Invision Community 5: Tagging Reinvented

[Matt]

Invision Community v5 takes a fresh approach to tagging and content discovery. It overhauls the concept to bring content across different sections together with a beautiful new tag page.

Tagging is a powerful concept but underused with Invision Community 4 due to overly complex interfaces in different areas of the suite, a confusing open tagging model option and no real benefit in content discovery beyond a simple list of content items.

A driving force behind Invision Community 5 is the question of how we can help time-pressured community members find the content that most interests them.

Invision Community has robust taxonomy through forum and category structures, but what about content in less visible areas such as Blogs, galleries or Events? How can we bring those together to homogenise the type of content and focus on the content itself?

Taxonomy via tagging across all applications in the community suite is the answer. However, we needed to re-approach how tagging was implemented in the Invision Community to bring our new vision to life.

Out with the old
The current tagging system is implemented loosely, allowing open tagging, which is more akin to hashtags than high-level taxonomy. Allowing forums, albums, and blog categories to define their own tags turns tagging into more of a status label, which does nothing to help bring disparate content together.

In with the new
With a new focus on taxonomy and content discovery, we set about rebuilding tagging for Invision Community 5. The UI to tag items is the same, but now each defined, globally available tag has its own page with cover image and ability to feature items within that tag page.

A uniform approach to different content items in the UI breaks down the barrier between content types and focuses solely on the content.

Tags featured on its page are automatically displayed on the community Featured Content page.

Finally, tags can now be followed, allowing your community to get a daily or weekly digest of all new tagged items, bringing people back to read more of the content they love.

Let’s take a closer look
In Invision Community 5, all tags are defined in the Admin Control Panel. The ability to use open tagging and per-node tags has been removed, but don’t worry—the upgrade system will offer conversion for those tags.

Once defined, the tags are available for all content types and feature on a dedicated new tag page. This page features cover photos and more information on the tag via a description.

Content from across your suite will be displayed on this page. If a single piece of content has multiple tags, it will appear on every relevant tag page making it easy to have content in multiple areas.

If you want to permanently or temporarily feature individual content, perhaps your latest news or product release, you can do so right from the tag page. Featured content will show on the community’s Featured Content Page.

 

Blurring the lines

Now that we have an attractive and focused page for each tag, we can start to blur the lines between applications and, indeed, forums and categories, offering a new way to organise content.

For some communities, the need for multiple forums to categorise content is diminished, and instead, tagging can be used to separate and find content from across the community.

Tags can be featured in the menu system, offering new ways into your community for new visitors, regular community members, and even those who visit daily.

Invision Community 5 is fearless in challenging past decisions or streamlining features to make them stronger and more focused. Our new approach to tagging takes a vague and underutilised concept and pushes it front and centre in any content strategy.

How will you use it in your community?

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[princeton]

ABSOLUTELY AMAZING!

I would pay double for this feature. I can't wait.

Edited June 6 by princeton

[Matt]

6 minutes ago, princeton said:

I would pay double for this feature. I can't wait.

Added a note on your account, thanks! 😂

[SoloInter]

MAMAMIA MY DREAM COME TRUE. 

 🤩😍 🤩😍 🤩😍 🤩😍 🤩😍 🤩😍

We tagged ALL our content since many years now. For people, subject, facts, for everything (articles, blog, database, forums, images, videos, ...). 

We have been looking for something powerful like that. THANKS ! 

Edited June 6 by SoloInter

[All Astronauts]

If anyone thought the alpha folks were keeping their lips shut about this I can state unequivocally we have not.

IPS kept this way close to the vest and none of us in the preview even knew this was what the tags changes were going to be, we just knew that tags were going to "change". This is not in the alpha yet, nor was it even hinted at.

I can state with some vague authority that this, treating tags as pseudo-content items to up discoverability and presentation of content has to be one of the best ideas I've seen in the CMS/Forums/Community space in years.

If you were waiting for something to differentiate V5 from just being V4 re-engineered, this is it.

