As we close out another year with Invision Community, I wanted to take this opportunity to review the progress we’ve made and look ahead to next year and beyond.

It's certainly been another busy year with over 1,300 improvements, fixes and new features.

We listen to your feedback and meet each month with many community management teams. These conversations help us understand what it takes to build and grow a strong community.

This year was about listening closely to that feedback and then turning that insight into practical improvements across the platform.

We launched major new features, reduced friction, improved insight, added new integrations and API endpoints, improved the mobile experience, and made numerous core platform updates.

Let’s take a look at the highlights.

A more app-like mobile and modern web experience

This year, we continued to close the gap between web and native app expectations by making Invision Community feel faster and more natural to use on every device.

Improvements included smoother loading states, familiar mobile interactions, and clearer notification prompts, resulting in an experience that feels modern.

We continued to remove client-side scripting in favour of native CSS solutions to improve loading and interaction speeds.

The mobile experience improvements included:

• Pull to refresh in iOS

• Loading animation

• Installation prompt banner

• App icon notification count badges

• Easier to use, enable notification prompts

• Mobile app-like menus

Deeper integrations and extensibility

In 2025, we expanded how Invision Community integrates with the workflows you rely on every day.

New APIs, webhooks, and automation made it easier to move data, trigger workflows, and integrate your community into existing systems.

The integration improvements included:

• New endpoints for Zapier

• New REST API endpoints

• New Webhooks

• Mailchimp integration

• iFramely integration

Driving discovery and engagement

Continued growth is essential to the health of your community. In 2025, we continued to invest in helping members find value faster and stay engaged for longer.

We also introduced our new feature, Quests, which bridges the gap between in-person events and communities by enabling gamification across both.

The complete list of improvements is:

• Quests

• Customisable welcome emails

• Auto follow clubs

• New email advertising and promotion tools

Clearer insight into community health

To help tell the story of your community and find actionable insights, we created a new suite of community health metrics.

For example, tracking 'first response time' provides a clear indication of how quickly new interactions are acknowledged within your community. A 'good' first response time might be within the first few hours of an inquiry, as quick responses often lead to higher engagement and satisfaction.

These new metrics cover everything you need to create your reports, with new tools to export multiple charts into CSV files with a few clicks for your own tools to analyze.

The new insights include:

• Author diversity

• Responsiveness

• Engagement

• First response time

• Daily active users / monthly active users

Stronger core platform foundations

Throughout 2025, we continued to improve on the core of the Invision Community platform, focusing on the everyday things that keep communities running smoothly.

Updates across content management, permissions, and moderation controls reduced friction and improved consistency across even the largest and most active communities.

• Auto-splitting large topics

• Profile photo gallery

• Auto lock topics

• Default pages per group

• Recommended tags

• Turnstile captcha

• Page Editor roll back

Looking ahead

As we look to the future, our focus remains on strengthening the foundations of the community platform to help yours grow.

We will continue to expand AI in thoughtful ways, not to replace humans, but to support moderation and surface relevant content.

At the same time, we’re committed to simplifying the platform to sharpen the feature set around what matters most: discovery, engagement, trust, and moderation.

The goal, as always, is a platform that is powerful but not complex.

To help us shape the journey ahead, we invite you to share your own ideas and hopes for 2026. What features or improvements would you like to see?

Your feedback is invaluable as we strive to create a community platform that meets your needs and ambitions. Feel free to join our community to share your 2026 wish list.

We're excited about the future, and we're glad to have you with us!

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

Auto-splitting large topics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome Emails

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

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

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

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

What else?

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

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

The Invision Community October release is packed with improvements, updates, and new features, including app-like mobile menus, a curated profile photo gallery, and a popular club request.

Mobile app-like menus

Our October release features redesigned dropdown menus with an app-like design on mobile devices, improved accessibility, and smoother performance.

Dropdown menus have received a significant redesign, resulting in a native, app-like experience on touch devices. Menus transition into view, occupying a larger area of the screen, which is great for accessibility. They can be dismissed by swiping the menu off-screen in a downward direction or by tapping the blank area above the menu.

These menus have also received accessibility improvements on desktop devices. They can be toggled using the Return/Spacebar keys, tabbed into using the Tab key, and dismissed via the Esc key. A huge win for visitors who are unable to comfortably use a mouse (or prefer to use a keyboard) while browsing your community.

The new dropdown system offers performance improvements for all devices and leverages modern HTML and CSS features, including the popover attribute, opening/closing transitions, and anchor positioning.

Combined, this makes browsing on mobile via browser or PWA feel like a truly native experience.

Curated Profile Photo Gallery

We work with many communities that are extremely privacy-focused, including those in the medical space and communities working with young, vulnerable people.

In these spaces, external uploads are disabled to reduce the risk of exposing personal information, preventing potential harassment, and helping protect members from being identified outside the community.

This means profile photos remain limited to the default letter image, which doesn't allow for much personalisation.

Our Invision Community October release introduces a user photo gallery that allows the community team to upload a curated library of images, which members.the community can then select

By using only community-approved photos, this ensures that profile images remain safe, consistent, and non-identifying, while giving members a sense of individuality and belonging.

Club Auto Follow

Clubs are individual micro-communities that often have a very focused membership who don't want to miss out on any updates.

While our follow and notification system is very robust, most people who join a club want to automatically follow any new items that are posted, such as forum topics.

With our October release, you can now set clubs to "auto-follow". When set, any new members who join are automatically added to the follow lists of all content areas, such as forums, ensuring they receive notifications when new topics are posted.

This feature is a great way to ensure your club members are always up to date.

As always each release contains many other minor fixes and improvements. We hope you enjoy these updates!

Some features not available for all plans:

• Mobile app-like menus are available for all plans.

• The private photo gallery feature is available for Team, Business and Enterprise plans.

• The club auto-follow feature is available for all plans.

Leaders must show up

Visible, active leadership sets the culture, drives trust, and sparks engagement. Communities reflect their leaders. If leaders are present, transparent, and approachable, the community thrives.

If leaders are absent, culture drifts toward noise, conflict, or apathy. Members look for cues from the top.

• People follow your lead. Show how you want others to behave.

• Culture is contagious. Silence leaves space for chaos.

• Engagement sticks. People stay when leaders make them feel valued.

Communities succeed when leaders act as participants.

Be an active leader

Leadership isn’t about dropping in with polished statements and disappearing. It’s about being part of the daily rhythm.

Members need to see you asking questions, joining conversations, and sharing in the wins. That visibility signals that participation matters.

You don’t need to be online every hour. What matters is consistency and authenticity.

• Share weekly updates or thought-starters.

• Reply to posts, not all, but enough to be noticed.

• Rotate leadership visibility across your team to avoid burnout.

A few minutes of genuine presence beats hours of distant oversight.

The psychology of participation

Why do members hold back? Fear of being ignored, embarrassed, or excluded. Why do they engage? Because they see leaders modeling the behavior, they trust it’s safe, and they feel appreciated when they contribute. When people know participation is encouraged, safe, and celebrated, they’ll step forward.

As a leader, you can create those conditions:

• Social proof: Model the behavior you want. Members will mirror it.

• Safety: Welcome all questions and feedback. Set the tone that mistakes and disagreements are okay.

• Recognition: Say thank you. Highlight wins. Shine a light on contributions.

Make it clear: “You belong here.”

Build trust, Keep it

Trust doesn’t come from titles. It comes from consistency, transparency, and how you handle tough moments. Community members notice if you respond, if you explain, and if you live by the same rules as they do.

• Show up reliably. Build a rhythm members can count on.

• Be transparent. Share decisions, admit mistakes, and explain why.

