Twenty years ago today, Invision Community was founded and within months the first version of Invision Community was released. Little did we know, this would be the start of a remarkable journey spanning several decades.

Our first version appeared shortly after we founded the company. It might be hard to imagine a time before social media and YouTube, but when we started out, the web looked very different.

The first version of Invision Community was called Invision Board, reflecting the popular term for forums back in the early 2000s. It was full featured and you may recognise some elements that persist today.

Like today, it even had a separate control panel where you could create new areas of discussion and customise the theme.

Twenty years is a long time and we've continued to adapt with the ever-changing needs of community managers. We've seen the rise of social media impact how people consume content and found ways to compliment Twitter and Facebook by offering a place for long-form permanent discussion.

Several elements remain from those early days but the concepts behind the theme have change significantly. New workflows, UI elements and views have helped the platform stay fresh and we've certainly innovated a few features that have since become industry standard over that time.

I can't express how proud I am of what we've built together. From those humble beginnings working until 2am to growing a creative and talented team around our passion for community.

I'm still as excited today as I was back in 2002. This year will see us build and release new tools to help guide and inform community managers. Our community platform continues to go from strength to strength.

Of course, the platform is only one part of Invision Community. Over the last twenty years I've been grateful to get to know many of you and watch your lives unfold.

This is as pure as community can get and I'm privileged to be part of it.

We have a few other surprises to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. We can't wait to share them!

I'd love to hear your memories of Invision Community! When did you first use our products and what was your community for? Please let me know in the comments below.

One of the greatest benefits of integrating with Invision Community is instant expanded functionality. 

This is often done through an API (application programming interface), which allows our platform to seamlessly communicate with third-party developed software like Google, Zapier and SendGrid. 

We also use webhooks to integrate. Webhooks allow other services and applications to stay in sync with your community data or to perform an action after a specific event occurs in your community. Read more about them here.

I had a chat with one of our developers, @Daniel F, who walks us through webhooks, explains why they’re useful and shows us an example (see the video above). In the example he uses, we would...
 

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1. Open Zapier, use the webhook trigger (only available with old plans) and grab the url for the webhook.
2. In the ACP -> System -> API, under the webhook tab, create a new tab and select the triggers/events which you want, e.g. when a club is created and paste the url which you got from Zapier.
3. Then after saving the form, head back to Zapier and test it.
4. Once the test was successful, move on to the next step in your Zap, e.g. use a newsletter connection to add the owner of the club to a club owner's mail list.

Here are a few integrations we want to put on your radar:

Zapier

What is it? Zapier is a service that allows you to connect over 3,000 web apps. The Invision and Zapier integration can communicate with some of the Internet’s most wide-reaching platforms, including Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Trello, Facebook Ads, ActiveCampaign, Zendesk, Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot, Discord, Stripe and more. Read our Zapier blog for more details (it’s worth your undivided attention!). 

An example: When a moderator posts a topic in a news forum, share it on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.

MapBox 

What is it? MapBox shares dynamic, performant, and customizable maps that can connect and visibly show where your members are around the world. 

An example: Create events that link to specific locations and specify where they’re taking place. 
 

Google Tag Manager

What is it? Google Tag Manager is a tag management system that allows you to add and update your own tags (snippets of code like a tracking pixel) onto your website for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more. 

Tags that can be incorporated include link clicks for events, scroll tracking, contact form abandonment, commerce shopping cart abandonment and more. 

Expect to see more functionality with Google Tag Manager in our platform later this year such as quantifying total amount of reactions in a post. 

An example: Tracking when a member clicks the ‘start new topic’ button.

Google Analytics

What is it? Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that shares statistics and basic analytical tools for SEO and marketing initiatives. 

Understanding your website’s data, including who is visiting, how often, for how long, device usage and more can better help you optimize your community. 

An example: Tracking unique visitors over the course of a year, then comparing that data to the previous year. Whether there’s an upward or downward trend, analyzing the data can help you create a plan of how to proceed, as well as understand what is (and isn’t) working. 

SendGrid

What is it? Sendgrid is a cloud-based email delivery system. It’s a vehicle for your community to send emails to your members.

An example: Sending a monthly newsletter using the Bulk Mail function in the admin control panel.

Integrations are an efficient way to take your Invision Community platform to the next level. There’s even more in your ACP that we didn’t discuss in this blog.

If you have an integration in place that you’d like to share with us, or have an idea, drop us a line in the comments and let us know.

Related:

If you’re even a little familiar with community building, you’ve probably seen marketing jargon about why owning your own community (and not exclusively relying on social media) is absolutely imperative for growth. 

Relying on social media is a gamble. 

• At any given time the social media giants can take away your platform and following you had spent years building. 
• Meaningful ongoing conversations aren’t really a thing.
• No customization; your social account won’t have different functionality than everyone else (there’s a few exceptions with Instagram, but it’s based on follower count). With a community, you can grant your members far more flexibility and power. 

Companies that thrive know of social media’s limitations. They opt to also include a community component to their brand because it’s a serious advantage. They use social media as a tool to drive traffic to their community and get to know their clients/customers on a deeper level. 

• Strengthens brand identity. Duh, but not really. I’d say most companies fail to establish a real look and feel. This is done by evoking an emotion in the customer through an intentional balance of visuals (colors, logos, fonts) alongside experiences the company, along with the community, creates together. 
• Builds trust with the consumer. Getting digital face time with your customers, sharing content and offering value on a consistent basis are the building blocks of trust between company and consumer. Gain this, and become an authority in your industry. 
• Provides a deeper understanding of customers' needs. Save money on market research. Tap into your audience's needs free of charge. 
• Encourages an open dialogue. Customers want to feel heard! Create an environment that's a two-way street so their thoughts and feelings don't fall into the Internet abyss.
• Creates visibility. At the heart of any business are the customers. Show them your true colors.
   

Now that we’ve nailed down the ‘why,’ let’s touch on the nuts and bolts, err… colors and fonts. 

Don’t underestimate the power of a cohesive and imaginative visual associated with your brand. 

When you think of McDonald’s, does your brain fire off a pair of golden arches and a ketchup red color combo? When thinking about Coca Cola, maybe a cursive font bubbles up. Apple is internationally admired for their visuals and product presentation.

These aren’t accidents.

Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing to perfect the brand’s look and feel. 

Your community should aim to feel as immersive as possible through its branding. 

Your community, powered by Invision Community, was designed with that in mind. In the admin control panel, community leaders can design their own theme, including colors, fonts, headers, footers and logo. 

Take a look at how some of our clients transformed their communities into something extra special:

Squarespace

Fiverr

Corsair

Those communities enlist our enterprise services. However, if you don’t have the marketing budget just yet to create a totally custom look and feel, we have a new option at your disposal starting today.

We just launched a theme service available for all Invision Community clients on our standard plans. We’ll create you a theme based on certain criteria and keep it updated throughout future platform updates. 

