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 leader will make all the difference in how your members react to each other. Your community boundaries will have a direct impact in the number troublemakers that infiltrate your community.

I'm sure you've come across trolls and troublemakers on your digital travels. You may be unlucky enough to have met some on your own site. Some trolls may be quite benign and productive members of the community. That is, until something or someone triggers them.

Some trolls like to annoy others because they are bored. Others because they are angry. Whatever the reason, they can be a handful to manage well.

A well managed community offers excellent protection against trolls that may join only to cause trouble. The troll has no fun against a charming community unwilling to engage in hateful behaviour.

Therefore, a positive community is essential in protecting your members, as much as it is making a welcoming atmosphere for new members.

Community Leaders
Your community leaders are there to model good behaviour.
How your leaders speak to your members is very important. If they are rude or offensive, then the community will view that as the culture you endorse and act likewise.

It's important that your leaders refrain from becoming embattled in aggressive discussions. An ideal leader is cool, calm and impartial. If members see your leaders engaged in heated debate, they may follow suit.

A good strategy is to use a leader's forum or Pages database where they can discuss contentious topics in private and agree on a way forward together. Forcing your leaders to remain impartial and discuss the topic elsewhere is a great way to retain professional separation.

If your leaders want to engage in debate, then allow them to create a personal account. This allows them to air their personal views inline with your boundaries.

It is vital to remember that your leaders carry your brand and message at all times.

Create a strong terms of service
Invision Community's terms of service feature is ideal to outline your community and what is acceptable.

Be positive with your terms and rules. Creating a positive culture from the earliest interaction with your site is important. This sets out boundaries in a friendly way.

Avoid using negative words such as "don't" and "can't". People tend to skip over these words. It is better to be positive, for example:

"A signature CANNOT have more than one image"

Could be better explained as:

"Your signature may have a single image".

This positive interaction feels better but still enforces your rules.

Keep the number of rules to a minimum. Visitors connect better with sites that aren't laden with rules and threats for stepping out of line. Indeed, reading a terms of service that outlines punitive action for every minor misdemeanour makes the site look unruly and embattled.

Even good productive members have bad days and may display out of character behaviour.

Weeding out the early signs of trouble
Not all arguing is bad. We've seen some dynamic and informative topics that have flowered from an initial disagreement.

The first step is identifying which behaviours you find unacceptable. Your community and culture will define these boundaries. What is acceptable for a casual community with a very young demographic may not be acceptable for a very formal conservative site.

Is this member trolling? A classic troll is someone who seeks to derail rational conversation through abuse, hectoring or needling. A troll isn't someone that disagrees with you, your product or your choices. Civil disagreement is the foundation for any rich discussion. A troll is less tolerant and their end goal is to aggravate others.

Is the member new? Perhaps they are unfamiliar with the expectations of your community. New members can often be eager to impress veterans and may come across as over excitable. 

It is worth noting down topics which have the potential to derail and check in on them often. You can add hidden replies that do not trigger notifications. This is an ideal way to leave notes to other community leaders.

The best judge is often experience. It may take a while to develop your sixth sense with your community.

Motivation through rewarding good behaviour
Invision Community is equipped with a reputation system which is linked to the number of positive reactions a piece of authorered content obtains.

The simplest expression is the humble 'like'. To encourage members to like and thank others for useful content empowers individuals and motivates them to post more good content.

You may wish to send a personal message offering thanks for exceptional content to your members. A brief personal note is a welcome gift in today's world of often impersonal automation.

We have seen communities that post up weekly topics linking to great content. Likewise, you can leverage featured posts to draw attention to your good content.

The Our Picks feature is yet another way you can promote great user submitted content. It must be very rewarding to see your hard work showcased to the rest of the community.

Avoid special forums for 'unmoderated discussion'
Some communities try and address the balance between the need for rule enforcement through moderation against the desire to offer a venue for raw discourse. This usually presents as a special forum often labeled as "Unmoderated", "The flame zone" or similar.

The intention is a good one and the logic makes sense. Provide a venting space for your community in one area to keep the rest of the community friendly.

In our experience, this plan quickly backfires. The unmoderated area becomes hateful, toxic and very unpleasant. Basal desires that are kept in check by your rules and boundaries are left to run amok. 

It's very likely that these discussions become so heated that members leave your site for good. That isn't a desirable outcome!

It's much better to keep your rules consistent throughout all areas of your site. Encouraging contentious discussion is rarely a good thing.

Punitive tools are the last resort
Invision Community is loaded with excellent moderation tools to handle persistent offenders.

We would encourage you to try speaking with a troublesome member first via the personal message system. Give them a chance to explain themselves and remind them of the rules.

If you have exhausted all avenues, you have several options to choose from.

1) Warning
Invision Community's warning system allows you to pre-set different warning thresholds which trigger specific actions.

For example, you may decide that after 10 warns, the member is set to full moderation. This means that their posts are hidden to other community members until you review and approve them.

This is an excellent tool and has success in rehabilitating hot headed members that react quickly and often find themselves in hot water with your community leaders.

Invision Community 4.3 introduced crowd sourced moderation. This allows the administrator to set up thresholds for actions based on the number of reports a content item receives from other members.

For example, you may decide to hide a post after it receives reports from five or more different members.

2) Full moderation
You have the option to enforce review and approval of all members topics and posts. The downside is that it increases the workload of your moderators, so should be used sparingly.

It is a very effective tool when used for a short time after a heated debate gets out of control. It allows you to enforce a time out until the situation has calmed down.

3) Short term banning to cool off
Invision Community allows you to temporarily ban a member from your site for a specified number of hours.

It is especially effective to enforce a break from your site. This allows an otherwise good and productive member time to cool down and reflect on how they wish to contribute. In most cases, the member comes back calmer and ready to post productively.

4) Permanent banning
As a true last resort, you can exclude the member from accessing your site completely. A banned member can no longer access forum lists, topics or posts. They can of course log out and view the community as a guest.

In most cases, members can be rehabilitated through personal messages, moderation or an enforced cooling off period.

A permanent ban can be lifted by an administrator at any time.

Conclusion
Cultivating a positive community can take a little work from your community leaders but the benefits are numerous. A fun engaging community of respectful members is a real joy. The infectious spirit of the members makes it very easy to join and contribute.

There is always a learning curve, so use any issue as a learning experience and give your members the benefit of doubt.

You wouldn't want to punish an overzealous and excitable new member and make them feel unwelcome by reaching for a moderation tool too soon.

Try and guide conversation by using your community leaders to model good behaviour. Try and keep a sense of fun and take the time to get to know your members.

Above all, enjoy the journey! Taking the time to engage in your community is a great experience and offers many opportunities to learn and grow as a leader.

Invision empowers you with the tools to manage and reward behaviors, but it's ultimately your stewardship to thoughtfully design a positive community.

We'd love to know which of these tips you already practise. Let us know below!

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 how we have it configured for this news blog.

In this entry, we'll be looking at something a little out of the ordinary.

In just five minutes, you can create a simple curated YouTube video gallery on your website using Pages. All of this functionality is built in. You won't need to learn code, or install any plug-ins.

Check out the video below for a walk through which covers:

• Creating a database and page
• Using the 'Easy Mode' page editor to drag and drop the database into place
• Setting up the database's custom fields for YouTube

You can take this further by tweaking the built in templates to create something unique for your site. You may wish to use a different listing page and show thumbnails of the videos to entice your visitors into the site.

This is ideal for sites which use YouTube heavily but wish to keep the discussion on your site. The built in comments and review sections display just under the video.

Pages opens up many different ways of curating and displaying content.

We'd love to see how you're using Pages, let us know in the comments!

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 front end right through to your download areas and shopping carts.

Imagine not having to juggle a dozen plug-ins and make several different applications talk to each other.

We offer a range of migration tools for vBulletin, xenForo, phpBB, Vanilla, bbPress and more. These tools convert your data such as members, passwords, forums, topics, posts and more across to Invision Community.

But first, let's look at how to make your migration a success.

Take our demo for a spin
Hands down the best way to get a feel for Invision Community is to take out a free demo. Once you are comfortable with the suite and know what it can do, the more confident you will be in discussing it with your members.

There's a lot of functionality to discover. Keep in touch with our sales team to get the most from the demo.  We recommend that you consider three uses.

Your community. Look at how they will settle in with the new interface and how they will use the new features on offer.

Your moderators. Take a moment to look in the Moderator Control Panel. Run through all the tools that are available, such as the warning system and content review system.

Your administrators. Probably the largest change between platforms will be in the Admin Control Panel. It's worth spending a little time getting familiar with it and looking at what's new, and where common tools are such as forum and member management.

Tip: Invision Community's Admin Control Panel has a global search bar to look for settings, members, invoices and more. If you ever feel a little lost, enter in what you're looking for.

Make your plan
Using the demo and speaking to our sales team will help you draw up a migration plan. You'll know which apps you'll need, and what data can be migrated over.

You may want to browse the marketplace to look for apps, plugins and themes to extend the functionality even further.

Tip: We offer a VIP migration service where we work closely with you to draw up your plan and take care of the conversion for you.