Edited June 6 by All Astronauts

[Randy Calvert]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

Finally, tags can now be followed, allowing your community to get a daily or weekly digest of all new tagged items, bringing people back to read more of the content they love.

Would it be possible to choose to receive on-site notifications as well (aka "the bell")?  This looks really interesting and is going to challenge me to think about how I organize content now.  I can absolutely see potentially consolidating a few forums...  I can also see being able to have a page that has images, files, and topics on a single subject as being a great way to start building documentation, etc.  

[Dreadknux]

Me, having used the alpha V5 site for a while, upon seeing the topic be about tags...

Me, after having read Matt's post...

This sounds really cool - a fantastic way to revitalise both the tagging system and content discovery across the platform. In my community, I did try to let users tag things themselves, but they often didn't bother and it was usually left to mods/staff - so I am not mourning the lack of open tags going forward...

But this new cross-functional tagging system, coupled with the Featured Content page, sounds like it will be a godsend for my community. Oftentimes community members will post news in the forum before our 'official news staff' get round to writing about it, so being able to tag the forum post as 'news' and guaranteeing it will sit in the same "news" space as our 'official' news articles is something I've been dreaming about!

The only piece of the puzzle missing for me in that regard is how well this feature will pair with the CMS/Pages "Copy to Database" system, which my 'official news team' uses a lot (both in terms of avoiding duplicate records appearing in the tag page, making sure linked Page/Topics are unified in search results, and ensuring Topic OPs are kept visible when converted while still prioritising any Page content as the 'canonical content').

I had a couple questions regarding the tag pages and featured content section:

1. What determines the posts that appear at the very top of the Featured Content page (the top three items)? Is it the most recent 'Featured' posts across any/all tags?
2. Can we decide which tags can be included on the Featured Content page, or is it automated?
3. Regarding the URL, are we able to set alternative FURLs for certain tag pages (for example, I might want the news tag page to be our site's actual news homepage, so it would be better to have the URL for this as www.site.com/news rather than www.site.com/tags/news)?
4. I hate to ask this but needs must... what are the opportunities for ad placements on the Featured Content/tags page? Will there be ad blocks we can use for the post grid, or will be only be able to place ads above/below certain sections/areas?

Thanks so much for another amazing feature update. Really surprised me with this one. 🙂

BTW, it looks like I'll be setting a calendar alert for the 21st June then... 😉

[Claudia999]

Finnally, finally, finally

[Mike G.]

I expected some improvements, but I was cautiously optimistic about how much of an improvement it could be.

This massively exceeds my expectations and it's that bridge that will really help unify everything - which has been my biggest challenge to figure out. 

Thank you. 

P.S. Even more impressive is how the team is able to not talk about it in advance.

[Joel R]

Some thoughts: 

- This really is a bold vision. This isn't some copycat, incremental change to a feature.  This is a vision statement by IPS to challenge us, as community admins: What are your core competencies and major topics of discussios, how are you identifying them, how are you organizing them, how are you presenting them, how are you leveraging the suite of apps around those competencies? 

This is interesting in the sense that there's yet another new way of presenting content.  There's Our Pages for featured content, there's this new Tagging for tagged content, there's Leaderboard for popular content, there's Activity Streams for recent content,  and there's the traditional navigation.  

- This approach is very top down, which poses significant pros and cons. The beauty of the open tagging system was that, quite frankly, it required no administration on my end.  You want to mistype a tag? Go ahead.  You want to create a new tag? Go ahead.  As an admin, I now have the opportunity - and more candidly, the burden - to maintain, update, and cleanse a master list of tags. This brings up questions like: what is the threshold for when a topic is popular enough to deserve a tag? Who is going to maintain and update the tag among my staff (with ACP security access)? How am I going to publish and promulgate a new tag to inform users? Who is going to consistently monitor content to ensure content is tagged and tagged properly? How do I backtag content if I introduce a new tag? Should a tag's relevancy or usefulness ever go away, and what would I do then? None of these are necessarily new questions, but a closed end universal system sharpens all of these questions for the community admin.  

