mikesound

On the 5^th of February we have ported our project to IPS. There are more than 100 000 registered users, 50 000 unique visitors per day and up to 2400 users online and we are growing every day. We use IP.Board, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, IP.Content, IP.Chat, IP.Tracker, IP.Calendar, IP.SEO. We also have custom modules and some modifications purchased in the Marketplace.

My own experience: Generally I am happy with IPS. I love the idea behind it and I do not regret the decision to go with IPS. However, there are some issues that I would like to address here considering our experience.

• I do not understand what IPS support includes. It looks like they can answer license questions and sometimes explain standard settings. Nothing more. Example: IP.Gallery has a critical issue with bypassing moderation. IPS Answer: you should forbid user moderation on your project to solve the problem. Dear IPS! With 35 000 active users in our project it cannot be the solution. If we have purchased the application and it has critical security issue, you cannot suggest just disabling the feature we have purchased.
  
• I do hate development cycle of IPS. Instead of fixing stable versions, they go ahead with next major release and leave their clients with the issues in the purchased versions alone. Example: we submit an issue in support area and Tracker. IPS Answer: "fixed in version 3.3.0". Dear IPS! You should understand that this cannot be a solution for your clients. We do not have access to 3.3.0, there is no release date for this version. So, saying "fixed in 3.3.0" means for us literally "not fixed and will not be currently fixed". We are on the stable version 3.2.3 and have the issue on 3.2.3 and we would like the solution for the version we have purchased.
  
• I am not happy with inconsistency throughout the applications. We have decided to go with IPS to have smooth integration of all applications. Example: we would like to have Tagging in all applications. Current IPS features: prefixes are only possible in IP.Board, tagging is possible in other applications too, but not in IP.Content. I had expected that all applications use the same API and have the same features integrated.
  
• I am very disappointed about the really poor quality of the Marketplace modules. We had to rewrite some of purchased modules almost to 100% to get rid of errors. The modules we have purchased have miserable code quality. Some of them are stated to run with 3.2.x, but we have detected that at least one module is only supposed to be so. I wish there would be QA for the modules.

Because of all these issues listed above, our project would not go online without our ****magic team**** and people helping me out in the community. Therefore I would like to honor and highly recommend them here:

Development team: AxisMedia http://axismediadev.com/
Member profile: http://community.inv...maxaxismediaru/
They can tune your IPS, they develop complex custom modules using IPS API, they integrate ready modules and tweak them or rewrite, they write patches and fix every issue in stable IPS applications. If you have big plans with your project and are looking for experienced IPS development and support team, do not hesitate to contact them.

Design: Igor Lesovsky http://lesovsky.ru/
Member profile: http://community.inv...16073-lesovsky/
Young designer with a high approach to quality. If your project should look completely different to standard style, yes, he can

Consulting: Marcher Technologies http://marchertech.com/
Member profile: http://community.inv...r-technologies/
My special thanks go to Robert who has done a great job helping me out to understand IPS in general and especially IP.Content. I wish IPS Support would have the consulting quality and engagement Robert has.

Conclusion
IPS license fee and conditions are fair. I think we cannot expect reasonable technical support for the small fee IPS takes. Still we expect fixing confirmed issues in the licensed versions. We will not purchase and integrate any other modifications from Marketplace as economically it is more effective to write clean code from the scratch instead of fixing multiple bugs in the purchased modules.

Our choice
Standard IPS + our team = is the best and perfect solution I could ever dream of.

Rarely in life do I consider handing out any kind of praise to anyone for anything, there's a time and exception for everything I guess and this is one of them for me. I'm not on the inside of IPB and I can not tell anyone what kind of person Jason is because I just do not know that. What I do know however is when I submit a ticket I look forward to one person helping me always and that is Jason. Many hard tech tickets from me and many I expect Jason to "read my mind tickets" that lacked information for him to even help.

