Hump Day: A magic wand to create a new feature?

[Matt]

If you had a magic wand to create a new feature or functionality within Invision Community, what would it be?

I'm especially interested in your thoughts for features or improvements to the discussion engine (aka forums), workflows around that such as moderation, reporting content and members, issuing warnings, etc.

 

Here's a list of updates and fixes from our developers made in the last 7 days:

Quote

- Fixed the birthday output on the day view page.
- Fixed an issue where the cms records widget settings form would throw an exception when error reporting was enabled.
- Fixed an issue where deleting an item would return an error when the item had no valid URL.
- Fixed an issue where the record listing table would show the total count of items in the category + all it's child categories as total item count.
- Removed disabled applications webhook references.
- Fixed the comment_deleted webhook which wasn't fired.
- Fixed minor issue where the Upgrade AdminCP notification could throw an uncaught Error if the latest version request failed. 
- Fixed an issue using PayPal via Braintree.
 - Fixed an issue display Braintree transactions in the AdminCP that had been processed by GooglePay.
- Added a setting to control the successful webhook log duration.
- Fixed an issue where registering via Commerce may not log acceptance of terms and conditions.
- Fixed a potential database error when viewing followed images.
- Fixed an issue where communities which were installed inside a directory where submitting an invalid keyLocation parameter to IndexNow .
- Removed the FX country code for france.
- Fixed an issue search results could show an error under some circumstances.
- Fixed an issue in the achievements member filter, where the "any" option would result in no matches.
- Fixed social logins bypassing purchasing a product or subscription when it is required on registration.
- Updated the default robots.txt instructions to further reduce crawl wastage.
- Added support for m4a audio files.
- Fixed an issue where paying with account credit can leave a pending amount less than minimum amount processable via Stripe.
- Fixed an issue where the activity stream widget would show the wrong event date as result.
- The rank progress in the mobile navigation panel will no longer overlap navigation links.
- Updated Spectrum, a color picker library to the latest release version.
- Fixed an issue where DailyMotion short URLs would not embed.
- Fixed an issue where grace periods were not correctly added when manually invoicing from the admin control panel.
- Fixed an issue where "All / None" links were shown under the Followed Content section of notification options incorrectly.

[Adriano Faria]

A way to display similar content when creating content, like this:

It would avoid duplicate content as the user would click in of these links to read the content and probably find what he's looking for.

[opentype]

56 minutes ago, Matt said:

workflows around that such as moderation, reporting content and members

Discourse trust levels to automagically moderate content and lift restrictions over time. 

https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/

[nodle]

I think the main focus of Invision should be on Forums, I mean that is why we are all here in the first place isn't it? The extras are always nice Clubs, Pages, Ecommerce etc. These are nice and all for extras, but the root of the whole experience is forums. There are a lot of add-ons that could be worked into the forum root like @Adriano Faria posted above. There are some quality-of-life experiences that I feel are missing from the forum experience that should be built in from the beginning. 

1. Tag editor (it would be nice to have a page built into the ACP where you can view all the tags added, modify, and delete these).
2. Updates to email such as the Drip campaign add-on. There should be a built-in system that notices if a user hasn't visited in a while and sends them an email showing them what they have been missing. Sometimes people just get busy and forget to come this, this would help pull back users to your forum. 
3. Widgets! We all love widgets; it would be nice to see more added. Invision has a genuinely nice drop in place system for these that the competitors can't touch. Expand on these 
4. Keep the monthly updates coming. One of my favorite things about switching back over. I love seeing new updates coming. (Maybe I am a nerd 🤓) A. It makes me feel like the devs are working for your money and you're getting something of value. B. It's nice having things patched in a timely manner and not having to wait months or years. C. I love when you guys introduce new features, again like A. This makes you feel like you are getting something of value and the software is not going stagnant. 

These are just a couple that come to the top of my head that can really add value to the whole forum experience and are standard built into the competitors forum software. Owners' engagement on this forum is also a plus. It's nice to see post from @Jordan Miller since switching back over here he brings life into the forums. Anyways, these are some of my suggestions. 

 

[Dll]

17 minutes ago, opentype said:

Discourse trust levels to automagically moderate content and lift restrictions over time. 

https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/

@Adriano Faria has made an excellent plug-in which goes some way to creating that.

 

[Chris Anderson]

IT's hard to know the overall value of any particular thread.  Just because it has lots of comments and some posts have some likes it's hard to gauge its overall value.

Having a visual que that a topic has an overall positive value would be helpful (like a Rotten Tomatoes score for movies), this might be thought of as a sentiment score.  Does each new contribution increase the sentiment score or not?  This might be attained by helping to keep the conversation on point and bringing useful insights and knowledge into play

Instead of "liking" a post you might instead acknowledge the value that post brings to the conversation and community as a whole.  Maybe this type of "liking" wouldn't' be publicly viewable but is tracked to determine an overall sentiment score. 

