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Louis Varley

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Posts posted by Louis Varley

  1. On 9/9/2021 at 3:47 PM, Thomas Turner said:

    A fair degree of protection could be achieved by placing the link to the static site within the members section of the LI website and if more protection  was necessary there could be a requirement for a members login to use the link and see the static site. This would not be a difficult thing to code and there may be provision for it in the CMS the LI is using (a search for User Login and the name of the CMS will probably bring this up).

    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.

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  2. @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.

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  3. 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.

     

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  4. On 9/3/2021 at 9:59 PM, Marc van Grieken said:

    I am afraid that since your  @Antonella Adamus very helpful training session (CPD ??) more questions came into focus. @ Louis Varley. The interface is all but intuitive and the menu items are in my opinion not in the right place or of equal weighting.

    For example it would be normal on a site like this to have a 'settings' menu and under that would sit a sub menu: in this case 'notification options- 'mode' (light/dark) customiser etc are all settings 

    May I suggest that the opening page should lead one intuitively to the bit you want to be:

     

    Personally i would 

    Simplify the photo or leave this out all together.  

    Move LI logo to top Right Moving a logo or anything you want to anchor to the right hand side is not good practice. You never know how wide someones screen will be but you can be sure

    the top left will always be visible when the user loads the page. Mobile views may choose to replace with a "hamburger" menu instead however

    top Left  say: welcome to connect and then a listing  (not necessarily this list ) This would require a custom theme to deliver these sort of layouts, not quite sure what you mean by whos who here?

    • Forum
    • Club
    • Topic
    • Who's who
    • settings
    • tutorial

    Then, as one hovers over , for example Forums it might bring up a pop up explaining in very few words what it is.  Having a "tooltip" on hover over many areas of the site would require a lot of development work, as you would also need settings to turn off this feature.

    Then when you click on Forums, this should take you to forums but it does not do that at present (well it does but only if you scoll down past Clubs.)  (incidentally, you should also be able to set which forums you want to have visible to you..) is it worthwhile to discuss this in more detail.  Yes at the moment clicking forums essentially just takes you to "home", if you are in lots of clubs they will be listed first and maybe clog up the page a little, we decided they best sit here to make it easier for people to find their clubs but this could change in time, as people know where to find clubs under the main menu.

    @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.

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  5. On 9/3/2021 at 9:59 PM, Marc van Grieken said:

    I am afraid that since your  @Antonella Adamus very helpful training session (CPD ??) more questions came into focus. @ Louis Varley. The interface is all but intuitive and the menu items are in my opinion not in the right place or of equal weighting.

    For example it would be normal on a site like this to have a 'settings' menu and under that would sit a sub menu: in this case 'notification options- 'mode' (light/dark) customiser etc are all settings 

    May I suggest that the opening page should lead one intuitively to the bit you want to be:

     

    Personally i would 

    Simplify the photo or leave this out all together.  

    Move LI logo to top Right

    top Left  say: welcome to connect and then a listing  (not necessarily this list ) 

    • Forum
    • Club
    • Topic
    • Who's who
    • settings
    • tutorial

    Then, as one hovers over , for example Forums it might bring up a pop up explaining in very few words what it is.  

    Then when you click on Forums, this should take you to forums but it does not do that at present (well it does but only if you scoll down past Clubs.)  (incidentally, you should also be able to set which forums you want to have visible to you..) is it worthwhile to discuss this in more detail.  

    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.

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  6. 15 minutes ago, Marc van Grieken said:

    I am really pleased to have joined  Connect and hope that many many more will join!

    But (there is always one) the navigation is not immediately obvious and in fact a bit complicated.  Looking at the opening page: the items that stand out (menu) are those in the green ribbons and not the more important ones hidden top right,  barely visible against the background.  A bit of tweaking of the website design would help if we are serious and use this platform as much as possible.  Lets try to make this as intuitive as possible, if not we will lose interest in this platform.

    @Louis Varley please can you help @Antonella Adamus

    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

    • Thanks 2
  7. 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

    • Like 2
  8. From 1 June 2021, all LI members will get free access all the Free and Paid videos on Campus (https://campus.landscapeinstitute.org)

    I've just finished making some chanegs the campus to give us a new trio of video types.

     

    Free Videos - these will always be free to anyone who is logged in

    Paid Videos - these are included free to all LI members and have a cost to non-members

    Premium Videos - these are not included as free access and will be the more extensive videos we release such as Masterclasses

     

    It gets better!

