Invision Stories

[FASEOFMARS]

We have seen it on instagram, facebook and youtube. We need this implemented as a feature for invision. 

This is becoming a vital part of social media with both facebook and youtube adopting it. With stories users blog their daily life without worrying about everyone seeing it or people looking at it more than once ect...It encourages users to check the site for live updates that they may miss if they decide to wait a week before logging back in. Users want to be able to make posts that only stay up for a day and self destruct, or that only select friends can see, when you give them this they will post more freely. It will also make your site look more complete by todays standards. 

I doubt many invision communities will develop a decent Club section most could be considered clubs themselves, its a really cool feature but more emphasis needs to be put on user interaction and post engagement, maybe a friend system. I run a few facebook groups and I know how notoriously hard it can be on facebook I can't imagine clubs working for too many communities infact most are bare with one or two clubs, its a wasted feature. We need user interaction, better status updates, we need to change the way we post, there is things we could be improving on that would help us even the playing field. 

+1 for Invision Stories 

 

Edited June 29, 2019 by FASEOFMARS

[tonyv]

On 6/29/2019 at 12:49 PM, FASEOFMARS said:

With stories users blog their daily life without worrying about everyone seeing it or people looking at it more than once ect...Users want to be able to make posts that only stay up for a day and self destruct...

Why??? What is the big deal with these dumbass stories disappearing?!? It's nonsensical.

 

On 6/29/2019 at 12:49 PM, FASEOFMARS said:

It will also make your site look more complete by todays standards.

These so-called standards to which you allude are crap. If I wanted to "blog about my daily life" I would do it right on my forum. If I wanted to make disappearing blog posts, I would go to one of those idiotic social media platforms and do that.

 

On 6/29/2019 at 12:49 PM, FASEOFMARS said:

clubs, its a wasted feature

I disagree.

 

On 6/29/2019 at 12:49 PM, FASEOFMARS said:

we need to change the way we post

No, we don't. Thankfully, forums are not childish chatsnap, nor should they be. 

 

 

[tonyv]

Going all out and posting a story. Now, only if I could get it to show only once for each user and self-destruct so I don't have to worry about it for more than one day.

 

[Time Travel Institute]

The Rules app will allow you to do what you're asking. Not everything needs to be baked in to the software, learn about the API and find unexpected ways to use available plugins.

[FASEOFMARS]

7 hours ago, tonyv said:

Why??? What is the big deal with these dumbass stories disappearing?!? It's nonsensical. 

 

It’s just like I said users will post more freely and recklessly. Something we don’t see on forums too much. It also can be used for other means of relaying messages you only want to show for a day. Like “heading out tonight if anyone wants to join me” or “any plumbers in the group just had a pipe bust” or “lovely day outside” stories are things you can expect to read relating to the current time or someone’s current situation or

even advertising. Their is tons of examples why users love it, I run a real life club and story posts have become more useful than Facebook groups. It may not make sense if your used to forums and making posts with a title ect but in the world of social media it makes alot of sense.

 

7 hours ago, tonyv said:

These so-called standards to which you allude are crap. If I wanted to "blog about my daily life" I would do it right on my forum. If I wanted to make disappearing blog posts, I would go to one of those idiotic social media platforms and do that.

 

Aload of crap to you mybe, not to the rest of the world as statistics show. Idiotic? Please don’t be ignorant we are clearly way behind. I don’t know about you but my member base does not spend their days in front of a computer screen or enjoy writing paragraphs for each post or adding a title. Or even uses forums. My goal is to create a platform that offers ease of use and can compete with social media. 

I did the forum thing over ten years ago when invision was back in beta. Times has changed.

7 hours ago, tonyv said:

I disagree.

 

No, we don't. Thankfully, forums are not childish chatsnap, nor should they be. 

 

Cool you disagree and do you have any examples of this feature being utilised on a large scale? It’s a wasted feature when you look at it in comparison to Facebook, one or two groups on a community makes the community look small. A whole feature just for one or two groups, sounds like a waste of space to me. 

We do have hopes of using this feature as we have lots of groups on board and inspire the creation of groups but whether they find it useful remains to be seen.

We need to evovle the way we post, if we want to make things like story post possible then there needs to be big upgrades to the what you see is what you get editor. Change is a good thing.

[Day_]

[Matt]

There's a few barriers here.

