Cyrem

action-reaction, on 24 April 2012 - 09:34 AM, said:

With less than a percent of the membership voting, and only a third of those that voted saying they actually needed this, I think that statement is a bit of a stretch.  I'm not saying this isn't a good suggestion, but you cannot judge what is best for a large customer base on such a small sample size.

Also keep in mind that you're likely to get far more people coming in to this topic that want this that don't; those that don't need this probably don't care to come here and voice their opinion since it'd just be a feature they wouldn't use anyway.

DChiuch, on 17 April 2012 - 06:15 AM, said:

If that's the best we can do in terms of hard evidence that forums are declining, then I'm happy.

Opening the thread, edit the first post, advance editor, edit the tags. This gets a bit cumbersome if most of your members don't feel like adding tags properly. The moderators are willing to make the changes but only if it is easy.

Similarly for editing topic titles it is time consuming. It was much easier on VB where you just needed to double click next to a topic title and edit the text.

Can there be a central and user friendly way of editing tags and topic titles?

Rimi, on 04 March 2012 - 11:11 PM, said:

It certainly shows.... anyone else unable to view that site without getting a blaring headache as a result?

I love how effective the IPS Spam Service is at catching spam registrations. However, a niggling gripe I have with it is how long it takes to clean my database of spam members.

Adding the following options would greatly improve this part of IP.Board, in my opinion:

• Allow registration to be denied entirely for specific "spam codes". Currently, the most sever action the board can take against a spam account is to "Register the account but immediately mark it as banned". It would be great if we had the option of not allowing code 4 spammers to make an account at all, and this is one of the things I love about the third-party StopForumSpam hooks.
  
  • If a user is prevented from registering because this option is selected, the board admin should be able to set a custom "registration denied" message, where a false positive member could contact an admin via email and have an account created for them manually.
• Add a "delete members" button to the list of spammers in the ACP. Currently, we only have the option to ban or unban them. To remove a spammer account, it has to first be banned, then deleted from the list of banned members. I don't want spam accounts to be mixed together with legitimate banned members (like trolls and rulebreakers), whose accounts should be retained for the purpose of record-keeping. The current setup makes it very easy to accidentally delete a banned member while cleaning up spammers.
  
• Add an option to prune spammer accounts after a specified length of time. We have this for validating accounts. Why not spammers?

There is no reason to keep spam accounts in the database, as they never have any actual history with the community. Adding the four features I suggested would make it much easier to deal with them, and provide a lot of granularity over what exactly to do with them, while providing an option for falsely flagged members to get past the filter.

Agree, Facebook stuff is garbage, Ok its handy for spamming your links in the hope that people can pull themselves away from facebook for 5 minutes before they have a panic attack but to encourage facebook usage away from your site is silly, and why we pander to facebook is beyond me, i wont even turn on sign up with your facebook account on my site..
Yep i hate facebook its the death to all small communities and makes it harder for us to survive so nothing like this needs to be core. Im all for an anti facebook campaign pet hate of mine that place

We have all had these experiences when visting a community...

Rules and Regulations

I know I have visited communities where their rules, guidelines, terms, etc. are longer than most of their topics. I really do not like that approach as it's not very welcoming and, really, honestly at the end of the day no one reads or cares about the rules. People know what is proper and improper behavior and do not need to be told not to use profanity, make personal attacks, post in the wrong areas, etc. - written rules or not people will still be people and do that.

Take the rules here on the IPS Community:

Quote

I think that gets the point across. Don't be a disruption and you're good!

Way too many forums and sections

This is mostly true for new communities. You're starting a new community and are understandably excited so you create many categories, forums, and sub-forums. So many in fact that your home page scrolls and new members have no idea where to post. Not to mention the fact that your site looks like a ghost town with topics scattered about dozens of forums.

Having many sections makes sense once your community is established and you need organization to keep things easy to read. But when you are first starting try not to overwhelm your visitors with too many areas.

Too Wordy

Does your News forum really need a description that says "This is where we post news and information about updates to our site. I hope you read it and comment often as it's very important. Read this first!" ... I mean the title "News" kind of says all the same in one word. There's nothing wrong with description when needed but just because IP.Board has a "Forum Description" box there when creating a new forum does not mean you have to fill it out.

