Recent content by fshagan

I just mention it here for others since the Announcement indicates it isn't available through Remi's repo. It now is.

Just updated my forums to 8.3.35 (latest 8.3 version the remi respository was showing) pending updating to 8.3.36 (the patched version). After updating my VPS, I checked and it looks like the remi repository has the update to 8.3.36 and it installed it: php83-php-cli-8.3.36-1.el8.remi.x86_64...

I just used Claude to create a simple one my audience asked for ... A button at the bottom of each new post to jump to the next new post without clicking back, and then clicking on the next topic. I tested it first on a local install, then copied it over to my production forum. I'll still buy...

I also found SES complicated. And slow to implement. I gave up and went with the free tier at Brevo (formerly SendInBlue), which is great for my small forum. I like being able to look in the logs and see when someone opened, clicked, or acted on an email.

It looks like you are self hosted on either a VPS or a dedicated server, and if you have access to the DNS records for the domain, you should be able to set up an external SMTP (email sending service) like Brevo. It's pretty easy to set up, but not the most economical choice if you have more...

Maybe we can help you narrow it down a bit. How is the forum hosted? Is it on it's own VPS, or on shared hosting? Do you "own" the domain name too, and do you have access to it's "DNS settings" (usually set through where you buy your domain name from).

I actually found a better way for my small forum. Just a Javascript and cookie verification that the visitor is human (I'm using AndyB's Human Verification add-on). With my .htaccess rules, and block bots add-on I was still getting hundreds of bots. About an hour after installing the human...

Email can be hard to figure out. I was using my domain's email server on a VPS and had tons of issues. I switched to using an external SMTP email service (SendGrid at first) to help get deliverability. Then early this year, they ended their free tier and my email deliverability was once again...

Thanks for your detailed response! I will definitely have to consider XenSocial if I'm not able to duplicate the functionality we used to have.

I have a request for a match to the old InvisionCommunity functionality of being able to view the next unread post without having to return to the New Posts listing of posts (one click vs back - scroll - click). I didn't see that you can apply this to pseudo or ad hoc nodes like the "New Posts"...

I had bot swarms, particularly Meta's AI bot, that absolutely hammered my VPS. Before I figured it out, I actually did an expensive upgrade and the "guest traffic" just increased with the new resources. Using blocking rules in htaccess (link) helped a lot. There are a lot of other solutions in...

As an alternate, create a block for "New Posts" that looks similar to the "Similar Threads" block that appears under the last post of a thread: I may take a crack at that myself using the New Posts template.

My pleasure. After having done a couple of migrations in the past, this has been the smoothest.

Migrating forum software always has it's quirks, and this one is bugging my most active users. I can't find anything like this in any of the searches I've done, yet this was possible with Invision before we migrated to Xenforo 2.3. The screen shots below show the behavior on Invision we would...

Review: In September, 2026, we contacted @MySiteGuy (Driven 2 Services) to convert our InvisionCommunity forums to Xenforo. We had tried to do the conversion ourselves, but were met with several database issues that seemed too complex to resolve. While our forum isn't too busy right now, we have...