Invision Community
773 blog entries in this category
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IP.Board 3.x supports "My Media", which enables you to share other content from within the community by using the "My Media" button on the editor. This results in: http://community.invisionpower.com/files/file/4464-ips-gdk-for-ipboard-32-amp-33/ While this works, it has a few shortcomings: The styling of the block isn't really designed for each type of content it might show Users have to click the My Media button, then browse for the item, when they probably already know the URL they w
- 17,330 views
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One of the most distinctive uses for a forum is that of a 'knowledge community', where users visit in order to get help with a problem or question. Our own Pre-sales forum uses this model, but we also have many customers who run forums that are almost exclusively knowledge-based (such as Roxio and Evernote). IP.Board 3.x introduced the concept of a "Best Answer" flag, allowing topic creators and staff the ability to highlight the reply to a topic that they deem best answers the question. This
- 24,044 views
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One of IPS Community Suite 4's main goals was to overhaul the user interface. We wanted to go further than just a few cosmetic changes to the theme, we wanted to examine each part of the user interface and see what could be improved. The community suite has a lot of functionality and there's a lot of tools that we all use regularly so we felt that any improvements on these common areas would be very welcomed. I'd like to focus on such a change in IP.Downloads. IP.Downloads has always had ver
- 13,815 views
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Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suit
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I can distinctly remember 5 years ago reading a blog entry on this site about the "personal conversations" feature in IP.Board 3.0, which we were working on at the time. Up until then, the messenger system in community software and other websites was much like email - you sent one message at a time, with little continuity between messages. We were one of the first, on the entire of the web, to introduce what we called "personal conversations" - a sort of "private topic" between invited members -
- 16,566 views
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The site eGullet.org was literally the first client of Invision Power Services when our company was founded over 12 years ago. Steven Shaw, along with his partner, stepped up and supported IPS in its first days and stayed with us all these years. They were our first paying client, our first hosting client, and often the first to get early betas of our releases. It was with great sadness that I read today of the passing of Steven Shaw. Steven was a friend and mentor to me personally. He advis
- 8,050 views
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Some sites make use of multiple calendars to help differentiate what type of events are being contributed to the community. You might have a staff calendar that allows staff members to add events and a community calendar for the rest of your users. Or you may have a holidays calendar as well as a gaming "raids" calendar on your community. Individual calendars are a form of categorization in IP.Calendar, and we wanted to bring some enhancements to them in the 4.0 Community Suite. Colors You
- 7,334 views
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Copying Settings Sometimes you need to change the same setting across multiple categories. For example, let's say up until now I've not allowed comments on files and now I want to enable it for most categories. In IP.Downloads for 3.x, I'd have to go into each category one by one and toggle the setting on. In 4.x, when editing a category, each setting has a "Copy" button next to it, when opens a window asking which categories to copy that setting value to, so I can make the change to one cat
- 8,676 views
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Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suit
- 12,127 views
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Different staff members typically have different roles within a community - especially larger communities, where you may have staff responsible for the theme, others handling tickets and different staff maintaining the system. In 3.x, we had a 'Bookmarks' system in the AdminCP that allowed you to create a menu of frequently-used sections in an effort to make them easier to get to, rather than navigating the main menus. As with every feature in IPS4, we took some time to think about what this B
- 9,372 views
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One of the goals for IPS Community Suite 4.0 was improving content discovery. In other words, making sure content still receives exposure even if it is posted in less used areas of the suite. The sidebar that shows on the IP.Board index page in 3.x helps with this goal to some extent, however people who visit the forums app infrequently may miss out on valuable content. This became an even more important issue when the decision was made to decouple IP.Board as a standalone application. What if
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IP.Calendar has supported an RSVP system for events for the last several versions, and this has been a well received addition to Calendar. Where allowed, users can request RSVP for events submitted to the calendar, and where allowed, other users can RSVP (and subsequently un-RSVP) for these events. This functionality is useful for real-world events being coordinated through your site to help event organizers know who will attend. Some minor but useful enhancements have been made to the RSVP f
- 8,071 views
