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One of the benefits of using Invision Community as your community platform is that you control and own your data.

There are several ways to review this data. One of which is via the Admin Control Panel which offers a suite of statistic views which helps to convert the raw data into something easily understood.

However, it's not always easy to determine trends and community sentiment from these singular views.

Invision Community 4.5 adds two new interactive views for user and activity statistics.

Invision Community has certainly changed a lot over the years as we've moved through major updates and large user interface changes.

While large scale changes offer a dramatic difference, it is sometimes the smaller changes that bring the most satisfaction when using your community daily.

This blog entry rounds up some of the UI improvements Invision Community 4.5 brings.

Statistics can help you manage and monitor the direction of your community, giving you valuable insight into how your visitors are interacting with your site and what areas of your community deserve the most of your attention.

With the popularity of Clubs in Invision Community, we determined that some statistics aimed at helping administrators review how this feature is being received by their end users was warranted.

Although we continuously review security within Invision Community, a major release such as 4.5 allows us to be especially proactive when it comes to keeping your community safe.

This blog entry outlines several enhancements to improve security in Invision Community 4.5.

The goal of every client here in the Invision peer community, myself included, is to launch and run successful communities.

Whether I’m going to be able to achieve that success in the new year depends entirely on trying these 10 steps. I know if that if I stick to these steps, then my community will grow – and I know if you follow along, your community will too.

Every single day, your members are searching your community for answers or interesting conversations to join.

Wouldn't it be great if you could learn what is being searched for to identify hot issues, commonly asked questions and discover trends?

We thought so too, which is why Invision Community 4.5 comes with search statistics.

For the first time, Invision Community gathers anonymized information on what your members are searching for so you can use this to highlight more relevant content and shape strategic decisions with your community's structure.

We have come a long way since the late 90s when someone had the genius idea of using a small yellow smiling face image instead of the more common colon-bracket representation of a smiling face.

In Invision Community, there are various places that photography can be used to create visual interest. From uploads in topics, to cover photos for blogs and members.

The humble upload field has served these areas well, but sourcing images to use can be a pain; especially when you have to walk the minefield that is copyright and attribution.

Invision Community 4.5 now includes support for Pixabay which brings quality copyright free stock photos to your fingertips.

Ever since Invision Community 4.x was launched you have been asking for the ability to categorize blogs in your community.

We heard you load and clear, but sometimes when a feature sounds straightforward, it requires some re-engineering of the framework. Because users in your community can create both blog entries and their own blogs to hold these entries, this was one of those areas.

Starting with Invision Community 4.5 I’m pleased to announce that it is now possible for blog authors to categorize their blog entries and it's now possible for administrators to categories blogs.

"When the clocks strike midnight on New Year's Eve, we will enter the third decade of producing Invision Community.

A lot has changed since we set up in 2002. Our team has grown and our product matured. In a world where online startups explode and die within a few years, we're something of an anomaly.

We still have the same love and passion for creating the very best tools to build a community, and we have always ensured that Invision Community is in touch with modern demands.

This decade has seen Invision Community go from strength to strength. In 2010 we were one of many forum systems catering to smaller niche audiences. In 2019 we're powering discussion for many international and well-known brands.

But first, let us climb inside our Delorean, rewind the clock to 2010 and start from the beginning."

Join Matt as he takes a look back over the past ten years in an honest (and sometimes brutal) review.

Almost every single day, we receive feedback on our popular clubs feature. Some of the requests are big in scope, and some a little smaller.

Following on from our previous blog entry for Club Pages, we’re pleased to announce a collection of smaller, but no less useful improvements.

Invision Community has supported member referrals via the Commerce app for many years.

Community owners have been able to see at a glance who is spreading the word and members have received the kudos associated with a growing referral count in return.

When planning Invision Community 4.5 we saw that this feature had the potential to be so much more… So what have we done to improve it?

You'd be forgiven for thinking that RSS feeds belong in some bygone era of the web where Netscape was king and getting online meant listening to your modem scream at your phone line.

There's certainly a lot of newer web technologies to share data, but the venerable RSS feed still has a place.

Invision Community has supported RSS feed importing and exporting for a very long time now; however, it has been restricted to just Forums and Blogs.

Importing an RSS feed is a simple way to populate content on your community. It's even a great way to share content to and from your site without creating blocks or writing custom code.

Invision Community 4.5 now centralizes RSS feed importing, so it is available for Forums, Blogs and Pages.

Without a doubt, clubs is one of the most popular features added to Invision Community in recent times.

Invision Community clubs allows you to run sub-communities on your site. We've seen clubs used in many ways, including managing geographically local groups and clan groups for large gaming sites.

This popularity drives us to keep incrementally improving the feature set for clubs, and Invision Community 4.5 is no different.

One thing that was raised many times was a way for club owners and leaders to create simple pages with general information members need.

Happily, in Invision Community 4.5, this feature now exists (and more!)

Invision Community has come a long way over the past five years.

We've added many new features and invigorated the front-end user experience to keep it current and in-line with modern interfaces.

One area that has remained largely the same is the Admin Control Panel.

When we released Invision Community 4.0 back in 2014, the Admin Control Panel was updated but has stayed relatively dormant since.

But that's all about to change with the upcoming release of Invision Community 4.5!

The engagement trap is a race to community activity for the sake of activity. It's usually measured by simple aggregate numbers like the total number of posts, topics, likes, or members.

Many community managers and webmasters enjoy spouting engagement numbers. It's an easy number to brag about. It's an easy number to find. It's also, unfortunately, a terrible metric to measure.

Once you have built your community and watched it spring into life, it's easy to think that you have done all you need to do.

However, there are three simple things that you're probably not doing that is curbing your potential growth.

Joel is back with another snack size blog where he flexes his community building and emoji selecting muscles to bring you 4 simple ideas that can be digested in less than four minutes.

Think about all the different touchpoints where you try to connect with members: forum discussions, blog comments, personal messages, email newsletters, weekly meetings, and perhaps offline events. You write witty and clever messages. You dedicate an entire section of your community to welcome and hello topics. You spend enormous amounts of time trying to elicit engagement from members.

What if I told you that there’s one touchpoint that you consistently overlook where members reach out to you, some for the very first time?

Security should never be an afterthought. Don't wait until an attack has compromised your site before you review your community's security.

All too often, site owners consider increasing their security only when it's too late, and their community has already been compromised.

Taking some time now to check and improve the security of your community and server will pay dividends.

In this blog, we run down 8 ways that you can protect your community with Invision Community. We go through the security features you may not know about to best practices all communities should be following.

Are you looking to launch a new online community or revitalize an existing community, and you're worried about the numbers of users?

Gaining members - and retaining them - is always the hardest struggle for new communities.

Joel explains how to build an audience with CHIP.

The term "flame-wars" was coined way back in the 1970s when computer scientists talking in the first electronic discussion boards noticed that here was "an escalation of critical comments and an increase in the frequency with which people would respond with short negative messages."

For anyone that has ventured into the comment section of Youtube, read Twitter for more than a few minutes or frequented active forums will know that our behaviour hasn't improved.

This article is the last element in our Sense of Community series, and it’s also the most powerful. It allows new communities to win over legacy ones; niche communities to triumph over generic platforms; and impassioned communities to outlast everyone. It’s also the hardest element to cultivate.

There is no doubt that unless you have a support community for your brand that you are not delivering the best experience for your customers and risk losing them to competitors that do.

Building a support community around your product or service will positively drive your business across all departments from product development through sales and into customer support.

Let's break it down and look at the key benefits for each department.