Educate your community
Keep your community up to date with your migration plan. Show them the platform they'll be using. Take videos and screenshots showing them the exciting new features coming soon. Make it a positive and fun experience.

Post something new every few days to get your community used to the idea and get them involved by asking them if they have any questions. Our sales and support teams are here to help you if you have any further questions at this point.

Getting the majority of your community excited about the change is the best way to make the transition a smooth one.

Make sure you explain the benefits of the switch too. If there's a good reason for it, your community will get behind it quickly.

Some benefits may be:

It works better on your mobile device and tablets, so you don't need to struggle with pinch and zoom to get around.

The built in embed system allows you to post images, YouTube videos more easily and you can preview it instantly as you type.

The crowd sourced moderation makes reporting bad content more beneficial. It'll help to keep the community clean from undesirable comments and moving a positive direction.

More features on the way. Invision Community is always adding new functionality based on our customers' wishes. These releases happen often so there's always something to be excited about.

Pick a day
The best migrations are planned down to the date and time when the data conversion will occur. Our team can give you a rough idea of how long the data conversion will take. It will vary but we can give you a ballpark. 

Your members will feel happy knowing what is going to happen and when. There will be some downtime while the data is converted, so it's always best to announce this well ahead of time.

Set up a test site
Once you are committed to switching, set up a test site. A single Invision Community license can be used for a development installation as well as a live installation.

This is the perfect time to work on your theme and look at any tweaks you'd like to make.

Invite in your team and a trusted few from your community to offer feedback and advice. It's worth taking the time here to make sure everything is perfect for when you do the final conversion.

Make it comfortable
Take some time to theme your new Invision Community so it has a similar look and feel to your existing community. Change resistant members will feel more comfortable if there are areas that are familiar to them.

Ensuring your branding is up, and the colours match what you had before is a good start.

The easy mode theme editor is a great place to start.

Mind your language!
There are always little differences in the interface language that may throw some of your older members off. For example, some systems use "threads" instead of topics and "messages" instead of posts.

Invision Community has a built in translation system so you can change our interface language to match your existing site.

Help your members
Set up a temporary questions and answer forum where your members can ask how the new system works and give you feedback.

Pin a handful of topics explaining where common items are now, such as how to edit your profile, how to send personal messages, how to mark the site as read and so on. Think about the daily activities your members make and explain how to do them with Invision Community.

You can use the pre-move time to ask your community what actions they do daily and may need assistance with on the new platform.

Be patient
Some of us dislike change. We are creatures of habit. You may find some members are very resistant. That's OK, they'll come around in time as long as you continue to make them feel valued and understood. Take the time to explain how the new system works and what the benefits of Invision Community are.

In our experience, members love the following Invision Community features:

Notifications
Invision Community has a variety of granular notification options, from browser to email so you're sure to not miss a thing.

Mobile Friendly
We're mobile friendly right out of the box. Our theme has a responsive framework, which means that it resizes perfectly to any device you're using. No need for extra themes or styles, it's all baked in.

Gamification
We all love a little friendly competition don't we? Invision Community has features like the leaderboard and member titles to reward activity. Who doesn't want to win the day?

Reactions
Liking content is fun, but being able to express thanks, laughter and more is even better. It's all baked into the system ready to use.

Educate your team
Invision Community has a whole host of moderation tools that your team will love as it makes their daily routines much easier.

From the comprehensive warning system, to the crowd sourced moderation feature, which can automatically hide content and notify moderators once it has been reported multiple times, Invision Community makes your moderators lives easier.

The best approach is to pin topics in a team area that explains how to use these new features and where to find them.

Summary
Investing in a new community platform and migrating your community across is a big decision. With the right planning and forethought, it will be a smooth and positive migration with lots to look forward to once complete.

We offer free conversion tools for you to use, or we offer a VIP conversion service where we take care of it for you and you get one-to-one help and support throughout the process.

We'd love to hear from those who have successfully migrated across from other platforms and how they made it a positive experience for their members.

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 GDPR compliance back in December. I've seen a lot of posts and topics on GDPR in our community since then.

First, let's get the disclaimer out of the way. I'm a humble programmer and not a GDPR expert or a lawyer. The information here is presented to assist you in making decisions. As always, we recommend you do your own research and if you're in any doubt, book an appointment with a lawyer.

It is also worth mentioning that GDPR is very much a living document with phrases like "legitimate interest" and "reasonable measures". None of these phrases have any real legal definition and are open to interpretation. Some have interpreted them severely, and others more liberally.

GDRP is about being a good steward of the data you store on a user. It's not designed to stop you from operating an engaging web site. There's no need to create stress about users linking to other sites, embedding images, anonymizing IP addresses, and such on your site. These don't impact any data you are storing and are part of the normal operation of how the web works. Be responsible and respectful of your users' data but keep enjoying your community.

Let's have a quick recap on the points we raised in our original blog entry.

Individual Rights

The right to be informed
Invision Community has a built in privacy policy system that is presented to a new user, and existing users when it has been updated.

What should your privacy policy contain? I personally like the look of SEQ Legal's framework which is available for free.

This policy covers the important points such as which cookies are collected, how personal information is used and so on.

There may be other services out there offering similar templates.

Right to erasure
I personally feel that everyone should listen to "A Little Respect" as it's not only a cracking tune, but also carries a wonderful message.

The GDPR document however relates to the individuals right to be forgotten.

Invision Community allows you to delete members. When deleting members, you can elect to remove their content too. There is an option to keep it as Guest content, thus removing the author as identifiable.

It's worth using the 'keep' option after researching the user's posts to make sure they haven't posted personal information such as where they live, etc.

Emailing and Consent
Invision Community has the correct opt-in for bulk emails on registration that is not pre-checked. If the user checks this option, this is recorded with the member's history. Likewise, if they retract this permission, that action is also recorded.

When you edit the terms and conditions or privacy policy, all users are required to read it again and opt-in again.

Cookies
A lot of GDPR anxiety seems to revolve around these tiny little text files your browser stores. If you read the GDPR document (and who doesn't love a little light reading) then you'll see that very little has actually changed with cookies. It extends current data protection guidance a little to ensure that you are transparent about which cookies you store.

Invision Community has tools to create a floating cookie opt-in bar, and also a page showing which cookies are stored and why.

This is the page that you'd edit to add any cookies your installation sets (if you have enabled Facebook's Pixel, or Google Analytics for example).

Your GDPR Questions
Now let's look at some questions that have been asked on our community and I'll do my best to provide some guidance that should help you make decisions on how to configure your Invision Community to suit your needs.

Is the soft opt-in cookie policy enough? What about the IP address stored in the session cookie?
Great question. There's conflicting advise out there about this. The GDPR document states:

Quote

Natural persons may be associated with online identifiers…such as internet protocol addresses, cookie identifiers or other identifiers…. This may leave traces which, in particular when combined with unique identifiers and other information received by the servers, may be used to create profiles of the natural persons and identify them.

The ICO states that session cookies stored for that session only (so they are deleted when the tab / window is closed) are OK as long as they are not used to profile users.

This is re-enforced by EUROPA:

Quote

Cookies clearly exempt from consent according to the EU advisory body on data protection- WP29 include:

• user‑input cookies (session-id) such as first‑party cookies to keep track of the user's input when filling online forms, shopping carts, etc., for the duration of a session or persistent cookies limited to a few hours in some cases
• authentication cookies, to identify the user once he has logged in, for the duration of a session
• user‑centric security cookies, used to detect authentication abuses, for a limited persistent duration
• multimedia content player cookies, used to store technical data to play back video or audio content, for the duration of a session
• load‑balancing cookies, for the duration of session
• user‑interface customisation cookies such as language or font preferences, for the duration of a session (or slightly longer)
• third‑party social plug‑in content‑sharing cookies, for logged‑in members of a social network.

My feeling is that GDPR isn't really out to stop you creating a functioning website, they are more interested in how you store and use this information.

Thus, I feel that storing a session cookie with an IP address is OK. The user is told what is being stored and instructions are given if they want to delete them.

Given the internet is very much driven by IP addresses, I fail to see how you can not collect an IP address in some form or another. They are collected in access logs deep in the server OS.

Finally, there is a strong legitimate interest in creating a session cookie. It's part and parcel of the website's function and the cookie is not used in any 'bad' way. It just allows guests and members to retain preferences and update "last seen" times to help deliver content.

Do I need to delete all the posts by a member if they ask me to?
We have many large clients in the EU with really impressive and expensive legal teams and they are all unanimous in telling us that there is no requirement to delete content when deleting a user's personal information. The analogy often given is with email: once someone sends you an email you are not obligated to delete that. The same is true with content posted by a user: once they post that content it's no longer "owned" by them and is now out in public.

Ultimately, the decision is yours but do not feel that you have to delete their content. This is not a GDPR requirement.

What about members who haven't validated? They're technically not members but we're still holding their data!
No problem. The system does delete un-validated users and incomplete users automatically for you. You can even set the time delay for deletion in the ACP.

