Invision Community 5: Quickly find the most helpful answers

[Matt]

Forum platforms have a wide range of uses, from helping with support to sharing knowledge, ideation and social interaction.

Topics can span years, and once the initial explosion of replies has passed, the topic lives on in local search and search engines for future viewers to discover and get value from.

However, it's not always easy to get the best content from a very long topic.

You may have noticed that when you come to a topic seeking an answer, some replies are less than helpful.

How do I fix my Apple Watch? Like this!

It's common to find a lot of social content mixed in with useful replies. Jokes, GIFs and off-topic musings are all great while the topic develops organically in real-time. Having fun is critical to feeling a sense of belonging in a community. However, those coming to the topic a little later, say from a link Google has suggested, just want to get the useful content in the fastest way possible.

That's where 'helpful' voting comes in.

A very helpful reply

Invision Community can already mark a single post as the best solution for that topic. Still, not every topic gets a definitive answer, and some community strategies resist quickly marking a post as the best answer to encourage more discussion rather than effectively ending it.

Even when you have a definitive answer, there is often value in other highly rated posts offering more context, alternative solutions and more thorough explanations.

With Helpful voting, your members are encouraged to flag which posts they find helpful in the topic. When enough votes are added to a single post, they are suggested as a possible answer. You can also tune out the noise and view the most helpful replies only.

This is a powerful way to get the very best content from a topic in a short space of time.

Want to just view the most helpful replies? No problem.

If you eventually choose to mark a post as the definitive answer, the suggested post will be replaced with the answer you choose, but you can still see the posts voted as helpful to gain further context.

The helpful voting works independently from reactions, which tend to cluster around social content. Social media conditions us to add a like or funny reaction to content that gets an emotional response. Indeed, a lot of the most highly reacted content is funny content. Social reactions are valuable when building connections between community members but often don't reflect what is the most useful content.

The suggested most helpful post threshold is configuration via the Admin Control Panel.

Helping your members find the best content within topics helps them do more in your community with less time.

Forums continue to evolve, and while social content helps develop the community, content that solves problems and helps others is the rocket fuel you need to keep members and attract new audiences.

Helpful voting also feeds into picking Community Experts, a new feature for Invision Community 5, but we'll talk about that in a future blog.

A sneak peak at the new Community Expert badge

I hope you found this update ✨helpful✨, and if you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comments!

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[Meddysong]

Just jesting: this is a great idea!

[UncrownedGuard]

I really like this feature setup!  As an end-user on platforms like Reddit and those "Q&A sites", I always find myself seeing the best answer or most upvoted answer and still wanting a bit more information!  This seems like a great solution for that issue for my end users now.

P.S. I still hope articles are redone to look a bit nicer without 3rd party tools on a homepage.  I'll beat that dead horse all day here 😅  

[Mike G.]

The 'Helpful' option is one of the features of Invision Community 5 that I'm most looking forward to. I expect it to give a lot of communities a nice organic boost. I love the implementation. 🔥

Once again, great work!

[Joel R]

What happens when: 

- 2 or more posts with the same max number of helpful reactions? 

- no posts are marked as Most Helpful yet? 

How does that display in the Most Helpful comment box? 

How does all of this integrate with the Topic Summary? This is like a separate way of summarizing the topic.  

[Marc]

7 hours ago, Joel R said:

- 2 or more posts with the same max number of helpful reactions? 

The first to reach the threshhold is shown 

7 hours ago, Joel R said:

- no posts are marked as Most Helpful yet? 

No "most helpful" bar is shown at all.

8 hours ago, Joel R said:

How does all of this integrate with the Topic Summary? This is like a separate way of summarizing the topic.

Most helpful posts are shown in the topic summary sidebar🙂 

[Percival]

Will there be an option to show more than 1 helpful post or will this be possible in the topic summary only?

[Rikki]

Shout out to the video editor you've hired ( 😉 ) - the preview videos you're putting out for v5 have been really slick. Way better than those Canva-esque templated ones!

