Site Update

[Hells Warrrior]

We'll be implementing a new update to the site soon, this will bring a few important fixes and a few new changes. I plan to do this tomorrow / Saturday. Here is a list of the improvements.

New or Changed Features

• When your link auto-embeds in a post such as with an image, YouTube video, Twitter link, etc. an option will now display to revert the embed back to a plain text link if you do not want the embed.
• New setting to disable embedding.
• Facebook/Twitter integration improvements
• If you encounter a system error STAFF will now see additional debug information, all other members will see the normal error message.
• Custom Fields for Support Requests in Commerce now show on the front-end.
• If an advertisement is set up with a main image, but not smaller images for tablets/mobiles, the ad would not show at all on tablets/mobiles. This has changed so the main image will display on all devices unless smaller images are provided.
• Topics scheduled to automatically lock or unlock will now reflect this in the topic listing and when viewing the topic.
• Placing a link to a Facebook status will embed when possible.
• Three character searches are now allowed in the Admin CP Live Search.
• The Account Settings page now uses vertical rather than horizontal tabs to prevent overflow.
• If Gravatar is enabled, and a user has not defined an profile photo, then their email address will be used to fetch from Gravatar unless explicitly set not to.
• The member REST API endpoint will now return custom fields.
• The Developer Center for Plugins now shows the filename in the list of hooks, and when editing a hook, a breadcrumb includes a link back to the list.
• Inline notifications can now be dismissed
• Efficiency improvements to the search index
• You can now close a poll independently of the topic
   

Important Fixes

In addition to dozens of smaller fixes this release includes fixes for the follow items that impacted many clients:

• Several security enhancements.
• The posting parser has been made more efficient.
• Some BBCode does not parse correctly in version 4 and we have applied some fixes for this. In general BBCode is deprecated so we only provide basic support.
• Sitemaps could sometimes be blank if there was no content in a specific section.
• Certain URLs from version 3 were not redirecting properly to the new version 4 format.
• The timezone detection is now more robust and will more gracefully fail if it cannot determine a visitor's timezone.
• Permission matrices have been reworked to send less data to prevent exceeding server limitations.
• The database class now handles InnoDB deadlocks more gracefully, and some queries have been changed to reduce the likeliness of deadlocks.
• Performance improvements to areas which perform large updates on the members table (for example, when editing permissions).
• Multiple fixes for tag searching

Activity Stream Improvements

The activity stream has a new toggle and filter bar that replaces the "Edit Form" link. It is now faster and easier to customize existing streams and to change the filtering options without having to create new streams.

Facebook/Twitter integration improvements

• If signed in with Facebook or Twitter, when posting a status update, a checkbox to share on these services appears instead of the old setting to export statuses in the account settings panel. This change ensures IPS4 conforms with Facebook's Terms & Conditions and will pass Facebook's App Review.
• When setting up Facebook integration, a new setting allows disabling status imports so you do not need to go through Facebook's App Review if you only want to allow users to sign in with Facebook and not integrate with status updates.
• When setting up Facebook or Twitter integration, the setting to allow automatic sharing is shown in addition to in the sharing settings so it is easier to enable this feature.
• Facebook integration has been updated to use their latest API endpoints.

 

A new guide will be available after 4.1.9's release to explain in detail how to go through Facebook's App Review process

[Hells Warrrior]

Thanks for the patience today, we have now upgraded the forum software but we have also changed our database system from the "normal" and standard install on most servers from MySQL to MariaDB and we are also in the process of updating the storage engine to InnoDB. 

This will bring a better performing database with faster queries and reducing things such as table locks which can cause the site to go offline as a result.

We are also introducing further changes down the line but as it stands we have done a severe amount of optimisation over the last year and more specifically since December and we haven't stopped yet.

Thanks for the understanding and I hope you all start see improvements, I'll be monitoring things over the coming days.

[Hells Warrrior]

We recently updated the site and style to the site and we are aware of issues with styling on some browsers, more noticeable on Edge, PS browser and Safari, Chrome and Firefox are both fine. We are looking into this particular issue and will update as soon as possible.

 

Sorry for the inconvienence but if you swap to a decent browser (if possible) it will display as intended - not a solutution but an alternative way to view the site without styling issues at the moment.