What about RECAPTCHA? I use this, and it technically collects some data!
Just add that you use this service to your privacy policy, like so:

Quote

Spam Protection
Google reCAPTCHA (Google Inc.)
Google reCAPTCHA is a SPAM protection service provided by Google Inc.
The use of reCAPTCHA is subject to the Google privacy policy and terms of use.

Personal Data collected: Cookies and Usage Data.

Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.

I see many companies emailing out asking for members to opt back in for bulk mail, do I need to do this?
Short answer: No.

Since Invision Community 4.0, you can only ever bulk email users that have opted in for bulk emails. There's no way around it, so there's nothing to ask them to opt-in for. They've already done it.

There is a tiny wrinkle in that pre 4.2.7, the opt-in was pre-checked as was the norm for most websites. Moving forward, GDPR asks for explicit consent, so this checkbox cannot be pre-ticked (and isn't in Invision Community 4.2.7 and later). However, the ICO is clear that if the email list has a legitimate interest, and was obtained with soft opt-in, then you don't need to ask again for permission.

What about notifications? They send emails!
Yes they do, but that's OK.

A notification is only ever sent after a user chooses to follow an item. This falls under legitimate interest.

There is also a clear way to stop receiving emails. The user can opt-in and opt-out of email as a notification device at their leisure.

Do I need to stop blocking embeds and external images?
No. The internet is based on cross-linking of things and sharing information. At a very fundamental level, it's going to be incredibly hard to prevent it from happening. Removing these engaging and enriching tools are only going to make your community suffer.

There's no harm in adding a few lines in your privacy policy explaining that the site may feature videos from Vimeo and Youtube as part of user contributions but you do not need to be worried. As stated earlier, GDPR isn't about sucking the fun out of the internet, it's about being responsible and transparent.

Phew.
Hopefully you've got a better understanding about how Invision Community can assist your GDPR compliance efforts.

The best bit of advice is to not panic. If you have any questions, we'd love to hear them. Drop us a line below.

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.

If you'd prefer a written step by step, then head over to our help guides.

As you can see, the whole process is very quick and very easy. Adding the latest topics on your site is a great way to drive discussion into your Invision Community.

Let us know if you have any questions!

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?"
Absolutely! You don't need to frustrate your users or risk goodwill by starting monetization. Running a community comes with tangible costs in terms of paying for the monthly cloud plans or license and hosting costs.

Not to mention your own time which must be factored into this decision. If the community sustained all or part of your income, could you commit more time to help it grow?

Now lets look at the "can we?"
Absolutely! You made a great choice by building your platform with Invision Community. We have built in monetization tools that allow you to collect micro-payments from third party systems; and we have tools for selling products and services.

Advertisements
An obvious choice, many sites will turn to advertisements through Google Adsense or a similar service to generate income from their community. Whether this approach will work for your community or not is dependent upon many factors.

Do you generate enough traffic that you will actually earn an income from advertisements?

Do enough of your audience browse your site without tools such as Adblock installed?

Is your site compatible with any of the many advertisement services out there? This is worth checking to make sure.

Advertisement services are a relatively easy solution for generating micro-payments. It's unlikely you'll be able to retire any time soon on advertising payments alone though.

An alternative approach to using advertisements is to sell advertisement space on your own site through Commerce.

This can be an especially attractive option if your site holds a captive audience in a specific niche, as advertisers will be certain their ads are targetting the niche they are aiming to target effectively.

Viglink
Viglink is a service that looks for commercial product references in user-generated content, and links to those products using referral links that can generate revenue. Generally speaking, there is no real harm in using such a service as the functionality is transparent for most users.

Invision Community features integration with Viglink out of the box. You simply need to enter certain account information into the AdminCPand the software will handle the rest.

Charging for products
If you sell digital or physical products, you can leverage Invision Community to help facilitate the sale of such products through your community site.

If you are an expert or leader in your field, then why not write a short e-book on your subject and put it up for sale? Low cost e-books under $10 tend to sell really well and it's a great way to generate some passive trickle income.

Sale, renewals, invoicing, shipping, customer support and more are all possible through our Commerce product with powerful features that allow you to easily sell products locally and around the world.

Charging for additional access
The simplest way to monetize your community is to charge for VIP access.

This may be for elevated permissions, such as being able to upload larger files, post more content per day and access specific features like user signatures, special badges and so on.

You can also set up VIP forums that regular members do not have access to. 

In fact, Invision Community can be tailored towards being an e-learning platform simply by setting up a subscription in Commerce and creating a private forum only the VIP group can access.

Simply post a new topic with each learning module. Topics can contain embeds from YouTube and Vimeo if you prefer to deliver training over video.

Be sure to give previews of such areas if you do sell access to additional areas of the community.

For example, you can allow all users to "see" that a forum exists, but show an error message to regular members who attempt to read topics in the forum, while allowing subscribers full access to those topics. This helps naturally entice users into subscribing to gain additional access by allowing them to see what they will gain access to.

Charging a fee for facilitation
Another possible avenue to monetize your community is by charging a fee for facilitating file sharing between your members. The Downloads application allows users to upload and even sell their files to other users on the community, while also allowing the administrator of the community to retain a percentage of all sales. 

If your community serves a niche that may see online sales of files in a marketplace-type setting, you can earn some money by administering such a marketplace.

As you can see, there are several opportunities available with Invision Community to monetize your community.

Do you use any other methods of monetizing your community?

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 members, things may fun fine. But fast forward to where your group becomes busy with thousands of members posting and reading.

Your group becomes overwhelming. You find it hard to locate posts made on previous days and search is of no use. It is getting harder to keep on top of troublesome and spamming members.

Worse still, Facebook's changing algorithms mean that your members are not seeing every post you make. You do as Facebook asks and link your page to your group to find that you must now boost posts to reach your members.

This is getting to be a very common scenario.

Even more worrying are rumours that Facebook is bringing advertising to groups. Will this allow your competitors to target your hard won membership?

Will Facebook roll out the "Discover" tab across all continents? This alone has destroyed organic reach for many brands.

What would you do if Facebook blocked your account for a week? Would your sales suffer?

There is a way to take back control of your membership and secure your business' future. Building your business on your own land is a powerful way of retaining complete control over your community regardless of what happens to Facebook longer term.

Created in 2002,  Invision Community has always adapted to the changing habits of the internet. Our latest product is clean, modern, mobile ready and equipped to integrate with social media. It can power your conversations, website and shopping cart. It features single click Facebook sign in and tools to promote scheduled content to your Facebook page.

We recently wrote why you shouldn't settle for a Facebook Group when building a community.

The benefits of an owned Invision Community are:

• You own your own data. Your data is not mined for Facebook's benefit.
• Make it yours by branding it your way
• You're no longer boxed in by the Facebook format
• Seamless integration to your shopping cart for more monetization opportunities
• Set up permission levels to better control what your members can see

Lets dig in a look at some of the tools you can leverage to make the migration easier.

Mobile Ready
Invision Community works great on your mobile. It resizes the page perfectly to match whichever device you are using. You don't need to install special apps or mess with themes. It just works out of the box.

Facebook Sign In
The first thing you'll want to do is turn on Facebook Sign In. This adds the familiar Facebook button right on the sign in page and register form. Clicking this logs them into your new community with their Facebook account. It even imports their profile photo so they are familiar with other members.

Make use of embeds
A great way to keep incorporating content from your Facebook Group or Page is to use embeds. Post a link to your content on Facebook and it transforms into a rich media snippet.

Social Promotions
Share your community content with your Facebook Page. Click the "Promote" button on any content item and you can customize the text and images shared. The promotion system offers a full scheduling system much like Buffer or Hootsuite. This is all built in at no extra cost.

Find Your Content
Unlike a Facebook Group, your Invision Community makes it easy to find older content. A powerful feature is activity streams. These are customizable "feeds" much like the Facebook News Feed but completely editable to you and your members needs. You can even make this the first page your members see for easy content discovery.

Use Clubs
Clubs allow sub-communities to run inside your main community. Let's look at a real world example.
A FitPro has several different fitness products for sale. Each product is a Facebook Group. She posts daily workouts and answers member's questions.
Using many groups can be very time consuming to manage.
Clubs puts these sub-communities right on the page making it easy to drop in and update.
These Clubs can be private and members invited to join allowing full privacy. This is like a closed Facebook group.

We're only scratching the surface of what Invision Community can offer you. You can take back control of your membership and be free from the fear that Facebook will change something that will impact your sales.

We're experts in this field with 16 years of experience. We've helped grow thousands of communities from the very biggest brands to the smallest of niches.

We'd love to talk to you about your needs.

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 to try this week and let us know how you get on.

Welcome every single member
A great way to make members feel welcome at your community is to post a daily or weekly topic welcoming your new members. Post a short message asking them to introduce themselves and tag new members.

This will encourage them to start a discussion that others can get involved with. It won't be long before friends are made and what may have been a passing member will be part of your core community.

Host a "lurker week"
Every few months, host a "Lurker week" where you encourage non-posting members to join in. You can explain the benefits of the community and encourage them to say hello. It's a great way to get people to introduce themselves.

Suzi Nelson pioneered this over at Digital Marketer. She created a lurker themed week and was able to activate 44% of her previously inactive members in only five days!