[sonimik1]

Good. As you can see, personally I don't like to publish anything, much less ask questions. But now I'm going to make one. When will we have at least an alpha of this version 5? Because apparently, or at least it seems to me, they should launch an alpha, right? I understand everything they are doing, because if we are going to wait so long, in the end they are going to release an alpha when xenforo releases its final version 2.3

[Adriano Faria]

10 hours ago, sonimik1 said:

When will we have at least an alpha of this version 5?

 

[Joel R]

While this post has received far less the reactions than the prior feature announcements on theming, this post is far more consequential to the future of our communities and a vision of the future. It speaks to an evolving shift in strategy and purpose behind our online communities. 

IPS talks about the value of social conversation, where users use humor and are rewarded with Reactions.  But for users who want to cut out the social conversation and jump directly to informative and insightful answers, users can use Helpful and Best Answer signals. 

IPS has been building upon these signals of expertise, authority, and solutions for many years now. The future is clear: independent communities cannot solely rely upon social conversation, when larger and better platforms ( Reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc) can host social conversations infinitely better. Pivoting into an authority site that provides support and solutions might help you survive. 

For more analysis along with some easter eggs, check out my deep dive: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/topic/371-deep-dive-into-ips-quickly-find-the-most-helpful-answers/

[Robert Angle]

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

For more analysis along with some easter eggs, check out my deep dive: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/topic/371-deep-dive-into-ips-quickly-find-the-most-helpful-answers/

You do not have permission to view this topic.

[Matt]

5 hours ago, Joel R said:

IPS has been building upon these signals of expertise, authority, and solutions for many years now. The future is clear: independent communities cannot solely rely upon social conversation, when larger and better platforms ( Reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc) can host social conversations infinitely better. Pivoting into an authority site that provides support and solutions might help you survive. 

At a fundamental root, every activity we partake in begins with the desire to add value to our lives. Mastering a second language or instrument takes a lot of time but the value is adding ability or knowledge.

We join communities to add value. It might be making friends all over the world who love running when you don't have much support for that activity in your 'real-life' friends, or it might be finding the best ways to use a piece of software you love.

Back in the 2000s forum communities were founded to bring people together over a shared interest forming small villages in a landscape of rolling hills and pasture. Forums were really successful because they were peerless. If you had an interest in ABBA, opening up a forum about ABBA gave people a space to talk about Swedish 70s pop and take deep dives in platform shoes and crumbling marriages. They gave an outlet for a passion that your friends in the pub had no interest in. Other's in similar situations would flock to this site, delighted with a space to talk about their disco obsession. As the community owner, you didn't need to try too hard, it was all Gimme, gimme, gimme!

20 odd years later and we have crowded mega-cities of non-stop conversation about every topic you want to know, and many you don't. Social media is better designed for informal conversations and finding like-minded people due to its huge reach and focus on personalities over topic.

Forums still very much have a place but they need to provide immediate value to keep and grow membership. That doesn't mean social forums will fail, there are many good examples of them but it means for a new community there needs to be a strong reason to visit and once you have a visitor, you need to give them what they want as quickly as possible. We're all time-poor on the internet with so many apps and dopamine hits to have.

You can build a social community around a support community, or a community that is designed to solve a problem later.

Content may be king, but value is definitely (the dancing) queen. Get those both right, and the winner takes it all.

[Joel R]

14 hours ago, Robert Angle said:

You do not have permission to view this topic.

I had the topic queued to publish this morning.  It should be available today. 

[The Old Man]

I like this feature, well thought out and presented well.

Re:

15 hours ago, Joel R said:

I had the topic queued to publish this morning.  It should be available today. 

and

On 10/30/2023 at 6:22 AM, Robert Angle said:

You do not have permission to view this topic.

Hi @Matt Looks like the way that IPS shows that error message to vistors (for queued content that is still currently unpublished) could be improved with a more friendly and meaningul error.

Edited October 31, 2023 by The Old Man

[My Sharona]

1 hour ago, The Old Man said:

Hi @Matt Looks like the way that IPS shows that error message to vistors (for queued content that is still currently unpublished) could be improved with a more friendly and meaningul error.

Being unpublished, visitors normally wouldn't see that message. They would have to have the specific url in order to get it.

Edited October 31, 2023 by My Sharona

[The Old Man]

Ah, of course, thanks for pointing that out. I had in mind it was a placeholder of some kind, having not tried the feature.