If that’s something of interest, please visit this new page on our website and reach out to us to get started.

Owning a branded community doesn’t need to be complicated. If your idea is solid, and your intentions are to unite and connect like-minded people, then you’re golden. 

Are you  interested in a branded community? Do you have a community that could use some extra attention? Are you ready to launch a new community but don’t know where to start? Drop us a line in the comments and we’ll respond to you.
 

2021 was a big year for Invision Community. 🎉 

We launched no-code automation with our Zapier integration, added web push notifications, offline support, stock replies and new reporting metrics.

We also improved spam management, SEO crawl efficiency, Clubs, Activity Streams and introduced a native gamification system named Achievements.

Not to mention the team grew! 👋  @Matt Finger @Marshall Slemp (and me 🙋🏼‍♂️).

We have lots to look forward to in the new year, but before we reveal more let's take a trip down memory lane. 

2021 was one of our best-performing years ever! Here are some highlights:

Community Activity 2021

We saw an influx of members contributing to our community support forum. 3,832 members submitted new content, followed something, or reacted to something in the community.
 

Points earned:

Thanks to the introduction of the Achievements system, members had the opportunity to earn points for contributing to the support community. In total, the community racked up 361,363 points. 📈

Topics created:

Members fired off more than 4000 topics, including questions, feature suggestions and community management tips. 😳 

New posts:

Inside those topics included an array of replies. 31,488 posts to be exact. 😱 

Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions given:

Members also engaged with the community using our Reputation system (think of it as our "likes" 👍 system). Here are the top 10 members who gave the most Reactions. 

@sobrenome @Jordan Miller @SeNioR- @Linux-Is-Best @OptimusBain @Matt @Adriano Faria @Davyc @Marc Stridgen @Unienc

Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions received:

If a member's topic or reply is well received, it earns Reputation using our Reactions system. Here are the top 10 members who received the most love. ❤️ 

@Matt @Adriano Faria @Nathan Explosion @CoffeeCake @opentype @Marc Stridgen @Daniel F @Davyc @Jimi Wikman 

Members who earned the most badges:  

Participating in the community also earns members special badges. You get a badge and you get a badge! ✅ 
 

@CoffeeCake @TAMAN @opentype @PPlanet @SUBRTX @Sonya* @Afrodude

Top Marketplace contributors:

Shout-out to our crazy talented third-party developers who take time out of their busy schedules to innovate and create downloads for other Invision Community clients to use! Here are the top Marketplace contributes: 
 

@Nathan Explosion @Michael.J @Miss_B @IBTheme @Kirill Gromov @ReyDev @Adriano Faria @shahed 
 

Most active forum:

You have questions and we have answers. Our support system shifted to our help & support forum and it paid off big time! 
 

Thanks to everyone who contributed to making Invision Community a better place. Whether you're an active poster in our community support forums, or a customer who lives to learn and absorb, we greatly appreciate you. Cheers to the exciting ventures on the way in 2022! 🎉 

One of the most powerful emotions is gratitude. It helps foster meaningful connections, expands awareness and, well, it just feels good!

Invision Community features powerful tools to help you maintain relationships with your clients, customers or members. Approaching them with gratitude in mind will inspire your community to blossom into something even greater. 
 

Here are five ways to show your community members you are thankful for them:
 

Our robust Achievements system is the most obvious method to tap into gratitude. As a community leader or moderator, you can literally show thanks by rewarding your members.

• Manually award members a Badge and Points for exemplifying leadership, posting special content or for their positive contributions. 

• Move members into an exclusive Rank for consistently being a positive force in the community. 
• Display a block of Badges on the community homepage to make members’ accomplishments visible.

Send a bulk email from the platform directly into your members’ inbox.

A newsletter is a wonderful way to intimately communicate with your die-hards. Blast the email to your entire community, or choose specific user groups. For example, relay this special gratitude email to members who’ve posted 100 times or more. 

Highlight your members’ topics or blog posts by curating them for more to see. This not only thanks your community for positively contributing, but also encourages others to follow suit. 

Use the Our Picks widget or the Feature moderation action to prominently display content items. Though different tactics, both showcase what your members are posting. 

Our Reputation system is one of the most efficient and effective ways to show gratitude in an instant. 

“Reacting” to members’ posts visibly shows thanks and communicates to others that the post is worth stopping and reading. Reacting also increases a member’s perceived value in the community. The higher a member’s Reputation score is, the more they are trusted by others. 

This might be the most powerful but challenging tip of all: create a topic in the Forums and tell your community you’re grateful for them. 

It’s one thing to award badges and points, curate content and send a newsletter, but it’s another for you, the community leader, to spend a moment and personally thank your members for supporting you. They are spending their time, one of the most valuable assets, with you. That’s worth celebrating! 

Speaking of… Invision Community would like to take this moment to thank you. Whether you are a serious hobbyist, a medium-sized company or an enterprise industry giant, we want to thank you for believing in us and using our platform to better your business.

If you’re someone who’s interested in joining, we’d love to hear from you!

🙏  Get in touch with us! 🙏

Achievements allows community leaders to reward members with points, badges and ranks for their outstanding contributions. We listened to your feedback and implemented some very exciting changes.

In this post, you'll get a crash course on the new updates included in your Admin Control Panel (ACP) upon updating your community to 4.6.8. Once you're familiar with these concepts, you can take action to elevate your community.
 

New! Married group promotions with Achievements. 

New! Added metrics to better understand how Achievements functions within your community. 

New! Implemented additional rules to further empower your members. 

New! Updated email notifications to let your members know when they've earned a badge.

New! Download member lists based on Achievements criteria.

Before we expand on the new features, here's a recap of Achievements to refresh your memory:
 

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Points: Achievements keeps a running tally of points based off of specific actions a member takes, like posting a topic or reply. 

Rules: Community leaders set up actionable processes for members to earn the points.

Badges: Leaders can also create specific Rules when deciding what actions earn Badges, for example rewarding your members with a badge for visiting your community for 20 days.

Ranks: based on earned points, display a members’ perceived value to the community. The higher a members’ Rank, the greater their influence because the more they’ve participated. 

Now that you’re up to speed, let’s take a look at the new metrics and rules.

Group promotions lay out various user journeys.

Based on actions a member takes in a community, for example  commenting 100 times, having a high reputation score or having joined a community a year ago, the platform will automatically place them in a group (based on the rules you previously set up). This is useful when creating a hierarchy in your community. The more your members are engaged, the more access / privileges they receive.

 Now, community leaders can automatically place members in specific groups based on what badges they've earned in the community.  

Couple examples:

• A moderator manually awards a member the 'Helpful Superstar' badge. In this scenario, that badge can only be earned if a moderator chooses to give it. Once someone earns that badge, they're automatically placed in the 'Helpful Superstars' group. This group may have the ability to create clubs (whereas the other groups can't). 
• A member earns the 'Engaged' badge. 'Engaged' badges are earned when a member has replied 100 times since joining. Once they've posted 100 replies, the system automatically places them in a new group with other contributing members. 