- For existing sites, we will be particularly challenged in trying to adopt this new vision. We are not equipped to update our existing content at scale: tools to batch add tags to certain sections, remove tags, batch edit / rename / merge tags, etc. 

 

My first impression is that vision seems impressive and amazing.  But it requires more upfront strategy, more upfront thought, and more ongoing work.  And this new system only works if the execution is there.  

Edited June 6 by Joel R

[Adriano Faria]

20 minutes ago, Joel R said:

- For existing sites, we will be particularly challenged in trying to adopt this new vision. We are not equipped to update our existing content at scale: tools to batch add tags to certain sections, remove tags, batch edit / rename / merge tags, etc. 

I would add the ability to set my own order of tags (in the content item) if I don't want to order them alphabetically. I was also hoping for multiple prefixes, colors, etc.

Edited June 6 by Adriano Faria

[David N.]

This new tagging feature looks really amazing. It looks to be everything I wanted, and even more! 🙂 I really look forward to experimenting with it. 

My community uses tags intensively and has hundreds of tags though, so that members can easily find threads related to a specific topic.

Is there a way to handle that in the +Add Tags pop-up menu? Can I search for the tag I want to add? Ideally, I would start typing the first few letters of the tag I want and only tags starting with those letters would show up, just like it's working now in v4? 

Also I would really love the capability to merge tags. 

Edited June 6 by David N.

[SoloInter]

26 minutes ago, Joel R said:

 

- For existing sites, we will be particularly challenged in trying to adopt this new vision. We are not equipped to update our existing content at scale: tools to batch add tags to certain sections, remove tags, batch edit / rename / merge tags, etc. 

It depend. We use a lot this tags system and we have set up all of this since the beggining thinking one day we will use it exactly like IC just presented. We have hundreds of tags, maybe thousand. All added with sense. It’s just a masterclass again what they have done here. 

[Matt]

3 hours ago, Dreadknux said:

I had a couple questions regarding the tag pages and featured content section:

1. What determines the posts that appear at the very top of the Featured Content page (the top three items)? Is it the most recent 'Featured' posts across any/all tags?
2. Can we decide which tags can be included on the Featured Content page, or is it automated?
3. Regarding the URL, are we able to set alternative FURLs for certain tag pages (for example, I might want the news tag page to be our site's actual news homepage, so it would be better to have the URL for this as www.site.com/news rather than www.site.com/tags/news)?
4. I hate to ask this but needs must... what are the opportunities for ad placements on the Featured Content/tags page? Will there be ad blocks we can use for the post grid, or will be only be able to place ads above/below certain sections/areas?

1) The top three items are from the normal "Featured Content". Oh, actually, we haven't spoken about that much have we. So we merged "featured" and "Our picks" into one thing. The old "feature" didn't really do much apart from allow you to filter in a widget and show a featured block above the content. This new page is much simplified.

You can still feature replies and show the post at the top of the topic as you can now. I should probably do a blog on all the other stuff we did but haven't spoken about. 🫠

2) Right now, all tags but I think it would be nice to have a toggle in the AdminCP form to determine this.

3) Yeah, nice idea. We'd need to be careful with Pages collisions.

3) Um. We can add a bunch of hook points ads can use on that page.

1 hour ago, Joel R said:

This really is a bold vision. This isn't some copycat, incremental change to a feature.  This is a vision statement by IPS to challenge us, as community admins: What are your core competencies and major topics of discussios, how are you identifying them, how are you organizing them, how are you presenting them, how are you leveraging the suite of apps around those competencies? 

Absolutely. It offers another way to categorise content across all apps within the suite which was the primary point - we wanted a way to bring all that content into one place and have it all look universal.

It will require some thought and it works best with fewer tags, not more. If you have 100+ tags then it's not as effective. Ideally you want broad tags rather than narrow tags.

46 minutes ago, David N. said:

My community uses tags intensively and has hundreds of tags though, so that members can easily find threads related to a specific topic.

