Have you ever found yourself muttering "there has to be an easier way" when managing your community?
If you have, it's likely that you are not the first person to think that. Invision Community has been refined over nearly two decades, and in that time we've received a lot of feedback from clients running very large and busy sites.
We love a short cut, especially when it makes our clients lives easier.
There's plenty of time-saving features throughout Invision Community, and here are five of the best.
Saved Actions
If you routinely perform the same actions to a topic, such as replying before closing it or moving the topic to a different forum, then saved actions will save you a lot of time.
Let's look at a practical example. You have a forum where your members can suggest new features for your product. You might choose to move some of these suggestions to another forum to shortlist them for inclusion in a future version, or to discuss further. You also may like to reply thanking the member for their idea, but it's not feasible at this time.
Here you would set up two saved actions, one that replies and moves the topic to a specific forum, and one that replies to the topic and closes it for further commenting.
Your saved actions are accessible via the moderation menu
You and your moderating team can select these saved actions quickly when reading a topic to perform multiple moderation steps in one go.
RSS Feeds
If your community regularly discusses topics that feature in the latest news, then you can quickly seed these discussions using the RSS feed import tool.
Not only can you import almost any public RSS feed into your community, but you also have control over how these topics are displayed, to whom they are attributed to and how the link back to the source article looks.
RSS feed import is an often overlooked but handy tool at starting productive discussions without the need to source and post them manually.
iCal Feeds
The iCal feed can be considered as the sister feature to the RSS Feed Import tool. It works in a very similar way in that it can accept almost any public iCal feed and import events into your community's calendar.
This is especially useful if you maintain an event stream outside of the community, but wish to share those events with your members in a native way, or perhaps you already have a calendar product used by your organisation.
Using the iCal feed tool to populate your community calendar with key dates relevant to your community can be achieved very quickly.
Auto-moderation
Moderating a busy community can be a time-consuming task. Trying to review new posts and topics to ensure they meet your community standards as they come in can be daunting.
Fortunately, Invision Community has an ace up its sleeve.
Auto-moderation allows you to use the power of your community to identify and remove content that does not meet your community standards. The administrator sets up a threshold so that when a specific number of reports for that content item is crossed, the content is hidden.
Auto-moderation has a lot of options to configure which we covered in this blog article recently.
Group promotion
Ensuring your members feel valued and rewarded for their contributions is key to member retention and keeping engagement high.
A simple way to reward long term regular contributors is to elevate their permissions. This can mean that they have access to otherwise hidden areas, or they get more allowances in terms of upload space and fewer restrictions.
To do this manually would take a significant amount of time. Thankfully, Invision Community has a feature called Group Promotion.
This tool allows the administrator to set up specific thresholds such as post count, or time since joining which then move the member into a new group when triggered.
This all happens automatically. Just set it up and let it run!
We spoke about Group Promotion recently, take a look here to learn more about this feature.
How many of you are already using these features, and which ones did we miss off our list? I'd love to know.
Edited by Matt