Badges Earned: Track what badges were earned during a defined period of time. This is especially useful to track both member engagement as well as identify how often your community moderators are awarding badges manually.

Badges earned by member group: How many members in each group earned a badge. Track this when quantifying what groups are most engaged with your community. Understanding which group(s) earn the most badges helps you better tend to groups that might be less engaged. It might be a good idea to show them some extra attention. 

Badges by member: Search a time-based list of all members with an earned badge total. Easily discover who your VIP members are and reward / thank them for being active contributors. 

Member downloads a file: Members may earn a badge for downloading a specific file. This could be useful if your company wanted to share new policies or an announcement; track which members took the time to download the information and publicly recognize them for staying on top of things. 

Member purchases a package or product: Members may also earn a badge for purchasing either a package or a specific product. For example, you could create a rule for members to earn a coveted product badge for opting to purchase a physical product (like a t-shirt). Only members who've purchased an item from your community would receive this type of recognition. 

New Email notifications: New notification emails let your members know when they've received a coveted rank.  

In theory, you can upload this list of members elsewhere to target this specific audience (like sending an exclusive email drip campaign in Mail Chimp).

Several examples include downloading a list of members who've:

• Earned 500 or more points
• Earned a specific badge
• Reached a specific rank

Achievements is a robust feature to engage your VIP members and spark the fuse of inspiration for newcomers. There’s a lot of power at your fingertips.

Unsure where to start with implementing Achievements? Check out our original post and determine what behaviors you want to reward within your community. Sometimes just logging in is a good place to start. Reward them for that. 🙂

Ready to take Achievements to the next level? Check out the new Group Promotions and Achievements Metrics now available in 4.6.8.

Where are you in your journey with Achievements? Drop us a line in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Reporting tools available in the Invision Community platform can help you better understand the inner workings of your community and decide whether your current setup is leading you towards or away from your bottom line.  We recognize that knowledge is power, so we expanded our extensive list of reporting metrics.

Now, community leaders can not only check registration count, topic creation, device usage and other engagement metrics, but may also view reports on follower statistics, top referrers, member preferences and more. In this post, we'll highlight a couple of our favorite metrics included in 4.6.8.
 

New! Metrics to better understand moderator actions:

• # of warnings given: track how many warnings moderators issued during a defined time period.
• # of suspended users: track how many members moderators suspended during a defined time period.
• # of reports submitted over a defined period of time.
   

Moderator actions include any action a moderator takes in the community, for example hiding/closing/deleting a topic. 

Understanding how your moderators handle sticky situations builds trust and clarity. However, a moderator’s value shouldn’t depend on the amount of warnings / suspensions given. Ideally, a well functioning community with a clear set of guidelines creates a culture where toxic members (and their posts) are less common. Don’t punish a moderator for taking less restrictive action; reward them because they didn’t have to! 

Why you should care: because metrics are imperative for goal setting.

For example, “we want to reduce the number of warnings given by 50% at the end of the year.” In this scenario, the overarching goal is to foster a better user experience, resulting in less problematic posts (and thus less opportunity for moderators to issue warnings). 

If X then Y: If moderators issued 50% less warnings, then their time is freed up to spend on other important tasks.
 

New! Metrics to understand whether your spam defense tactics are working:
 

• Unlikely to be a spammer
• Possibly a spammer
• Likely to be a spammer 
• Known spammer
   

No one likes a spammer. Unlike the junk you receive in your physical or email inbox, Invision Community includes powerful tools to combat spam.

Our new spam defense metrics let you know if the systems you put in place are working, or if there's room for improvement. We integrated an intelligent spam defense system directly into the platform, as well as a few additional steps to avoid spam, including an invisible reCAPTCHA and question and answer challenge.

Why you should care: because spam hogs resources and clutters a community.

The higher the "unlikely to be a spammer" stats are in comparison to "possibly a spammer," "likely to be a spammer" and "known spammer," the better. With the new metrics, you'll know without a shadow of a doubt how frequently spammers are flagged and blocked.  

If X then Y: If there are 75% less spammers per month, then your community's health has increased.
 

But wait... there's more!  Here are additional metrics included in 4.6.8:
 

• Members with the most followers
• Members following the most people
• Number of content items deleted 
• RSVPs to calendar events
• Questions with the most up/down votes over time
• Member preferences
  • Most-used theme
  • Most-used language

Information is one of the most valuable resources for any community leader because it prompts inspired action. The additional reporting metrics included in 4.6.8 will be made available to you in the first half of November.

Thoughts on our new reporting tools? Drop us a line in the comments. 

No matter how good your content is, how accurate your keywords are or how precise your microdata is, inefficient crawling reduces the number of pages Google will read and store from your site.

Search engines need to look at and store as many pages that exist on the internet as possible. There are currently an estimated 4.5 billion web pages active today. That's a lot of work for Google.

It cannot look and store every page, so it needs to decide what to keep and how long it will spend on your site indexing pages.

Right now, Invision Community is not very good at helping Google understand what is important and how to get there quickly. This blog article runs through the changes we've made to improve crawling efficiency dramatically, starting with Invision Community 4.6.8, our November release.

The short version
This entry will get a little technical. The short version is that we remove a lot of pages from Google's view, including user profiles and filters that create faceted pages and remove a lot of redirect links to reduce the crawl depth and reduce the volume of thin content of little value. Instead, we want Google to focus wholly on topics, posts and other key user-generated content.

Let's now take a deep dive into what crawl budget is, the current problem, the solution and finally look at a before and after analysis. Note, I use the terms "Google" and "search engines" interchangeably. I know that there are many wonderful search engines available but most understand what Google is and does.

Crawl depth and budget
In terms of crawl efficiency, there are two metrics to think about: crawl depth and crawl budget. The crawl budget is the number of links Google (and other search engines) will spider per day. The time spent on your site and the number of links examined depend on multiple factors, including site age, site freshness and more. For example, Google may choose to look at fewer than 100 links per day from your site, whereas Twitter may see hundreds of thousands of links indexed per day.

Crawl depth is essentially how many links Google has to follow to index the page. The fewer links to get to a page, is better. Generally speaking, Google will reduce indexing links more than 5 to 6 clicks deep.

The current problem #1: Crawl depth
A community generates a lot of linked content. Many of these links, such as permalinks to specific posts and redirects to scroll to new posts in a topic, are very useful for logged in members but less so to spiders. These links are easy to spot; just look for "&do=getNewComment" or "&do=getLastComment" in the URL. Indeed, even guests would struggle to use these convenience links given the lack of unread tracking until logged in.  Although they offer no clear advantage to guests and search engines, they are prolific, and following the links results in a redirect which increases the crawl depth for content such as topics.