    Previously, we offered a 100% discount to members on a yearly subscription when we launched campus. With the new offer, members will not need a subscription (free or otherwise). Just log in using your MyLI Credentials and you will have access to all Paid videos from the get go.

     

    Campus has been on of the most fun projects i've undertaken at the LI and was built entirely in-house. If you've not yet checked out Campus i implore you to give it a go!

     

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  9. Q: What are tags?

    A: Tags are used to give a new post one or more subjects. They are great for niche or specific subjects. Users can follow a specific tag of interest to them and it will notify them when a new post is made with this tag.

    Tagging is also important as if something is very popular, and has many posts and has been tagged many times. For example if many posts are tagged greenbelt the LI will recieve stats showing it is a popular topic and may justify being given its own forum.

     

    Q: What tags should i use?

    A: keep tags to ideally one or two words. For example Policy would be a great tag, where as Policy for Scotland is too complex. You have to aim to have or use tags others would instinctively use. You may instead tag the post with two tags, Policy and Scotland as seperate tags.

     

    Q: Tags were added which i didnt add, or tags removed?

    A: Moderators will change or add tags to make your tags more relevent. It is likley a moderator has added or removed tags on your post

     

    • Like 2
  10. There was an issue with club members not properly syncing at all. Mainly due to us reaching 25 signed up members and confusing something in my code.

    Hopefully this is now fixed and people are now added to clubs they are meant to be in, within 1 hour of first logging into connect now.

    • Like 2
  11. As you post on Connect your "post count" increases.

    With post counts, your rank rises, below are the number of ranks currently setup for Connect. While these are subject to change in the future without notification (which may effect whatever rank you currently have), we will always try and reflect the changes here. 

    All ranks relate to ever increasing size / biomass and then special record breaking trees

     

       

     

    ranks.PNG

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  12. I can't post in forum X or forum Y. It says I have not met the necessary requirements or posted enough topics

    From time to time certain forums may have certain requirements, for example to prevent new members adding their ideas before they have properly looked through the forum and seen all it currently has to offer.

  13. This is a forum dedicated to raising bugs. Please read the following before using this forum to raise a bug.

     

    What classifies as a bug?

    A bug is an unexpected issue with one of the Landscape Institute's platforms .

    These include issues with the following platforms:

    A bug will be about the functionality of the platform rather than the data contained within.

    Here are some examples:

    • I clicked to save my profile and an error came up
    • I clicked the button and nothing happened
    • I logged in and the screen just went white
    • I tried to change the date but it says the date is not valid.

    The following are not bugs:

    • My password does not work
    • Can I change my practice name
    • I don't seem to be getting password reset emails
    • I am a member but MyLI says I am not
    • My invoice is not correct.

     

    What should I include when raising a bug?

    Include as much information as you can. The LI IT Services team will have to investigate the issue and will need to be able replicate what you did. Please also TAG the topic using the "Tags" option with the name of the platform you found a bug with. For Example "MyLI", "CPD" if you are having a CPD issue. 

    Include information such as

    • What browser you are using
    • Screenshots if possible
    • The URL when the bug happened
    • What you were trying to do when the bug happened
    • Any messages that came up
    • Information on whether you were using your home or work computer.

    The more information we have the quicker we can investigate and fix the bug.

    In some cases we might reply to your topic to notify you we have fixed it, or if we were unable to replicate the issue. In other cases we will reach out to you via private message, email or telephone to discuss the problem in more depth.

    Some bugs might be the result of a known issue or limitation, in which case we will notify you.

    Any bugs raised which we do not consider a bug will be deleted to keep this forum as clean and tidy as possible. We will normally notify you by private message if this is the case but if you post and it vanishes, it was likley not following the rules set out here.

     

    Conditions to raising bugs

    Bugs here are as a best endevour and a way for IT Services to directly interact with you, our members. There is no minimum or maximum SLA (Service Level Agreements) given. Only things raised by the membership support channels will have official service levels as set by the membership team.

     

     

     

  14. Who are the Admins on Connect?

    All LI Staff are Admins of Connect. They will have an LI Logo as their display profile picture.

    Who are the Moderators on Connect?

    Moderators are normally members who have agreed to volunteer their time to keep Connect a happy and vibrant place. They have the power to delete, lock and edit topics and replies.

    If there is an issue with a post or topic, Moderators should be the first point of contact. They may raise issues to Admins, if needed.  

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