Although we continuously review security within Invision Community, a major release such as 4.5 allows us to be especially proactive when it comes to keeping your community safe.

This blog entry outlines several enhancements to improve security in Invision Community 4.5.

Password Handling
Keeping your member's passwords secure is the simplest way to keep accounts safe and out of the wrong hands, so it makes sense to look at ways to ensure this doesn't happen.

Invision Community already uses strong one-way hashing when storing passwords, which means that once the password is stored in the database, there is no way to know the plain text version.

However, when creating a new member account via the AdminCP, a random password was created, and this was sent in the welcome email to the new member's email address.

As of Invision Community 4.5, this no longer happens, and the new member is invited to create a new password when visiting the community for the first time.

Part of your internal security procedures might be to force a reset of all passwords periodically. Invision Community 4.5 allows this on a per-member basis, or via a selection of filters to enforce a reset for many members at once.

This clears out any stored password hashes and emails the affected members to remind them to set up a new password.

AdminCP Security
The Admin Control Panel contains the most powerful tools available to Invision Community. This is already a very secure area with a separate login with an option to add two-factor authentication to the login flow.

Part of the session authentication has been a special key in the URL. While we have protection in place to prevent this special key being discoverable by a malicious user, there remains an incredibly remote theoretical chance that this could happen with a series of complicated steps. There was an additional annoyance that you are unable to share links within the AdminCP to members of your team due to the increased protection to keep URLs safe.

As of Invision Community 4.5, we have removed the special key from the URL and moved it elsewhere in the session authentication flow. This means that it's impossible to fetch the special key via the URL and links can now be shared and will survive a login action.

Text Encryption
There are a few areas within Invision Community that we use text encryption to allow us to save data in the database in a format that is encrypted when saved and decrypted when read. This protects you in the incredibly remote event of your own hosting being compromised and your database downloaded (of course, our Community in the Cloud customers do not need to worry about this!)

Invision Community 4.5 improves on this encryption by using PHP's built-in methods which give "bank-level" security to our encryption.

Security is critical to the success of your community, and we are always proactive in improving security throughout Invision Community.

Do you have any comments on this entry? Let us know below!

Every single day, your members are searching your community for answers or interesting conversations to join.

Wouldn't it be great if you could learn what is being searched for to identify hot issues, commonly asked questions and discover trends?

We thought so too, which is why Invision Community 4.5 comes with search statistics.

For the first time, Invision Community gathers anonymized information on what your members are searching for so you can use this to highlight more relevant content and shape strategic decisions with your community's structure.

When a member searches, their identity is converted into a unique key that cannot be reversed to identify the member. This allows us to track a single member's search usage over many search sessions without being able to link it to a specific member account.

The AdminCP now features a dashboard to review the most popular search terms as well as a raw log of recent searches along with the results they returned.

We have a lot of ideas in mind for additional changes down the road with the tracking of popular search terms, but for now, we hope you like the new statistics page and find the information presented useful for your future site plans.

We have come a long way since the late 90s when someone had the genius idea of using a small yellow smiling face image instead of the more common colon-bracket representation of a smiling face.

In Invision Community, there are various places that photography can be used to create visual interest. From uploads in topics, to cover photos for blogs and members.

The humble upload field has served these areas well, but sourcing images to use can be a pain; especially when you have to walk the minefield that is copyright and attribution.

Fortunately, there are a few "CC0" online stock photo libraries that offer quality photography that requires no attribution and are not hampered by copyrights.

One such library is the ever-popular Pixabay, which was established in 2012 and features a very powerful API. Pixabay has over a million images ready to use from llamas to sausages and everything in-between.

Invision Community 4.5 now includes support for Pixabay which brings those images to your fingertips (or mouse pointer if you're on a desktop.)

This video shows the feature in use.

As you can see, not only can you upload into posts from the stock photo library, but you can also use it to add a cover image to your profile and blog entries.

Finding quality photography has never been so easy!

For those that love technical details, the stock photo picker is a programmatic option on the upload form field type making it very easy to add to your own code and apps.

How will you use this new feature? Let me know!

