuitive.

I was really hoping that things had improved since IP.Board 2.3.6, but this is definitely an area where the update has made things a lot worse.

It has been a few weeks since I upgraded to IP.Board 3 and I have to say that the CKEditor is probably the most disappointing part of the upgrade. With pure text posts it is simply not necessary and with more complicated posts it screws up more than it helps. Pasting text into posts or setting up more complicated layouts (like nested lists) has become a huge pain in IP.Board 3 because of the strange issues introduced by CKEditor. Custom BBCode also has major isses - newlines are getting lost, buttons don't work properly. Every day I run into some new issue where CKEditor does not work as it's supposed to and I have to drop back into text-only mode to fix it. And sometimes my post looks completely fine in the editor, but then gets screwed up when I actually post it, which is even worse.

Since writing posts is obviously the main activity in any forum, this is a big problem. I have even had to move long posts over into a separate wiki because they kept getting screwed up.

Is there any chance we could get back the old text-only editor from 2.3.6? It may not have been that intuitive, but once you got the hang of BBCode it was perfectly fine and didn't have any of the issues we now have. My users have been complaining a lot about this, and I am afraid they will just post less and less in the long-term...

Right now when I access my page via HTTPS all the links still point to the HTTP site, so as soon as I click somewhere I am back to the unencrypted connection. Also, the page is marked as insecure because the images are still served via HTTP.

Wouldn't it be possible to detect if the forums have been accessed by HTTPS and automatically correct the image and base URLs when this is the case?

I think something like this in the conf_global.php might already be a start, but I'm not sure what kind of subtle bugs this might introduce, for example if URLs are put into the cache:

if($_SERVER['HTTPS']) {
    $INFO['board_url'] = str_replace('http://', 'https://', $INFO['board_url']);
}

It would be great if I could disable likes for certain forums, similar to how I can disable topic ratings.

Right now the profile feed is not very useful, since it only shows status updates and nothing else. I think it would be a great idea to add other actions that the user has performed there, similar to how Facebook shows activities in the profile. Possible actions would be:

- New Friends
- New Thread
- New Post
- New Gallery Images
- New Blog Entry
- Profile Changes
- ...

I think this would be a great addition and has the possibility of increasing user engagement quite a bit. Frankly I'm a bit surprised it hasn't been added already

Is there any way (without too much hassle) to allow users of an IP.Board 2.3.6 to use the same usernames and passwords on a separate TikiWiki installation? Or is there any other Wiki-Software that has good and simple integration?