• Tackle conflict. Don’t go silent. Address issues calmly and fairly.

• Empower members. Share ownership. Let others lead projects or groups.

• Model fairness. Apply the same rules to yourself as everyone else.

Trust is earned daily.

Managing vs Participating

Traditional management looks like top-down control. Community leadership is different. It’s collaborative and participatory which is closer to hosting than managing. Leaders who join the journey create stronger, more resilient communities.

Real-World Examples

• Salesforce Trailblazers: Executives engage directly with members, answer questions, and empower MVP volunteers. The result? A 3M+ member community that drives product success.

• Stack Overflow: Founders participated daily, modeled quality interactions, and gave ownership back to the community. Trust was earned through transparency and responsiveness.

• Wikipedia: Leadership facilitated consensus instead of dictating decisions. Community-driven policies created long-term resilience.
  

Share community ownership

Communities flourish when leaders actively nurture and partake in the world they’re building. Your leadership team’s job isn’t just to set rules or watch from the sidelines. It’s to model the behavior you want, build trust through transparency, and share ownership so the community becomes stronger than any one person.

Communities succeed when leaders lead by doing.

Our Invision Community September release adds a wave of powerful improvements to our REST API, Webhooks, and Zapier integration, designed to give developers and community managers more flexibility, insight, and automation.

Zapier

Zapier has long been part of Invision Community, helping you automate routine tasks and connect with apps you already use and make them work together automatically. Instead of copying and pasting information from one system to another, Zapier acts like a bridge that passes data between them the moment something happens.

Our September release introduces numerous new triggers and polling endpoints, enabling automations to reach further across your workflows. This provides greater flexibility, faster processes, and more control over how your apps work together.

Here are some of the ways you can use the new triggers to sync your community with other services without writing any code.

Welcome new members automatically: when someone joins a club, you can instantly send them a personalised email, add them to your CRM, or post a friendly Slack message to your team.

Stay on top of event changes: if a member updates their RSVP, Zapier can update your calendar, notify the organiser, or even adjust catering numbers in a connected sheet.

Keep moderation flowing: when content is reported, assigned, or a member is flagged as a spammer, Zapier can alert the right person, log it in an external support tool, or escalate to the next level.

Enhance learning experiences: when a member enrols in a course, automatically send them a welcome pack, sync them into your learning platform, or kick off an onboarding sequence.

Manage file updates: when a new version of a file is uploaded, Zapier can update other applications with the latest version.

Track engagement: know when members follow topics or each other, so you can celebrate milestones or spot rising interest.

Keep records tidy: if two member accounts are merged, you can sync that change with external CRMs or analytics tools to keep your data clean.

⚡Technical Details: New Zapier Polling Endpoint

⚡Technical Details: New Zapier Triggers

REST API

Our powerful REST API enables developers to interact with your community data, pulling existing content or adding new content, such as topics and posts.

The September release brings new endpoints to support messages, tags and courses.

⚡Technical Details: New Endpoints

We have also modified the following endpoints:

• Forum returns the additional properties: description, cardImage, followerCount

• Member returns the additional properties: totalMessages, unreadMessages, badges

Webhooks

Webhooks are now more capable with several new events, letting your applications stay in sync with what's happening inside your community in real time.

The system tracks various actions taken by members to enhance user experience. For instance, it monitors when a member follows or unfollows an item, as well as when content is assigned or unassigned. Additionally, it keeps a record of actions such as enrolling in a course and completing a lesson. It also watches for when members are identified as spammers and notes when they are banned or unbanned. Furthermore, the system captures member interactions, including when they react to content or when those reactions are removed.

The importance of these updates

Whether you're using Zapier to connect your Invision Community to other applications, or your development team is bringing your community into existing properties, these updates allow more flexibility, access to more data and new ways to trigger events.

Our September release of Invision Community is packed with improvements and new features, including editor enhancements and a brand-new integration with a popular service.

Our commitment to enhancing Invision Community, which is shaped by feedback from many of our customers and partners, continues with this release.

In addition to the usual fixes, we have some exciting updates to share.

Editor improvements

The editor is one of the most important components of Invision Community, as it serves as the interface for contributing to the community. We have upgraded the editor by transitioning to the latest version of Tiptap for Invision Community 5.

This update introduces several improvements, including support for touch events on mobile devices and enhanced overall efficiency.

The editor's toolbar is designed to be compact, making it suitable for all devices, whether large or small. However, many found it difficult to locate the code box button and the spoiler feature.

In our September release, these features are now more prominently featured in the menu.

We've added the ability to drag and drop quotes, boxes, and images within the editor.

We will never let you down.

Finally, we've added the ability to set alt text for an image, and a video title and default start time for a video.

Mailchimp

Invision Community can send emails to your members, but you may require more sophisticated content or wish to set up automation and email drip campaigns.

Mailchimp is a widely-used service that we have experience with, and the new integration allows for automatic addition or removal of members from a list.

You can also export existing members and import them into Mailchimp, which offers a double opt-in option via a confirmation email to ensure permission for subscription.

Auto lock topics

A popular feature request is to have a way to auto-lock topics based on criteria, such as when they have not had a reply for a long time.

This functionality is now available in our September release. You can exclude pinned topics, topics created by specific authors and those tagged with particular tags.

Default pages per group

There are several reasons why you may want your default Pages page to be different for each member group. You might have a membership community and want to show them a pricing page, or you may have a special VIP group that has access to more parts of your site.

With our September release, you can now set a default page per group.

This only examines the member's primary group, given the complexities that may arise when secondary groups are used, as they can be combined with many other groups.

We hope you enjoy these new features, and we encourage you to keep sending in your suggestions; they truly help us shape the future of Invision Community.

All these features are available to all Invision Community plans.

Over the past year, Gatorade Performance Partner has built something special for athletic trainers, coaches and other sports performance practitioners: the Gatorade Fieldhouse. Gatorade Fieldhouse is a member‑only hub where professionals can ask questions, share best practices, and stay in touch long after an event ends.  The online community was prominently featured at this summer’s National Athletic Trainers’ Association (NATA) conference in June 2025, where Gatorade’s booth invited attendees to “join the conversation.”

A digital home for sports health professionals

Gatorade Fieldhouse is the first cross‑discipline digital forum for sports health and performance professionals. Inside the community you’ll find:

• Ask + Answer forums – members can pose questions, share experience and crowd‑source real‑world advice.

• Events and webinars – the team hosts regular science spotlights and mentorship talks, such as “The Value of Mentorship for Athletic Trainers” and “How cross‑discipline collaboration can improve athlete performance.”

• Curated resources – information from Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) and partners gives members credible, science‑backed answers.

• Hot topics – Gatorade Fieldhouse surfaces trending discussions and encourages members to dive into conversations.

These features make Gatorade Fieldhouse more than a message board.  It feels like walking into a professional development hub where athletic trainers, sports dietitians, strength coaches, and other sports performance professionals learn from each other.  That atmosphere was recreated in Orlando at the NATA conference, where the booth hosted panel discussions and Q&A sessions.  Seeing a crowd gather around the stage for a talk on mentorship underlines how thirsty practitioners are for this kind of connection.

Bridging in‑person and online experiences

One of the biggest challenges at any trade show is turning a one‑off conversation into a lasting relationship.  Gatorade addressed that by introducing Quests, a new gamification system created in collaboration with Invision Community.  Quests lets you design challenges that reward real‑world actions. Attendees scan a QR code to join the community and start their first quest. Once completed, the achievement automatically syncs to the member’s online profile.