The current problem #2: Crawl budget and faceted content
A single user profile page can have around 150 redirect links to existing content. User profiles are linked from many pages. A single page of a topic will have around 25 links to user profiles. That's potentially 3,750 links Google has to crawl before deciding if any of it should be stored. Even sites with a healthy crawl budget will see a lot of their budget eaten up by links that add nothing new to the search index. These links are also very deep into the site, adding to the overall average crawl depth, which can signal search engines to reduce your crawl budget.

Filters are a valuable tool to sort lists of data in particular ways. For example, when viewing a list of topics, you can filter by the number of replies or when the topic was created. Unfortunately, these filters are a problem for search engines as they create faceted navigation, which creates duplicate pages.

The solution
There is a straightforward solution to solve all of the problems outlined above.  We can ask that Google avoids indexing certain pages. We can help by using a mix of hints and directives to ensure pages without valuable content are ignored and by reducing the number of links to get to the content. We have used "noindex" in the past, but this still eats up the crawl budget as Google has to crawl the page to learn we do not want it stored in the index.

Fortunately, Google has a hint directive called "nofollow", which you can apply in the <a href> code that wraps a link. This sends a strong hint that this link should not be read at all. However, Google may wish to follow it anyway, which means that we need to use a special file that contains firm instructions for Google on what to follow and index.

This file is called robots.txt. We can use this file to write rules to ensure search engines don't waste their valuable time looking at links that do not have valuable content; that create faceted navigational issues and links that lead to a redirect.

Invision Community will now create a dynamic robots.txt file with rules optimised for your community, or you can create custom rules if you prefer.

Analysis: Before and after
I took a benchmark crawl using a popular SEO site audit tool of my test community with 50 members and around 20,000 posts, most of which were populated from RSS feeds, so they have actual content, including links, etc. There are approximately 5,000 topics visible to guests.

Once I had implemented the "nofollow" changes, removed a lot of the redirect links for guests and added an optimised robots.txt file, I completed another crawl.

Let's compare the data from the before and after.

First up, the raw numbers show a stark difference.

Before our changes, the audit tool crawled 176,175 links, of which nearly 23% were redirect links. After, just 6,389 links were crawled, with only 0.4% being redirection links. This is a dramatic reduction in both crawl budget and crawl depth. Simply by guiding Google away from thin content like profiles, leaderboards, online lists and redirect links, we can ask it to focus on content such as topics and posts.

Note: You may notice a large drop in "Blocked by Robots.txt" in the 'after' crawl despite using a robots.txt for the first time. The calculation here also includes sharer images and other external links which are blocked by those sites robots.txt files. I added nofollow to the external links for the 'after' crawl so they were not fetched and then blocked externally.

As we can see in this before, the crawl depth has a low peak between 5 and 7 levels deep, with a strong peak at 10+.

After, the peak crawl depth is just 3. This will send a strong signal to Google that your site is optimised and worth crawling more often.

Let's look at a crawl visualisation before we made these changes. It's easy to see how most content was found via table filters, which led to a redirect (the red dots), dramatically increasing crawl depth and reducing crawl efficiency.

Compare that with the after, which shows a much more ordered crawl, with all content discoverable as expected without any red dots indicating redirects.

Conclusion
SEO is a multi-faceted discipline. In the past, we have focused on ensuring we send the correct headers, use the correct microdata such as JSON-LD and optimise meta tags. These are all vital parts of ensuring your site is optimised for crawling. However, as we can see in this blog that without focusing on the crawl budget and crawl efficiency, even the most accurately presented content is wasted if it is not discovered and added into the search index.

These simple changes will offer considerable advantages to how Google and other search engines spider your site.

The features and changes outlined in this blog will be available in our November release, which will be Invision Community 4.6.8.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Invision Community editor could re-use whole replies, text snippets, and even reply templates?

As we get ready to welcome more customers into our staffed community support area, this feature idea has become a reality to help form personalized replies.

Invision Community has a saved actions feature that allows the community team to perform multiple actions on multiple topics. For example, you might want to add a title prefix, move the topic and add a reply. This works great for 'canned' responses and actions, but it is less useful if you want to edit the reply to personalize it.

Stock replies allow you to set up entire replies, partial replies or even reply templates.

Once you have these set up in the Admin Panel, they are visible on the editor.

You can choose multiple stock replies to build up a message with handy re-usable reply snippets.

Each stock reply has full permission capabilities, meaning you can specify which member groups can use each stock reply. For example, you may wish to create partial replies for your team but encourage members to use a reply template to report bugs, etc.

We hope you like this feature, which is coming to our 4.6.7 October release.

It’s been a minute since our last blog post, but we have cooked up several epic projects in the interim.

To refresh your memory, we recently launched a new platform update, 4.6. It includes *takes a deep breath* Achievements, Zapier integration, web app and push notifications, anonymous posting, solved content, the ability to show when a team member has replied, a new health dashboard, spam improvements and more.

In the time since, we prepared a few special treats for you. Before we dive into the feature feast, sample our forthcoming website refresh. In the very near future, our entire website will slip into something a little more comfortable. Not only will the look and feel change, but we’re implementing new sections to explain how and why Invision Community is any business’ go-to- solution for community building. More on that to come, but for now take a bite out of this:

Onto the feature updates; hope you’re hungry!

Extended closed Club functionality

Clubs with ‘closed’ permissions have more flexibility than ever. 

Now, the owner of a closed club can opt to have the club’s forums, calendar, pages, gallery and downloads be visible for all to see (despite the club being set to closed). Previously, members could not access any part of a closed club unless they joined.

For example, a closed club leader could create a special landing page that’s viewable by members who have not yet joined the club, but the rest of the club is closed. This might be useful as a means to encourage someone to join, share information that’s pertinent to those in and out of the club or as a sales tool. 

Another example could be keeping the club-associated forums visible for all, but keep the club’s calendar and image gallery exclusive to the club’s members as an incentive to join. 

Gobble up this screengrab below:
 

Subscribe to Activity Streams

Never skip a beat! Members of a community can now subscribe to any default or custom activity stream (minus the All Activity Stream) and receive either daily or weekly email notifications with a roundup of content they may have missed. 

This is especially useful for die-hard community members and moderators who frequently consume content. By subscribing to an activity stream, members have important, need-to-know items they’re interested in delivered straight to their inbox. 
 

Community administrators have the option to limit how many activity streams a member can subscribe to. 

Because email notifications are inherently intimate, we have also implemented something called stream decay. If the user hasn't visited the site for a predefined amount of time, the activity stream email notifications they previously subscribed to will automatically stop until the member re-engages with the community by visiting. Pretty nifty, right?
 

Health Club

Since you’ve made it to the bottom of this blog post, sink your teeth into dessert. Sugar free, of course! 

We recently launched a new Health Club. It’s free to join and available for all Invision Community clients. This is a great opportunity for you to connect with other community leaders in the industry, as well as our own team, through the important modality of physical and mental health. The world is in a weird spot right now; please utilize this club to lean on one another for support, give advice, ask questions and share your health wins and missteps. As cheesy as it sounds, upping your general well-being will make you a better community leader and ultimately elevate your community as a whole. Just some food for thought!
 

