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Invision Community Blog

Our take on managing successful online communities

Video Tip: ACP Tips and Tricks

Work smarter, not harder is a motto we hear a lot of in our modern age. This is of course great advice. Invision Community's Admin CP is packed full of tools and settings to help you configure your community to your needs. In this short video I show you how you can work smarter in the Admin CP. Dashboard Blocks <br> I show you how create a dashboard perfect for your needs. The dash…
Matt

Matt

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Video Tip: Create a homepage in under 5 minutes with Pages

We often get asked how to create a portal-like home page for a community. A homepage has many benefits including: Showing your best content first <br> By using the "Our Picks" blocks, you can display your best content first. This content sets the tone for the site and will encourage engagement across your site. Display multiple areas of the suite <br> Each application has its own …
Matt

Matt

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How to cultivate a positive community

A positive community is a wonderful thing. It's fun to read and almost irresistible to join. You instantly feel welcomed and quickly make new friends. Carefully managed communities tend to be respectful. Individuals may occasionally argue and disagree, but these are short term incidences that do not affect the community. Is this by chance or by design? Your role as a community leade…
Matt

Matt

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Video Tip: Set up a curated video gallery in 5 minutes with Pages

Pages is one our most flexible applications. We use Pages on this site for our news blog, our release list and our bug tracker. We also use it internally to track customer suggestions, knowledge base articles and more. The most common use for Pages is as a simple articles database. With its built in templates, you can create interesting and engaging pages in just a few minutes. This is h…
Matt

Matt

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How to successfully convert your platform and breathe new life into your community

Do you have a community but are looking to move to a more modern and feature rich platform? There's a lot of ways Invision Community can breathe new life into your community. With our engagement features, advanced promotion features and mobile ready responsive themes, your members are going to love the changes. Invision Community can power your entire site, from the content management fr…
Matt

Matt

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Your GDPR questions answered

You've no doubt heard about GDPR by now. It's a very hot topic in many circles. Lots of experts are weighing in on the best approach to take before the May 25th deadline. Which reminds me of my favorite joke: "Do you know a great GDPR expert?” Yes, I do! “Could you send me his email address” No, I'm afraid not. I wrote about how Invision Community can help with your G…
Matt

Matt

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How to use Invision Community content in Wordpress in under 5 minutes

If you've already got a Wordpress website, and have recently added an Invision Community, you might want to show recent posts or topics right on your Wordpress site. You might think this involves complex programming and custom themes, but thanks to some Pages magic, it's a very simple task that you can do in under 5 minutes. This very short video walks you through the process. …
Matt

Matt

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5 ways to monetize your community

To monetize, or not to monetize, that is the question that preoccopies our administrators! Ok, I'm no Shakespeare, but a vital question community owners are faced with at some point is: can we and should we make some money from our community? Let's first look at the "should we?" <br> Absolutely! You don't need to frustrate your users or risk goodwill by starting monetization. Running a …
bfarber

bfarber

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Why owning your own community is better than using a Facebook Group

Are you a member of a busy Facebook Group? Do you find it overwhelming trying to sort through all the posts to find something posted the day before? Are you now missing new posts and only seeing them a few days later? Facebook Groups are tempting to use as they are free to set up but is this the best decision for the future of your business? At the beginning with just a handful of member…
Matt

Matt

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7 ways to nurture new members and encourage more participation

There are many different reasons to build a community. It might be based on your business or a hobby. It may be to talk about your favourite sports team. Whatever the content, the key to success is to engage your community. We've been helping successful communities for over 15 years. During that time, we've picked up a handful of tips that we are going to share with you today. Pick one t…
Matt

Matt

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How to brand your community in minutes

One of the advantages of running your own community is that you get to control the branding. Branding is important as it defines and re-enforces your customer's experience. Branding also promotes recognition, it sets you apart from your competition and it provides motivation and direction for your staff. Invision Community has many built in tools to change the look and feel of the commun…
Matt

Matt

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7 questions you must answer before starting your community

When I started creating communities close to two decades ago, getting new members was easy. All you had to do was put up a script, create some "Chat here" forums and email your friends. It didn't take long for word to spread and you had a healthy forum buzzing with conversation. Now, it's different. The internet is a crowded space. No matter what your niche, you will be competing with other b…
Matt

Matt

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6 ways to simplify your community and drive up engagement