Ever since Invision Community 4.x was launched you have been asking for the ability to categorize blogs in your community.

We heard you loud and clear, but sometimes when a feature sounds straightforward, it requires some re-engineering of the framework. Because users in your community can create both blog entries and their own blogs to hold these entries, this was one of those areas.

Starting with Invision Community 4.5 I’m pleased to announce that it is now possible for blog authors to categorize their blog entries and it's now possible for administrators to categorize blogs.

Blog Entry Categories
When creating a new blog entry, your members will now be able to create a new category for the entry or choose an existing one that had been created previously.

When a reader then visits the blog they can choose to display only those categories that interest them.

Blog Categories
Running a community where users can create their own blogs, you don’t only need to make sure individual pieces of content are categorized correctly, you also need to make sure the blogs themselves have a logical place. Well guess what? Now you can!

As an admin you can now set up predefined categories in the control panel and Blog authors can then choose which one to create their new blog in.

We realize some of you have been waiting a long time to see these changes so we hope you enjoy this and everything else to come in Invision Community 4.5!

On behalf of the Invision Community staff and company, I'd like to wish our clients and community warm blessings and gratitude for the New Year.  

We're proud to be the community platform of choice for you and your organization over the past year (or decade!), empowering you and your users with the space to debate, discuss, investigate, solve, innovate and celebrate a shared sense of purpose.  The ability to positively touch and connect with the lives of others regardless of location is one of the most transformative benefits of the modern web -- and there's never been a greater demand or need for online communities to connect members in an authentic, branded experience.  

Your community is the gift that keeps on giving, and we're delighted to be a part of it. 

Here's a round-up of the 2019's most visited, most commented, and most clicked-on articles from the Invision Community Blog:

• Invision Community managers use tools like Saved Actions and Auto Moderation to work smarter with 5 of the best time saving features
• Avoid the Engagement Trap, a never-ending race that measures all the wrong metrics in a community
• The crowd goes wild in the teaser announcement of the forthcoming mobile apps for iOS and Android
• Go back in a time machine with a Decade in Review - a celebration and testament to the enduring power of community.  

Once again, may the magic and wonder of the holiday season stay with you throughout the year!

Almost every single day, we receive feedback on our popular clubs feature. Some of the requests are big in scope, and some a little smaller.

Following on from our previous blog entry for Club Pages, we’re pleased to announce a collection of smaller, but no less useful improvements.

Improved Map Display

A small but useful change to the clubs map means the view is now centered and zoomed around available clubs. Previously the map would show a world view even if all of the clubs were located in a concentrated geographical area.

Member Tab

A commitment to privacy always influences our development decisions, and this is true in clubs as well as other areas. It is now possible to set who can view the club member list on a per club basis. Clubs can be set to show the member list to everyone, only to club members or only to club leaders and moderators.

Club Widgets

A common request for clubs is that widgets should be able to display content from within clubs. With 4.5, this is now possible and allows you to better bring attention to your club content from anywhere in your community.

Some people wanted to control where widgets would show more finely. This wasn’t previously possible, but now it is. When adding widgets to a page, you can now set whether you want it to appear everywhere, everywhere except clubs, or only in clubs.

Join Requests

Club leaders can invite members who they believe will enjoy their content to join. Likewise, members can request to join a club that is not open for all to join instantly.

For a site with a lot of clubs, this could mean that you are invited to many clubs or find that your pending request goes unnoticed.

Members can now cancel pending requests themselves quickly and easily from the Club homepage.

Clubs are becoming an increasingly popular part of Invision Community and really helps foster a sense of involvement.

We are always interested and surprised by the variety of ways this feature is being used. Let us know how you’re using clubs in the comments and keep the great suggestions coming!

Invision Community has supported member referrals via the Commerce app since Commerce was called Nexus all those years ago.

Community owners have been able to see at a glance who is spreading the word and members have received the kudos associated with a growing referral count in return. 

When planning Invision Community 4.5 we saw that this feature had the potential to be so much more… So what have we done to improve it?

See Who Was Referred

In addition to seeing a count of referrals, it’s now possible for both admins and members to see who they referred. If Commerce is enabled admins can also see how much commission (if any) was earned. 