At the NATA booth, attendees were encouraged to get to know the Gatorade Fieldhouse by participating in a digital scorecard hosted on the platform. They completed a few quick tasks around the Gatorade Fieldhouse, which were checked off automatically. Once all tasks were completed, attendees received a special gift.

Why Gatorade Fieldhouse matters

Gatorade Fieldhouse shows how a brand can move beyond transactional marketing and build a genuine community, and our Quests feature is just one piece of a broader strategy:

• Lowering barriers to entry – a simple QR code in the booth lets anyone join within seconds.

• Encouraging participation – small challenges and scorecards nudge visitors to engage, both on‑site and online.

• Rewarding expertise – sharing answers or attending webinars earns recognition, giving practitioners a reason to return.

• Mobile friendly – Gatorade Fieldhouse works great on phones, and it's easy to install the community like a native app.

The result is a platform that continues conversations all year rather than for one weekend.  By rewarding actions at conferences and synchronizing them with online profiles, Gatorade keeps members invested in each other’s success.

A model for other communities

Not every brand can set up a giant orange roof in the middle of a trade show, but every community can learn something from Gatorade Fieldhouse’s approach. Quests lower the friction between in-person and online engagement, while mentorship talks, science spotlights, and discussion forums keep members coming back.

It’s a space that brings practitioners together through genuine connections, shared knowledge, and experiences that carry well beyond the event floor.

When someone lands on your community for the first time, their decision to stay or leave happens in seconds. A confusing layout, long registration form or silent homepage can drive them away. To keep them around, provide an engaging first impression with clear next steps and a sense of progress.

This guide will provide the tools and guidance community managers need to build a smooth onboarding experience for their community.

🛠️ Your onboarding tools

• Social & Enterprise SSO - One‑click registration with Google, Apple, and enterprise SSO protocols.

• Alert System - Send must‑acknowledge messages (welcome notes, rules updates) to individuals or groups.

• Profile Completion - Request additional profile details after a simple registration; supports mandatory/optional steps and quick registration.

• Achievements & Quests - Gamify onboarding with badges, points and quests; define rules for events like posting or completing profiles.

• Featured Content & Tags - Highlight standout content and aggregated content members can follow.

• Clubs - Sub‑communities with their own forums, galleries and calendars; support various membership models.

• Community Experts - Automatically identify and badge members who provide solutions and helpful content.

• Leaderboard - Highlight top members and content over different periods and award daily badges.

Make a great first impression

People decide whether a site feels worth their time based on visible activity. You can use our Page Builder to showcase Featured Content containing suggested content at the top of your homepage. Combining this with curated tags and trending discussions will provide visitors with a lively mix of content.

Simplify sign‑up

Lowering barriers to entry leads to more members. The Complete My Profile system emphasizes that registration can be as simple as display name, email and password; additional information can be requested after sign‑up through profile completion steps. We also offer Social Sign‑On (Google, Apple, Custom) and enterprise SSO via protocols like SAML and OAuth to make sign‑in a one‑click experience. Avoid lengthy forms and enable quick registration and SSO where possible.

Make navigation obvious and explain your purpose

A new visitor should instantly know where to go. Use clear menus, descriptive forum names and a mobile‑friendly layout. A short mission statement on your homepage or a pinned post clarifies why the community exists and what members love about it. Don’t assume visitors will hunt for information; guide them to the right place.

Greet EVERY member

A warm welcome signals that members matter, and our Alert System allows you to send a message that must be acknowledged before the user continues browsing. Alerts can target individuals or groups, include start and expiry dates, and be configured so they only appear for new members. When used for onboarding, a welcome alert can greet new sign‑ups, thank them for joining and invite them to post an introduction. Alerts can be sent anonymously or as yourself and can optionally allow replies, turning the conversation into a private message. Use this to deliver a friendly, personalised greeting while ensuring it isn’t missed.

Encourage profile completion

People feel more comfortable engaging when they know who they’re talking to. Our Profile Completion wizard shows a progress bar prompting members to upload an avatar, write a short bio or answer any custom fields you require. Administrators configure which steps are mandatory or optional in the Admin Control Panel; members see a dismissible progress bar reminding them to finish. This gentle nudge helps your community feel more human and builds trust.

To motivate completion

• Keep the initial registration simple (name, email, password), then request additional info using profile completion tasks.

• Consider making essential fields (avatar, bio) mandatory and let members skip others, so they don’t feel forced.
  

Provide a clear starting point

Orientation reduces hesitation. Give newcomers a structured path so they know what to do first.

• Pin a “Start Here” guide – Create a pinned post or forum section explaining how to navigate, where to post introductions and where to find help. Link to tag pages, popular forums or key resources.

• Offer a short onboarding course or quest – Our Quests feature lets you design a sequence of lightweight tasks. A “Welcome Quest” could encourage new members to complete their profile, post an introduction and follow a few other members. When they finish, they can be rewarded with a badge or voucher, giving them a sense of accomplishment.

• Use an introductions space – Provide a dedicated forum where new members can post a hello. Staff or volunteer ambassadors should reply promptly to every introduction to build rapport.

By giving members a clear first action like posting an introduction or completing a quest, you remove ambiguity and boost the likelihood they’ll participate.

Help members get early wins

Early wins build small victories, encouraging new members to keep coming back.

• Suggest a simple action – Direct new members to an easy, low‑pressure task. This might be answering a poll, reacting to a post or following a tag. A clear link in your welcome alert or quest removes friction.

• Highlight beginner‑friendly conversations – Use Featured Content to surface casual prompts, polls or threads designed for newcomers. Ensure there’s content available that’s accessible to first‑timers.

• Invite them personally – Tag new members in relevant discussions. A personal invitation like “@Mike Gitkos , I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!” can turn a lurker into a contributor.

• Create an onboarding quest – As described above, quests can guide members through tasks and reward them on completion.

• Follow up on the first post – Use Achievements to trigger an automatic badge or thank‑you message after a member’s first post. Positive reinforcement makes people feel appreciated.
  

Encourage content discovery and joining in

After members introduce themselves, show them how to explore topics and connect with others.

• Teach them to follow tags or forums – Our tagging system reimagines content discovery. Tags have dedicated pages with cover photos that aggregate content and can be followed for email digests. In your onboarding messages, show members how to follow tags that match their interests, so their feed feels personalised.

• Create member traditions – Start weekly threads like “Welcome Wednesday” or “Showcase Sundays” where newcomers can share something about themselves. Consistency offers easy, predictable entry points. There is less friction in posting an easy reply compared to creating a new topic.

• Promote Clubs – Clubs are sub‑communities with their own forums, galleries, calendars and downloads. They support membership types from public to private and can be open, closed or read‑only. Invite new members to join Clubs aligned with their interests. Smaller group spaces feel intimate and encourage connection.

• Highlight community experts – Our system automatically identifies experts based on metrics like solutions, helpful votes and response speed. Experts are displayed with badges next to their posts and can be followed by members. Introduce newcomers to your experts so they know who to trust and where to seek help.

Reward early contributions

Recognition fuels engagement. Even small acknowledgments make people feel valued.

• Achievements – Use the Achievements system to award points and badges for milestones (first post, reacting to content). Actions like joining a club, following items or logging in can earn points and help members progress through ranks.

• Group promotions – Automatically move members to another group once they hit a milestone (e.g., five posts, a certain number of reactions). This can be used to graduate active newcomers into “regulars.” and display trust.

• Celebrate small wins – Publicly acknowledge progress: “Congrats on your 10th post!” or “Thanks for helping a fellow member.” Simple shout‑outs make people feel seen without formal systems.

• Showcase rising stars – Use the Leaderboard widget to highlight top contributors. The Leaderboard page lists the most active members and content for various timeframes; daily winners are recorded on the Past Leaders tab and receive a badge. Seeing their name on this list can be a proud moment for a newcomer.