Is there a way to handle that in the +Add Tags pop-up menu? Can I search for the tag I want to add? Ideally, I would start typing the first few letters of the tag I want and only tags starting with those letters would show up, just like it's working now in v4? 

It uses the standard autocomplete form widget which will offer a search box if there's more than N items (can't recall offhand what that is)

46 minutes ago, David N. said:

Also I would really love the capability to merge tags. 

I think we will need to add some bulk tag management in some form. Right @Esther E.? 😅

4 hours ago, All Astronauts said:

IPS kept this way close to the vest and none of us in the preview even knew this was what the tags changes were going to be, we just knew that tags were going to "change". This is not in the alpha yet, nor was it even hinted at.

It still lives in another branch. I'll be updating the alpha site soon.

[Claudia999]

It would be nice if tag pages could be indexable for Google and Co. Or if we had the option to choose whether they are indexable or not.

[David N.]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

It uses the standard autocomplete form widget which will offer a search box if there's more than N items (can't recall offhand what that is)

Music to my ears. Thank you!!

[Esther E.]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

I think we will need to add some bulk tag management in some form. Right @Esther E.? 😅

Dude, it's already done.

(No, it's not, but if I say it's done then I just make myself more awesome.)

[Michael R]

Can't wait!

[AlexJ]

Is their an option to control prefixes? I am sorry but having 100 prefixes and wrong prefix especially, is not value added. 

My strategy is always open ended tags but controlled prefixes. So current changes on tag is welcome addition.

Also as someone mentioned in topic: Thoughts on bulk maintaince and color code for each prefix? 

Will you be supporting Ryan's tagging system? OR I think Makito owns that now? Thanks

Edited June 6 by AlexJ

[Kirill Gromov]

If I have 60 thousand tags now, what will I get after updating?

[Matt]

14 minutes ago, Kirill Gromov said:

If I have 60 thousand tags now, what will I get after updating?

A lot of decisions to make. Why do you have 60,000 tags? How do they benefit your community?

[shahed]

Very well done Invision. great work as always. 👍

I have two question and not sure if it answered here:

1. Is it possible to have all existing tags to be manage in there? system list all used tags on that page or it must be added manually?
2. Is it possible to limit usage of tags on specific apps? or specific areas? I really hoped we see a feature in v5 for every apps or every node, across community to define different tags for them.

[Kirill Gromov]

30 minutes ago, Matt said:

A lot of decisions to make. Why do you have 60,000 tags? How do they benefit your community?

they have accumulated over a long period of time
almost all of them are of course useless

[Sonya*]

Love it!

 

[Matt]

1 hour ago, shahed said:

• Is it possible to have all existing tags to be manage in there? system list all used tags on that page or it must be added manually?
• Is it possible to limit usage of tags on specific apps? or specific areas? I really hoped we see a feature in v5 for every apps or every node, across community to define different tags for them.

1) Each tag must be created in the AdminCP (Content Discovery > Tags). It's a bit like the current "closed" system where you have to add the tags manually if you want your community to use them.

2) No, this was a strong part in the new system; if it is going to work, it must be universal. To start omitting tags from some apps, some forums, etc weakens the entire system. This is a way to bring content across your community into one place. If you need tags like status labels (open, fixed, etc) then I would recommend a Pages database and custom fields. 

Think of it like organising your house. You have a lot of things that can be hard to find (I know I had a charging cable here somewhere...) so you buy 10 large plastic crates and organise everything into those boxes (electronics, clothes, toys, cables, etc). You label each crate and it's now easy to find what you want. Need a charging cable? Open the cables box. Need to find your Gameboy (it's 1999 in my head) then go to the electronics box. It's easy.

If you then added a bunch of rules on top (blue cables can't go into any box, orange toys can't go into the toy box) then you break that simple and strong organisation.

Likewise, if you chose instead to buy 500 small lunchbox sized boxes and put one item in each, then you have changed nothing, objects are still impossible to find and are not in the same place.