Ask yourself if a forum you're creating needs a ton of explanation perhaps it's not needed. And surely not every single forum needs description text - it just starts to clutter things up and creates a lot of scrolling to see the list of forums.

As far as I'm concerned, there are two golden rules for creating a healthy and successful community.

The first is to be involved in your site. Don't try to take a passive role and hope it takes care of itself--it won't. Choose a subject matter you care about. Spend some time every day to actually talk with your users and contribute to discussions. If there aren't any going on, start some. You'll get to know your users, and your users will get to know you. The community and friendships you build are what actually make for a successful site, and will encourage other people to join as well.

That leads me to point two: Get others involved, too. As you get to know your users, you should be able to tell who are the most knowledgeable, helpful, and capable. Give them a chance to help out--let them moderate a particular forum or section. If that goes well and you need the help, bump them up to global moderator or eventually even administrator. You'll end up with staff you can trust, and they'll be more loyal and appreciate you for it. You can also consider setting up an intermediate rank to recognize good users you're not sure you want moderating.

Under no circumstances should you ever post moderator applications or the likes. The types of people you will encounter may not be the best choices for your community, and it'll discourage the ones who are. Find users who will be good at it, not the ones who want it.

Don't oversaturate your ranks. Keep it simple so that new users can understand what's going on and don't feel left out. If you need help, bring some more staff on--but not too many, or you might have trouble keeping them all in line.


These are just a few thoughts from my experience, and they've worked out pretty well so far. Ultimately, you need to figure out what works best for your site. Your circumstances may require a different approach, and that's okay. But never undervalue your users and the community aspect. If you don't give people a reason to become involved and stay involved, they won't.

Ok I admit I made up the term "teaser forums" just now. There is no such setting in IP.Board but you can create these by creative use of permissions. So let me explain what I mean.

In my very special definition a teaser forum is a forum that a visitor does not actually have access to but it still shows up on the listing. When they click into it rather than getting a not-so-friendly "Permission Denied" message they get a sort of sales pitch. You can have IP.Board display custom text to explain to a member why they should join so they can have access to this special, private area. Another approach may be a paid content area. Let's say you require members pay for access to certain sections of your community. Using the teaser forum approach you can show them what they're missing without actually giving them full access.

Here is a screenshot of settings in Manage Forums from our site:




The first setting, Allow members who can see the forum but cannot read topics to see the topic list, is a bit confusing at face value but really all it means is that if a member does not have the "read" permission set for a forum IP.Board will, rather than just showing an error message, show the listing of topics in that forum. However, if a user tries to click into a topic they will then be defined access.

This setting is optional. If you have it enabled it shows a member what topics they could be reading if only they had access. It's a great way to entice people to sign up. If you do not enable this setting then the forum can still show to a user but they will be denied access without seeing the topic listing.

The second setting, Custom 'Permission Denied' Message, is your change to brush up on your sales skills. This is where you can offered the default, generic "permission denied" message and instead present some useful information and encouragement to join. Here on IPS Community we use this feature to explain to members that they have to be an active client to access certain sections.


Sure it's a simple set of features and sure I made up a whole new term today but using these simple settings can really increase your membership by showing people what they are missing.

I guess it depends if your chocolate fireguard is designed to appeal to humans who can use tags as secondary categorisation and discovery or to appeal to bots to mindlessly spider more pages.

I'm not disregarding your suggestion (it's come up before and I don't disagree) but the trouble with looking through the eyes of a search engine bot is that you get tunnel vision and start to lose perspective on what's truly important to humans.

It has come to our attention that a XSS (Cross Site Scripting) attack is possible within the Admin CP. The javascript is only executed when viewing the detailed pop-up of a specific failed admin log in.

This issue exists in all IP.Board 3 versions. We recommend that everyone using these versions apply this simple one file patch.

Simply download the zip for your IP.Board version, expand the zip on your computer and upload the file to the relevant folder on your server. The directory structure is maintained in the zip so you will have no issues finding the file.

If you need assistance, please contact technical support.


