Hi!

Does community experts feature work in self hosted forums?

I dont find how to set this up. Where's that?

Cheers

Ibai

7 hours ago, Ibai said:

Hi!

Does community experts feature work in self hosted forums?

I dont find how to set this up. Where's that?

Cheers

Ibai

I could be wrong but I don't think so. Certain features like that tend to only be available to cloud customers.

Hi @Ibai,

Community Experts is available from the Team Cloud plan. You can see it listed here.

Sign up for Invision Community - Invision Community

You can learn more about Community Experts below.

Thanks for your reply @Ernest_Defoe @Gary !

May I label manually someone as community expert?

No problem! Always happy to help!

I don't think you can manually set someone to be a Community Expert. As per the blog entry, "Invision Community 5 identifies these experts through metrics such as the number of solutions they have, the volume of 'helpful' votes on their replies, the speed of answers and more."

It would be great that we could flag some members a community expert manually in self-hosted mode! 🙃

Haha, highly unlikely but you can always suggest this as feedback. 😉

Or spark the idea to a clever third-party IPS dev. 😉

9 minutes ago, beats23 said:

Or spark the idea to a clever third-party IPS dev. 😉

Yeah @onlyME has already done this with their Active Viewers application. So maybe someone will take this up for self hosted customers.

4 hours ago, beats23 said:

Or spark the idea to a clever third-party IPS dev. 😉

Yes, or this of course. ☺️

On 3/30/2025 at 1:50 PM, Ibai said:

Thanks for your reply @Ernest_Defoe @Gary !

May I label manually someone as community expert?

On 3/30/2025 at 2:29 PM, Gary said:

No problem! Always happy to help!

I don't think you can manually set someone to be a Community Expert. As per the blog entry, "Invision Community 5 identifies these experts through metrics such as the number of solutions they have, the volume of 'helpful' votes on their replies, the speed of answers and more."

The way I would approach this is to create a special secondary group, and assign it to members you feel would make good Experts. Then, in the Community Experts setting, select only this special usergroup (Allowed Groups) as eligible for Expert status.

I think the concept of Community Experts is just great. But I think there are some problems with its implementation and some understandable teething issues. When these are ironed out, I will revisit implanting Community Experts. (I just cannot use it as it is now.)

@Ibai Did you manage to resolve the problems you identified when using your test account?

That does look like a viable workaround! Thanks for sharing, @Como.

Just a reminder for other readers of this topic, Community Experts are a Cloud feature only at this point in time.

16 hours ago, Como said:

I think the concept of Community Experts is just great. But I think there are some problems with its implementation and some understandable teething issues. When these are ironed out, I will revisit implanting Community Experts. (I just cannot use it as it is now.)

If you have ideas on this, please do post up within our feedback area. You're quite right in saying this is our first implementation, so of course there will likely be changed going into the future. But any thoughts on these, while they wont always be implemented, are always welcomed. We cant guarantee implementation of an idea you put forward, but we can always guarantee we wont implement something we don't know about :)

17 hours ago, Como said:

@Ibai Did you manage to resolve the problems you identified when using your test account?

Oops. I somehow confused you with another member from another topic.

1 hour ago, Marc said:

If you have ideas on this, please do post up within our feedback area. You're quite right in saying this is our first implementation, so of course there will likely be changed going into the future. But any thoughts on these, while they wont always be implemented, are always welcomed. We cant guarantee implementation of an idea you put forward, but we can always guarantee we wont implement something we don't know about :)

🙂 I'll write up something soon.

@Como I think you came to my same idea. New group and set this new group as a secondary group to every community expert. Then, highlight their posts.

However, it doesn't highlight the name from the secondary group but the primary.

It seems to be a bug, though it's not fixed yet.

Hi @Ibai

So, 'Experts' have (or should have) their posts highlighted? I was not aware of this. I know that Experts have a small banner placed in their profile.

One thing which really needs to change is to not have posts marked as solution feeding into the algorithm. On our Contact forum, when a inquiry is resolved, we use this on the most relevant post. More often than not, it is just the member acknowledging our response and is the obvious post to mark as resolved. And in any case, invariably, there are no posts on the Contact forum which imply any 'expertise'.

As I stated earlier, if this an AI-managed system,* training via human feedback would seem the ideal approach to me (admittedly, as someone with a very think knowledge of AI). Admins across thousands of communities feeding back to the AI by removing unsuitable Experts seems like the obvious approach. And is probably better (and simpler) than attempting to build an admin interface to decide what type content/data should be used to determine who might become an Expert, what parts of the community should not be considered (Contact forums, etc.), and weighting controls, etc. Though, having the ability to not include some obvious areas (Contact forums, teams spaces, and more) probably should be considered anyway. And, as discussed, we already have a way of filtering in suitable members which might be considered by the AI.

* I know, it will depend upon the type of AI. Nearly everything is called AI these days. I expect that the thermostat on my toaster will be referred to as an AI soon. https://www.evolution.ai/post/ai-washing I am not suggesting that Invision are doing this, just that as far as I am aware, there have been no details published about the use of AI here. And the term covers a multitude of possibilities.