From my perspective as a customer over the past I think almost 2 years this is the type of employee I would certainly say stands out for doing their job and going the extra mile. I certainly don't have to go over what his job is because if you've submitted a ticket you know. Jason has a very vast area to cover and does it extremely well imo. Hard worker, knowledgeable worker. A+++++

Now of someone promotes him because I said this and removes him from support expect and angry customer ticket

Regards

mikesound, on 03 September 2011 - 01:39 PM, said:

Yes, very often happens on my site after upgrade.

Hello all,

I couldn't find the option to chose which exif data to be shown in the G4, is it one of the features that is coming?

I would also very much welcome 'custom fields' for photos, we are running site with a gallery of buildings and I would like to have fields like 'city', 'architect' etc. fillable for our users.

best regrads!

First, before someone tells me I'm posting in the wrong area (which I might still be) I'm not asking for a Gallery feature.  This is an IPB feature request as I understand it.

See this post:  http://community.inv...ost__p__2087352

I want to make sure someone on the dev side for IPB 3.2 is taking a look at the issues with Gallery integration.  It looks like you're moving towards use of Gallery images to replace avatars.  That's excellent!  Take it a step further and make it so users can link to Gallery images from new posts and replies.  I'm stuck on SMF until you add this and that really burns me since I paid for this software already.  That's on me for not doing my research deep enough.  I figured the Gallery app was integrated instead of merely being attached.

Grum, on 23 January 2011 - 03:43 PM, said:

In the filter section, choose a field (let's say color), and then in the filter section put "@color".  Add ?color=red to the end of the url the block appears on and you have a dynamic filtering block.. viola.  Brandon wrote this feature in a few releases ago but it's not really documented.

Matt's statement in his Gallery Blog Manifest post:

Quote

pretty much nailed my feelings, I totally agree with that goal, it should be dead easy to just upload images and share them. That's what the members want to do, and for the external social media, it seems to do that quite well...

BUT

Why does IP.Gallery 4.0 seem to almost ignore the ability to readily share IP.Gallery Images WITHIN the IPB platform?!

Seriously... The expectation seems to to be that members will:

1. Be chatting in the forums on a topic.
2. Decide they want to show that friend an image (or several that they have uploaded at different times before).
3. Leave the forums and go to the gallery
4. Upload the image(s)
5. After they upload the image they have to click on it to bring up that image's details
6. Drop down the "Share Image" button. Don't even see this as an option for an album, though I'm sure Matt means it to be there based on his BBCode test thread.
7. Copy the BBCode for that image

STOP HERE TO CONSIDER

A large % of community users don't know what BBCode is. They wouldn't have a clue that they need to copy/paste that in order to put their image in a forum topic/post.

8. They have to go Back to the forum and start typing their reply to their friend.
9. Paste in the BBCode (that they probably didn't even know to copy, since they likely don't know BBCode or what it does) for the image IF they didn't forget and copy something else in the mean time, like a piece of text from their friend's post that they wanted to call out (many folks copy paste instead of using reply).  If they did copy something else they have to start over again digging into the Gallery, because it's not really easy to find your own images/albums at the moment.
10.Repeat steps 4 through 8 several more times to put in the other images they wanted to talk about (why not just use an album?  Well, maybe several pictures are already uploaded, that's VERY common in our current system, upload once and reuse them to make your point in your forum posts).
11.Hopefully our member was patient enough to go through all these steps, and didn't just throw up their hands and upload the images as attachments, and they can now *finally* submit their post.
12.  When the other members are reading the post, they are often trying to compare details in the images to what the image poster was talking about... Unfortunately, every time they click a linked image they leave the forums and can't see the rest of the post. :-(.

Do we REALLY think that many community members (keeping in mind that they're NOT forum admins and don't KNOW how to use all the features of the system, or what BBCode is) are actually going to go though all that?

So...

My question is: Why is uploading images and sharing them to Facebook, Twitter etc so much vastly easier than it is to upload them to IP.Gallery and share them within the IP.Board system itself?