IP.Board 3.2.x
 feb_3_2_x.zip   2.72K   4177 downloads

IP.Board 3.1.x
 feb-3_1_x.zip   2.76K   1068 downloads

IP.Board 3.0.x
 feb-3_0_x.zip   2.76K   375 downloads


If you are running a version of IP.Board older than those listed we highly recommend you upgrade to the latest, supported version as it will include this and other fixes.

I agree with Kenichi. We admin gods are not to be reported. If a member reported one of my admin posts..I'd unleash a fury of angry smilies upon him and slap him a 4567544678 years ban. Additionally, we would find out where the member lives and send him a man with a hockey mask and a chainsaw to tear down his doors and leave a dead cat hanging on one of the light bulbs (we would stick our board logo on the cat to avoid any confusion).

If we feel like it, we would call him late at night and just breath on the phone, moaning untill he goes crazy.

Other then that, we're a nice little community always welcoming new members for chat and socializing, meeting new people etc.

Is there any possibility of you folks at IPS looking into ways for us to hook into some things we can't today, namely the various IPSMember methods or other static methods like those?  I'm sure there are technical hurdles to allowing this, but with them being untouchable right now it restricts us mod makers from doing some things we might want to.

For example, there are two fairly popular hooks of mine for IP.Board 3.1 that I cannot upgrade to make work in 3.2 now due to the combining of avatars and profile photos: my Default Avatar and Identicon Avatars hooks.  Those used to work on the principle that I could hook into the userInfoPane template and do my work of showing a new avatar, since that was the only place by default that avatars were ever shown.  Now, though, avatars/photos are shown in tons of places, and there's no realistic way to hook into each one individually.  So ideally what I'd like to do is hook into IPSMember::buildNoPhoto(), and use that function to show something else if I wanted to.  But there's no way to get to that function right now.

Maybe some of the code could be moved off into library files that we could hook into?  That way, IPSMember::buildNoPhoto (or others like this, that may need to be hookable) can still be called like normal, but they return the value from a library file, which can be overloaded.  I don't know if this is even feasible, but I'd like to hear if this may be something that can be looked in to.  It seems that these static methods are showing up more and more in the product, so It'd be great if they weren't so black-boxed to us third party developers.

I really would like to see IPS step it up and do better. Xenforo software looks very impressive for only a year in development, I think it is time to listen more to the feedback section more than ever to keep current customers.

Experience and design are two different things, you could be the most professional programmer in the world and not know a thing about designing something well. I'm not saying that this is the case for IPS, but it appears that Xenforo is taking larger steps than IPS at the moment. The skin lost many of its features, even though it is much more elegant the most important factor is easy to use. Something doesn't have to be shiny for it to work well, it needs to be flexible and friendly for any type of audience.

I believe that firstly hooks and application support to help contribute more to 3rd party things should be done. Providing an index of all the functions, organizing it well so developers can follow the architecture of it, and many other steps to make it easier to use. What I mean by this is, you should provide this in the forum software itself. People may wonder why bulk it up more, well it could be a separate application if people feel that way. There should be a search function and things of that nature, even grouping would be great.

The custom profile fields in IP.Board can have some significant improvements done to them that I believe would make IP.Board that much better.

A.) Everything can be edited, there isn't any mandatory profile fields required except display name, username, password, and email. Unless they are otherwise specified by the custom profile fields section.

B.) Make it more flexible by allowing a setting to have the users add their own custom profile fields. This can be enabled or disabled based on the administrator's decision on what they prefer.

C.) Add more depth to the fields, allow private fields and things like that (could be based on friends only/etc).

Other things could be done such as adding back wanted things users suggest that were removed from the old skin and many other things. I didn't spend too long on this since I wasn't sure if it would be read by IPS or not.

realmaverickuk, on 09 December 2011 - 03:33 PM, said:

x million members..... and only xx that have posted today..... I'm very curious how you got to x million members and only have xx a day posting?  You only have xxxk post as well?


If your running two servers with 24gb of ram... it's not really needed looking at your traffic... I have sites with twice your traffic on one box with a server load of about 13% . So while you may have some issues that need to be addressed, please do not dismiss IPS for issues that you are having specific to your site.