• Identify community experts – As noted above, experts get badges and can help new members. Encouraging new members to aspire to become experts fosters long‑term engagement.

Continually improve your onboarding

Onboarding is not a set‑and‑forget process. Check your analytics to see where new members drop off. Run surveys or ask newcomers about their experience. Update your “Start Here” guide, welcome messages and quests as your community grows and features change. Ask moderators and ambassadors for feedback on where newcomers struggle and adjust accordingly.

Use tools like Profile Completion, Achievements, Alerts, Tags, Clubs, and Community Experts to can create an onboarding journey that feels personal, encourages participation and rewards progress. Focus on the visitor’s perspective: show them a lively, friendly environment; make it easy to register; provide clear next steps; celebrate their contributions; and continually refine the experience.

When newcomers feel valued and confident from the moment they arrive, they’re far more likely to become the engaged, long‑term members that make communities flourish.

You've no doubt heard of the term' engagement' many times when designing and managing your community, but what does it mean?

Every community is different, but they all share the three main types of engagement.

🚀 Active engagement is centred around creating, including posting, replying, voting, and reacting.

📖 Passive engagement is based around consuming, such as reading, logging in and following content areas that interest them.

🤝 Relational engagement is based around networking, such as following members, private messaging and joining clubs.

Every community is unique, so it's essential to start by defining what meaningful engagement means to your community.

If you're a support community, then key metrics would be the time taken to answer topics and the percentage that are marked as solved. Brand communities would want to track metrics such as author diversity, positive reactions and feedback interactions. Educational communities would focus on monitoring the quality of replies and the percentage of courses completed.

Let's examine some broad strategies you can adapt to suit your community.

Community design

What can people see before they are logged in? Can they see some teaser content and that the site is active and full of life, or do they see empty blocks and 'Please sign in' messages?

Ensure your community is set up to provide sufficient content for guest visitors to encourage them to read more. Ensure your home page shows signs of life. Our Page Editor enables you to drag and drop blocks on the home page to display member leaderboards, trending content, and more. Signs of life are key to encouraging membership.

Engagement can't happen if those visiting can't see what your community's purpose is and how it can solve their problem.

Be transparent and open-ended

Finding the balance with moderation is key to a healthy community. Members should feel safe speaking up. Allow debate, moderate fairly but robustly, and avoid rules that focus on penalties. When people understand that their voice matters, they are more likely to show up. Setting healthy boundaries and making them known helps keep bad actors away and the community positive.

Interact personally and make it easy to respond. Ending a post or blog with a question or clear call to action works just like it does on YouTube—ask for thoughts, feedback, or shared experiences. The easier it is to jump in, the more likely people will.

Lead conversations with tools like Live Topics to host real-time chats and Q&As. These turn into permanent discussion threads and help build momentum through live interaction.

Making it easier to contribute to your community can help engage those reluctant to start their own conversations. Creating group topics can help. Some examples of that may be:

• Weekly themed threads (e.g., "Showcase Sunday")

• AMAs with staff or key members

• Quick polls to prompt votes or discussion

Reward and recognize contributors

People stay engaged when their efforts are seen. Use built-in tools like:

• Reputation points

• Automated achievements with badges and ranks

• Personal recognition to award custom badges and points

• Automatic group promotions that unlock perks when milestones are hit

Community Experts feature highlights members who consistently help others, making it easy to surface trusted voices and reward helpful behavior. 

You can also use the Featured Content option to showcase standout posts, questions, or stories from anywhere in the community. It's a great way to recognize quality content and share it with the entire community.

Try it for yourself

When people feel welcomed, heard, and appreciated, they engage more. Keep it simple. Guide first actions, make it easy to respond, recognize outstanding contributions, and repeat what works. That's how communities grow.

Spend five minutes a day to welcome someone new, highlight a great post, or start a conversation. The more you show up, the more your community will too.

Imagine empowering your community members to take real-world actions and instantly see their achievements recognized online. That’s the power of Quests, a brand-new feature coming soon to Invision Community.

What are Quests?

Quests are a flexible, engaging way to gamify experiences both in-person and online. They’re made up of challenges that members complete to finish a Quest. Each completed Quest rewards your members with badges or other rewards of your choice, fostering deeper connections and continued participation in your community.

Real-World Impact

Quests were designed to bridge the gap between in-person experiences and online communities. For example, at an event, attendees can scan a QR code to join your community and instantly start a Quest, such as completing a quick fitness challenge or checking in at a booth to earn a prize—with their achievement automatically synced to their online profile.

Use Cases Across Industries

• Events & Conferences – Reward check-ins, session feedback, or networking interactions

• Musicians & Artists – Include Quest QR codes at shows to link attendees to specific events and continue the community vibe post-tour

• Sports Teams – Gamify game-day experiences with rewards tied to attending the game or visiting fan zones

• Creators & Educators – Create challenges for students or community learners to track progress and celebrate milestones

• Brands & Retailers – Incentivize in-store visits or product demonstrations with instant online recognition

But Quests go far beyond event activations. They’re also a powerful in-community gamification tool, enabling you to create achievement-based experiences that motivate members to take action, engage meaningfully, and keep coming back.

Tailored Gamification Experiences

Our achievements system is a great way to collect points and move upwards through the ranks while interacting with the community on a regular basis. Quests takes this a step further by allow you to create specific pathways through the community to earn rewards. For example, you may set all new members on a "Welcome" quest where you complete your profile, post a welcome story and follow five members. On completion they could get a badge or a voucher for money off their next order from your store.

Set your Quest achievement rules

With Quest Achievement Rules, you can tailor exactly what behaviors are rewarded. Whether you’re encouraging members to engage with your forums, onboarding flow, or live events, Quests give you the flexibility to align incentives with your goals.

Here are a few ways Quests can be used in your community.

• Reacting to posts

• RSVPing to events

• Following members and content

• Attending online events or webinars

• Scanning event-specific QR codes

Quests are coming soon!

We’re extremely excited to see how you integrate Quests into your community strategy. Whether it’s to bridge the gap between in-person and online interactions, or to build tailored gamification experiences entirely within your platform, Quests unlocks a whole new level of engagement.

Share ideas for Quests and ways you might use them in your community.

Quests is available for Invision Community Team plans and above.

Enhancing the Mobile Experience with New PWA Features

As part of our ongoing mission to ensure Invision Community 5 feels as smooth and modern across all devices, we’re pleased to announce several improvements in 5.0.10 that enhance the Progressive Web App (PWA) experience.

The goal for this update is to make your community feel closer to a native app and to make the PWA more accessible, so lets take a look at what's new!

Pull to Refresh on iOS

Adding pull-to-refresh in the iOS PWA has been a popular request in our feedback forum and I'm excited to share that it has now been implemented. Just like in a native app, users can swipe down to refresh the page in iOS, making it easier and more intuitive to see the latest content.

This feature replaces the Refresh button previously found in the mobile footer and brings the iOS experience in line with modern mobile app standards.

Loading animation

Navigating between pages in PWAs could sometimes cause confusion due to the lack of a loading indicator. To alleviate this, a custom loading animation has been added which should reassure your visitors that the next page is actually loading. It’s a subtle addition, but it's one which many visitors would expect to see in modern mobile apps - and now they can!

Installation prompt banner

Some users may not be aware that they can install your community directly to their device like a native app. To help with that, we’ve introduced a new installation prompt banner to help guide them through the install process.

This banner appears when users are browsing your community in a mobile browser. Tapping the banner brings up step-by-step instructions tailored to their device. It’s a gentle nudge that increases PWA adoption while also respecting your visitors choice with a dismiss button.