Member Promotion

Seeing a rising count of who has been referred gives members a great feeling of community involvement but wouldn’t it be great if you could reward your members in other ways too? 

Referral counts now work as a member filter when using the group promotion feature.

You can now automatically promote members that have referred more than a specific number of members to another user group and give them access to exclusive content. This still works alongside paid subscriptions so be another method for members not willing or able to pay for subscriptions to get access.

Integration With Sharing

If the feature is enabled, any time a link is shared via the built-in share links, referrals will be tracked. This occurs automatically without the member needing to think about it. It’s now easier than ever to see who your superfans are and who is bringing new people to the community.

Blocks

As well as the default share links we have added a new sidebar block that can be added anywhere across your community. This prominent call to action can be added on pages you think are most likely to result in recommendations.

Given that referral capabilities have been expanded into many more areas outside of Commerce we decided that this should now be available as a core feature. Earning commission on sales as a result of referrals will still, of course, require Commerce to be installed.

We hope that these are welcome improvements and they help you encourage more members to participate in your community.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that RSS feeds belong in some bygone era of the web where Netscape was king and getting online meant listening to your modem scream at your phone line.

There's certainly a lot of newer web technologies to share data, but the venerable RSS feed still has a place.

Invision Community has supported RSS feed importing and exporting for a very long time now; however, it has been restricted to just Forums and Blogs.

Importing an RSS feed is a simple way to populate content on your community. It's even a great way to share content to and from your site without creating blocks or writing custom code.

Invision Community 4.5 now centralizes RSS feed importing, so it is available for Forums, Blogs and Pages.

You can now choose to import an RSS feed to any Pages database. Better yet, there is now full support for image enclosures.

RSS feeds have a special tag to note that the feed entry has an attached image. Lots of RSS feeds use this, such as the NASA Image Of The Day feed. Until now, this image has just been silently discarded.

Now, it is imported as an attachment (so it can be moved around in the post or Pages entry). If the Pages database you are importing to has record images enabled, you can optionally import the enclosure as a record image which some template sets can use as a header image, just as our blog here does.

But what about exporting enclosures?

Happily, Invision Community 4.5 can now export the main content image of an item as an enclosure. This certainly makes the Gallery RSS feed export a lot more useful!

While these updates are not revolutionary, they certainly make RSS feed importing and exporting much more useful. We've been asked to support RSS feed importing into Pages for quite a while now.

What do you think of these changes? What will you import into your Pages databases?

Without a doubt, clubs is one of the most popular features added to Invision Community in recent times.

Invision Community clubs allows you to run sub-communities on your site. We've seen clubs used in many ways, including managing geographically local groups and clan groups for large gaming sites.

This popularity drives us to keep incrementally improving the feature set for clubs, and Invision Community 4.5 is no different.

One thing that was raised many times was a way for club owners and leaders to create simple pages with general information members need.

Happily, in Invision Community 4.5, this feature now exists (and more!)

In addition to the title and visual editor that allows full formatting of the page content, there is an additional visibility setting which allows owners and leaders to define which types of members can view the page.

This is perfect for showing a page that is only visible to non-members which informs them how to join the club.

Likewise, it is a great way to display moderation guidelines to the club moderators only.

Of course, owners and leaders will always be able to see all pages added to a club.

Additionally, once a page is added to a club, a tab will be added alongside others, and the page can be re-arranged just like the rest. 

Using this, owners and leaders can create an alternative unique index page for the club.

This is just one of many club improvements finished for Invision Community 4.5. We'll be talking about these in a future blog!

Invision Community has come a long way over the past five years.

We've added many new features and invigorated the front-end user experience to keep it current and in-line with modern interfaces.

One area that has remained largely the same is the Admin Control Panel.

When we released Invision Community 4.0 back in 2014, the Admin Control Panel was updated but has stayed relatively dormant since.

But that's all about to change with the upcoming release of Invision Community 4.5!

The Admin Control Panel in 4.5 has received a substantial update, resulting in a modern color scheme and a clean, minimalistic design.

