This morning, Monday 9th of September 2019, the forum has been unavailable during one hour, from 10:30am to 11:30am, Paris timezone. This upgrade was prepared and testing on an iso preproduction infrastructure in order to make it as smooth as possible.

What has been done:

• Upgrade to version 4.4.6 of Invision,
• Installation of the Auto Welcome module in order to improve the on-boarding of new members
• Installation of the New topic information module in order to add guidance and tips to write better topics
• Tests that everything is fine

The deployment of the new modules is still in work in progress and will also come with a new member group, "New-Members'", that will ease spam and troll filtering. It has been asked by forum moderators.

If you would encounter any issue after this big maintenance, please write an answer to this topic or send me a private message via the forum.

On Tuesday morning, the forums will be in maintenance, and so, it might  be very slow or not available during a moment.

On the schedule:

• Upgrade to the latest version of the forum engine, Invision Community, from version 4.2.9 to 4.3.6
• Back to default theme, with just a few colors changes and the logo in order to match the current prestashop.com website; default Invision Community theme will also be available; the aim is to provide the best user experience with the forums
• The theme is compatible with mobile devices
• More account settings will be editable, including the email; it was asked for a long time ago
• The upgrade come with new features with the forums engine, including a new rules editor; this will help to fight spam

Please have a look at the screenshots below, taken on our integration and testing server:

This upgrade has been prepared with great care and discussed with moderators, in order to take in account important feedback.

At the PrestaShop company, we really hope this will be appreciated by the forums members :-)

This discussion is open, feel free to comment.

Some people reported that they don't get anymore email notification from the forum, thank you very much for your messages on social networks and other channels.

We have identified the issue with the MailJet service, and we are currently applying the solution. I will let you know when it starts again.

Read the release note on the Build blog:
http://build.prestashop.com/news/prestashop-1-7-5-0-available/

After some tests, the Korean filter is enabled in the antispam configuration, and will automatically block for review new content written with Korean text.

The first aim is to test the behavior of this setting on the production forum. That is why the "Ban" option is not enabled, to be sure that there is no impact on current users.

Once it is sure that no good user can be banned, the automatic "ban" option will be enabled.

Don't forget that on a big forum like this one, with many, many sections and languages, there will always be a bit of spam. That's inevitable, regarding the amount of created content. However, I really hope that with the current settings, the amount of spam will decrease. I also continue to feed the word filter with keyword about pharmaceutical products, beautiful girls and all that kind of stuff (and you can see that I chose carefully my words to avoid the filter).

What's next? I am currently studying two ideas:

• Create a "new members" group, with the current content filtering rules of the "members" group, and a rule to migrate users after a certain amount of content if no warning has been given. Then, it would be possible to remove the word filter on the "members" group, as it is possible to trust users in this group. That would also allow to test some interesting configuration, e.g: enable signature only for confirmed members.
• Create some rules so all users can report "spam", and if a content has 3 or more reports, that would flag the author as a spammer et hide his content. This would be applied only on the "new members" group. Of course, the aim is to be sure that it could not be used by bad people as a trick to ban a user. 

What do you think of those ideas? Do not hesitate to tell in the comments.

Many of you noticed that emails sent by the forum server are not going to the users inboxes. It means:

• Missing some notifications
• Difficulties to validate a new account
• Impossible to change the password

After investigation, the forum is sending up to 200 emails per hour. The server is a bit overloaded, and also, some email provider (e.g: Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, ...) are blocking them even before filtering them as spam. So, the need was an independent solution, that can scale to handle the peaks of content creation and other activities on the forum.

After testing a few solutions, the PrestaShop company IT team has activated MailJet on the forum this morning. The amount of emails is currently monitored, in order to adjust the plan to the good one that will fit the number of sent emails.

If you feel that you are missing something, please check your notification settings. If you are connected in the forum just click on this link:
https://www.prestashop.com/forums/notifications/options/
And configure your notifications.

Stay tuned for updates.

When does maintenance for the 1.6 version end?

Initially, maintenance for the 1.6 version was planned to expire in October 2018. For various reasons, we have decided to extend this maintenance period until 30 June 2019.

First and foremost, the community is at the heart of our projects: we consider all feedback and suggestions for improvement in order to help PrestaShop grow together. We heard you. Based on your input, we have decided to extend maintenance for the 1.6 version.

This maintenance work will consist mainly of fixing critical bugs or security vulnerabilities. Tweaks to improve service or reports on minor bugs will thus no longer be processed.

With new features reserved for the 1.7 open-source project, the 1.6 stores can add new features through the Addons Marketplace .

We understand that many of you in our community are anxiously waiting for certain features included in 1.6 to be added to 1.7 before making the switch. We are currently focusing our efforts on making such changes in the upcoming 1.7.5 and 1.7.6 versions.

This extension enables our users to focus on their year-end sales activity and to prepare to make their transition under the best possible conditions.

Finally, we are counting on the PrestaShop community to help us develop the open-source project .

Why should you launch your e-commerce project on, or transfer your shop to, PrestaShop 1.7?

The 1.7 version of PrestaShop introduces functional and technical changes with a strong focus on the user experience.

This new user-centric version primarily features a more efficient Front Office and includes new child themes that provide more flexibility in terms of long-term theme customization. It also offers improvements with regard to creating product pages and order tunnels. Furthermore, the Back Office has been optimized for mobile devices.

The version includes major technical advancements that go beyond performance improvements, including directly integrated automated tests, and of course, code migration to the Symfony framework, opening up new opportunities for developers and integration specialists.

With more than 50,000 stores already active on PrestaShop 1.7, we are actively working with the community to offer you even greater performance and even more comprehensive features. Feel free to use our Feedback tool to tell us about your priorities so that we can better tailor the product to meet your needs.

To recap, maintenance for PrestaShop 1.6 will end 30 June 2019. Start preparing today for your store’s transition to PrestaShop 1.7.

The PrestaShop Team