Spotlight members you want others to model
Often you will see a member do something amazing in the community. Maybe they posted a really good question or perhaps they have been very active and helped many other members.

Create a topic about it. Highlight how and why they are an asset they are to the community. This sends a positive message to other members that these kinds of actions will be celebrated.

You can even turn this into a weekly or monthly ritual where you celebrate the member of the week or month.

Educate about notifications
The notifications system in Invision Community is the best way to get return visits.

Why not put up a pinned topic in a visible area reminding your members how to get the best from the notification system, and asking them to enable them and follow any interesting forums or topics.

This way they won't miss out of any discussion while they're away and as a bonus, they're more likely to return to catch up.

Regular Interaction
This is a very simple but often overlooked tip. As the community manager your purpose is to facilitate discussion. Make sure you show up regularly and create new discussions as well as reply to existing ones.

People are more likely to post if they feel they will get a reply. Often your reply will send off a cascade of more interaction as different facets of the conversions come out.

Ask for feedback
Members love to be involved in brainstorms and to share their thoughts. Asking for feedback works on two levels. You get great ideas on how to improve your community. It is also a great tactic to get discussion going.

Taking action on feedback makes that person feel more invested in your community and will champion it to others.

Try and be specific when asking for feedback. Try "How can I increase the level of activity" or "Do you need any articles or topics written on specific subjects". The more specific, the easier it will be for your members to narrow down their thoughts.

Be persistent
These tips might give your community a short burst of engagement. To build a long lasting and highly engaged community, you have to be persistent and keep at it.

The key to building a community is simple: put in the work and care about your members. If your members see how much you care and that you are showing up every day, they are more likely to show up too.

Which of these tips are you going to try this week?

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 community. If you are a savvy coder, you can dive right into the HTML and CSS templates to create truly unique themes. You might also look at an off-the-shelf theme from our marketplace. There are some great themes you can use as a base for your branding.

Easy Mode Editor

One tool that is often overlooked is the Easy Mode Editor. It's a great way to make some simple changes to reflect your brand's identity. It offers a great deal of control, but I want to show you how you can brand your community in just a few short minutes without knowing a line of code.

The presentation below takes you through creating a new Easy Mode theme, and using the Easy Mode Editor on the front end to dynamically change the colours. You'll also learn how to upload your logo.

Email Branding

Another area to consider is outgoing emails. Invision Community leverages emails for notifications, as well as the bulk email system in the Admin CP. These emails look fine by default, but adding your logo and primary color re-enforces your branding.

The presentation below shows you the few simple steps needed to brand your emails.

As you can see, Invision Community offers simple tools to change the look of your community without knowing how to code.

We hope you find this useful. If you have any questions, please let us know below!

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 businesses for visitors.

You need a solid strategy to succeed, and I want to help you.

Before you open the doors to your new community, consider the following questions.

What is your vision?
Your community must have a strong reason to attract visitors.  Write down your community's purpose and bullet point how you will achieve it. When you configure and set up your community, keep asking yourself "does this fit my vision".

For example. Consider a fitness professional who is launching a community. The vision is to educate your audience on good nutrition and exercise. You then have subscription based packages for one-to-one coaching.

This is a very focused vision. You will create one or two forums for the public areas. You will leverage clubs for the paid memberships. You wouldn't create forums for non-fitness areas such as technology or movies.

You will strip the complexity back to encourage interaction as your target market may not be very technical.

What is your voice?
You will lead your community and set the tone. If you are handling investment portfolios then you will want the tone to be friendly, but professional.

If you are creating a forum for marathon runners, you'd want to use a lot of running "lingo" and be informal and fun.

Consider your target audience. Think about how they would like to be treated. How would they like your interactions to be?

Once you have found your voice, keep it consistent. Your members will follow your lead and keep your community positive.

How are you going to onboard new members?
If you want people to join in with your new community, you need to hold their hand and show them why they are important to you.

They will want to feel comfortable and valued in your community.

When you are starting out, take the time to welcome each new member and point them to any welcome guides you may have. You can create and pin a topic that explains how to get started. When a new member joins, link them to that topic.

You should also use profile completion to politely enforce the use of a user photo. A photo personalises a user's profile and reminds that you are speaking to a human!

Remind them to set up email notifications so they won't miss any exciting updates or new topics.

What is your promotion strategy?
No matter how great your content is, it needs promoting. There are several great ways to do this.

You can create a monthly email sent to all members. You can outline any important topics or articles. You can list upcoming events.

You can promote your articles to Facebook and Twitter. Make the headlines interesting to encourage clicks into your content.

By driving traffic back to your site, you will increase your membership.

How often are you going to contribute to your own community?
In the early days of your new community, you will have to be very active. You will want to welcome new members and keep conversations alive. You will be creating new conversations for others to contribute in. You must budget time for this and be consistent. Show up every day.

I recommend setting aside two blocks of 30 minutes each day. Use that time to reply to any new topics and to kick off a few of your own. Visit early in the morning, and again in the evening.

How are you going to reward active members?
Once you community gets going, some individuals will stand out as leaders. These leaders are well respected and encourage others to take part.

Create a special member group with better privileges such as increased storage space, or the ability to create post signatures. Give them a special badge and member title.

It will show that you respect and appreciate their contributions. Having a small number of community leaders will save you time. They will always have their fingers on the pulse and can feedback any issues before they develop into something serious.

Are you going to funnel discussion into your community?
Your community is one part of your site. If you have pages and articles up elsewhere, I recommend you encourage posting in the forums. At the end of each article, link to a related forum and ask for their thoughts.

People love sharing their thoughts and opinions.

Summary
Taking the time to create a strategy will pay dividends later. Getting into a professional and focused mindset will make you stand out from the crowd. Knowing the exact purpose of your community and how to execute it is key for success.

Thinking about the questions posed above is a great start. It should make you think about your target audience and how to serve them. It may even create more questions. I'd love to help you answer them.

Let me know what your plans are for your community.

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 step back and evaluating your site from a new user's point of view.

We'll take you through our 6 best tips to simplify your site and increase engagement using built in tools.

#1 Use Social Sign In with at least Facebook and Twitter enabled.
Social sign in makes it easy for causal visitors to become content contributors by creating an account. Social sign in removes the complex registration form that may put some off.

It's a fact that most people visiting your site will have either a Facebook account or a Twitter account. Use that to your advantage!

#2 Use Profile Completion
One of the biggest reasons sites fail to convert visitors into members is because of large or complex forms. If you have many required profile fields, your potential member is likely to abandon the form. Use the Profile Completion system with fewer fields where possible for a simpler registration form.

The Profile Completion system allows new members to complete their profile in their own time. Of course, you can still enforce vital fields before members can contribute.

#3 Use Fluid View
Traditional forums can be a little daunting to site visitors used to Facebook. The top down categorisation is a strength for separating conversations. Yet, it can be confusing for a first time visitor to navigate.

Fluid view breaks down these boundaries by presenting your conversations in one simple list. By removing the need to jump between forum containers, new visitors are encourage to keep diving deeper into your conversations. An engaged visitor is more likely to contribute.

#4 Keep your forum structure simple
Even with fluid view enabled, complex forum structures can confuse. Consider a brand new forum with a hundred different conversation areas. Would a new user know where to go and post? Would they be put off thinking they are posting in the wrong area? The best advice is always start off with as few forum containers as possible and increase them as your community grows.

#5 Use Reactions
One of the simplest ways to increase engagement is to turn on Reactions. Reactions allow other members to leave feedback on a post in a few clicks. The default reactions allow one to like, give thanks, express confusion, sadness or happiness. You can add your own reactions to tailor the platform to your niche and personality.

Non-verbal engagement is important for your active posters. If they receive reactions to their posts, they are more likely to reply more and return often to see what feedback they have received.

#6 Use the Sign In/Sign Up widget
A very simple way to increase visitor to member conversion is to just ask them to register. Invision Community ships with a drag and drop widget that you can use to outline what your site is about and encourage registration.

In one very simple but prominent box, you can see what the site is about and how to join in.

Summary
New and existing communities should take a moment to see their site through a new visitor's eyes. Consider how easy your structure is to navigate and how many barriers to registration there are.

You can streamline both registration and conversation presentation with our built in tools. The key to increasing engagement is to make it a simple as possible to join your community. Make sure your barriers or entry are set low.

Not using Invision Community? We can convert you from other platforms preserving your data. Our migration page has more information on the platforms we can convert you from.

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
HTTPS is fast becoming the standard way to serve websites. In 2016, more than 50% of web requests were served under HTTPS for the first time. Chrome and Firefox now explicitly warn users on login forms that aren’t sending data over HTTPS, and it’s not hard to imagine that in the near future all insecure pages will receive the warning.

HTTPS simply means that website data is served over a secure connection and can’t be read or tampered with by a ‘middle man’ hacker. You can identify a site using HTTPS because the address in your browser will show ‘https://’ (instead of http://), and normally a lock icon or the word ‘secure’.

Invision Community supports HTTPS by default simply by changing your base URL configuration to include HTTPS. Of course your web host will need to support it as well and our Invision Community Cloud services support it by default. Contact support if you have any questions.