App icon badges

Receiving a notification on the community now adds a notification badge to the PWA icon on your home screen, even if the PWA isn’t open. It’s a great (and familiar) way to inform your members that there’s fresh content waiting for them, and it's just a single tap away.

Redesigned enable push prompts

Enabling push notifications has never been easier. You are now prompted not only in the main notifications menu, but also when tapping follow on any item.

More improvements coming soon

This is part of our ongoing commitment to make Invision Community 5 the best possible experience on mobile. We’re already working on additional improvements to make the mobile experience even more polished and I look forward to sharing them with you in a future update!

We've all been there. You accidentally remove the wrong block when using the Page Editor, and that custom HTML or WYSIWYG editor block is gone forever. You may have also moved some blocks around, only to realise the layout was perfect before.

The new Invision Community 5 Page Editor is a powerful tool that enables you to create custom pages using your community data. We know how effective it is; we have used it to build out this site.

We also know the pain of deleting the wrong block or wanting to revert to a previous layout.

Our Invision Community 5 July release introduces the ability to roll back to a previous version, providing confidence in using the Page Editor, knowing that any action can be undone.

The video shows the Page Editor rollback in action. In this example, I "accidentally" removed a text editor with custom text inside. In the past, this would have meant recreating it from scratch, but now you can view past versions of the page from within the Admin CP and restore it with just a few clicks.

Each time you change something when using the Page Editor, such as adding a block, editing a block's settings, or changing the block template, a revision is stored. When you click the "Finish Editing" button, a manual save event is stored which is a great way to navigate the list of changes. Those manual save events act as definitive versions of that page.

The filters allow you to review those changes quickly, and even show just the changes you made in your last Page Editor session.

Accidental deletes, experimental layouts gone wrong and incorrectly edited settings are now a thing of the past.

We hope that you find this new feature useful. I know we will!

Invision Community's advertising system enables the inclusion of linked images in your community's feeds to highlight events, draw attention to important updates, and promote external services.

You can even monetise your community by selling advertising space via the built-in commerce tools.

In Invision Community 5’s July release, we’ve added several improvements to the advertising system to make advertisement placement more flexible and even allow them to be placed in emails.

Let’s dive in!

A flexible approach to advertisement placement

The system enables you to place advertisements between topics when viewing a list and between posts when viewing a specific topic. However, the current setup only allows for advertisements to be displayed at set intervals, which may not achieve your desired results. For example, if you set an advertisement to appear every three rows and repeat once, it could end up appearing on the sixth row instead of the intended placement.

The update introduces an additional option that allows you to place items via intervals, for example, every 10 rows, or via a specific list position, such as after the third item.

In addition, you can now specify which forums you want the advertisements to show, giving you even more flexibility when targeting content.

Selling email advertisement slots

New to our Invision Community 5 July release is the ability to sell advertisements in select emails, such as notifications. You could do this for internal marketing, or to generate revenue for your community.

The advert will appear at the top of the email.

You can set up advertisement sales from the built-in Commerce functionality. You can choose to sell advertisement space on your community, or you can sell advertisement space in notification emails. Furthermore, you can choose which member groups receive these advertisements as well as target specific areas of the community.

In addition to these features, we’ve given the Page Editor widgets a refresh to improve their functionality.

We continually strive to enhance existing features, and we hope you enjoy the updates to our advertisement system!

Invision Community proudly powers the newly launched AI Skills Hub, created by Innovate UK in partnership with PwC! Invision Community 5 offers a broad range of capabilities beyond just classic forums that enables you to build out an entire interactive website with community at its heart, and that is what we did for Innovate UK.

The AI Skills Hub is part of the UK’s national push to upskill workers across high-impact sectors like agriculture, construction, creative industries, and transport. With an urgent need for practical, ethical, and industry-specific AI training, the Hub brings together learners, employers, and training providers in one seamless digital environment. Invision Community is the perfect platform for this project. Let’s take a look at some of the functionality we provide.

Organize webinars and events

The AI Skills Hub runs a full schedule of in-person and online events along with webinars all organized by our built in Events manager. Members can follow these calendars to get notified instantly when new events are available and confirm attendance with the RSVP system.

Create pages, courses, and blogs

Our pages application allows AI Skills Hub to create resources, statistics and FAQ that look great across all devices — no need to learn a complicated CMS or how to code. Additionally, leveling up skills is key to the success of the AI Skills Hub. This is where our courses functionality stands out as the backbone of the learning pathway system. Members can learn about tech-stacks, generative AI and more in a structured process.

In a fast moving sector, it’s important that members are kept up to date on key topics. Our built-in blogging functionality helps the AI Skills Hub keep their members in the loop. With the ability to subscribe, it’s easy to ensure members are brought back to the site.

“AI is here to stay,” said Zlatina Loudjeva of PwC in the official press release. “To benefit, workers must take charge of their development.” We couldn’t agree more—and we’re proud to be part of this project, proving that Invision Community is much more than just a forum platform!

To see what Invision Community has to offer, you can start a free 30 day trial (No credit card needed)

You can get a lot of data from your Invision Community. We have charts and graphs for almost every item you can think of from reactions used to time to solution. However, it can be hard to extract meaning from the raw data and even harder to organise the charts.

Our June release of Invision Community 5 aims to solve both of these problems with “My Charts” transforming into a much more useful “Saved Reports” feature and the addition of a key community health metrics dashboard.

Let’s dive in!

Saved Reports

Previous versions of Invision Community had the ability to save charts to a single page that only you could see. This was fine but it meant that all your key metrics were jumbled together and you could not share this curated dashboard with other team members.

The new Saved Reports feature solves these problems by allowing you to optionally save to a new custom report page that all your team can see allowing for logical grouping of saved charts.

When you want to save a chart, you’ll see some new options. You can opt to store the chart in an existing report, or create a new one. Reports are like pages of a dashboard. For example, you can create a saved report called “Forums” and store all the forum-based metrics you wish on that page, and then create a separate report called “Members” and store member-based metrics on that page.

Now you can organise all your commonly used statistics into one place with a logical grouping which saves a lot of time scrolling up and down trying to remember which chart you wanted.

Each saved report page has tabs for charts and blocks, which means you can now store activity blocks right to your report dashboard.

Finally, you can download a single CSV of all the charts into a single file which you can then process externally if you so wished.

Saved Reports is available on all Invision Community plans.

Community Health

Now that you have all your data organised, how can you see the health of your community? Is it based on the number of posts made per day, or the number of reactions? Partly, but there is more to the story when looking for trends over time.

To help answer that question, we have created a new special report called Community Heath which contains key charts fed from multiple data points and crunched with our own algorithm to produce a visual indicator of how your community is doing.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these charts and break down what each mean.

Author Diversity

Knowing how many posts have been made is good, but do you know if a very small number of people wrote them? A healthy community has a broad range of voices contributing to topics. This chart uses an algorithm to smooth the data. The actual number of authors isn’t as important as the trend. A ratio of 1.0 means nearly every post is from a different person showing greater diversity.

Responsiveness

This chart is another algorithmically generated trend line depicting the time between posts within topics. This is an important metric to help you understand the spread of posts across your community. The time of the first reply is important, but so is the speed of ongoing replies.

Engagement

This chart takes a variety of different interactions and combines them into a single metric over time. The interactions include reactions, following, solving and creating content. This chart is likely one of the most important as you can see trends over time and if engagement is falling or growing.

First Response Time

A responsive community where members get answers to their questions and replies to their topics is a sign of a healthy community. This chart uses some smoothing to produce a trend line you can monitor over time.