The new Club and Activity Stream features will be made available in September.

Questions? Comments? Feedback? Drop us a crumb in the comments - we’d love to hear from you!

Header photo: Unsplash

To celebrate, we hosted a live event on Zoom.

I, alongside two of the three Invision Community co-founders @Charles and @Matt (shout-out to @Lindy) sat down for a roundtable talk to chat about some of the slickest features 4.6 has to offer.

If you'd like to refresh your memory with exactly what features we implemented in 4.6, check out our detailed blog post (after you're done watching our live event above, of course). 

It includes:

• Achievements
• Spam Improvements
• Health dashboard
• Web app and push notifications
• Anonymous posting
• Solved content
• Show when a team member has replied

Did you catch the low-key Smart Community announcement? 🙃

We also wanted to take the time to answer a few questions we received during the live event that we couldn't get to in the moment.

Question: regarding the anonymous posting... is it completely anonymous (like no record is stored of who posted it) or is just a pseudo thing, like it shows "anonymous" but admins/mods can see who posted it?

Answer: The community owner can choose whether moderators can see the true identity of the user. This uses the built in moderator permissions so they can have it so all moderators, just specific moderators or nobody can see this info.

---

Question: Is the translation service be hosted by IPS or do we need to use Google or Bing services on our community?

Answer: It will be a turnkey service provided by Invision Community.

---

Question: Does Achievements show how many x Points are left to the next level?

Answer: Yup!

---

Question: When will Smart Community be available?

Unsatisfying Answer: We are excited to share more details on Smart Community soon!

---

We appreciate you participating / watching our first-ever live event. We're planning on doing more, so keep an eye out for the next one.

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Concerns? Drop us a line in the comments!

Nearly two decades ago, Invision Community President, @Charles , set out to make a leading online community platform. 

Around that time, Charles also met his now-husband of 18-years and hasn't looked back since. Until now. 

Behind the code, product updates and newsletters are a group of people who share a passion for community building. Considering how volatile and toxic the Internet can be, we want to become more visible, transparent and vulnerable.  To help you familiarize yourself with the masterminds behind Invision Community, starting with Charles, we're kicking off a new series that'll highlight our team.

I interviewed Charles for the first installment. In it, he commented on the state of the Internet: "I do think some times, for or better or for worse, people forget there are real people on the other end," he said.

Mr. Warner also touched on Invision Community's evolution over the years. 

"People don't like change. No one likes change," Charles said, adding "sometimes you say, 'we really need to change something' either in the software, or how you do things, and people push back. It might be we change a feature or maybe internally we change the way we do something. Sometimes you have to move forward. Sometimes it's irritating at first. 'Why did you change that?!' And also you have to recognize that sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes you might change something [and think], 'no, it's not better...' I really find that that's a big thing – to constantly be looking at all those other options and try stuff out. It doesn't harm [anything] to try things."

And in the spirit of Pride Month, Charles opened up about being part of the LGBTQ community and also President of a successful company. He hopes it'll inspire others.
 

Quote

"I am lucky, and it's a privilege. [For one] that the world we're in now is different than the world was five years ago, 20 years ago... but also being an Internet company you have a unique position where people don't know your gender, your age, your race, anything about you online... Particularly 20 years ago when we started even less so... that's the thing that's always kind of been there. I think I'm lucky in that regard. I recognize some people don't have that unique approach to things that I've enjoyed. I would say on that whole it hasn't really been a big thing and I'm lucky that it hasn't."

The full interview is available to watch up top. 

After watching, please drop us a line in the comments and let us know your thoughts! 🌈 

Well, friends, what a journey we've been on since we started work on Invision Community 4.6.0.

With 11 developers accumulating 934 commits over 3,157 files changing 120,281 lines of code, we're ready to show it to the world.

Along with over 260 bug fixes, this new release contains some great new functionality. Let's take a look at what's new.

Achievements
Achievements, badges, ranks, rules, gamification, whatever you want to call it, this is the most significant feature for Invision Community 4.6.0. This brings a whole new level of earning and showing trust to other members while gently nudging more quality contributions to your community.

Zapier integration
Do you want new member registrations to magically appear in a Google spreadsheet? Perhaps you want members who opt-in for newsletters to be added to Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. Cloud and Enterprise customers can do all this and more without writing a single line of code, thanks to Zapier.

Web app and push notifications
We took the time to round out our PWA (progressive web application) framework for 4.6.0 to include service workers, push notifications and more. I barely understand it, but Rikki takes you through the changes in our blog entry.

Anonymous posting
For some types of community, where discussion topics are particularly sensitive, community owners want to make sure that members register with their real details but are given the option to post anonymously where appropriate. For example, organisations dealing with abuse or sensitive topics might want the member to feel safe and disinhibited to post info without fear of being identified by the rest of the community.

Solved content
In Invision Community 4.6.0, we have rounded out our "solved" feature by allowing the feature to be enabled on a regular forum, along with notifications, statistics and more.

Show when a team member has replied
When you're scanning a list of topics, it's helpful to know when a community team member has replied, as these replies tend to have more authority and are more likely to resolve an issue. 4.6.0 adds a feature to show when a member of the team has replied.

Health dashboard
As Invision Community is a top of the line community platform with excellent developers and an amazing QA team, it's unlikely ever to go wrong. On the infrequent occasions that you need to identify potential issues within your community, the new health dashboard makes it easier to diagnose problems and request support.

Spam improvements
Our Enterprise customers run very visible and very busy communities. One of the pain points they had was identifying and limiting the annoyance of spam within the community. We created a new round of improvements based on that feedback to mitigate spam, and these changes are available to all Invision Community owners with 4.6.0.

Cloud and Enterprise customers will also benefit from multiple under-the-hood optimisations for our cloud platform, including better caching of resources for faster response times.

Let me know in the comments which feature you're looking forward to the most!

Spam is as much a part of life on the internet as emoji overuse, serial GIF abuse and regretful tweeting.

But I'm not here to talk about how I conduct myself online; I wanted to talk about three spam improvements coming to Invision Community 4.6.

As you may be aware, Invision Community has its own Spam Defense functionality, which uses a mixture of crowdsourced data, publicly available data and our own special sauce to help reduce the number of spam accounts that get through the registration system. Invision Community also has several other tools to mitigate spam post-registration.

These tools have served us well, but as spammers evolve, so must our systems. Here's what's coming to our next release.

Spam Defense Scoring
I can't divulge too much on our Spam Defense system lest we give spammers targeting Invision Community information that can assist them. Still, we have made several changes to our Spam Defense system.  These include rebalancing the score thresholds, checking against known TOR networks and proxies and using other data in the public domain to inform our scoring decisions.

Spam Defense Blocking
The current implementation of our Spam Defense only allows options to either prevent registration entirely or put the registration in an approval queue. However, the days when Spam Bots stood out from normal registrations are long gone, and it's hard to know if an account in an approval queue is legitimate or not.