Recommendation: Set up HTTPS for your entire community to prevent ‘man in the middle’ attacks.

2. Set up Two Factor Authentication
Invision Community supports Two Factor Authentication (2FA for short), and we highly recommend making use of this feature for your users, but especially for your administrator staff.

2FA is a system that requires both a user’s password and a special code (displayed by a phone app) that changes every few seconds. The idea is simple: if a user’s password is somehow compromised, a hacker still wouldn’t be able to log in to the account because they would not have the current code number.

You may already be familiar with 2FA from other services you use. Apple’s iCloud, Facebook and Google all offer it, as do thousands of banks and other security-conscious businesses.

Invision Community supports 2FA via the Google Authenticator app (available for iOS and Android) or the Authy service, which is able to send codes to users via text message or phone call. You can also fall back to security questions instead of codes.

You can configure which members groups can use 2FA, as well as requiring certain groups to use it. 

Recommendation: Require any staff with access to the Admin Control Panel or moderation functions to use 2FA, to ensure that no damage can be done should their account passwords be discovered. Allow members to use 2FA at their discretion.

3. Configure password requirements
The password strength feature displays a strength meter to users as they type a new password, showing them approximately how secure it is, as well as some tips for choosing a good password.

While you can leave this feature as a simple recommendation for users, it’s also possible to require them to choose a password that reaches to a certain strength on the meter. 

Recommendation: Require users to choose at least a ‘Strong’ password.

4. Use Admin restrictions
It’s very common that many different staff members need access to the Admin Control Panel depending on the role. You may have design staff, billing staff, community managers, and so on, all with particular tasks they would like to achieve.

Invision Community can help improve the security of your Admin Control Panel by allowing you to restrict the functions available to each administrator, granting them access to only the tools needed to do their job. 

Recommendation: Audit your community’s administrator accounts and applying restrictions where it makes sense to do so.

5. Stay up to date
It’s important to ensure you’re always running the latest release of Invision Community. With each release, we add new security features, audit code and fix any issues reported through responsible disclosure. Falling behind can therefore make your community a tempting target for potential hackers.

Your Invision Community Admin Control Panel will let you know when a new release is available, and you can also check out our Release page to track releases.

For our Enterprise customers, we’ll automatically apply updates for you shortly after release as part of your plan. For our self-hosted and Cloud customers, you can easily apply new updates via the Admin Control Panel with a couple of clicks.

Our Invision Community Cloud contains all best practices for security. However, if you are self-hosted, be sure to work with your web host to ensure your server is setup properly. Ensuring that server software, firewalls, and access controls are in place is very important as an insecure server can be your worst enemy.

Recommendation: Aim to install latest updates as soon as feasible.

6. IP address restrictions
For organizations where staff are centrally-based in one location, or are required to use a VPN, you can improve your community security by restricting access to the Admin Control Panel to the IP addresses your staff will be using. This is a server-level feature, so contact your IT team to have this facility set up your installation. Enterprise customers who wish to utilize IP restrictions should contact our Managed Support team, while Cloud customers can submit a support ticket to have this set up.

Recommendation: Where staff all access the community from a small number of IP addresses, restrict Admin Control Panel access to those IPs. 

Summary
Don’t leave security as an afterthought. Invision Community includes a range of tools to help you ensure your data and members protected, as well as industry-standard protections ‘under the hood’. Make use of these features, and they’ll help ensure the wellbeing of your site.

As always, if you have any questions or need advice, our support team are on hand to assist you.

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 with Google, you've become a target.

Invision Community has several tools in its arsenal to deal with spam leaving you free to concentrate on your members and content. We'll take a look at these tools in more detail.

First, it's important to know that there are two main types of spam. Computer generated and human generated.

Computer generated spam is malicious software that throws millions of messages out and hopes some sticks to high profile communities.

Human generated spam is more pernicious as it can often bypass automated measures. Human spammers often register accounts and post as members on your community.

The first line of defense
Invision Community comes equipped with Spam Defense. This is free with all cloud and licensed plans. Spam Defense harnesses the combined knowledge of thousands of Invision Communities. It will assess the potential threat of each new user and stop them before they can cause any problems.

To date, Spam Defense has blocked over 3,000,000 spam accounts.

Spam Defense works by evaluating the registering member against its database. It will score the account from 1 (not a spammer) to 4 (a known spammer) allowing you to decide what to do with each level.

If a spammer gets past the Spam Defense, flag them as a spammer using the built in tools. This will clear up all their posts in a single action and report back to Spam Defense that this account has spammed your site. These community led reports allow Spam Defense to learn and adapt.

Preventing spammers from registering
The CAPTCHA ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a well tested and robust method to defeat computerised spammers. It is usually a small widget on a sign up form that asks you to re-enter words shown in an image.

Invision Community supports Recaptcha2 by Google, meaning that in most cases your users don't even have to type in random letters. Instead, Google algorithms determine if the user is human or otherwise. Invision Community supports KeyCaptcha. This requires guests to solve a simple problem before they can contribute.

The Question and Answer challenge works on its own or in conjunction with a CAPTCHA. This system allows you to create simple question and answer challenges unique to your community. As these answers are unique, computerized spammers cannot solve them. Also, human spammers not knowledable with your niche are often unable to solve them too.

While the above are great for reducing the number of computerized spammers, we need to be especially clever to weed out human spammers.

Dealing with human spammers
Smart configuration of your community will also help in defeating spammers. Invision Community supports posting without registering. This feature allows for fast engagement but use it with caution. It works best if you only allow it for specific forums.

Invision Community's membership promotion system also has tools which you can leverage.

To make your site less appealing to human spammers, you can configure two membership groups. Let us look at an example which uses "New Members" and "Members".

"New Members" is the default group for new registrations. In this group you can remove the ability to add a signature to each post. Often spammers use signatures to earn referrals on links.

You can also define a limit for posts per day. This will throttle the number of spam posts a member can make.

Now that you have your "New Members" group set up to build trust, you can promote them using Group Promotions.

A good strategy is to promote them to "Members" when they have reached a certain level of reputation. This shows that they have become a trusted member of the community.

You may wish to promote them a week after joining knowing that spammers usually leave after a day or so.

There are many different criteria you can use allowing you to tailor it for your own needs.

Summary
Dealing with spam is a reality for every successful community. Invision Community has several features to mitigate its impact.

Through leveraging its built in tools to smart configuration, you can make your community a fortress against spam. In addition, our exclusive Spam Defense system grows and learns every day stopping spammers from registering.

To learn how to configure Invision Community's spam prevention tools, please see our help guide.

Not using Invision Community? We can convert you from other platforms preserving your data. Our migration page has more information on the platforms we can convert you from.

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 approaches for you automatically, without you needing to lift a finger.

Even still, there are a few additional steps you can take to potentially help your site rank better.

How Invision Community helps you automatically
Invision Community does a lot of automatic SEO for you behind the scenes to help your site rank better or to help search engines understand your content. Some of those include:

• Sitemap generation
  A sitemap file helps search engines to locate pages within your site. This helps search engines find pages so they will be crawled quicker. Invision Community automatically generates a sitemap for you that points to all of your content URLs, and submits it to Google.
• JSON-LD
  Another way a site can help search engines is by providing metadata about a page. For example, if the page contains a review, additional data can be supplied to the search engine with rating count, average, and so on. There are dozens of items that can be described in this way, and doing so can mean your results in search engines display this additional data. This makes results more useful to users, potentially leading them to click on your result versus another. It can also help search engines understand your content better.
• Canonical URLs
  Search engines can penalize your site in situations where the same content can have multiple URLs. With software that generates pages dynamically, such as a community, this can happen frequently because there are URLs to get the last read post, the latest post, the first post and so on, all ultimately pointing to the same topic page. Invision Community takes care of this for you by setting a canonical URL for every page, telling the search engine which is the definitive URL it should use.
• Semantic markup
  The HTML markup used to generate a page is possibly the most important factor impacting SEO. Each HTML tag has a specific meaning (e.g. H1 is an important title) and allows search engines to determine the structure of the page. It's therefore important that tags are used correctly and in the appropriate context - known as semantic markup. Invision Community has been built with semantic markup principles in mind right from the start.
• Responsive theme
  Google has been transitioning to a mobile-first approach when crawling sites and it's likely this does or will factor into its PageRank system. Now more than ever it is important that your community offers a genuine mobile experience. Invision Community achieves this by supporting responsiveness - where the theme adapts depending on size of the screen being used - by default.

What you can do to improve ranking

Let search engines see your content
One of the most important things you can do to help with SEO might seem obvious, but we've seen many people unwittingly neglect it: ensure that search engines can see your content!

It's tempting to lock down your community so that users have to log in before being able to see your content, and for some communities this might be necessary. However, a search engine can only see content accessible to guests, and so by locking your community down a search engine won't be able to see very much at all, and your pages won't show in search results.

Wherever possible, we suggest allowing guests to read your content, though you can require registration to reply.

Enable HTTPS
Even ignoring SEO this is a good idea, because it's more secure for your users and browsers are increasingly alerting users about sites that don't use HTTPS, showing them as insecure.

