Dear members and friends of ipernity,

1. One month until IGA. Sign up by April 3rd in order to attend.
Our annual membership meeting will be held online on Sunday April 7th 2024, 5pm [Correction: 6pm] Paris (16:00 UTC). Please see Sign-Up Procedure for IGA. For anyone who has not attended previously, a look at the IGA group will give you an idea of how the meeting is conducted online. There are two mandates open for election.

2. Meeting in the real world.
We are indeed a virtual community, but there are also groups of friends that exist here and arrange to meet in the real world. One meets in Hamburg (northern Germany) in two month's time. More information: Hamburg 2024 April 26-28.

3. Progress towards sitewide secure connection (https).
Thanks to club member Ralph, (RCW), and our webmaster Rob Stamp we are finally making some headway towards upgrading the whole of our website to secure connections.
While we already have SSL on all confidential pages of our website, login, account details, etc, adding SSL to the rest of our website will allow us to be visible on search engines, thus helping us gain more members.
The testing so far is promising. However there may yet be an obstacle to some feature, especially an external service, which means the concept we are exploring may not be realized after all.

Ralph is leading the way with what you may consider an automatic redirect of any http links to https. This avoids the prohibitive task of editing all such links within the ipernity coding, as was a previously proposed solution that was thus never considered.

Let's all keep our fingers crossed that it is a success.

4. Update to the 'Download an entire album' feature.
As described in FAQ 6.2 this process is not easy, but it is the only tool we have for downloading multiple files, as the alternative to obtaining them one at a time. The problem with it stopping after 60 files has been solved. In simple terms, there was a program that paused the process for a user from doing, "too much - too fast". It was now too aggressive given the increase in internet speeds, as well as failing to restart after the pause.

We have received requests regarding the lack of photo titles in the file names provided by this tool. This too has been solved.

5. Request to all group administrators - please add translations.
How do members find a group to join? They do a search. What do members do before creating a new group? They do a search, (see item 1 in the Club News from 5 Jan 2024).
However, if the search is done in a language that has not been entered by the admin of a group, it may fail, even though such a group actually exists. For example, the search term "Finnland" (German) returns zero results, while "Finland" (English) returns two. It is therefore important to offer all groups in all seven languages used by ipernity. This is the only way to ensure that our group search function displays all relevant groups.

To help you with this, we have issued a new FAQ chapter 8.8: Why do administrators need to provide 7 languages?. The advantages are explained there in more detail. You will also find complete instructions there. To help you identify where translations are still lacking, a corresponding note will appear for those groups that you are admin of, in the list of groups you are in. English speaking readers can use this link to FAQ chapter 8.8. For other languages, use the FAQ link in the left hand panel on the Help & Contact page, and find item 8.8 in the index.

Thank you for taking the time to help improve this aspect of ipernity.

Your ima team.