In 4.6, we've added a new Spam Defense option that you can choose to allow the registration but put the new members into the posting approval queue, meaning their posts will need moderator approval before being published.

This reduces the decision burden and makes it easier to take a chance on a low score from the Spam Defense system and review their posts before they are made public.

Word Filters
We have added a new option to the Word Filters to allow content containing specific words or phrases to be held for moderator approval where the author has less than a set threshold of posts.

For example, you may notice an increase in spam targeting "CBD Oil" and add it to the word filter list to hold the content for moderator approval. This works great and captures a good number of spam posts; however, your regular members get frustrated when they want to talk about CDB Oil in their posts.

This new option allows you to set a trust level for allowing these words to be used without capturing them for approval.

We hope these three changes to our spam controls will reduce the level of spam you get in your community!

I'd love to know what's the weirdest spam (that is safe for work!) you've seen in your community.

Achievements is Invision Community’s native gamification system baked into our latest update, 4.6. 

We’ve dreamed up innovative actions for community leaders to publicly recognize members who show up and participate in meaningful ways.

Award Points and badges based on conditional Rules!

Here’s what you need to know...

Our Achievements Points system keeps a running tally of Points. Members may earn Points in a multitude of ways. Essentially, it’s achieved by participating in the community. 

Create a topic? Points! Post a reply? Points! Follow another member? Nothing. Just kidding… Points!!!

This is done through creating Rules.

Rules are actionable processes set up in the admin panel. 

Here are what members can earn Points for:

When a...

• Member joins a club
• Reaction is given
• New poll is created
• User follows a content item
• Review is posted
• Member logs in for the first time that day
• New club is created
• Content item/comment is promoted or featured
• Comment/reply is posted
• User follows a forum, blog, gallery, category etc
• User votes on a poll
• User is followed
• New content item is posted
• Post is marked as best answer

There are also corresponding When/Then Rules for each item listed above. 

When this action happens, then this subsequent action happens.

Example: when a member posts 10 times, then this Badge is awarded.

Community leaders can also create specific Rules when deciding what actions earn Badges. 

For example, reward your members with a Badge for visiting your community for 20 days.
Once a member reaches 20 visits or more over 20 days, the Achievements system will automatically award them a ‘20 Visits’ Badge you’ve previously created.

In 4.6, we’ve completely revamped our Ranks system to communicate with Achievements. 

Achievements’ Ranks system will replace our previous Ranks system*

Set up different Ranks based on how many Points a member earns. Ranks display a members’ perceived value to the community. The higher a members’ Rank, the greater their influence because the more they’ve participated. 

Ranks are currently for prestige at the moment. 

Here's our example for a pretend Coconut community:
 

There’s a lot of information to absorb here, but if there’s anything to take away from this blog post it’s this: empower your contributing members with Achievements and watch your community grow. It creates an immersive and elevated experience for your die-hards. And hey, who doesn’t love to earn? 

When 4.6 and Achievements is officially released for all, we’ll hold a live Q&A event for you to join and ask any questions you may have.

Props? Concerns? Comments? Questions? We’d love for you to sound off in the comments! Not only because we want to hear from you, but because it’ll earn you some sweet, sweet Points, too!

Invision Community has an exciting opportunity for an experienced PHP developer to join our team.

Invision Power Services, Inc. is behind the leading community software platform, Invision Community. Our tailored solutions serve clients of all sizes, from smaller communities to the world’s biggest brands.

We have been on the forefront of independent and white label engagement communities since 2002.

The Role
As a back end PHP developer, you will be working closely within a tight nimble team. You are a clear thinking problem solver and are able to demonstrate skills in creativity and innovation with the ability to meet deadlines. You thrive when given a brief and create well structured efficient code.

Your role will be varied and involve bug fixing, peer reviews, helping refine a technical specification and contribute code towards new functionality for Invision Community.

The position is remote, but it will require significant overlap with the EST working day. We offer a friendly relaxed environment with an established team who have a passion for what they do. There is an opportunity to learn from others and progress into more senior roles.

Key Responsibilities

• Write well designed testable efficient code by using sound development processes
• Cooperate with other team members to develop new features
• Gather and refine specifications are requirements based on technical needs
• Create and maintain software documentation

The most important characteristic is a willingness to learn and to take on new challenges. The role is varied and you can be working on a launch with an enterprise customer or crafting code for our latest features depending on priorities.

Skills & Experience

• Significant experience as a PHP developer in a commercial environment
• Experience with MySQL.
• Experience with github.
• Experience with various web services such as OAuth, SAML, REST, etc.
• Experience working within a team with a strong culture.
• Some experience with HTML, CSS and JS.
• Worked on large scale applications.
• Confident with modern OOP standards including traits, etc.

The depth of experience can vary between developers. Please apply even if some of these areas are not your strongest points. We can offer training and mentoring for the right candidate and our team is very supportive.

Location
Remote but must be available for a significant portion of 9-5 EST working day.

Salary
Dependent on experience. Please submit your salary expectations on the application form.

How To Apply
Please complete the application form giving us as much information as possible.

As we approach the release of Invision Community 4.6, I wanted to take you through some improvements for using Invision Community on a mobile device.

Web push notifications

For some time, we've used the local browser notification API to show users notifications. There's a big drawback though: users had to have the site open in a tab for these to work. This is particularly problematic for mobile devices.

In 4.6, we've added support for the WebPush API, which allows sites to push notifications to users' browsers & devices even if the site isn't open - or even if the device is asleep.

We already have support baked in for push notifications via our beta mobile app, so we've piggy-backed on that system and expanded it to support browser-based push notifications.

For users, it's a simple process. A little while after joining a community they will prompted to accept notifications from the site when they open the notification list dropdown (or they can opt-in any time from the notification settings screen). After accepting, they will be able to choose a "Notification List + Push" option for any of the available notification types.

Existing users, who may have already granted permission to the site in the past, will be re-prompted to accept push notifications upon logging in after the 4.6 upgrade.

Push notifications typically show on the homescreen of a phone or in the notification tray of a desktop computer, so receiving dozens of notifications could be overwhelming. For that reason, Invision Community will automatically merge related notifications - for example, multiple mentions from the same topic, or multiple new topics from the same forum.

And, of course, users can stop push notifications across all of their devices with a single click if they want to opt out.

We're excited about the engagement potential of push notifications, since they allow you to immediately reach users who aren't currently on your site - a job previously left to email alone.

On the subject of notifications, one more thing: we've heard your feedback about notifications for new replies/mentions being merged with notifications for likes/quotes, and will be separating these two types into their own permissions in 4.6. We're acutely aware that making notifications annoying results in users turning them off, so we're always looking to ensure there is a reasonable balance.

