Ohn03s

It seems I missed the boat on Twitter and Facebook Login Intergration but have taken the steps to have it incorporated now.

Is the next stage Google+ ?

I suspect that eventually Google+ will out-perform Twitter and Facebook so I'd imagine this is something that's in development. I'm not missing anything am I?

Best

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 think adding a Team leader(s) option to groups would be a nice addition to IPB. Add remove users without the pain of contacting an admin and such

What I find strange is that people say, we do not want groups, yet IPB already has groups built in.

All that is missing is the ability for members to add themselves to these groups, and for people to lead some groups to add/remove people from them

Anthony., on 03 October 2010 - 11:14 AM, said:

You can already positive rep a post with ipb. I do this a lot on this forum.

Sounds like a joke, but it isn't.
It lacks a better visual aspect to allow easier permissions verification.

I wrote this userscript to meet this need: http://userscripts.o...ipts/show/71200

I'll be happier knowing that it will be implemented in the next version.

Regards,

Welcome to IP.Board 3.1.0 Beta 1!
Welcome to the latest development version of IP.Board 3.1.0. We're excited to reveal the product we've been working on for the past few months. This build contains all the features we've blogged about recently including the search improvements, Twitter integration, Profile Customization and more.

As always, this is a very early beta build so please expect to find the odd bug here and there. Please report any bugs found into the tracker as usual.

As always, we'd love to hear your feedback. Happy clicking!

Note: Please perform a hard refresh / delete temporary items in your browser to ensure you get the correct CSS and JS

Preview Only: IP.Board 3.1 is in preview only. It is not yet available for download. Keep an eye out for a future announcement.

What's New
Link Sharing
Easily share links from your community to Facebook, Twitter, and more. Great way to drive traffic to your community!

Status Updates
Enhancements to the existing member status system in IP.Board to include the ability to reply and more.

Topic Preview
Preview the first few lines of a topic without loading the entire topic.

View Reputation
Optionally allow your members to see who gave reputation points on their posts.

Twitter Integration
Your members can now link their account with their Twitter account!

Improved Facebook Integration
Further enhance the link between your community and Facebook to drive traffic.

Advertising Code Integration: Part 1 and Part 2
Easily place advertising code throughout your community with simple settings in the admin area.

Profile Customizations: Part 1 and Part 2
Allow your members to customize the look and feel of their profile page.

Skin Upgrader
Upgrading your skin between versions of IP.Board just became a lot easier.

Soft Delete Posts and Topics
Rather than actually deleting a post or topic you can now hide it from view to easily restore it later.

Notification System
An easier way to be notified of all the various events that happen in your community.

Modification Development Enhancements
Great tools for those that create modifications for IP.Board

Hook System Improvements
Improvements to the IP.Board hook system to make it easier for modification developers to expand the functions in the software.

Search Engine Optimization: Part 1 and Part 2
Allow search engines to better index and rank your community in results.

Search Engine Overhaul
Search engine rebuilt from the ground up introducing more flexibility and power.

Schot, on 14 February 2010 - 06:05 PM, said:

I know for a fact that since at LEAST the year 2005, peer-to-peer support for IPB was limited to customer-only forums.  Your forum account is dated as 2006, so there weren't places as a member that you could post and receive support from others.

Schot, on 14 February 2010 - 06:05 PM, said:

They're not exacting control over support.  With support at $25/6 months (which is optional and can be paid at any time without penalty to lateness), you could actually pay $25/year and not only get 6 months of support but also the latest version of IP.Board as well.  You also need to consider something else.  The Peer-to-Peer support areas are for those who are active customers.  If someone comes along and asks for support and isn't listed as an active customer, then how do we other customers know that they are running a legitimate copy of the software?  There actually are people out there who will download a pirated copy of the board, install it and then when they have a problem, will sign up here and ask for support, very conveniently leaving out the fact that they didn't pay for the product.  If they are able to browse the customer areas, then it would defeat the purpose.  As for 'past customers', what's to stop someone from being a customer, their license expires, then they too start using pirated versions of the product, coming on here to seek free support?  Would appear rather suspicious if they are asking for support on the latest version of the product when their last license expired a couple of years before.  Also, it would start getting confusing if people are asking for support for v1.3.x and v2.0.x and those trying to help are going based on the latest version (or even on v2.3.x) only to find out that the help is for a version so old that very few people are still using it.  Keep in mind that v1.3.1 was the last free (stable) version.

Schot, on 14 February 2010 - 06:05 PM, said:

As mentioned above, it would create a lot of confusion if someone is asking for help for one version and someone was offering help for another version.  That and knowing who is running their actual latest legit version -vs- having an expired license but still downloading and running the latest versions.


Initially your idea sounds great, but when you consider the amount of piracy that goes on, it's actually a smart move by IPS to limit customer areas to those with active licenses.  The only benefit I could see to a "Past Customers" group would be in knowing who really did own a copy of IPB, so if they mention that their license expired, we active customers will know it's legit and not someone just claiming it.

I own a Lifetime license so I'll always technically be an active customer.  I also have a license that I pay $25/6 months for (and have let it lapse a couple of times, only to renew without penalty).  I started using IPB when it was in the 1.3.x series and didn't pay for it (it was free at that time) but started paying when it was no longer free.  I certainly respect the point of view of "Past Customer", but aside from a member group to reflect it for the sake of proper respect to those who have previously purchased IPB, I can't see any reason to do it.  No offense, but I don't want a non-active customer to be browsing the help areas, especially if they are looking for help on the latest version when they shouldn't be running it.