In terms of SEO, research has shown a correlation between between sites using HTTPS and their ranking position, and in 2014 Google indicated that HTTPS would be a “ranking signal” going forward. Given the other benefits of HTTPS, it would therefore be wise to enable it across your community.

Ensure your site loads fast
A fast-loading site is very important for rankings, and so you should do what you can to keep your community running quickly. This includes:

• Enable guest caching
  Invision Community includes a built-in caching system for pages viewed by guests, ensuring they don't have to be re-generated for every page view. This can greatly speed up your site for guest users and therefore search engines. This is automatically configured on our Cloud services.
• Don't go overboard with plugins
  A few good plugins can set your community apart from others, but going overboard can significantly slow down your load times or clutter your interface.
• Be wary of image-heavy themes
  As with plugins, a great theme is a good thing to have, but try to avoid one with extensive use of very large images.
• Choose a good host
  Some website hosts are slower than others, so ensuring your host is up to scratch is important. Of course our Cloud services are a great solution here!

Use 301 Redirects if migrating
If you're migrating from another community platform, your page URLs will change to reflect Invision Community's architecture. You can greatly improve SEO retention by using special redirects (known as 301 Redirects) to send users from your old URLs to the new. Search engines understand this method and will update their records.

We include redirects in our free migration packages to help you retain your SEO standings after migrating to Invision Community.

Write relevant content
If your site targets a particular niche, you may see benefit in writing longer-form content as articles on a site blog. This kind of content ranks well and allows you to ensure keywords are used (versus content posted by members, which can be anything). You can also encourage further discussion of the article in the wider community, amplifying its benefit.

For a site news page/blog, our Pages app can be used to build an articles section for this purpose.

Use social media profiles to your benefit
You should register social media profiles for your site on the popular platforms and make them a part of your presence. These sites rank very highly of course, and so if your social profiles can also rank highly for your name, they can be a good way of directing traffic to your site.

Use the ‘About' section of the profile to write an interesting blurb about what your site offers. Create eye-catching header images and profile photos to use on the profiles too. Cross-link each social profile to the others (and back to your site, of course). Finally, link to your social profiles from your site too. Invision Community allows you to easily do this and insert icons in your header or footer.

Beyond that, you can also use social media to your advantage by cross-linking some of your best content to it. We'll go into more detail on how best to leverage social media in a future article, but the new Promote functionality in Invision Community is a great way of achieving this.

Summing Up
As always, content is king when it comes to ranking, and that should be your most important focus. Fostering a vibrant community that creates and shares interesting content is key. You can then use SEO methods boosted by Invision Community features to expand your community's reach in search engines.

If you have any SEO tips that have helped your site, we'd love to hear them. Share them in the comments below!

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 social media platforms) to your advantage.

With an owned community, the rewards of your hard work belong to you and your business alone.

You own your data
The biggest point to consider when using Facebook groups is that you do not own your own data. Facebook owns it and does not even allow you direct access to it. If you decide later to move to a different platform, need to run reports to extract meaningful insights, or otherwise work with your community data: you are out of luck.

In contrast, with an Invision Community, your data is your data. You can use it in any way that makes sense for your goals; be it analyzing trends, sending promotions to users, or generating reports and statistics. We never hold your data hostage and there's no fee to get it.

Beyond owning the data, you also control how it's used and presented. Facebook is notorious for changing algorithms for when (or even if) people see your posts. When you run your own community the experience for your and your users is in your control.

Branding opportunities
This is a big one. An owned community gives you the tools you need to make your community a seamless part of your user's interaction with your business. This naturally includes your brand styles (your logo, colors, site navigation and so on) but also your community web address (URL). With an owned community, your URL will be easy to find - customers normally opt for something like forum.yourname.com or community.yourname.com. 

Users will have more confidence that they're in the right place, and more closely associate your community and your message with your brand.

Emails sent out by your owned community can also carry your branding, consistently reinforcing that connection between your business and your community.

And, of course, when users share content from your community to Facebook and other social networks, they're sending users directly to your website where you have the opportunity to lead with your most important call to actions.

More control over user experience
All Facebook groups are, essentially, the same experience and yet your business needs almost certainly aren't the same as every other. One size doesn't necessarily fit all when it comes to community!

When you control your own community, you have the ability to control your user's experience. Need to show specific types of data in specific places? You can do that (and more) with Invision Community's easy to use Blocks feature. Need to create a custom community application to serve as a resource center for product support? You can do that too.

Another huge benefit of this control is that, unlike a Facebook Group, users won't be seeing ads and 'recommended content' from competing businesses and communities. With user attention being pulled in so many directions these days, the last thing your community needs is for users to leave because Facebook has suggested a competitor!

No barriers to monetization
Not all communities require a monetization strategy. In many cases, the community is part of a larger customer relationship strategy rather than a revenue-generating destination in its own right.

But for those communities that do plan to monetize, options with a Facebook group are at best difficult to act upon, and at worst practically non-existent.

In contrast, Invision Community gives you the opportunity to explore monetization strategies that work for you. These might include paid subscription plans (a particularly attractive option for fan club communities), traditional advertising through Google AdSense and other networks, or sponsorship deals with other businesses that might be relevant to your members. Invision Community has tools for each of these approaches built in, allowing you to start monetizing with minimum fuss.

Fine-grained permission controls
Facebook groups struggle to reflect the real-world roles that staff members play in your organization, limiting your choices to 'administrator' or 'moderator'. And the same is true of users, too - your options for recognizing different levels of user (such as VIPs, or brand ambassadors) are limited.

Invision Community is different. Since you are creating and configuring each member group, you can precisely control who can see what, and how they are recognized within the community. You can even sync these roles via Single Sign-On (SSO) making setup and assigning users to groups painless.

For staff groups, you can limit access to key community functions based on roles or responsibilities, ensuring access is granted on an as-needed basis only.

For users, you can get creative and find a group structure that works best for your specific needs. For example, support communities often find that recognizing the most knowledgeable and helpful members with a new member group (complete with elevated permissions) is a great way of engaging users.

And finally, with this control over access, it's very easy to create restricted areas of the community. Whether you want to create a private subforum that staff can use to coordinate tasks or a file repository that's only available to subscribers, Invision Community can achieve it.

You can still reap the Facebook benefits
Setting up your community within Facebook's walls might not be the best approach for you. That doesn't mean you should ignore Facebook, however. On the contrary, it's an influential platform and there's a very good chance your users are already using it.

Invision Community offers a number of tools that allow you to benefit from Facebook while avoiding the drawbacks we discussed. We'll go into more detail on utilizing social media in a future article, but to summarize:

• Invision Community features social sign-in options, enabling users to register and log in using their existing social media accounts, substantially reducing onboarding friction.
• Content can promoted by staff back to your social network pages, automatically and on a schedule you decide.
• Invision Community supports automatic embedding of a wide number of social networks (and other services), allowing users to share their favorite Facebook and Twitter posts and spark a whole new conversation - but this time in your community.

Summary
When you are creating an online community for your business or hobby it is important to think about your goals and future growth by choosing a platform that is there to work for your needs.

When you establish your community on Facebook, you're helping to grow someone else's business (including, potentially, your competitors!) and hoping that some of those spoils fall to you. With an owned community, the rewards of your hard work belong to you and your business alone.

Invision Community has been enabling users and businesses to communicate online since 2002, and we're proud of our reputation as a platform that puts control in your hands. Contact us if you'd like to discuss how we can help you too.
 

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.

When users visit your community, they're usually looking for authoritative information

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. As we'll discuss in future articles, a key part of engagement is that users see your organization's team interacting with the community. In many cases, users will expect and appreciate acknowledgement from your community team, and by highlighting those responses you can add a visible stamp of authority.

Invision Community has a few different tools to help you highlight staff posts, so let's take a look at them in more detail. 

Group badges
With group badges you can upload a small image that is shown beside a user's posts. It's shown alongside the user's group name, so you don't need to repeat that text.

Each group can have a different badge, perfect for communities that structure their staff groups based on role type. It's common to color-code group badges for easier identification - support as green, product development as blue, and so on (and you may want to coordinate these colors with the prefix and suffix you use, which we cover later in this article).

It's not just staff groups that can have badges, either; your regular member groups can too. However, a word of caution! If every group has a badge, they may lose their distinctiveness. We recommend reserving group badges for those groups you specifically want to draw attention to.

Post highlights
Second is a feature more explicitly designed to highlight a post rather than simply draw attention to the author. Group settings in Invision Community enable you to choose to have posts by users in each group show with a distinctive background color and border. The color is defined by your theme and so is easily configurable, too.

As with group badges, it may be tempting to highlight every group's content, but we recommend not doing so as that reduces the overall impact of the feature. Keep it reserved for your key staff groups, and especially those that regularly interact with the community.

Group prefix/suffix
Invision Community allows you to define a custom prefix and suffix for each group. This is used in key locations, including to highlight usernames in the Active User block and to style member group names alongside content.

An important part of this feature is that it accepts HTML tags, which gives you a lot of scope for customizing the display by adding an opening and closing HTML tag to the prefix and suffix settings, respectively. For example, let's say we want to add a shield icon before the name, and make the text purple.