Splash Screen Images

When you add a website to your phone's desktop, it appears like a native app. Tapping to launch the site can show a blank screen for a few seconds while the website is loaded. Fortunately, you can now set a 'splash' image in the Admin CP which is shown when launching the app.
 

Sharing using native share options

Another enhancement coming in 4.6 is the addition of the device share sheet when sharing content from within Invision Community. Users will now see a "More Sharing Options" button (providing their device/browser supports the underlying API) which, when tapped, will open the device share sheet. The options available depend on the device, but typically include actions like sharing links in WhatsApp, posting to Facebook or creating a note.

Offline support

With a larger share of users now using mobile devices for most of their browsing comes the problem of patchy phone signal and internet connections dropping out. For a dynamic web-based platform like Invision Community, it's difficult to offer much in the way of full offline support, but starting in 4.6 we will present a branded offline page to users when they have no internet connection and try to access the community.

We hope that you are looking forward to these PWA improvements coming in Invision Community 4.6!

You’ve probably already noticed that something looks a little different in our community today.

As part of our ongoing community improvements, we’ve performed some housekeeping to streamline the forum structure, make more distinction between areas and open up a few areas to guests and friends.

The big visual change is that we now have four separate areas: support, community, marketplace and developers. It should hopefully be clear what each section does, but let's go through a few examples.

Support

This area is where you can leave feedback on existing features, help shape Invision Community’s future by suggesting new functionality and also where you can get quick support from fellow Invision Community owners and our team.

Starting today, you can post in the Help & Support forum to get help from our team. If you’re unsure what a feature does, or think you’ve spotted an issue that needs our help, then you’re welcome to start a topic. Of course, if you want private support, then you are welcome to create a ticket in the client area as normal.

Community

Even the most seasoned community manager needs a little help from time to time. This section is the place to ask about strategy, to blow off steam in the lounge or to ask for fellow owners to help with support requirements outside of official support, such as configuring servers, databases and so on.

Marketplace

Our Marketplace brings hundreds of new features, themes, language translations and plug-ins to your Invision Community. If you need support or have a request for something you’ve purchased from the Marketplace, drop into the forums here.

Developers

Invision Community is blessed with a strong developer community extending the rich functionality of Invision Community. If you’re looking to develop an idea for Invision Community, these forums will let you connect with our development team to answer questions as well as get help from other marketplace authors.

Other Changes

There are a few other changes of note that I’d like to go through. Firstly, ‘Visitors’ (that is a registered member without an active license) are now ‘Friends’. Who doesn’t need new friends? Guests and Friends can now view the official support forums, but cannot post a new support request or reply to existing ones.

We’ve merged ‘General Chat’ in with the Client Lounge to form ‘The Community Managers’ Lounge’. This is still a perk for active customers and the topics are not viewable unless you have an active license.

Finally, we’ve gone through and spruced up some of the forum rules, descriptions and custom error messages.

I hope these changes make it easier to find what you need and get a little help when you need it.
 

Invision Community customers can create automated workflows between Invision Community and over 3,000 other apps including Google Documents, MailChimp, Facebook and Twitter with just a few clicks.

If you haven’t integrated your Invision Community with Zapier yet, you’re leaving organic growth on the table!

It’s been a wild year, so we’d like to refresh your memory regarding the very powerful Invision and Zapier marriage (hey, remember when weddings were a thing?). 

Zapier is a service that allows you to connect over 3,000 web apps. 

Last year, Invision Community released the 4.5 update, and with it a beta service of Zapier integration.

Zapier is the first smart community enhancement available for Cloud and Enterprise Community customers exclusively.

It’s worth it’s weight in gold. Or, crypto? However we quantify value these days, Invision Community and Zapier together creates real value and has the potential to elevate your community (and bottom line). 

If you haven’t yet set up Zapier, you can follow our guide to creating your first ‘Zap’ with Invision Community.

As @Matt previously mentioned in our announcement post, the Invision and Zapier integration can communicate with some of the Internet’s most wide-reaching platforms, including Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Trello, Facebook Ads, ActiveCampaign, Zendesk, Asana, Salesforce, Hubspot, Discord, Stripe and more.

There are three key items we want to highlight:

• Triggers
• Actions
• Self-integration

Triggers: Invision → Zapier

A “trigger” takes place when there’s a specified signal in your community. For instance, a member registering or a topic being posted. 

A trigger can be sent to Zapier to then run actions in other apps.

Here are a few examples:

• When a member registers, add their email to a Mailchimp list.
• When a moderator posts a topic in a news forum, share it on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.
• When a member posts something that requires moderator approval, send a message to a Slack channel for your moderators.

Actions: Zapier → Invision

An “action” is similar to a “trigger” in that there’s movement, but it happens by setting up an action in Zapier first which then tells your community to perform X action. 

Whereas a “trigger” happens by setting up an action in your Invision community first, which then tells Zapier to perform X action.

Here are some examples to wrap your mind around:

• When you add an event in a Google Calendar, create a Calendar Event on your community.
• When you receive an email to a feedback email address, create a topic on your community in a forum for moderators.
• When you create a task in Trello, add a record to a Pages Database on your community.
• When a new member registers, add them to your mailing list via MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, etc.

Self-integrated: Invision → Invision

Triggers = Invision talks to → Zapier, then Zapier takes action.

Actions = Zapier talks to → Invision, then Invision takes action.

Self-integrated = Your Invision community talks to → your Invision community, then your Invision community takes action.

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below! I’m here to help you transform your Invision community into an engaging and efficient world with automated systems powered by Zapier. 

Already on Zapier? What’s been your experience? Sound off and let us know what features you’ve utilized thus far and which triggers or actions you’d like to see for the future.

I'm thrilled to introduce the newest member of team Invision Community.

You may recognise Jordan from his photo as he's been an active member of our community as BreatheHeavy. Jordan has been running his site BreatheHeavy.com using Invision Community for nearly a decade.

Jordan's official title is "Community Advocate" which means that he will be working very closely with our community to guide and curate feedback, assist with support questions, to help educate and inform and to bring you news of the latest developments being cooked up by our development team.

Jordan says:

Your feedback, ideas and questions matter.

I've spent the last decade discovering what it means to be a community leader in my own Invision Powered community, BreatheHeavy. Community building is an ongoing journey that's taught me invaluable lessons, namely the importance of absorbing feedback from the community then taking decisive action. I'm excited and honored to share that insight with the Invision Community. My new role is designed to shed light on what Invision Community members (that's you!) want and share it with the team.

I'm looking forward to getting to know you! 

We're very excited to start a new chapter within Invision Community to improve communication, engage more Invision Community owners and make the most of the excellent feedback we receive.

You'll be seeing more of Jordan on the forums in the coming days.

The support tool has served us well for many years. You can identify, at a glance, potential issues with your community both presently and down the road, right from the comfort of your AdminCP, and you can often resolve those issues with just a few clicks.

But what if we could do better? What if we could make this useful administrative area of the software even more useful?