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IP.Calendar allows your users to schedule and share events through a centralized community calendar and supports many features that allow your community to coordinate, organize and interact with each other through the calendar. For instance, event organizers can request RSVP for events in order to note who will be attending before hand, and you can allow commenting on events submitted through IP.Calendar to allow users to share their thoughts about an event. The latest version of IP.Calendar
- 8,449 views
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Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suit
- 13,542 views
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IP.Calendar has a few primary important views: the monthly grid view (i.e. a typical calendar table), the weekly view which lists a calendar week and any events occurring during that week, a daily view which lists all events occurring on a given day, and the actual event views where you view details about a specific event. All of these views have their usefulness, however we felt that there was a missing piece to the puzzle. During planning meetings we discussed adding a popular feature reques
- 9,869 views
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Working with an image handling suite to resize uploaded images, build thumbnails, apply watermarks and perform other similar image-handling tasks has been improved in 4.0 to be easier than ever. It is important to know that many of the built-in helpers in 4.0 will automatically handle image-related tasks for you, such as building thumbnails when appropriate. In the instances where you need more control or cannot simply make use of an existing helper, however, you will find working with images
- 1,292 views
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Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suit
- 16,497 views
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Day to day administration of your site and particularly managing member permissions has been greatly improved in IPS Community Suite 4.0. It is now easier than ever to see who has access to what but there are still times when being able to see exactly what a member sees can be useful. Perhaps a member is reporting that they can't view a section of the site or they need assistance altering settings on their account? For this reason administrators can log in to other users accounts automatically v
- 16,560 views
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Effective moderation features are essential for online communities. Forums, blog entries and member-to-member messaging are particularly attractive for spam bots and nuisance users alike. IPS Social Suite has always been best in class when it comes to moderation features with features like the free IPS Spam Service that are completely unmatched by other web applications. Over this series of 5 blog entries I'm going to introduce you to some of the new moderation features in the IPS Community Suit
- 21,499 views
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For many years, IP.Board has featured a "Moderating Team" page where the community moderators are listed so that users can quickly and easily identify who to contact in the event they need assistance. This page has typically been a somewhat generic table-style view of users who are a moderator of some level. The page is not configurable and has limited usefulness and relevance when you consider the entirety of the suite. It is a relic of an older age and it really stood out as needing an over
- 14,511 views
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Almost all of our applications support commenting or reviewing to some degree. You can comment on events in IP.Calendar, images in IP.Gallery and blog entries in IP.Blog, and you can review products in IP.Nexus, for instance. The differences between reviewing and commenting are subtle, yet important. Commenting allows you to say something about a content item that has been contributed, while reviewing is intended to allow you to give feedback about the item based on your experience. You shou
- 13,623 views
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IP.Calendar has supported basic recurring calendar events for many versions now. You can create events that recur weekly, monthly or yearly in IP.Calendar, and they will automatically show up on their specified schedule. While this capability is certainly useful, we felt it was time to enhance event recurrence capabilities in the next version of IP.Calendar. New options Recurring every week, month or year is useful, but there are many other ways events can recur and IP.Calendar has no prov
- 10,163 views
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The submissions process in IP.Downloads has a certain complexity that may not be apparent at first. As well as simple file uploads, we also support adding files from URLs and from the local file system, and screenshots can also be added in these ways. Which category you choose to submit to affects which of these options are available. In addition, via the AdminCP you can bulk-upload files - but not via the front-end. For IP.Downloads 4, we wanted to improve this process with interface and func
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Following content is an important aspect of interacting with your community. It allows you to be notified when there are updates to the content or when other users comment on the content, and it allows you to find content you are interested in at a later date. We have taken the opportunity with 4.0 to enhance the system where-by users can follow content in the IPS Community Suite to simplify and clarify certain processes, make it easier to follow content you submit, and to be sure you are rece
- 12,989 views
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