The Invision Community November edition includes numerous improvements, including customizable welcome emails and a new feature to keep your community running smoothly.

Auto-splitting large topics

While most topics run their course over a small number of pages, some continue to receive daily replies for years, growing to quite a size.

Many communities have breakout areas where people enjoy simple forum games or trivial social updates that help bond community members together.

However, when forums reach hundreds or thousands of pages, they can struggle a little and may take a little more time to show.

We all know how vital page loading speed is to both SEO and user experience, so we have a solution that doesn't disrupt the conversation flow.

When a topic nears 100,000 replies, the moderating team will see a message indicating that the topic is approaching the split threshold.

Once it exceeds that threshold, the original topic is locked, and a new topic is opened automatically via a background task.

Each topic will list all the various parts of the topic in the sidebar and in a block on the topic itself.

This allows the conversation to continue, and signposts where the older parts of the conversation are for those who wish to revisit them.

The result is a fast-loading topic that preserves all the history.

Welcome Emails

The first point of contact after joining a community is crucial to the onboarding process.

Invision Community has always sent a generic "Thanks for registering" email, but it's not particularly useful outside of informing the user that the process has been completed.

Now, in our November release, you can easily add content to that email to tailor it to your community.

You can add a message that fits the tone of your community, or signpost key areas to help acclimatise members.

What else?

Of course, every monthly release includes numerous bug fixes and minor improvements.

This month, we've focused on the posting editor to address some issues and add some minor quality-of-life improvements.

View full blog entry

Great stuff! I especially like the welcome email. This is a perfect new addition in combination with Daniel's Welcome PM application.

Thank you for your work, Invision. 👌

Is the default, but now editable welcome message imported from the current one in the language strings or do I need to save that before upgrading?

Small, but useful improvements. 👍 Thanks!

46 minutes ago, opentype said:

Is the default, but now editable welcome message imported from the current one in the language strings or do I need to save that before upgrading?

I would suggest saving that

Love the auto splitting feature, will it be possible to change the number of replies from 100,000 to lower?

Also will it go back and split older topics, or only affect topics that breach that number going forward?

You can change the numbers via our constants.php file.

Also will it go back and split older topics, or only affect topics that breach that number going forward?

It affects all topics, also older ones

Where can I find the “send welcome email” configuration?

15 minutes ago, PanSevence said:

Where can I find the “send welcome email” configuration?

I would suggest to use the search feature every time you can't find something in the menu.

2 hours ago, Day. said:

Love the auto splitting feature, will it be possible to change the number of replies from 100,000 to lower?

Also will it go back and split older topics, or only affect topics that breach that number going forward?

We're talking about this. Our current thinking is to add a setting, and to only split older topics when they get new replies, so older topics that don't get any replies are not altered.

I'm a fan of the welcome email! Well done Invision Community! 🥳

Great changes! Love the welcome email and the auto-splitting!

14 hours ago, Daniel F said:

You can change the numbers via our constants.php file.

We tend to lock and start new topics after 2,500 replies (100 pages @ 25 per page) so I'll definitely be doing this - what's the name of the constant?

ETA: In a future release it would be great to see this editable and toggleable via the ACP.

Edited November 1, 2025Nov 1 by Mick79

I find it interesting how IPS provided the justification to lock and split large topics as a technical one (which is a totally valid reason on the part of IPS, but usually technology should be designed to follow human behavior, not the other way!). There's some very interesting behavioral thoughts behind thread duration - most normal conversations do have a natural beginning and ending, which should be enforced. It's definitely a design flaw of forums to allow topics to go on theoretically forever, and if there's a line to be drawn in the sand, then 100,000 / 4000 pages seems to be as good of a milestone as any other number.

I do think bringing a finality to topics with 100,000 replies will be a shock and will disrupt the psychology of users who post in mega threads, where part of the premise behind reply after reply is the soothing lull of continuation. There is comfort in responding to these topics, because you've already responded a thousand times already. In fact, I would argue that users who have posted into the 90,000+ are used to the slowness of the website, and consider it a given of the site at that point! When you give them a fresh new topic that loads a split faster, they're going to be taken back. It's different. It's not the same. They're not going to like it.

This is going to unsettle some of your community's most prolific and long term members. (They've literally posted thousands and thousands of replies!). If I were a community manager with some of these topics on my board (and I probably am), a small but impactful takeaway is to proactively reach out to these members and let them know about these changes - that the good times will continue, just in a related topic.

On a related note, I do wish IPS would embrace the behavioral side of human conversation that ebbs and flows and digresses. They've build a simple and elegant concept to show "Topics in this discussion" can be easily applied to topics that have split, merged, etc.

The feature of splitting the topic should be an option that can be enabled or disabled, not mandatory

On 10/31/2025 at 7:34 AM, Daniel F said:

You can change the numbers via our constants.php file.

It affects all topics, also older ones

3 hours ago, EliasM said:

The feature of splitting the topic should be an option that can be enabled or disabled, not mandatory

I think @Daniel F already mention above. There is a number for that in constants.php

Would be nice to have a setting in the ACP for cloud customers, etc.