Despite your best efforts, is engagement a problem for your community? You have your site promotion running well and you are seeing plenty of traffic but it doesn't convert into comments, posts or reactions? Invision Community is a powerful platform that offers layers of complexity for the many sites it powers. When you are struggling to convert page views into comments, it's worth taking a s…
Matt

Matt

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How to lock down and keep your community secure

Making security considerations a key part of your community setup and maintenance can save you from many future headaches. You've worked hard to get your community moving. Don't make yourself an easy target and undo that work. Here’s our current advice to our customers.   1. Enable HTTPS <br> HTTPS is fast becoming the standard way to serve websites. In 2016, more than 50% of …
Rikki

Rikki

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Build a fortress: stop spam in your community

We all know what a pain spam can be. We deal with it daily in our inboxes often relying on clever software to filter it out for us. Even worse, some spam is so well disguised that it can fool you into thinking it is a genuine message. You've put in the hard work with your community. You've used the built in social promotion tools and SEO features to get it noticed. Now that it's indexing well…
Matt

Matt

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Top tips for optimizing your community's SEO

Unlike a regular website, where you write content for each page, target keywords and optimize text, a forum community's content is predominantly written by users. They don't know or care about your site's SEO and just want to interact with other users or find answers to their questions. To keep your community moving forward, Invision Community implements many best-practice SEO techniques and …
Rikki

Rikki

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6 reasons why you shouldn't just settle for a Facebook group community

Whether you run an existing community or are taking tentative first steps into setting up an online community forum around your brand, an important choice you need to make is between social networks like Facebook or having a community you own and control. Let's take a look at the benefits of an owned community versus a Facebook group - as well as how you can still use Facebook (and other soci…
Rikki

Rikki

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Highlighting staff posts to improve communication

Whatever the purpose of a community - be it customer support, fan engagement, interest-based groups and so on - there's usually a need for site staff to communicate important information to users. Of course, in some cases this information is best suited to a site announcement, which by design has a lot of visibility and authority. But it's important that day to day staff posts stand out too…
Rikki

Rikki

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Proactive and reactive moderation - which is right for your online community?

One of the bigger decisions a community manager has to make as a community grows is whether to employ proactive or reactive moderation (or a combination of both). This isn’t always a conscious decision; sometimes forum moderation features are toggled without giving much explicit thought to the style of moderation desired and the pros and cons of doing so. It’s worth taking a moment to consider the…
Rikki

Rikki

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Avoiding Google Security Warnings

Google has recently been stressing that sites should use secure connections (served via HTTPS) whenever possible. They have recently also started warning sites that collect password on non-secure pages and will also be updating Google Chrome to warn users when a password is being entered on a non-secure page. You can read more information at Google and a good article on Ars Technica. There ar…
Charles

Charles

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Theme Tip: Color coding tags

We were recently asked if it's possible to color code tags - the customer in question used tags as statuses on topics, and so wanted 'resolved' to be green, and so on. Despite being a great idea, this isn't something that is currently possible 'out of the box' - although we'll add it to our internal feature idea list to follow up on later! But just because it isn't built in, that doesn't mean…
Rikki

Rikki

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Theme Tip: Create a per-forum feed block

An enterprise customer recently asked us how to have a different feed block for each of their forums. Their goal was to have each forum show a 'popular topics' block containing topics only from that particular forum. Unfortunately this isn't possible using the standard block manager right now, since each view is treated as one configuration. That means that any blocks added to forum view will show…
Rikki

Rikki

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Theme Tip: Replacing forum icons with images

In IPS4, it's easy to add custom icons to your forums, simply by uploading them on the Edit Forum screen in the AdminCP. But if you want to replace all of your forum icons, uploading the same icon for each forum can be a bit tedious. It's easy to use some custom CSS to replace all of the icons - lets see how. First, you'll want to upload the image(s) you want to use to the Resources sect…
Rikki

Rikki

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Theme Tip: 5 useful template tags

IPS4's theme system has a feature called template plugins, which are special tags that do something to the values you pass in. You'll see them throughout the templates - they look like this: {lang="..."} This tag displays the language string for the key you pass into it, and is probably the most commonly used one. But there's many others too, so let's review some of the useful ones you can …
Rikki

Rikki

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Theme Tip: Dynamic(ish) forum feeds inside Pages databases

Recently, we had a post in our pre-sales forum that asked how to achieve a few different things with Pages. One of the questions asked was if it was possible to show topics from a particular forum in each database record. While Pages can create a topic for each record for you, there's no way to associate an entire forum with a record. In my reply, I indicate that you'd need to have a forum ID…
Rikki

Rikki

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