What about integration with the forums, when will we be able to readily use images and albums in the gallery IN the forums to facilitate the conversation?

Having images added as attachments in forums posts because that's soooooo much easier than using the reusable, searchable images in the gallery... Well, as a community builder, I cry every time I see people upload a really good image as an attachment because I know it'll be buried in that thread and never show up in the search system, never be seen by anyone looking through the gallery for that sort of image. It's a nigh-criminal waste of sometimes priceless User Generated Content. With everyone carrying a smartphone, images are an ever increasing part of the conversation, and the gallery should be evolving to be more of a gestalt with the forums rather than a more or less separate, parallel system.

I really hope that this new release carries with it the ability to quickly and easily upload images to the gallery while in the forum post editor, and to use albums and images (via a quick popup that provides access to content you have uploaded to the gallery) in a forum post. It should be an easy, seamless experience. Images/media belong in the gallery not as attachments! :-)

Along the same lines, why is the commenting on images/albums happening in an isolated stove-piped environment?  Why can't we tie it into the community conversation happening in the forums topics the way we can with comments on Articles (IP.Content)?!  Shouldn't that be a major goal of integrating the IP apps?  Bringing that user interaction TOGETHER instead of fragmenting it into multiple different systems where it's rarely seen?  Shouldn't the goal be a community PLATFORM where everything ties in together, rather than separate parallel systems that share an authentication system?

In conclusion, I heartily support Matt's goals in reworking the Gallery, and much of it is looking wonderful! I greatly appreciate his efforts, and hope that he will read this feedback as what it is intended to be:

Constructive feedback intended to show how a bit of what appears to be "Curse of Knowledge" blindness, may be preventing an appreciation of how  IP.Gallery falls sort in a real world setting.   Of course, I may be totally wrong and Matt et al *totally* get the need for deeper integration, and we just haven't heard about how they are going to tackle it yet!

James

Waiting several months for view new content bug it's a nightmare... My users will kill me.

bfarber, on 07 January 2011 - 05:20 PM, said:

So basically, we have to live with a major function of the software not functioning as intended, hurting our traffic for many months (as stated in your 3.2 development announcement)?  It really is a major feature that most users utilize.

It's costing me revenue, yet I'm going to have to keep paying for support to get the fix to something that used to work properly.

OK, Charles, remember you did ask for some suggestions.

1. I would like to see a report page to show when each sitemap was generated and how many URLs were included.
2. I would like to see a report to show when the sitemaps are accessed and by what user agent.
3. I would like to see a simple means to insert Google Analytics code into each page, without the need of an add-on.
4. I would like to see FURLs become user definable. What if someone wants underscores for separators, rather than hyphens?  What if I want my forum URLs to appear as domain.com/f12/?  What if I want my topic URLs to appear as domain.com/f12/topic-keywords-784/?
5. I would like to see a means to define custom rewrite rules for add-ons, so pages we want indexed are rewritten.
6. I would like to see Meta Tags dynamically-created with relevant keywords from the given page, rather than being user-defined on a page-by-page basis.
7. I would like to see external page titles added to external domain links as anchor text, to create keyword-rich links.
8. I would like to see user-defined stopwords (a, an, the, with, the, that, etc.) removed from FURLs
9. I would like to see rel="nofollow" become user-defined for all internal and external links, rather than just on or off.
10.I would like to see something similar to vBSEO's Virtual HTML Display, so users could define repetitive template code to be rendered with Javascript, to remove repetitive content and unnecessary links.  Side column code could be wrapped in Virtual HTML tags, leaving the convenience there for users, but eliminating all the links from the spiders.  Same with the Active Users display and the Calendar display.  Removing the useless links would increase the weight of the remaining links on the page, which should be highly relevant, if the admin has done his or her job correctly.
11. I would like a simple means to eliminate the Forum Jump menu for guests. This would eliminate the need to generate all the non-relevant HTML code and also eliminate all the content from the page, increasing the content to code ratio.
12. I would like a simple means to eliminate the Last post Info column for guests, for the same reasons.
13. I would like to see a means to add image size attributes to all forum images.