Prefix: <span style='color: #9013FE'><i class='fa fa-shield'></i>
Suffix: </span>

Simple! Now our staff members will display in the Active User block and elsewhere like this:

Bonus feature: Staff activity streams
I wanted to also mention a feature that achieves a slightly different goal to those we covered above, but nonetheless is an important way to bring additional visibility to staff content: activity streams.

As well as an overall “All Activity” stream that shows everything happening in the community, Invision Community allows you to define pre-made streams that are available to all users. You can use this to build streams of content with particular tags, certain types of content - or, as in this case, content by users in specific groups.

Simply create a new activity stream in the Admin Control Panel, set the configuration so that it only pulls content from members in your staff groups, and you're done. Users will now be able to visit the stream page to get a handy overview of everything staff members are doing in your community.

I recommend checking out the other filter options available for streams while you're setting this up - there's a huge amount of power available!

Summing up
I hope this quick overview of content highlighting features has been useful. When users visit your community, they're usually looking for authoritative information and that often comes right from your own team. By utilizing the features we've discussed here, you can make that information stand out more against the other content in your 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 reasons behind each type, and come to a justification for one or the other.

Firstly, let’s discuss what we mean by proactive and reactive moderation.

Proactive Moderation
With a proactive approach to moderation, the goal is to prevent bad content from ever appearing in public. The primary way that this is achieved is by having moderation staff review all content posted, and manually approving it after deciding whether it is acceptable.

Another feature that could be classed as proactive moderation is administrator screening of new registrations. When a new user registers in the community, their account can be placed in a ‘validating’ state, requiring an administrator to review the information submitted and deciding whether to approve the account.

As you might expect, proactive moderation is the safest way to ensure bad content doesn’t make it to public view. However, the significant drawback is that users won’t see their content immediately, which can be frustrating and severely stifle productive discussion. At worst, it can push users away from your community altogether. Heavy-handed moderation is often viewed negatively by members who are trying to participate, and can ultimately backfire. 

With a proactive moderation approach, it’s important that you communicate with members one-to-one if they post content with good intentions but which doesn’t meet your criteria. This can reduce resentment over wasted effort, and gives them the opportunity to adjust their approach for future content.

Reactive Moderation
In contrast, a reactive approach to moderation allows user to post freely, without explicit pre-screening of content, with moderators reacting to issues as and when they arise. Reactive moderation is, generally speaking, a more pleasant experience for users because it allows them to engage fully with the community. However, there is of course the risk that unsuitable content is seen in public, at least temporarily.

Choosing a reactive approach doesn’t have to mean a free-for-all. There are many features you can use to make identifying and dealing with bad content a quick and painless process, while still allowing users to contribute freely to the community:

• Report center
  Allows users to identify bad content and submit notifications to moderation staff for prompt action.
• Badword filter, URL filtering and keyword triggers
  Prevent common swear words and other divisive terms from being used by censoring them or replacing them with ***. You can also blacklist undesirable URLs from being used within posts. Plus, automatically watch and moderate posts that contain terms you specify.
• Warning system
  Where a user has proven to be problematic, the warning system in Invision Community allows you to track infractions and apply punishments to the account. These can range from a simple warning message, to suspension, to complete ban. Users can be required to acknowledge the warning before being able to see the community again.
• Moderation queue
  Individual users can be placed into the moderation queue, requiring all content they post to be screened by a moderator before being visible - a good compromise that means you don’t need to screen all content, just that from troublemakers.
• Spam service
  The IPS Spam Defense Service is a free service that automatically reviews new registrations to your community to determine whether they match any known spammers, using data crowdsourced from other Invision Community sites. The service can virtually eliminate known spammers from your community, preventing them from ever causing a problem.
• One-click spam cleanup
  If a spammer does make it into your community, removing their posts and banning them is a one-click action for moderators.
• Saved actions
  Saved actions make it quick to apply multiple moderation actions in one go. For example, if members often post support topics in a non-support forum, a saved action would allow moderators to move the topic and reply to let the member know what happened - all with a single click.

Which is the right approach for your community?

We recommend creating a clear, detailed set of community guidelines that outlines the boundaries of the community

Every community is different, so there’s no one answer here - that’s why Invision Community includes features that enable both approaches, to allow you to determine which to use.

In general, we suggest thinking of reactive moderation as the default stance, and increasing the amount of oversight you make depending on the circumstances. There are exceptions of course. For example, in a situation where a user posting personally-identifying information in a public forum could have a profound implication for personal safety, a proactive moderation approach might be more desirable. Similarly, if it’s essential that users receive correct information that has been vetted by your staff, you may want to review content before it appears (though in this case, other techniques might be considered, such as staff labelling content once it is ‘approved’ by them).

Your choice need not be entirely one or the other, either. While Invision Community has moderation settings that apply to the entire community, it’s also possible to apply different settings on a per-forum or per-member group basis.

Communities often make use of per-group moderation as a way of screening new members. This is achieved by putting new members into a ‘limited’ group that requires content to be reviewed by a moderator. Then, using Invision Community’s group promotion tools, the member is automatically moved to a regular member group once they have a specified number of approved posts (usually a low number; one to five works well). This approach reduces the danger of a rogue member signing up and creating a problem, without requiring the resources to screen every new post to the community.

Finally, whichever approach to moderation your team ultimately finds work best, we recommend creating a clear, detailed set of community guidelines that outlines the boundaries of the community, and what you consider acceptable and unacceptable from members. Most users don’t set out to create problems for you, and referring to your guidelines can often put the lid on any trouble before it starts.

We hope this overview proves helpful to both new and established communities. If you have any approaches to moderation that you think others might be able to learn from, please go ahead and share them in the comments below!
 

There are two ways on IPS Community Suite to avoid these alerts. Keep in mind that doing nothing will not cause you any problems, your site will still work, but users will get warnings and this may impact how people perceive joining your community.

Make your Community 100% Secure

The easiest option is to make every page on your IPS Community Suite use a secure connection. To do this you would need to ensure your web host has HTTPS support enabled on your site and then simply edit conf_global.php and change the URL field to https:// and that's it.

One thing to keep in mind is that your users, if you allow it, can still paste in links to externally hosted images which might not be secure. This does not impact the security of your site but it may generate a browser warning indicating your site has "mixed content" meaning some is secure and some is not. You can optionally enable the Image Proxy feature to make externally linked images route through a proxy on your local server to maintain 100% secure content.

Only Login/Registration Forms and AdminCP Secure

If you prefer not to use HTTPS for your entire site, we do have a setting to only use secure connections for login, registration, and AdminCP. 

When the login-only secure option is enabled the quick login drop down is also disabled and instead users are sent to a full page to login. This is a small change required to avoid browser warnings. Although the quick login menu submits to a secure connection, the form field itself may show on a non-secure page which would generate a warning.

IPS Community in the Cloud

Those using IPS CiC can get secure connections for a $15 setup fee plus $5 month on our 40, 65 and 100 user Cloud plans. You can either bring your own certificate or we can provide one for you. On the 200, 450 and 750 plans, SSL is completely free - again, either your own or we can provide one.

But just because it isn't built in, that doesn't mean it isn't possible! In fact, with a little CSS, this is quite easy to achieve now.

Writing a CSS selector

We can do this by writing a CSS selector that matches the tag URL for the tag we want to style - a handy way to use CSS that can be applied to lots of other ideas within the suite!

Lets say we have a tag called 'resolved', and we want to make it green. Add the following CSS to your custom.css file:

.ipsTags a[href*="/tags/resolved/"] {
    background: SeaGreen;
}
html[dir="ltr"] .ipsTags a[href*="/tags/resolved/"]:before {
	border-color: transparent SeaGreen transparent transparent;
}

The first style is the main part of the tag element; the second matches the :before pseudo-selector which we use to make the 'point' of the tag.

Another tag we'll style is called 'needs help'. In this case, there's spaces in the name, which are represented by the + symbol in the URL (since it's URL-encoded). We'll make it purple this time:

.ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"] {
    background: Purple;
}
html[dir="ltr"] .ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"]:before {
	border-color: transparent Purple transparent transparent;
}

Supporting prefixes

This little CSS snippet won't change prefixes, however - they'll still be shown in the default color (specified by your theme settings). If you want to change prefixes too, you need to adjust the CSS as follows - replace the previous CSS with this version:

.ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"],
a.ipsTag_prefix[href*="?tags=needs+help"] {
    background: Purple;
}
html[dir="ltr"] .ipsTags a[href*="/tags/needs+help/"]:before,
html[dir="ltr"] a.ipsTag_prefix[href*="?tags=needs+help"]:before {
	border-color: transparent Purple transparent transparent;
}

(Note: Notice the slightly different string we're matching in the href attribute; once you upgrade to 4.1.14, this won't be necessary - both selectors can use the same href format, e.g. /tags/needs+help/. Prior to 4.1.14, tags and prefixes used slightly different URL formats.)

That's it - now everything looks correct!

However, as usual in IPS4, some of the more advanced power under the hood does allow you to achieve the same goal - in this case, by using HTML Logic. This technique uses a similar idea to the one I outlined in the Dynamic-ish Forum Feeds blog in May.