Is it worth my time to read through the comments and participate further or should I ignore it and skip onto the next forum topic?  It's really hard to know for sure. Sometimes a topic for discussion will have multiple instances being commented upon at the same time.  Which one do you participate in, well if one has a higher sentiment score that might be the better one to participate in.

Tracking member likes has value, but there might be even more value in tracking their contributions to topic sentiment scores.  The more they contribute and get acknowledged for their contributions the higher their score becomes.

The score could reset on a yearly basis. This would encourage people to keep returning on a continuous basis so that they can continuedly be seen as a valuable contributor to the site.

 

 

 

 

[nodle]

Guess I should had read a little bit lower about the moderation part. I just read the top...

If you had a magic wand to create a new feature or functionality within Invision Community, what would it be?

Sorry guys! 

[DawPi]

Multimoderation from search results.

[sound]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

If you had a magic wand to create a new feature or functionality within Invision Community, what would it be?

I'm especially interested in your thoughts for features or improvements to the discussion engine (aka forums), workflows around that such as moderation, reporting content and members, issuing warnings, etc.

@Matt

were you aware of Sphere's Zen Flow, don't think it ever seen much use as  they ended up been bought up by twitter

a similar addition to the activity feeds where members can dismiss topics that they are not interested in may be useful

 

concept below, bits could be extracted and fit in with invision activity feeds

Quote

 

With Zen Flow:

Each new topic gets its own dedicated chat card, making each conversation easy to follow, and helping your group feel confident starting new chats without disrupting other ones. No more messy megachats! 🙌

 

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These chat cards will expire after 24 hours of there being no activity in that particular conversation, so they don’t clutter the flow. But, your members can reactivate them from the All Chats page.

 

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If you aren’t interested in that conversation at all, you can hide it from your feed, by tapping the context menu for each card. Less is more, after all, and this is YOUR space. Want to bring it back? You can do that from the All Chats page.

 

Quote

Events show as a unique, styled card within Zen Flow, with simple action buttons to choose whether you’re attending or not. Once you’ve RSVP’d, the Event Card displays the chat related to the event, but with the event details there too making it easy to plan timing, lifts, themes, or anything related to your event!

 

 

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You might think of Zen Flow as like a feed, in the sense that it doesn’t replace your list of chats, but it’s a layer that lives above them for better interaction, relevance, and organisation

more on zen flow here

https://blog.sphere.me/zen-flow-appreciations-and-more-upgrade-your-group-chat-with-a-whole-new-way-of-using-sphere-9d03ae71f94

Edited March 16, 2022 by sound

[Ocean West]

• Grid View better layout more like Our Picks (no truncating forums names)
• Activity Stream show content with out replies (ability to ignore some forums, pinned topics)
• Ability to grant permission to a person (or group) to manage set of their forums. (like clubs but in the main forums)
• Notification queuing so that if an action is required and admin / mod takes action it suspend sending notifications to others since it's been taken care of.
• Ability to sell advertisement placement in email more exposure to advertisers.
• Granular pessimistic security around web hooks.
• Standard JSON object for web hooks payload.
• Better control to thwart / prevent spammer registrations.
• ACP ability to have dynamic columns to choose from to see in list form (members) 

[Sonya*]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

improvements to the discussion engine

• Bypass modal window with forum choice if there is only one forum the user is allowed to post in. 
• Correct the bug with fluid and expanded view.
• Allow users to subscribe to tags and fire a notification if something is posted with the tag
• Show topics without read permissions in the fluid view

2 hours ago, Matt said:

reporting content and members

Allow guests to report content providing e-mail and add a spam protection to it.

 

 

[Jordan Miller]

Love, love, love this! @Matt, hope you don't mind I made this this week's Hump Day post. 🐫 

Looking forward to hearing everyone weigh in. 

[Jordan Miller]

3 hours ago, nodle said:

• Updates to email such as the Drip campaign add-on. There should be a built-in system that notices if a user hasn't visited in a while and sends them an email showing them what they have been missing. Sometimes people just get busy and forget to come this, this would help pull back users to your forum. 

I think the drip campaign idea is pretty nifty. 

 

Quote

• Widgets! We all love widgets; it would be nice to see more added. Invision has a genuinely nice drop in place system for these that the competitors can't touch. Expand on these 

Love our drag and drop feature. Could be cool to expand on this yes. 👌 

 

Quote

Keep the monthly updates coming.

💯 💜 

[sudo]

Automated search monitoring so a user can configure a stream with certain forums and search term and if any posts are created they get emailed out as a digest to help draw them in, or at least a search term AS with rss feed.

[Dean_]

Has the last topic, and its views been taken into consideration, hence this topic? I hope so. As the backlash was quite apparent.

Is there a way, where we could upvote potential new features that you guys are working on, or hope to be working on in the future?

Or, can we vote and say, we don't want any new features, but please work on the rest of the suite. We keep going on about Commerce, Pages, Blogs, etc. I'd love it, if they were brought up to 2022 and made to feel modern.