So it's been a while since last I was here.  Plenty of things have changed around here but what shocked me about 20 mins ago was the most effective and lightning quick use of the "close topic" function, lol.  Granted I didn't realize at the time that the section I was posting in was not the proper place for me to be posting.  Where then I ask do I pose my desperate plea for help if not at the location where I bought my forum?  I gotta say that I nearly fell off my chair when my topic was closed.  I spent nearly an hour putting that concise help me topic together.  Making sure all my facts were in order so as to best inform any who might be able to help.  I pretty much dropped my jaw at Michael's response.    Wit's end...  Michael, might want to work on his interpersonal skills when behind the "closed PM door" btw.  

The last time I was here there was plenty of places, as a Member, to post and talk to others in order to get help.  Why now is it required to be a Customer in order to recieve help from Peers?  On that note it seems as though IPS is charging for the serices of the general public. Let's call it cashing in for the sake of drama.  Am I missing something here?  Disposable customers?  

To be specific and to the point of this sections purpose.  Feedback.  I'm very disappointed that there appears absolutely no way to find interactive help via posts within the company forum for which I bought it's product.  I get the fact that IPS doesn't want to provide eternal technical support by their own staff.  That makes sense.  But charging for the support of the public?  That's much too bold.  I notice that there are forums at the bottom for Members and that they can create topics and posts.  So long as they "do not post topics about IPS or its products and services here".    And on top of aaaaall of this I guess my previous years as a "Customer" now amounts to the equivalent of someone who just registered to the forum, a Member.  


I'm very dissatisfied and not at all inspired to become a Customer once again...  It's dirt cheap at $50/year support but to exact control over support so tightly like this is not good business sense at all.  Very distasteful in my opinion.  I'd like a forum on the company site where customers, I mean past customers, can post about the product they bought from you.  It seems like a bit of an insult to provide a forum to members where they are not even allowed to talk about the very reason they are here.  

To sum it up I believe there should be a section provided by IPS for Past Customers to speak freely about the IP product they bought and ask for help from others of the same group status.  Why would IPS not provide this?


Thank you

P.s.
The product I bought from this company can be found in my signature.

Please send an email to accounts[@]invisionpower.com if you would like your account deleted. Requests like this need to go through proper channels and such.

Hi!

I was creating this member account in hurry when I needed quick answers. Please delete my account, I dont see where in the settings I can do that myself. Also please delete this thread when done. Thank you in advance.

bfarber here's an idea to toy with, not sure how feasible it would be though.

When someone wants to subscribe to a protected feed, the URL is generated is for the member (if it's a permission based feed).  So long as they have access to that feed, they get it.  Once their access is cut off, the feed will no longer work for them.  That URL would have something similar to a session key, in the format of domain.com/forums/rss/key/(identifying key) and that key would point to the members account AND the specific feed they are wanting (forum or whatever).  That way, to remove access, just remove that key and it's done.  Key could be removed either because of abuse (sharing it with other people), loss of access to the content or the member might have requested a new feed URL (which in turn would delete the old one and generate a new one).

Something similar to the way some private torrent trackers work, where a key identifies the member.  Added security could be detecting where the feed is going to (ie, a website pulling it) and once that's detected, it could be 'locked' so that no one other site could pull from it.

The benefit would be that it would be hard for the content to be shared except to redistribute it.  Whereas otherwise a password could be shared and multiple people could then leech from it.

Bain, on 14 November 2009 - 09:12 AM, said:

Yes, yes it does.  But renewal is $50 a year.  Not $125 a year like this chap is offering to pay.  And if you buy 2(?) licenses your licenses are $125 with $50(?) a year renewals.  You really should ensure you comprehend fully what you're replying to.

chasz, on 20 June 2009 - 05:44 PM, said:

When a feature request is made, the IPS staff have to weigh out the options, benefits, drawbacks, necessity, demand and other factors that get involved with making such a request possible and available.

Out of the thousands of people who put in requests and have reasons for using IPB and the included features, only an extreme few, such as yourself, want the IP address to NOT be recorded.

So then, let's look at the overall concept.  To prevent it from logging IP addresses, an option would have to be included that would ignore IP addresses altogether.  Then other options and features that rely on the information would have to be reprogrammed to take into account that the feature may be disabled.  Additional programming would have to be designed and implemented in order to adjust the board and the way it functions in order to not produce undesired or seemingly buggy results from the lack of obtaining and recording IP addresses.  Overall, it's a massive undertaking just to make one very undesirable feature available for a select few people.

If you're really that worried about IP addresses being recorded, then go into the Peer to Peer forums and ask for help making a task module to run hourly that would do SQL queries to blank out or put in "127.0.0.1" in place of real IP addresses.  Then you won't have to worry about it because the longest an IP address would remain in the database would be up to an hour.  Would be much easier to design and would accomplish what you want.

I do believe I speak for an overwhelming amount of other board owners when I say that I would prefer that such a 'feature' not have a way to be turned off, because all it would take is for a hacker to find a way to inject malicious code to force a board to disable IP logging or a disgruntled administrator to turn it off on a board not his own, and then suddenly that board is vulnerable to all sorts of trouble.  Not only that but someone could turn it off accidentally and then not realize it until they really need it.  It's just too much trouble and too much that could go wrong with it.

Whether or not the software logs an IP address is kind of irrelevant as the server will log the IP address of every visitor.

Also, if the software cannot log IP addresses, it causes technical issues... there are various features that rely on knowing the IP address, including security features such as IP matching, account locking, et al.

Furthermore, an IP address is not regarded as private information (like a name or email address), nor can it be used to identify you.
Some people seem to have an idea that every computer has a predefined IP address and anyone who knows it can find out your name and address... simply not true. Sure, your ISP has that information, but that's not public... think of your IP address like your library card number