The next version of Invision Community introduces a new "Health Dashboard" which replaces the previous support tool and helps you get a better overview of potential issues within your community while retaining all of the functionality you've come to know and rely on to resolve issues with your community.

When you launch the new health dashboard, the first thing you will notice is that the previous "Wizard" process is now gone, in favor of a single page giving you access to everything you might want or need.

Central to the page are blocks that identify specific areas of your community, server, and configuration which could be problematic now or in the future. Invision Community will check for available updates, modified source files, server software configuration issues, whether your server is running required and/or recommended versions of important software and more.

Additional checks and recommendations have been added to this page, to help identify other adjustments that could benefit or prevent harm to your community.  Issues are color coded and classified as informational, recommended, or critical and a summary is provided at the top of the page with an easy "check again" button which will do so without taking you away from the screen.

If we become aware of an issue, we can quickly notify communities through a bulletin which will be displayed in the "Known Issues" block on this page. These bulletins can also trigger AdminCP notifications, however they will continue to show on the Health Dashboard so long as they are relevant, even when the AdminCP notification is dismissed.

A graph showing system, error and email error log activity has been added to the page to help you identify spikes in logged issues. Commonly, if an issue begins to surface on your community there will be an increase in these types of error logs, so the graph here is intended to allow you to identify an increase in these logs, allowing you to investigate and react quicker.

The right-hand sidebar surfaces common tools you may need to access.

The first block allows you to see our most recently featured guides, as well as search our documentation. While this functionality was available in the existing support tool, we found that it was rarely used because people more often visited the tool to allow the software to check for common issues, and the ability to search the documentation required a separate work flow through the support wizard. With the block always available (and searches performed "live" via AJAX), we expect users will find the ability to search our documentation from the AdminCP much more useful now.

Next up, the Tools and Diagnostics block gives you access to common tools you may need to use. You can quickly clear your system caches, as well as access phpinfo, the SQL toolbox (for self-hosted clients only), and disable all third party customizations. The process and behavior for disabling customizations is very similar to the existing process within the support tool, with the list of customizations disabled opening in a modal window and the ability to re-enable all customizations, or selectively re-enable individual customizations, still available.

Finally, the ability to submit a support ticket is still available right from this screen. Upon clicking the button to submit a support ticket, you will be presented with a form inside a modal dialog that behaves very similarly to the existing form with one minor but useful addition: if there are any patches not yet installed on the community, you will be alerted to this right on the form before submitting your ticket. Think of this as one last reminder that your issue may already be solved by installing any available patches before reaching out to us for official technical support.

We believe the improved workflow and user experience will help administrators and support technicians alike more quickly identify any issues that need addressing on the community.

Invision Community is growing! We're currently recruiting three new roles, one full-time and two part-time.

Applications are now closed, thank you to all those that applied. We'll be going through them over the next few weeks.

It's been a very busy year for all of us at Invision Community and our continued success means that we're looking to expand our team even further with three new roles to fill.

Invision Power Services, Inc. is behind the leading community software platform, Invision Community. Our tailored solutions serve clients of all sizes, from smaller communities to the world’s biggest brands.

We are looking to kick start 2021 with a tight-knit customer-obsessed support team to build a positive support culture for our clients.

All roles are fully remote-working.

Customer Service Superstar
We are in need of a full-time Customer Service Superstar, a new position within the company. You are solution-driven, customer-obsessed and passionate for cultivating a positive support culture for our clients. 
 
The person in this role:

• Answers client questions in a public-facing forum.
• Triages client requests to developers according to our processes.
• Deescalates problem or potential problem communications. 
• Advocate for customers to our development team.
• Is comfortable with technology and willing to learn our platform. 

Why should you apply? 

• You are a Customer Service Star - solution driven when helping clients.
• You are confident in conversing via forum style, public-facing support.
• You can clearly communicate both in writing and verbally. We primarily provide customer service in English.
• You see opportunity to streamline improvements to help our team better serve our clients. 
• Excited about interacting with our clients within our community to build a vibrant support culture.
• You work well with a team remotely. 
• You are personally organized, suited to excel in a remote work environment.

Part-Time Community Support Assistant
We are looking to add two part-time community support assistants to our growing team. You are self-motivated and focused on helping customers with support enquiries.
 
Your role will be in assisting customers via a public-facing support forum.

Ideally, you will have customer support experience, be familiar with our community platform and comfortable with technologies such as FTP, Amazon S3, PHP and MySQL.

Work Location:
Our company is headquartered in Lynchburg, Virginia with staff located around the world. These positions are remote working.

Interested?
Share your resume and characteristics that make you the best fit for this role. Please include your available work hours (timezone). As we are open to both entry-level and experienced applicants, you may choose to include a desired starting salary based on your own evaluation of your relevant skillset and experience.

Apply now!
Applications are now closed, thank you to all those that applied. We'll be going through them over the next few weeks.

Wouldn't it be great to know if a staff member had replied to a topic before you clicked to open it?

When you're scanning a list of topics, knowing which have had a reply by a member of the community team can help decide which to read. Currently, you need to open the topic and scan the posts to see if there's a reply from the team.

Happily, in our next release, we've made it clear which have had a reply by a member of a specific group.

You can specify which groups to show as having replied via the Groups form in the Admin CP.

You can select to detect the group based on the member's primary group, secondary group or both.

When viewing a list of topics, you will see a badge showing that a member of that group has replied.

This simple feature will make it easier to highlight when important replies have been made to topics, which is a great addition for forums using the new 'solved' feature.

Let me know below if you'll use this new feature and what you'd like to see in the future.

For a long time, Invision Community has supported a Question and Answer mode within the Forums application which allows a reply to be flagged as the "best answer" to the question posed. With the release of 4.5, we also introduced a way to allow topics to be marked as "solved" which introduces similar functionality without transforming the look and feel or other behavior of the forum itself.

Based on the popularity of this new addition in 4.5, we have made some further improvements to solved topics and answered questions in our next release.

While notifications were available to the poster who answered a question or solved a topic with the release of 4.5, this release also adds notifications for the topic or question starter so that they can be made aware that an answer is available to their question.

Solved topics and answered questions provide for measurable statistics that can help you determine the health and direction of your community, particularly for support communities. To that end, we have introduced two new content statistic blocks that can help you measure how well areas of the community that support answers and solutions are faring.

You can now quickly see the percentage of topics/questions that have been solved (relative to the total number posted in areas that support solutions), as well as the average time it has taken for a solution to be marked on a topic or question (relative to the time the topic or question was initially posted). These statistic blocks support time period filter, time period comparisons, and node filtering to narrow down the statistical data for your specific needs.

User profiles now show the number of solutions the user has posted, and also allows you to view all of those solutions, in a manner very similar to reputation.

These improvements should help reward the most helpful users on your community by giving them more prestige and helping other users find their answers quicker.

Collectively, we hope that these changes make the question and answer and topic solution features in the Forums application more useful for your community members, and the administrators behind the community.