In Invision Community's October Release Live Webinar, we discuss a few key features included in the next platform update. 

@Charles showcases our new Events application which now features a visually stunning overview page. He also answers a few questions clients submitted to @Olivia Clark, including how to use the app for physical versus online events, what to do if your community doesn't offer many events and more.

We also talk about adding support for OpenSearch 2.1, adding application filters for new reports in the Moderator Control Panel's report center, as well as updating Graphql library to 14.11.6.

Do you have a question about the October 2022 release? Feel free to ask in this topic.

Did you miss the webinar? No worries. We uploaded the video session for you to watch:

 

 

 

It was great to see some familiar community ‘faces’ participating in our first, monthly release chat! ❤️

We are excited to share these questions and answers that were submitted to us both in advance of and during the webinar. Thank you for your participation! We are happy to dive into any of these questions and topics further - comment below!  🎉

 

Events Questions:

Question: What is the technology behind the map feature the shows the locations of the in person events?

A: (This was discussed in the webinar.)You can use either Google Maps or Map box via API. Those settings can be found in your AdminCP.

 

Question: Can we disable location specific event promotion?  (We don't have many events that occur in person.)

A: (This was shown in the webinar.) You can populate in-person and/or online events, whatever your community uses. We are currently just promoting online events if you want to check out ours as an example: https://invisioncommunity.com/events/

 

Question: For communities without a large number of events, the weekly/monthly views come across as bare.  Any thoughts to keeping the event view (list of all upcoming events regardless of date)?

A: (This was discussed in the webinar.) You could choose to hide the weekly/monthly views and let your users just use the new events overview. If there are only a few events as you get started, that’s ok! Your users will appreciate you showcasing what is available to them.

 

Question: Can you add integrations with other services?

A: (This was discussed in the webinar.) Yes, we see your requests to add Twitch, SpotMe, and Vimeo so we are looking into bringing those to you. You are welcome to share request for others as well.

 

Question: Are the events displayed in order of distance to the user?

A: (This was discussed in the webinar.) Yes, it will attempt to locate the user but you can manipulate it too. If you change the location, perhaps you are traveling, you can manipulate the map to show a different location and the events that are near that new location will show.

 

General October Release Questions:

Question: How does IPS plan to rollout the changes for moving from display name to email address?  Is there a way we could possibly setup a system that warns a user and allows them to use a display name for XX amount of times while telling them to use their email address (and reminder them what it is) going forward?

A: We are still planning the deprecation of this feature. You can read the communication in advance of that change in the release notes and Feature Deprecation topic when that plan is posted.

 

Question: With Facebook promotion feature being removed, what ways does the IPS team recommend using to help promote communities?

A: (This was discussed in the webinar.) We suggest leaning into Zapier and web hooks for promotions. Zapier and others that specialize in these areas have partnerships with platform like Facebook so leverage those for access verses having to apply yourself.

 

Question: Now that the IPS team has had a good amount of time working through monthly release cycles, have you found it has helped the development process?  Should we expect to continue seeing this cadence through 2023?

A: (This was discussed in the webinar.) We have been doing monthly releases for over a year and are happy to continue those. This brings new features, enhancements and fixes to you more often.

 

Question:The October release added support for OpenSearch 2.1.  Is there any recommendations or preferences for using it versus ElasticSearch?

A: (This was discussed in the webinar.) These are actually the same, and often used interchangeably.

Thanks for this informative video guys! I know a lot of the feedback you get from customers here (including myself sometimes!) is to have more of a view on what’s coming up with new features and roadmap items, so it is great to see that happening with these videos. Hope they become a regular feature!

I love the new Events front page, would this replace the current Calendar view at all? Also, my community tends to use the Calendar feature as more of a release date/anniversaries feature for certain products (games, comics, etc) so would those sorts of calendar events still be able to be presented in that Events homepage style? Or is it more designed for actual events (in-person or zoom call style)? I think it would make certain upcoming game anniversaries (ie. X Years Since Pac-Man Released) and livestream events look really cool!

