Dll

Lindy, on 10 May 2012 - 12:16 AM, said:

I think you're missing the point. Mobile is becoming as standard as Windows7, or Mac etc. You don't design for everything but Chrome (and charge extra for a Chrome version). It would be pretty tacky if forum end-users that used Safari for Mac had to pay for a special download to get the most out of a community. Mobile is another access point with a different browser.

No IPS product/feature is made solely for any single community. But no other feature/product asks for your client's members to pay you directly, and that undermines the branding of every single community that is your client. You are changing the relationship everyone has with their own customers. Telling us that's not the case is incorrect. The people giving you feedback know what is correct. It's not like you have to do this because you have no other way to make money from IPS. You aren't Tapatalk, you are IPS. You already charge for the platform that makes this (what amounts to a type of skin/theme for a different browser) work. If you're not charging enough for the system to work then charge more.

It had never crossed my mind to look at Tapatalk, or Forumrunner (never even heard of it before) but if you are building apps that compete with others, and we need to protect our brand by going white label, then anyone who provides white label service is an option we all need to evaluate.

More than anything, the primary frustration with all this is the non-communication before embarking on this etched in stone route. There are plenty of routes to take. Yes you're a business, but your business should be a lot more inclusive in the process. It's not like you're a tire maker and supply retailers with tires to sell off the rack. If you were a tire company the investment your customers make in your company is a simple phone call to place an order. Here you're dealing with an enormous amount of people who invest an incredible amount of time and energy integrating your product line into their websites. To be shut out of any pre-launch product feedback or brainstorming feels like you simply don't care what your customers think or want. It's all by assumption. I've never dealt with anyone so disinterested in feedback. Perhaps you get your feedback solely from the corporate level but what is there to learn from the likes of the NHL who is stil on version 3.1.4?

Aiwa, on 09 May 2012 - 04:06 PM, said:

But I really wish that InvisionPower would ​listen to their customers on this​

The problem we have, as forum owners, is trying to make a stronger "brand" (for those lucky enough to have a brand) and this kinda forces us to "push" our own app rather than yours, most of the time by loosing money in the process

It's not that we don't want people using IPS's or tapatalk, it's more that it makes more sense in a branding approach to loose money in a white label app with a strong brand, than to have people surfing freely on your website with a less customized experience...

well it's just my opinion, glad this will be a feature indeed.

First, let me say that we've purchased over 50 IPB licenses over the years.  It's been great to see how the forum software has developed over the years since we started using it. . .from 2.1.7 to 3.3.1, IPB has proven time after time to be stable, reliable and rock solid.

Second, IPS support is top notch - there isn't another company out there that matches the quality of their work and service.

Thirdly, the community here that supports each other with technical help and the people that offer both paid and free hooks/applications are superb.

With that being said though, IP Gallery is what has stopped us from further purchasing more IPB licenses. In fact, we've moved some of our current sites away from IPB to competing software.

The gallery is such an important part of a community and IP Gallery simply does not live up to a publishers or a users expectations. I'm not going to rehash here what's wrong with IP Gallery because it's been discussed over and over again.

It's obviously not economically in our best interests to leave a license "idle", purchase "redundant" software AND change everything around, but IP Gallery just doesn't cut it.

We've waited and waited for an improved version of IP Gallery, but had to move on.

Our company forums not being updated until after release was an oversight.  We are constantly refining our QA processes and this was identified internally already, and flagged to ensure it doesn't happen again.  We do make mistakes, try as we might not to.  We also try to learn from those mistakes to avoid repeating them.

Blog 2.5.1 will be applied to the company forums prior to release.

I just wanted to give an example of why the cropped thumbnails wouldn't work for me
My gallery holds scanned images of various items from various games

An example


This image has an automatically generated thumbnail that represents what the image is so you can tell what you're clicking on


This works great for me. In the new system though I'm assuming I'm going to be stuck with something similar to this cropped image


As you can see you can't really tell what that is.

I understand you have obviously focused on this version of the gallery strictly for photos but I think it would be nice to have the option to change things to be able to make it work for other things.

Ditchmonkey, on 29 January 2011 - 07:48 PM, said:

Ultimately, isn't the Gallery for your users to use, and not just you to administrate?  Surely any experience in finding better ways to let people use the software is a good thing, isn't it?

What really needs to happen is a change in IP.Board 3.2, so that on the attachments form, there is a link to "Open Gallery Uploads", where you can select your uploaded images in the gallery, and add them into a post just like a normal attachment.

Similarly, when you upload an image file to a post, you should be able to hit a checkbox to "Add to Gallery".

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

IPS Staff: I hate to say this but the IPS Upgrades are becoming a real inconvenient Annoyance.

What am I talking about? Everytime there is a service update to IPB (2.0.1, 3.0.2, etc) the upgrade creates havok with the hooks that I have installed. Not only do I have to disable the hooks, but, they have to be un-installed and then re-installed. The upgrades are not anticipating already installed hooks and adjusting for them and it's becoming an annoyance.

Does IPS plan on fixing this problem or is this going to be a regular 'romp and stomp' action with every upgrade/update? For one, I would love to see this corrected.