Louis Varley

Hi @Thomas Turner, the CMS does not control anything around member authentication. We only use wordpress as CMS on our main website, and for campus, however member authentication uses oAuth Authentication controlled by a dedicated set of API endpoints on our API server which connects to our CRM via a client. oAuth works by obtaining a time limited token from the authenticating server which must be renewed at given times before it expires. The token is used to identify the user logged in and request any information the site asked the user permission to share. To handle this you need a oAuth client to talk to the oAuth server and handle the authentication. As the copy we now have of TL is a dumb site, it has no logic. merely html pages, we would need to setup a basic oAuth client, with login / logout, and token management to handle this and register as a dedicated app with the CRM. Sites like campus etc, (wordpress sites) have many off the shelf oauth clients to do this, and MyLI has an oAuth client i wrote but its intergrated into the framework. I've got no resource in place to do anything with TL so much of what i've done now has been of an evening. As @Antonella Adamus said, the options are around either, making a static copy available or using archive.org which will make talkinglandscape.org essentially available to the public anyway when it gets indexed.

@Thomas Turner Oh additionally, about keeping it as a member only resource, we wont have any way of verifiying who are and are not members, and once TL it switched off from ning, we wont be able to add any new members in the old way it was handled. With the static site, it wont be possible to, for example, retrofit a MyLI Authentication so it sits behind a closed login page. I will discuss this with @Antonella Adamus as i assumed members who posted would not mind that it would be public as a static copy, but yes, maybe when they signed up, they did not agree to this.

Hi guys, so my 2p on this and current progress... In Terms of exporting Ning will not give up database dumps, we have tried to get this in the past to no avail They have an API to extract data HOWEVER they dont provide API access to forums, only blogs, photos, and videos Theres no ability to export data So what i've done instead, i've running a scraping program (it's taken 2 days to run) but its essentially cloned the entire site, and so i know how a static, (no real functionality, just the content) copy of TL on my laptop, and on an azure webapp. What i need to asatain is what we are legally allowed to do. While your current, ning will no copyright or legal ownership over the posts, conversations etc, they will have copyright over their HTML, stylesheets, and javascript required for it to even be readable. I tried removing these but as @Antonella Adamus can confirm, it was not nice to browser or get around. I've asked ning if we are able to host, a fully static copy of TL on our azure platform, without any mention of ning, with all stylesheets and JS minified and not loading from their servers. If they deny this we may have to look at serving a version without any style or JS. Whatever happends, i will swap over where the domain points, so going to talkinglandscape.org will take you to a static version. Worst WORST case then we will wait till archive.org takes a snapshot and we will reference that instead, keeping a copy for our selves but private.

@Marc van Grieken i don't know if this helps, but here is a list of a few larger websites using Invision Community Boards. It may give you an idea of how they handle their layouts https://community.ultimaker.com/ https://linustechtips.com/ https://forums.support.roxio.com/ https://forums.hak5.org/ I've also added a few comments to your suggestions above The theme we use here is a slightly modified version of https://www.ipsfocus.com/. Basic CSS modification has been done to hide some areas but any larger scale changes would mean we could not update the theme as new patches, security releases of invision are released, leaving us open for security issues. If we wanted to hire someone to design a completly custom theme, we would need a long term contract to ensure the theme is update whenever invision change their base applications so it continued to function, and security issues were patched.

Hi Mark, biggest limitation we have with connect. Is being a platform off the shelf as such, my options for heavy customisation are limited. Things like LI Campus, MyLI, i built from the ground up so we have quite a bit of control. Forums have a lot of moving parts so it made no sense to build one, so we licence this, although we do host it ourself to give us a bit more control. One of the first things i built for connect was the MyLI login which was a baptism of fire for how to build new plugins for connect. To Address many of the issues you'd be looking at multiple plugins and a custom theme. We have control over what is displayed on the green menu "Unread, Forums, Clubs, Online Users" etc but beyond that we don't have a lot of control without much more indepth dev work. Something i think we can justify if and when connect starts getting a lot of traffic and users. However i will ask @Antonella Adamus to keep as a suggestion for things we can look into as the site grows.

Hi Marc, i've made a change to the style to give the toolbar a background color on both light and dark modes to help it contrast. Let me know if that helps solve the issue 🙂 You might need to do a full refresh to get the new style to load. (Hold Ctrl and then hit refresh in chomr, or hold shift and refresh in firefox) normal refresh wont reload it until the cache expires

I want to green roof my (big) shed but my wife is putting her foot down... any advice for how to convince her?

I used to live just 5 minutes from groundworks in Billericay... just thought i'd share that 😄

Hi @Paul Reynolds yes, only admins can add new discussion areas, I've added an LVIA section for you.

I've finished adding a Dark mode theme and a switch between the two. You now have the ability to select Dark or Light mode using the Moon Icon on the top right toolbar.

We have enabled a new Chat Room feature, you should now see "Chat Room" at the bottom of the site You can use the chat room to jump into a live rolling conversation at anytime with other members logged into the site. Alongside the public Chat Room, is the ability to have private 1:1 chats with other members, when you open a users profile you will have the ability to chat using the "Chat" Button The same community rules apply to the chat feature as do other parts of the site

Congrats to Simon Odell for becoming our first moderator! May his reign be fair and just @Simon Odell

strapline still being decided, to be updated

Hi Simon, i've extended to unlimited edit time

Yesterdays walk, i have a favourite local duck, shes black and white and probably either escaped fancy duck, or a from a fancy duck parent. I was happy to find she has had a clutch of ducklings