On 11/4/2025 at 1:21 AM, Joel R said:

I find it interesting how IPS provided the justification to lock and split large topics as a technical one (which is a totally valid reason on the part of IPS, but usually technology should be designed to follow human behavior, not the other way!). There's some very interesting behavioral thoughts behind thread duration - most normal conversations do have a natural beginning and ending, which should be enforced. It's definitely a design flaw of forums to allow topics to go on theoretically forever, and if there's a line to be drawn in the sand, then 100,000 / 4000 pages seems to be as good of a milestone as any other number.

I do think bringing a finality to topics with 100,000 replies will be a shock and will disrupt the psychology of users who post in mega threads, where part of the premise behind reply after reply is the soothing lull of continuation. There is comfort in responding to these topics, because you've already responded a thousand times already. In fact, I would argue that users who have posted into the 90,000+ are used to the slowness of the website, and consider it a given of the site at that point! When you give them a fresh new topic that loads a split faster, they're going to be taken back. It's different. It's not the same. They're not going to like it.

This is going to unsettle some of your community's most prolific and long term members. (They've literally posted thousands and thousands of replies!). If I were a community manager with some of these topics on my board (and I probably am), a small but impactful takeaway is to proactively reach out to these members and let them know about these changes - that the good times will continue, just in a related topic.

On a related note, I do wish IPS would embrace the behavioral side of human conversation that ebbs and flows and digresses. They've build a simple and elegant concept to show "Topics in this discussion" can be easily applied to topics that have split, merged, etc.

We had discussions with several customers affected by issues caused by mega-topics and they all agreed that locking and opening a new topic is absolutely fine. They are all linked up so they can be continued.

There are unfortunately real limits on how long a topic can go. I added a lot of optimisations in this area a few years ago to effectively reverse sort the last 50% of the pages so MySQL was not asked to request a very large offset which is very inefficient in the database layer.

The middle 40% of any large topic is problematic. One of our enterprise customers has a single topic with 1.2m replies in it.

A potential solution would be to remove pagination and just have first / last and next / previous but that degrades the experience and makes navigating long topics tedious.

Ultimately we're limited by the available technology. There are probably ways around it by splitting up the data in tables, leveraging intermediate layers between the database and caching but that's a lot of work and months of time to solve a problem that only affects 0.05% of our customers.

Self-hosted customers can change the values with a constant, because if you want to take down your own servers, that's your choice but we've kept it at a fixed number that is optimised for our cloud platform to avoid extreme resource allocation on a small number of topics.

Question about the welcome email, as i am setting that up now.

Can we do something like: Welcome [name],

So that the username is automaticly placed in the welcome email?
As that was something that was possible in the Translation/localisation?

57 minutes ago, Matt said:

We had discussions with several customers affected by issues caused by mega-topics and they all agreed that locking and opening a new topic is absolutely fine.

Agreed for us that is fine aswell. We used to manual close and create a new topic once in a while when they got to big. So this change is welcome.

2 hours ago, Moestuin said:

Can we do something like: Welcome [name],

Here's how it should work:

Welcome {name}

This is an entirely conceptual observations on mega-threads: I would posit that most members actually only care about the first few pages and the last few pages. The middle 98% is skipped.

You might need to glance at the first few pages to understand the pattern in how people reply (eg. A forum game)

You will usually glance at the most recent page before you add your own reply.

All of the middle is skipped.

These are not the types of topics where you are thinking profoundly about concepts or ideas in prior posts in order to reply; your new reply is usually independent of prior posts.

Mega-threads are an interesting phenomena of forums.

Some other thoughts:

• Whether forum games or social updates, these long threads reveal something fundamental about human behavior: humans are social creatures. We like playing with each other and we like sharing our news to others. Humanity shines through in mega-threads. We can't stop ourselves from socializing with others over years and years and thousands of pages.

• IPS called them trivial social updates. That understates the power and importance of these mega threads and life updates. Mega threads may be trivial in substance and content, but they are far from trivial from a sense of community and belongings. Why is this important?

• In a rapidly approaching world of AI Overviews, LLMs providing immediate answers, and Google Zero, communities that don't lean into this sense of community and common identity are going to be crushed. Professional community management is already measuring drops in engagement.

• If you're one of the 0.05% of IPS customers that have nurtured this incredible sense of community and belonging, that's a huge accomplishment.

On 11/8/2025 at 1:19 AM, Joel R said:

The middle 98% is skipped.

Not by search indexes and other useful bots.

On 11/8/2025 at 1:19 AM, Joel R said:

In a rapidly approaching world of AI Overviews, LLMs providing immediate answers, and Google Zero, communities that don't lean into this sense of community and common identity are going to be crushed.

Indeed, I wrote about that here.

On 11/8/2025 at 1:19 AM, Joel R said:

If you're one of the 0.05% of IPS customers that have nurtured this incredible sense of community and belonging, that's a huge accomplishment.

Agree, but it still causes issues on a practical level.

Where is this Auto-splitting setting?

11 hours ago, media said:

Where is this Auto-splitting setting?

There isnt a setting for this.