 

[marklcfc]

Not all new features but needed, as I suggest every time a topic like this appears.

Night mode button.

Ask certain members to revalidate their email. (bounced email occasions)

Merge old member title with new rank system, so the ranks title becomes editable after # of posts, and place that title under the username. 

Edited March 16, 2022 by marklcfc

[LiquidFractal]

7 hours ago, Matt said:

If you had a magic wand to create a new feature or functionality within Invision Community, what would it be?

I know you're especially interested in new features for existing functionality, but in terms of new features within the suite itself?  IP.Points:

• create customisable points economies (banks, "account," "credit") etc.
• integrate points with different apps: e.g., you can earn points when uploading content, posting in (specific) forums, prizes, quizzes, etc.; points or credit packages can be purchased in Store
• integrate with rules: email/PM member when they're low/out of points, they've been awarded points, etc.

You get the idea.

[AlexWebsites]

Talking about workflow, I would just be happy if this one feature introduced in 4.6.2 actually worked. I know its more involved, but what a nice idea to draw people back if you are moderating/approving content.

As for new features? There are a bunch of suggestions that are awesome. Below are a few more.

• Promote to linkedin, is this possible? 
• Is there any type of FB groups integration even possible? Cross content posting?
• Add Forum Index data-pagecontroller for each view, for CSS styling per forum view
• Edit Content within Moderator Approval Queue
• Imports via RSS to build content - RSS Import - add tags and RSS Enclosure Tag Other File Types like audio/mpeg
• Support more sources of podcasts as player url embeds and RSS import with embedding the actual players within posts from enclosure and other tags.

 

[Sonya*]

19 hours ago, Jordan Miller said:

Love our drag and drop feature.

I love it too, but I wish we could get more areas to drop. And we could mix one-column, two-columns, three-columns on one page.

• Add widgets below the title (between the header and main content)
• Add full width widgets (above and below main content, including sidebar)
• Add widgets in two columns side by side, e.g. hot topics and new topics in two columns above or below the forum index.

[Matt]

I'm always interested in what you'd add if you had control of the roadmap. Let's try not to move this into a debate over how feedback is managed.

I'm reading every comment, and there's already a good number of items that I've thought about adding so just reading these suggestions helps validate those ideas and allows me a useful insight into what you'd like based on running your communities.

I also read the last topic and took away notes.

Development can be slow, we have our pipeline mostly filled until summer so it while it may appear that not much is going on, be assured that lots of things are.

We are continuing with the monthly releases. Every month we deliver a new update with dozens of bug fixes and feature tweaks/additions. I like this cadence as it makes each release smaller and more manageable.

[Edjazoli]

WEBP, SVG

Joined solution option, bulk reaction for administration,  "topic posting time/choosing date and time for topic to be active ( sometimes we want to write something at night but prefer post is next day etc)

Integration with resizing engine..eg TinyPng etc....

Fully translatable Announcements... Im talking about the text input...who's with me!!??

 

More control over ads, ability to show adverts after post numbers, currently we can only select after the first post.

[Square Wheels]

Reply by email

Search autocomplete / find as you type

 

[Donnie95]

• Update the Status Update feature for a Stories mode similar to Instagram. (Better for quick sharing videos, pics, text.)
• I would also add swiping support for the Lightbox.
• Update the font Awesome Icons.
• Add Hcaptcha by default.

 

[kmk]

More advanced permissions for clubs, let us build mini groups that let them handle public and private contents. 

1. Example:

A forum exclusive for clubs moderators or leaders

A forum exclusive for club members 

A public forum for members and not members. 

2. One of the weakness of the forum is all topic need to be assigned a title, that format just not convenient to motivate people to develop conversation with more freely. 

Why not made Status Update available for clubs? With that we can create a type of public comments for each clubs. Then let us 📍 EXCELLENT comments for a determined time period. (you have a good point comment, I pin it for 10 days because I guest that 10 days we will still talking about it. That same mechanism we can apply for announcements purpose....for populate some public topic purpose... 

3. Enclose commands buttons in a tool button 🔳 

Enclose the repeated title and description in an ABOUT button, because each time we go to that page is  for the read content purpose, not read again and again first the same title and same description. Leave it as an pop up modal so who really want to read that ABOUT information go to Click on that button. After that when we open the club (for mobile case) we can see contents from the first view. By now each time open the page we need to scrolling to find (again) page content or topic content that is the focus. 

Edited April 16, 2022 by kmk

[My Sharona]

On 3/17/2022 at 10:27 AM, Edjazoli said:

 

WEBP, SVG

Joined solution option, bulk reaction for administration,  "topic posting time/choosing date and time for topic to be active ( sometimes we want to write something at night but prefer post is next day etc)

Integration with resizing engine..eg TinyPng etc....

Fully translatable Announcements... Im talking about the text input...who's with me!!??

 

More control over ads, ability to show adverts after post numbers, currently we can only select after the first post.

All of this and more Zapier triggers.