The technical: to allow 'stories' to be posted, you'll need a fair bit of storage for the videos, you'll also need a queued system to take in raw video and transcribe it into a more friendly and compressed format which is beyond the reach for most self-hosted sites.

The strategic. No one comes here to see what I'm up to. They come here for help with their Invision Communities, or they come here to post advice for others, or to learn how to manage their communities.

Forums are discussion led platforms. The discussion is the star.
Social media are people led platforms. The person is the star.

Allowing random members to upload stories about what they're doing and so on cross-circuits the purpose of a discussion led platform.

Social media is great at being social medial. Forums are great at being forums.

[tonyv]

8 minutes ago, Matt said:

Social media is great at being social medial. Forums are great at being forums.

Exactly. If you need social media you go to social media. If you need forums, well...that's why I'm here. It's like saying you think diesel is great. Well, it is, and it has its uses/fans. But you don't buy a gasser and say, let me turn this into a diesel, change the engine, rip out and replace the fuel system, etc. You just get a diesel if that's what you want/need. This kind of "change" is bad, impractical, at best. 

[FASEOFMARS]

To clarify further by stories I mean pictures with writing on them. Not necessarily videos, picture status updates. 

Everyone has different purposes for their community ours is to connect with friends. Everything is discussion based even Facebook groups. That sense of community does not come without discussion. 

Story posts would boost activity for us because I know members will be clicking on a new story post to read it rather than saying “I’ll log in tomorrow and read it” because it won’t be there tomorrow. It encourages frequent usage and there is a demand for it in this day and age. Forums are great at being forums and social media is great at killing forums.  

Mybe I am light years ahead we still have not got push notifications but you can’t blame me for putting the idea out there.

 

Edited July 1, 2019 by FASEOFMARS

[tonyv]

3 minutes ago, FASEOFMARS said:

... social media is great at killing forums ...

Another sound-byte cliche like "change is good." Only for people who want social media to begin with. There's nothing wrong with logging in tomorrow to read a post if that's when you have the time to do it. It's better than showing up now when you're out of time (like I am now) and half-assing it. 

[FASEOFMARS]

2 minutes ago, tonyv said:

Another sound-byte cliche like "change is good." Only for people who want social media to begin with. There's nothing wrong with logging in tomorrow to read a post if that's when you have the time to do it. It's better than showing up now when you're out of time (like I am now) and half-assing it. 

I didn’t say write I said read not everyone will feel the need to write a paragraph in response to a quick status. Your logic is backwards and only applies to a certain type of discussion. 

It is no secrete social media has been killing forums. Features like groups make communities look small in comparison. Stories is a popular feature that would help us take it back to the glory days. 

 

[tonyv]

3 minutes ago, FASEOFMARS said:

I didn’t say write I said read not everyone will feel the need to write a paragraph in response to a quick status. Your logic is backwards and only applies to a certain type of discussion. 

It is no secrete social media has been killing forums. Features like groups make communities look small in comparison. Stories is a popular feature that would help us take it back to the glory days. 

 

I believe you're being sincere, but I just don't agree. And that's okay. Forums are primarily for certain types of discussion (e.g.paragraph style posts) just like social media is primarily for certain types of discussion (e.g. broadcast messaging). From what I've read those groups are a timeline-driven mess. I wouldn't waste my time posting on them. 

[FASEOFMARS]

My forum is timeline driven. 

Your idea of discussion is different from my idea. Your being  stereotypical of posters. 

Facebook and social media has been changing how people like to post. This generation has different posting expectations than the generation 15 years ago.

 

[Matt]

12 minutes ago, FASEOFMARS said:

My forum is timeline driven. 

Your idea of discussion is different from my idea. Your being  stereotypical of posters. 

Facebook and social media has been changing how people like to post. This generation has different posting expectations than the generation 15 years ago.

 

I actually agree, and we have things we want to do to modernise the interfaces to encourage more contributions to the discussions. Insta-style stories don't fit into the framework of those ideas.

It's not a terrible idea, but it's something 90% of communities wouldn't use, just like status updates.

[Day_]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

Forums are discussion led platforms. The discussion is the star.
Social media are people led platforms. The person is the star.

Disagree, I’m the star on my forum.

My mum told me.

[opentype]

5 hours ago, FASEOFMARS said:

It is no secrete social media has been killing forums.