DAU/MAU

The Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users ratio indicates how “sticky” your members are. It depicts the trend line of how often your monthly users come back daily. Any value over 1 means that your community is receiving a greater number of daily users than the monthly average. This chart is taken from our community and you can see when we announce new releases (May and June) we get a spike in returning members.

What do they tell us?

You can combine these charts to get a better understanding of your community. For example, you can see we had big spikes in returning visitors, but our engagement and first response times remained fairly average which indicates that people returned to read, but not contribute which is consistent with people returning to read about the latest release.

You can also tell that our author diversity is fairly healthy with a value of 1 meaning every post is by a different person. Any community will have a core group of people that post more, and our values are consistent with a good number of unique voices.

Overall, this shows that our community shows healthy signs of distributed activity and good responsiveness. You can also see that there are times where a smaller number of voices make the most contributions to our community. We might choose to engage those who haven’t posted as much by asking more questions and creating more opportunities for replies.

The new Community Health metrics will help you understand your community data.

We’re excited to see what your community trends are and how you can use the data to keep your community healthy.

Community Health is available on Invision Community Creator Pro plans and above.

It’s been four months since Invision Community 5.0.0 was released and we’ve had a lot of feedback over those months which has fed into a number of improvements.

While we have a number of bigger features in the pipeline, sometimes the smaller improvements which improve your time on the community can have a bigger impact.

Let’s take a look at those changes.

Tag usage chart filters

Our re-imagined tagging system brings content from across the suite into a single page offering opportunities for secondary categorization. The AdminCP statistics chart for tag usage was updated with a customizable filter so you can drill down by app and sections allowing you to look at tag usage in specific forums or galleries rather than across the community.

Recommended Tags

While we recommend that communities use as few tags as possible to make tagging more effective, it can be possible to end up with dozens of tags even though your community may use the same handful for most of their content. You can now surface any tag to the top of the list by making it a recommended tag. This also has the benefit of nudging your community to use your preferred tags.

Forum Collections

There are many places in the AdminCP where you’re asked to select many forums. It might be when you’re creating a saved moderation action and want to choose which forums it can be run on.

Most communities tend to have logical groupings. On our forum here, we have feedback and ideation sections, along with support sections. We often have to select the same forums when setting up moderation, announcements or even default streams. We have to click the same four or five forums each time and if we ever removed or added a forum, we’d need to remember to go and add that in manually.

Forum collections allow you to create groups of forums. In our example, you may create a grouping of all support forums. Once set up, you can select that single grouping instead of manually selecting the forums you need. They even update when you add or remove forums.

Turnstile CAPTCHA

The venerable Google hCAPTCHA has served us well. For many years we’ve been identifying traffic lights and motorcycles for reasons no one really knows when we have the temerity to use a public WiFi connection. As much fun as it is working out if two pixels into a new square means it should be clicked or not, the truth is that hCAPTCHA isn’t as effective as blocking bot traffic as it once was.

Cloudflare’s Turnstile CAPTCHA is a very effective (and free!) solution. It’s much less obtrusive too and in most cases you don’t need to do anything. It’s now an option and we recommend you check it out.

This wraps up the most recent improvements to Invision Community 5. Which are you looking forward to the most?

There's a lot for your members to love with Invision Community 5, and we recently covered five of the best features. Today, I want to discuss five features your team will love.

One of the main concepts for Invision Community 5 was to reduce the complexity of power-user tools like theming and page building. These functions had been built around those with deep technical and coding knowledge, locking out many community teams. 

We also wanted to build new tools to help busy community teams organise, moderate and identify trusted members.

Did we achieve that? Let's look at five new features we think your team will love in Invision Community 5.

The new theme editor

I can't describe how much I love the new theme editor. It is everything we wanted for Invision Community 5 and more. Now, anyone can manage their theme without needing to be knowledgeable in HTML and CSS. 

There's so much to discuss, so it's best to head over to the news article we put together. From an easier way to select colours and drag-and-drop header arrangements to simpler ways to upload logos and preview your community on tablets and mobiles, the theme editor puts all the power and complexity of managing themes into the hands of your community team.

The editor, combined with the new views, such as the feed view for forums, article-like featured first post in topics, and the new sidebar view, Invision Community 5, really does take things to the next level.

The new page editor

We've taken the concepts of drag-and-drop widgets to a higher level with Invision Community 5.

You no longer need to create custom blocks using HTML and CSS to produce fantastic custom pages. With the new page editor, you can access a library of pre-built widgets with multiple view options, such as grids, rows, and carousels. Coupled with the power of Pages databases, you can quickly build custom pages to showcase the best content from your community.

Jimi, a valued customer, recently created a walkthrough video showcasing the new theme and page editors. It is a must-watch to experience the system's power.

Assign topics

Getting the right help to your members at the right time can take time and effort. Pairing a community question with the expertise of specific team members can require some manual overhead with external systems.

It can also be difficult to hold your team accountable, ensure they are answering questions in good time, and get an overview of their assignments.

These issues are fixed in Invision Community 5 with the topic assignments feature. You can assign a topic to a specific member of your team or a group of members. You also have complete oversight on the volume and time required to reply to your entire team.

It's a great feature that helps keep your community running smoothly.

Badge creator and icon picker

This feature is a dark horse. At first glance, it looks like a nice feature, but perhaps it is something that you may not use. However, I believe this is a feature your team will love. There are many areas where you may need custom graphics. We have rank badges, one-off celebration badges, custom reactions and more. In the past, you'd have been required to do this with apps like Illustrator or Photoshop and import them back in.

As part of our vision to bring power tools to everyone, we built a badge creator that allows you to combine over 1,700 icons and hundreds of emojis with badge backgrounds to quickly create custom badges and reaction icons. It really only takes a few minutes to create all the custom graphics your community needs.

In addition, there are now many areas, such as menu items, where you can use icons and emoji to enrich your user experience.

Who doesn't love the ability to create badges without needing a designer?

Community Experts

Community experts are vital to the well-being of any community. The Pareto principle holds true in your community. Twenty percent of your members create eighty percent of the interactions across your community, but featuring those members to newer users can be difficult. In the past, we've relied on metrics such as the date they joined and the number of posts they've made, but these celebrate longevity but not expertise.

Invision Community 5 uses a bespoke algorithm to identify and feature experts based on the speed, accuracy and helpfulness of their responses.

This not only celebrates those members with an exclusive badge and notification, but it also helps other users identify those community leaders who are more likely to help them and guide them through their journey with you.

We think your team will love that Invision Community 5 identifies these members for you and allows them to help lead your community.

I could have easily written about ten features your team will love, but these are my top five. Do you agree? Which features are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments.

As we move closer to releasing Invision Community 5, I wanted to review a few key features I believe your members will love after you upgrade to Invision Community 5.

The all-new editor

We have to start with the brand new editor, recoded and redesigned from the ground up. The new editor is not just faster and leaner, but also remarkably user-friendly, ensuring an upgraded experience for your members in Invision Community 5.

Your members will love the streamlined toolbar that no longer hides buttons on smaller devices. They'll also appreciate the new emoji and icon panel, which allows them to insert over 1,700 icons to enhance their posts.

Content boxes, resizing images, and media embeds via drag handles will also be well received.

Finally, small UI improvements, such as new line arrows on blocks that can be tapped or clicked to insert new lines accurately, will end fiddly cursor placement and settling for poor spacing.

The editor is the most important touch point within your community, so we wanted to ensure that Invision Community 5 does this perfectly.

New live community features

I can speak from experience that when I see other people typing, I'll stick around to see what they say. Likewise, if I post a topic and I see multiple people reading it, I'll keep tabs on it to see if any replies come in.