Some of the ongoing problems people are mentioning could be eliminated by implementing some of these suggestions.  The ability to define URL structure would be great for new sites. (Of course it would create havoc, as admins with established and well-indexed sites would want to change their URLs.)  The ability to create custom rewrite rules for forum add-ons is also nice, as it allows an admin to rewrite everything he wants to have indexed.  On my vB/vBSEO sites, I would rewrite any resource I wanted to have indexed, without the use of any extensions. (Remember, extensions can be and have been deprecated.)  From that point, creating a robots.txt file was wickedly simple.  I merely disallowed all .php scripts.  Actually, to confound the wannabe crackers, I would disallow all extensions - .htm, .html, .cfm, etc - just to throw them off the track.  I do not want or need stopwords in my URLs.  Words like 'the', 'or' and 'a' are not keywords, so why am I lengthening my URLs by including them?  A short URL is a good URL and yes, I do think a URL using nothing more than forumid/topicid (domain.com/f12/t864/) will be indexed as well as any other URL with loads of keywords and stopwords.  The definition of image size attributes will speed up page rendering and will also help search engines determine the relevancy of images to the text surrounding them, as they calculate keyword relevancy for a given page.

I'm pleased to see IPS addressing SEO in a positive manner, but the addition of a sitemap generator, a graphic representation of the search engine logs and user-defined meta tags is a far cry from search engine optimization.  Give me the ability to determine what links I want re="nofollow" added to and which I don't and then I'm suddenly optimizing my pages for the search engines.  Give me the ability to dump off all the user profile links from my forum index page and then I'm suddenly optimizing my page for the search engines.  Give me the ability to dump off a lot of wasted and repetitive code for the guests (search engines) and I am suddenly optimizing my page for the search engines.

I use and appreciate Dan's Search Activity add-on, but how is that ever going to be confused for something that will help with search engine optimization?

See the differences?

Charles, are you sure you wanted input and suggestions?

Not every forum is as busy as this one is. If only.

On many boards, it really isn't all that difficult to keep up with new posts, etc. On such a board, the main goal would be to get to the place where there were enough posts to sort through.

I doubt most people here would be that impressed by reputation. But to a person who may have been lurking at a small board for a while before making their first post, it means acceptance. Once you are able to make a person feel comfortable and as though they belong to your group, you have just moved that person from the lurker group to the contributor group. Not easy to do on most forums.

Ok, you're missing the point. It does not matter how much you think IE7 sucks, how great you think IE8 is, or how easy it is to upgrade. All that matters is what people out there are using. Not everybody uses the latest and greatest software, period. Nobody here, or even on planet earth for that matter, has the power to force everybody with a computer to upgrade to the latest version of IE.

60% of Windows users still use XP
7% of internet users still use IE7

Windows 7 is better than XP. Do you think this means that nobody must support XP? Of course not.

It does not matter if you think the software is garbage and nobody should use it. As a forum owner (and software vendor, IPS), you must support IE7 because a significant number of your visitors use it.

After much deliberation:

- I have scoured Bing's TOC and I must admit they are much less restrictive. They allow local caching of data and are less concerned in general in how you access and store the information. They do have limits of 500,000 requests in a 12 month period but with caching of data this shouldn't be a huge problem. For these reasons, I have switched to Bing for the default mapping service.
- I have abstracted the mapping into IP.Board core and abstracted out the services into separate classes so you can write your own mapping plug ins to use Google, etc.

Luke, on 10 May 2010 - 05:41 PM, said:

From what I've read that's correct, IP.Commerce 1.0 will just support items that the admin lists. That's why I'm suggesting a way to allow members to list items for sale and auction in a later version.

Its been asked before in the past and the response is usually something like "so many files have been changed downloading them all is easier".
With minor version updates being released about every month now, could we just get an update patch of a few files rather then having to upload 2,000+ files each time?