Creating conditional blocks

The way we would implement this functionality is by creating a custom block that is simply a wrapper for other blocks. This wrapper block will contain HTML Logic that determines which feed block to show, based on some information about the current page.

The first step would be to create standard feed blocks for each of the forums to which this should apply. In our example we're creating 'popular topics' blocks, but it could be anything you wish - the principle will remain the same. Another idea would be to create a 'Topics from other forums' block for each of your forums, whereby in the block configuration, you set it to include topics from all forums except the one in which it will be displayed - a good way of cross-promoting your topics.

In order to include the blocks later, set the template key of each to be forum_x, where x is the ID of the forum in which you will display the block.

Once we've created a block for each forum, the next step is to create our wrapper block, which should be a custom block set to use Manual HTML, with the following code:

{{if request.app == 'forums' && request.module == 'forums'}}
	{{$id = \IPS\Request::i()->id;}}
	{block="forum_{$id}"}
{{endif}}

What's happening here is we're checking the app and module from the page URL are both 'forums', which indicates we're in forum view. We then use the {block} tag to insert the appropriate block based on the ID parameter from the URL.

To use this block, simply save it, then using the Block Manager on the front-end, drag it into the desired location in your forum view.

I hope this quick suggestion gives you some ideas for other ways to create blocks that show contextually depending on what the user is viewing. If you have ideas for interesting ways to use this technique, share them in the comments!

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 section of your theme so that it can be used in your CSS. To start with, we'll use the same image for both read and unread status, but we'll cover using a different icon for both too.

The basics

Here's the basic CSS to replace the icon for all forums with your custom image:

body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large {
	width: 50px;
	height: 50px;
	border-radius: 0;
	background-color: transparent;
	background-image: url('{resource="mushroom.png" app="core" location="front"}');
	background-size: 50px 50px;
}

body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large > i {
	display: none;
}

What we're doing here is specifically targeting the item status icons in the forums app, using the body[data-pageapp="forums"] selector. Within this style, we're setting the size of the icon - I've chosen 50px here which is about right in most cases, although you can change this if desired. Next we reset the border radius and background color so the icon looks right. And finally, we set the background image to our icon by using the {resource} tag and the background size to the same dimensions we just set the element to.

The next style hides the FontAwesome icon that IPS4 inserts by default, so that our icon can be seen.

Using a different 'read' icon

By default, your icon will be faded out for 'read' icons, but it's easy to use a completely different icon if you wish. Simply add:

body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large.ipsItemStatus_read {
	background-image: url('{resource="mushroom_faded.png" app="core" location="front"}');
}

All we're doing here is using a more specific selector with .ipsItemStatus_read so that only the 'read' state is targeted. In the style, we specify the background image - we don't need to set and reset the other rules again because the styles we wrote in the first step are inherited.

Using different icons for redirect or Q&A forums

If you want to add icons specifically for redirect or Q&A forums, you can do that by targeting unique classes that are added to the icons for those kinds of forums. Those classes are .cForumIcon_redirect and .cForumIcon_answers, respectively. So, to use a custom icon for a Q&A forum, you would add another style like so:

body[data-pageapp="forums"] .cForumRow .cForumIcon_answers.ipsItemStatus.ipsItemStatus_large {
	background-image: url('{resource="question.png" app="core" location="front"}');
}

Notice we've added .cForumIcon_answers to our selector.

{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 use in your themes and addons.

{member}

If you need to show any data about a member, the {member} tag is very useful. It's a shorthand that can display properties and call methods on a member object, so it's much neater than the manual approach. It's used like this:

// Get a property, like 'name'
{member="name"}

// Call a method, like 'link()'
{member="link()"}

By default, it will work with the currently logged-in member, but you can pass an id attribute to show data about any member:

// Show the name of member #67
{member="name" id="67"}

{expression}

The expression tag allows you insert simple one-line PHP expressions into your templates. For example, if a variable is an array of values and you want to show one per line, instead of writing a loop, you could do:

{expression="implode( '<br>', $myArray )"}

{prefix}

The prefix tag is unusual in that it's designed specifically for use in CSS files. It prefixes CSS styles with the various vendor prefixes, meaning instead of writing:

.myClass {
	-webkit-transform: scale(3) rotate(45deg);
	-moz-transform: scale(3) rotate(45deg);
	-o-transform: scale(3) rotate(45deg);
	transform: scale(3) rotate(45deg);
}

You can write:

.myClass {
	{prefix="transform" value="scale(3) rotate(45deg)"}
}

{hextorgb}

Continuing with the CSS theme, next there's the "Hex to RGB" tag. If you're a theme designer and want to use a theme setting value but apply some transparency, this tag will be particularly useful to you. Color theme settings are simple hex values, e.g. #000000. To apply some transparency, you need to use the rgba notation however (the 'a' meaning 'alpha channel', otherwise known as transparency). The {hextorgb} tag does this for you.

It accepts either a hex color, or a theme setting key. By default it outputs the same color in rgb notation, but if you want to add transparency, you can add an opacity parameter which will represent the alpha channel value.

{hextorgb="#ff0000"}
--> rgb(255,0,0)

{hextorgb="page_background" opacity="0.6"}
--> rgba(235,238,242,0.6)

{truncate}

Finally, there's the truncate tag. This tag takes some text (usually as a variable), and truncates it to the length you specify. By default it appends an ellipsis (...) to the end of the content, although this is configurable via the append parameter.

{truncate="$someLongText" length="300"}

Note that this isn't designed to be used on HTML markup; you may break your page if HTML tags are included in the text. For those cases, consider using the javascript ipsTruncate widget instead.

I hope this overview of 5 lesser-known template tags will help you as you build themes or applications! Share your related tips in the comments.

In my reply, I indicate that you'd need to have a forum ID stored with each record in a custom field, and then use PHP to interact with our API to pull the topic list.

As it turns out, however, there's an easier way that I discovered after some experimentation. In hindsight it's obvious, but I want to share it here because it could open up some other interesting possibilities with some creative uses.

Setting up blocks

The first thing we need to do is create our blocks. We're going to create a block for each of our forums. You can set whatever parameters you want here, but the important thing is that they're named consistently using the forum ID. So, for my forum ID 2, I've named the block forum_2. This will allow us to include our blocks later.

Adding the field

Next we'll need to create a field in our Pages database that will be used to set the forum ID that is going to show in each record. For simplicity, I'm creating a Number field and I'll enter the forum ID manually, but if you wanted to go further, you could create a Select Box field, with the key being each forum and the value being the name. This would give you a friendlier input from which to select the forum for each record.

Here, though, I've just created the Number field, and named it Forum ID.

Using the field formatter to show the correct block

Finally, we'll use the Field Formatting options to show the correct block based on the forum ID entered for each record. On the Display Options tab, I'm going to hide the field from the listing template, but show it on the display template. I've selected Custom as the format, then entered this format:

{{if $formValue}}
	{block="forum_{$formValue}"}
{{endif}}

That's it - that's all you need for this to work. It's very simple. All we're doing is passing the $formValue of the field (which is the raw value) into the {block} tag as a variable, so that the block that is rendered depends on this value. As long as a block exists with the correct key, it'll be shown in the display view:

Going further

So, given that we know we can use variables in block names to pull in different content (providing the block has been created ahead of time), what other possibilities are there? For starters, we aren't just restricted to using field formatters. Instead, we could use blocks directly in the database templates, using some of the data available there.

Here's one idea - if you have just a few staff members posting records, you could create a block for each staff member that lists their recent posts, status updates, etc. In your database template, you could include the correct block by doing this:

{block="content_for_{$record->author()->member_id}"}

I hope this relatively simple approach gives you some ideas for more creative ways to use blocks. If you have any suggestions for other ways to use this approach, please let us know in the comments!

Your first instinct might be to open the template editor and add some custom classnames so you can style them. This would certainly work, but the downside is your template is now customized, so any future IPS4 updates would leave the template out of date. Not ideal by any means.

Instead, you can use some helpful attributes that IPS4 adds to the body element, and then build a CSS selector around them. There's four attributes, and they always reference the current page the user is on:

• data-pageApp - The application key (e.g. core, forums, cms etc.)
• data-pageModule - The current module with the application (e.g. pages)
• data-pageController - The current controller within the module (e.g. topic, page etc.)
• data-pageLocation - Either admin or front.

So let's say we want to change how the .ipsPageHeader element looks within topic view. Our selector would look like this:

body[data-pageapp="forums"][data-pagemodule="forums"][data-pagecontroller="topic"] .ipsPageHeader {
	...your styles
}

If you don't want to be that specific, you can just use the attributes you need. For example, if you want to change all .ipsPageHeader styles in the Forums app, you'd do:

body[data-pageapp="forums"] .ipsPageHeader {
	...your styles
}

Tip: If you don't know the correct app/module/controller for the page you're on, you can find out by visiting the page and then viewing the page source. You'll see these attributes in the body tag near the top.

And as always, be sure you add your CSS to custom.css to keep your upgrades easy  

This theme tip is taken from our guides section.