True, but does that mean we should try to copy social media or set ourselves apart? Always a tricky question. 

As Matt said, there is nothing wrong with the feature request, but the best path to get it is probably the 3rd-party path. Video uploads are already possible. It shouldn’t be hard for a developer you hire to create a plugin which does the auto delete after 24 hours and implement the display of the videos in whatever way you want it. 

[FASEOFMARS]

3 minutes ago, opentype said:

True, but does that mean we should try to copy social media or set ourselves apart? Always a tricky question. 

I think we have been copying social media in a way with user profiles and status updates. We are just limited to how we post and that’s why status updates are not used as much. When we improve that things like status and story posts will make more sense I suppose. 

[Joel R]

@FASEOFMARS This is the most interesting topic of the month because it brings up the larger question: what is Invision Community and what does it offer relative to other community software? 

Invision Community is a software that is fundamentally designed for community of content.  This means things like shared discussion, group blogging, group galleries, collaborative wikis. It requires design principles like permanence, organization, structure.  

What you want is a community designed for users.  This means user posts, user blogs, user albums.  It requires design principles like social connections, levels of privacy, and emotion.  

There are important, fundamental distinctions between the two.  Invision Community overlaps with both, but it's fundamentally designed for communities of content.  

I see you struggling with this answer, and I struggle with it too.  My personal community is social in nature, and I have users who treat it exactly like Facebook.  They almost exclusively post status updates.  Sometimes I worry that users don't know how to use forums anymore.  In the past week, I have had: 

- a user report a post, so he can reply back with a comment.  

- a user write his first topic in my Test Topics category, literally the worst and last board you could possibly choose out of a dozen other public boards.  

As the Community Advocate for IPS, I encourage every client to think very hard about evolving themselves into a community of content. You must pair your forums with definitive, valuable, and unique content.   You won't win if you try to stay as a social community of users.

[kmk]

Maybe we use the word "copy", but why not use Word "learning"? The "core" is how we can make our platform more powerful and easy to use? Thinking an idea or design from nothing??? Or maybe valid too learning features from others platforms.... All for improvements... We can change because the times has changed, obviously ensure changes for GOOD.. 

[Joy Rex]

Honestly, I wonder why people who use IPS are seemingly obsessed with emulating or trying to improve upon Facebook, etc. - to me, the biggest "threat" are sites like Reddit when it comes to IPS-driven sites.

[sobrenome]

With Google webstories the scenario is changing. Now stories will also be more used by Google to show content in search results.

And the most important tip on this new scenario is the first Google plugin for Wordpress for webstories.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-web-stories/373520/

I think that adding stories to Gallery app will make it very linked to the current social media state. WhatsApp has stories. YouTube has it. Why not IPS? IPS is a community. It’s content driven but also a place where the most participating people may want to get closer using stories. 

And now, stories will also be used for content, not only for personal stories but also for content stories. At least Google wants it.

So why not add this feature to Gallery app? It will make IPS much more complete allowing community to use stories for content and also for get users more closer to each other.

[Jordan Miller]

Love love love this idea. 

[RocketStang]

I don't think we need anything like 'Stories" in IPB, I still can't figure out what the Status Updates age good for!  My members seem to get confused and try to post regular posts in the status updates, they treat Blogs as regular posts instead of creating blog type posts...I'm sure stories would just be misused as well!  As a matter of fact, I wish there was a way to convert status updates and blog posts into regular threads, but that is a different topic!

I strongly believe that forums need to COMPETE with social media but NOT BECOME social media!

 

[Jordan Miller]

On 7/28/2020 at 9:47 AM, RocketStang said:

I don't think we need anything like 'Stories" in IPB, I still can't figure out what the Status Updates age good for!  My members seem to get confused and try to post regular posts in the status updates, they treat Blogs as regular posts instead of creating blog type posts...I'm sure stories would just be misused as well!  As a matter of fact, I wish there was a way to convert status updates and blog posts into regular threads, but that is a different topic!

I strongly believe that forums need to COMPETE with social media but NOT BECOME social media!

 

I think stories are pretty universally known at this point though. Status updates are kind of a thing of the past.

I bet if members had the ability to use a stories feature in IPB, it'd be pretty intuitive 🙂 

And it'd also encourage them to follow one another. 🙏