These are not just great engagement features but also an exciting experience. Invision Community 5 takes it further, blurring the lines between group chat and a traditional topic. Now, when a new reply or reaction is made, it will appear magically on your screen, keeping your members on site for longer.

Your members will love feeling like they are part of the live community and watching reactions and replies in real-time. They'll also appreciate seeing their notification bell numbers increase without having to refresh or move between pages.

Topic Summaries

Time is our most valuable resource. Your members use many apps and communities in a day, so when they make time to visit your community, we want to ensure that they get the most from your forum in the shortest amount of time possible.

Long topics are great but few have the time to read through dozens of pages. Topic summaries take the very best of a topic and remove the rest, allowing your members to optimize their time well while on your community, making their experience more efficient and productive.

They'll love keeping up to date with more topics without scrolling past gifs and side quests.

Dark mode and the new mobile experience

Late-night scrolling becomes much more comfortable with Invision Community 5's native dark mode. Your members will love being able to choose a mode or allow it to sync with their devices, giving them a uniform experience across the many apps they browse.

They'll also appreciate the new user experience, which includes improved performance, better accessibility for screen readers, and a vastly improved phone experience. We've made sure Invision Community 5 is mobile first.

The new tagging experience

Invision Community 5 reinvents tagging to make it more community-focused and increase content discovery across all apps. With its new tag pages, you can easily bring gallery photos, forum topics, events, and blog entries into a single page in Invision Community 5.

Your members will love following their favourite tags to get notifications on new content and discover more of your community they are interested in without having to browse many forums and different areas of your community.

These are just the top five features we think your members will love. Are you looking forward to these features or perhaps some of those not mentioned here? As always, let us know in the comments.

Invision Community 4.7.19 will be released in November and contains many updates along with the report center improvements.

While Invision Community 5 moves through the beta process, I wanted to let you know about all the updates coming in Invision Community 4.

I've already spoken about the Report Center updates, which bring more professionalism and compliance to that area, and this blog will outline a few other highlights for the forthcoming release.

Dormant Account Login Notification

Keeping member accounts secure is a top priority for all community teams, and with data breaches containing usernames and passwords regularly shared on the dark web, it makes sense to be vigilant to a potential account takeover.

Your members will now receive an email if a successful login occurs six months or more since the last log in to ensure the account is still in the right hands. If the account owner is not responsible for logging in, they can contact the community team to ensure the account is returned to the owner.

Prepare for Invision Community 5

We have added a new information dashboard to the AdminCP so you can review the impact of the upgrade and ensure the PHP and MySQL versions are suitable. Of course, our Invision Community Cloud customers need not worry about this as we take care of it for you.

You can also see impacting items you may want to know, such as deprecated and removed features that your community currently has enabled. This dashboard is a great starting point for evaluating your upgrade when the time comes.

SEO Improvements

We regularly review SEO best practices to ensure that your community presents itself in the best way to search engine bots and spiders.

This update comes in two parts; the first is a new crawler setting to reduce links on the page for guests and search engine bots. This new feature removes hyperlinks around dates in comment feeds and removes the sharer menu item that shows the sharing box. These links dominate the crawl budget for little value, leaving little time for crawlers to work their way deeper into your content. 

The second SEO-focused feature is the permalinks to specific comments throughout the community. Currently, the permalinks point to a content handler (do=findComment&comment=123) that locates the correct page number and then issues a 301 redirect to the correct page (topics/1-topic-title/page/2/#comment-123).

While 301 redirects are not a problem for search engines, and it's been a long time since a 301 redirect incurred any SEO penalty, the permalink is in a different format to the actual comment URL, which is handled via a fragment.

Putting aside search engine optimization for a moment, working to eliminate a lot of redirects positively impacts performance.

The new permalink is simply the actual link using a fragment to locate the post in the browser's viewport. This removes the need for a 301 redirect and reduces any search engine confusion over the permalinks canonical URL. Of course, the page number may change if topics are merged or many posts deleted, and we have some client scripting magic to handle that eventuality.

It's an exciting time here at Invision Community with a brand new version in development and several new features for our stable product line.

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments.

Invision Community 5 is currently in beta testing for all customers with the Invision Community Classic license. Invision Community Cloud customers can request a private demo to test the latest version.

After months of development work, we're pleased to move Invision Community into beta testing, the final phase before its stable release.

We'd love your help to find the last few bugs. You can join our Invision Community 5 Beta Testing Club and download the beta onto your test site or request a cloud demo.

During the early stages of testing, we've implemented a lot of feedback, and I wanted to show you a few of the key changes we've not discussed in previous news blogs.

Image Resizing

Our brand new Invision Community 5 editor has many great features and quality-of-life improvements, one being the ability to resize images via drag handles. You can still specify a precise pixel value in the image menu, but the ability to resize using grab handles makes it easier to find the right size for your images.

Embed Resizing

We can also resize embeddable media, such as YouTube, in the same way as you resize images. You can resize by using the grab handles or set a specific pixel value, giving you fine control over the size of your embedded media.

Page Editor Widgets

We spoke about our new page editor in a recent blog, but a common request was to make it easier to find the right widget without a lot of scrolling up and down the menu bar.

We've implemented a search filter enabling you to quickly find the right widget and a favorites system to pin your most used widgets to access them much quicker.

Pages Database Layout Options

A common request has been to make changing the look of the Pages database index and listing easier. Currently, with Invision Community 4, this means coding new templates by hand or using one of the many excellent pre-designed templates available from third-party developers.

With Invision Community 5, we've brought the same magic we used with widgets to databases, allowing you to select from many layout options such as rows, grids, and wallpapers. You can still use a custom template, but these new layout options make it much easier to get the UI you need for your community.

These are just a few of the many changes implemented since we opened Invision Community 5 for testing. We hope to see you in the beta club soon!

Invision Community 4.7.19 contains a significant upgrade to the Report Center to improve compliance and professionalism within the reporting workflow.

The existing report center functions well enough but lacks some of the more professional tools modern communities need when managing complaints. In previous versions, a member or guest reported a piece of content, such as a comment or topic, which was then handled by the community team behind the scenes, and the report closed when dealt with. It was up to the community team to inform the original content author if any decision was made and to inform those who reported the content of the outcome. 

The Invision Community November update improves the report center with a better workflow, including asking those reporting the content the reason for the report, notifications on the report outcome, and the content author being notified as to why their content was moderated.

Now, a report can be closed as valid or rejected. These new completion statuses allow you to signal whether your team found the report valid or whether you decided that the report was not required and thus rejected.

Let's look at what has changed.

Admin Control Panel
The initial Report Center interface now has various options to control how the public reporting form works. From here, you can configure how reporting works for guests, whether they are required to leave a name (email is always required), and whether a message is required for the report.

Content Author Notifications
In this section, you can create notification templates that can optionally be sent to the author of the original content when choosing to complete or reject the report.

Report Types
In previous versions, report types were solely for automatic moderation. In this update, we've brought report types to both automatic moderation and public reporting. Gathering the reason content has been reported is vital in deciding the outcome.

Each report type can also accept a message sent to the person who made the report depending on the valid or rejected outcome via an email notification that can be opted out of.

Reporting Content
Now, when a logged-in member or a guest user reports content, they can select from one of the pre-configured report types. If a guest is making the report, they are asked to leave their details along with a message to accompany the report.

Managing Reports
When managing reports via the ModCP, the interface has been updated to make the status of the report and the reasons for the report clearer.

This screenshot shows green rows, which are new reports that still need to be managed by the team, along with yellow rows, which are currently under review. Each row of reported content can have multiple reports from different members, and the reason for those reports (such as Spam, Offensive, etc) is shown in labels.