I know other services like Twitch was mentioned in the Q&A (which is great because I’d love to see Twitch and YouTube Live be integrated into this), but would Discord also be a consideration? We have a Discord server and it would be awesome if we could integrate it with our IPB site so that any Events we post on the IPB would be automatically reflected in our Discord server (and maybe vice versa , but not necessarily).

Thanks for putting this video together!

11 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

I love the new Events front page, would this replace the current Calendar view at all?

Yes.  This basically reworks the existing calendar app.  

12 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

Also, my community tends to use the Calendar feature as more of a release date/anniversaries feature for certain products (games, comics, etc) so would those sorts of calendar events still be able to be presented in that Events homepage style? Or is it more designed for actual events (in-person or zoom call style)? I think it would make certain upcoming game anniversaries (ie. X Years Since Pac-Man Released) and livestream events look really cool!

When you create the event, you choose if it is in-person or virtual.  You can also make an event an all-day event without providing a link to a streaming event.  

IPS is doing this on this site with the days their offices are closed for holidays for example.  

🙂 

@Dreadknux Discord has already been added and Twitch is on the list to be added soon. 

Here is the list of the integrations that are currently available. 🙂

• Zoom
• YouTube
• EventBrite
• On24
• Facebook
• Google
• Webex
• Slack
• Discord
• Microsoft Teams

I would've loved to watch this live guys but due to the time difference I couldn't make it. Really good webinar and I can't wait to see more!

I just noticed a future event, Private Messages for 21 October 2022, has a start date and time in reverse. Not sure whether this is just on my end due to the time difference, but I thought I'd highlight it. Other events are displaying correctly though they don't start and finish on different days.

It is displaying in the same way on the Upcoming Events block.

Edited October 11, 20223 yr by Prosperous

I reported the event...  but this also seems like a bug where an event can be set to end before the start date/time.

Hello,

Can events in the calendar be user-group specific? I want to use the events, but I want to schedule different events for different user groups. 

Each user group has different privileges to discuss specific topics in my community. I cannot organize an event for everyone because those who do not belong to user group X will not understand what is being explained to other user groups with higher privileges.
Is that even a possibility? I can't see that.
Thanks

Edited October 12, 20223 yr by OptimusBain

On 10/11/2022 at 3:39 AM, Randy Calvert said:

I reported the event...  but this also seems like a bug where an event can be set to end before the start date/time.

It looks like that was actually just an issue with the item that was created. Fixed that 🙂 

 

1 hour ago, OptimusBain said:

Hello,

Can events in the calendar be user-group specific? I want to use the events, but I want to schedule different events for different user groups. 

Each user group has different privileges to discuss specific topics in my community. I cannot organize an event for everyone because those who do not belong to user group X will not understand what is being explained to other user groups with higher privileges.
Is that even a possibility? I can't see that.
Thanks

If I understand you correctly, can you got do this by creating multiple calendars? You can then apply permissions as you need to those calendars

Nice enhancement of Events! 

No good deed goes unpunished 🙂 In this peri-pandemic era many of our dog club events (primarily member, board, and committee meetings) are both in person *and* call-in.  Love to be able to list those events in both categories.

I have one site where the location-based search could become terrifically useful. On the regional dog club site our use case is probably an outlier; location-based searching for events is not terribly useful for us. Pretty much by definition our service area is the location for everything we promote. I'd probably disable or maybe trade the right-side location search block for a second (or scrolling, dream big) featured event block —  but that's just the one site 🙂  

Either if neither of those is feasible, still like the update. 👍

Edited October 12, 20223 yr by bradl

2 hours ago, bradl said:

No good deed goes unpunished 🙂 In this peri-pandemic era many of our dog club events (primarily member, board, and committee meetings) are both in person *and* call-in.  Love to be able to list those events in both categories.

Good point. We didn’t consider hybrid events 🙂 

9 hours ago, Charles said:

We didn’t consider hybrid events 🙂 

Therefore my feature suggestion 😉

 

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