Viewing reported content now shows more detail in the user reporting section. If a guest has reported the content, the guest's name and supplied email address are shown, and clicking this allows you to send an email to them. The reason for the report is now shown.

For each user report, you can change the submission reason, and this change is logged in the moderator comments to create an audit trail.

You can now mark the report as Complete or Rejected, which will trigger an email for all those who have reported this piece of content. You can also send one of the notification templates to the content author to update them on why their content has been moderated.

This email to each person who reported the content contains the date, content title, and reason for reporting, along with the pre-configured message for the report outcome. In this case, the report was flagged as valid, and the message to the person who reported it confirmed the outcome.

Putting it together
These changes help automate notifying both the author of the content and the person who reported the content on the outcome.

Let's look at an example flow to understand how these new tools help the workflow.

In this example, User A (Author) creates some content, and User B (Reporter) decides to report this content, choosing "Offensive" as the reason for the report.

The moderation team picks up the report, examines the reported content, and decides that the report is valid, so they mark the report as complete and choose to use a notification template to tell the content author (User A) that their content has been removed. As the report has been flagged as complete, the person who reported the content (User B) receives an email telling them the report has been upheld and action has been taken.

We hope these changes improve your experience with the report center. Let us know what you think below.
 

Can you start from a stock Invision Community 5 installation and have it themed, customized, and a new homepage built in under an hour without relying on custom templates and coding?

Yes, and Jimi Wikman, a long-time Invision Community customer, did just that in his latest YouTube video.

Jimi has over twenty-five years of experience in development and twenty years of experience in graphic design.

Invision Community 5 has been in testing for a few months now, and Jimi produced this amazing walkthrough of Invision Community 5's new page editor and theme editor while re-creating his own site.

Our vision for Invision Community 5 was to put the power into the hands of everyone, not just those who are proficient in PHP, HTML, and CSS. Jimi's video shows this vision as a reality as he moves through the theme editor to create his custom theme, and the page editor to build a custom homepage.

Sit back and enjoy watching Jimi put together a new site.

Thanks Jimi!

If you're interested in testing Invision Community 5 for yourself, just join our Beta Testing Club.

Introducing new Page Builder tools in Invision Community 5

Widgets are an incredibly powerful tool for displaying curated content of your choice on any page of your community - and despite the extensive array of settings for customizing their data, they've often been limited in terms of their design options. But this changes thanks to the new Page Builder tools in Invision Community 5!

Widget Designs

Previously in version 4, widgets would often have 2 designs: one for the main content area and a more minimal version for the sidebar. This worked well, but it meant your page was very limited in terms of design as you'd typically need to use the same table-like layout for most widgets. Anything beyond that would typically require a custom block to be coded, often with additional HTML or CSS.

Version 5 offers much more customization by allowing you to change the design of each widget with the click of your mouse - no coding necessary! When dragging a widget onto your page, a new toolbar at the bottom of the page appears, holding all of the widget design options. Lets take a look at some below!

Grid

A familiar a very layout used elsewhere in the suite, the Grid design neatly aligns entries in a grid with a large cover photo sitting up top. A great combination of visual imagery alongside meta data such as entry descriptions.

Featured

A spacious list and a great way to feature content, pardon the pun.

Wallpaper

Perfect for content which includes uploaded cover photos or thumbnails! The Wallpaper design stretches each image to make it occupy the entire background, overlaid by a minimal amount of content. A subtle gradient sits behind the text to ensure it's easy to read, even on detailed images.

Rows (table)

The Rows design is a very familiar one, used very often throughout other areas of the suite. Content is displayed in a neat table, that collapses into a more compact design on small screens.

Minimal

Great for displaying a lot of content in a compact area! Minimal only shows primary information and hides meta data such as entry descriptions and stats. Great for sidebars, or areas with limited width.

Minimal Grid

The Minimal Grid design removes large meta information and displays content in a nice, compact grid. A nice option for displaying a lot of content while being cautious of vertical space.

Carousel

The Carousel option is quite unique because it can be applied in tandem with other widget designs, and is a perfect way to make the existing layouts even more compact. For example, by default, the Wallpaper design is aligned as a grid, but with the Carousel option enabled, the layout is converted into a carousel instead:

Here's another example, using the Featured and Carousel options:

Fun fact for developers: All of these designs use the exact same HTML structure; the only thing that differs is the class name on the parent element. This makes it incredibly easy to adjust the design of your own widgets without needing to manually code multiple layouts.

Widget Areas

Version 4 was often quite limiting when it came to aligning widgets in pages. Widgets could be dragged into a stacked, vertical list but that was typically as far as you could go in terms of design. Version 5 introduces a new concept called Widget Areas, which allow you to align multiple widgets in a variety of ways. Lets take a look!

To create an area, you simply need to drag one widget on top of another.

By default, they'll align themselves into a grid, but can be realigned with ease by using the toolbar at the bottom of the page. The toolbar also holds controls for adjusting the width of widgets, and the gap between them:

Widget Designs and Widget Areas in Version 5 make it incredibly easy to create a completely custom page in a matter of seconds. We're really excited for you to get your hands on these new tools in Invision Community 5, and are looking forward to seeing all of these new page designs in the wild, in the very near future!

We recently announced the new Invision Community 5 editor which adds many new exciting features such as semantically correct header tags, custom boxes and more. As the new editor is a leap forward in technology, some legacy features had to be left behind. We received a lot of messages about these changes, and have created new tools based on that feedback to ensure you still have the tools you need.

The new features are based around restricting some high level editor functionality for specific member groups and enabling an easy way to add custom embeds.

Permission Levels

Invision Community 5 puts a lot of new tools in the editor, including header tags, boxes and positioning tools. These are useful features, but perhaps you do not want your members changing the semantic structure of the page by adding H1 tags. Or maybe you don't want them being able to add custom boxes with colors. Based on this feedback, we have introduced a permission levels system.

At the heart of the system lies three editor permission levels: Minimal, Standard and Advanced.

Specific editor features are assigned to one or more levels. For example, you may only want header tags and content boxes to be for the 'advanced' permission level which only administrators can use.

These permission levels are configurable via the Admin Control Panel.

When is Each Restriction Level Used?

Now that we have set up the permission levels, we need to apply them to member groups.

We do this by simplying heading over to the Member Groups section of the Admin Control Panel. In the "Content" section of that form, there are two new options:

1. Default Editor Restriction Level: This is the restriction level the group uses by default, for example in Forum Topics and Blog Posts.
2. Editor Restriction Level for Comments: This is the level used for Comments (including Topic Replies) throughout the Community.

When a member has multiple groups, they will use the most permissible editor setting out of all groups.

Custom Embeds

In response to news that the ability to toggle into 'source mode' and directly edit the underlying structure of the editor document was not implemented because editor technology has moved on, many people told us they used that feature to add custom iframes from specific services they use.

We understood the need for custom embeds, and we've added the option to create iframe elements with any whitelisted URL from a link.

Additionally, iframes created this way have configurable height and width so you can resize to your liking

This feature has two editor permissions: "Can Embed External Content," and "Can Convert Links to iframes".

Adding iframes into a post can potentially be a security issue, so strong controls are needed to ensure there isn't abuse of this system. The editor will only allow links to be converted to iframes if the domain has been whitelisted. The whitelist exists in the new tab, Admin Control Panel > System > Posting & Editor > Embeds. The feature can also be entirely disabled from here.

That wraps up this round of changes based on your comments. We hope that you enjoy this update to our Invision Community 5 editor and we always appreciate your feedback.