We felt that a lighter, more open design allowed the content more space and to feel less crowded. 

The dark grays have been replaced with shades of blue and aqua which closely reflects Invision Community's new branding, while other colors have been lightened and saturated.

Along with the new color scheme, the overall layout of the ACP has intentionally been kept similar to the existing version, resulting in a design that feels surprisingly familiar yet refreshingly new at the same time.

We hope you've enjoyed this small sneak peek into Invision Community 4.5 and we look forward to introducing you to some more new features in the upcoming weeks!

Minor releases are almost always just maintenance releases. We gather up a fistful of bug reports and fix them to ensure that every month or so, our clients enjoy more stability and efficiency with Invision Community.

However, more recently we've noticed that we're running low on bug reports, so we've managed to squeeze in a handful of improvements in Invision Community 4.4.5.

Let's take a look and see what's new in Pages.

How should the canonical tag behave?
While this isn't the most exciting name for a feature, it does explain it reasonably well. We had a recent discussion on the forums where it was pointed out that the canonical tag directed search engines to the first page of any record. While this makes perfect sense for an articles or blog system where the content you create is more important than the comments, it makes less sense if the user-generated content (aka the comments) is more important than the content you put up. A good example here is where you put up a video or link for review. You don't want the canonical tag pointing to the first page as it will ignore the reviews themselves.

If you didn't understand much of that, don't worry. The idea behind this feature is to provide Google and friends with a better hint about which content is more important. A happier Google bot slurping your site is a good thing.

How about that Admin CP menu?
When you create a new database in Pages, it is shown in the ACP menu under 'Content'. This is fine, but when you get a lot of databases, it starts looking a little cluttered, and it can be hard to find the correct one.

We've reworked the menu so items have their own section, and can be re-ordered using the ACP menu re-ordering system.

Member fields are now filterable.
Pages allows specific field types to be filterable. This means you can sort by them with the table's advanced search box, and you can drag and drop a filters widget next to the table to refine the rows shown.

Now a member custom field is filterable, which is handy if you use them in your databases.

Other areas of the suite.

Messenger search
A while back, we made a change that removed the ability to search messenger by the sender or recipient name. We also limited the reach of the search system to one year and newer.

Unsurprisingly, this wasn't very popular. We've restored sender, and recipient name searching removed the one year limit and re-engineered the internals of search, so it's more efficient and returns results much faster.

How many members do you have?
You can see quite quickly if you have the member stats widget on the front end, but finding out via the Admin CP is a little more tricky. 

Until now! We've added a dashboard widget that not only shows the number of members you have registered, but also a break down of their email opt-in status.

A happier autocomplete.
Apple has this cool feature where if you receive a text message for a two-factor authentication login, it offers to auto-fill the code box for you.

We've had a sweep throughout the suite to ensure two-factor authentication fields allow this autocomplete to happen.

While we were at it, we made sure that other fields are more easily autocompleted.

That wraps up the new features in Invision Community 4.4.5. How many have you spotted after upgrading?

Let us know your favourite below.

Every day, LGBTQ young people from all walks of life log into TrevorSpace, the world’s largest moderated safe space for LGBTQ youth online.

Here, young people can support each other, share their stories, and find refuge from what might be a less than accepting environment offline.

Launched in 2008, TrevorSpace is housed under The Trevor Project, the foremost suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth in the world. Having an affirming digital community has been an indispensable resource for the youth The Trevor Project aims to protect, but guiding it to the success it enjoys today has had its challenges.

Shortly after its launch, TrevorSpace rapidly grew to serve tens of thousands of users in just a few years. While the platform initially started on commercial community software, some unique requirements led the organization to go custom, building a community platform from the ground up.

Faced with increasing hosting and development costs and declining user activity, senior leadership faced a tough decision: either dramatically transform the program, or discontinue it altogether. That’s when Invision Community stepped in.

“We were already planning a digital transformation, replacing everything from our physical computers to our crisis services software infrastructure, the platforms that young people use to reach out to us, like TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText,” John Callery, director of technology at The Trevor Project said of the challenges facing the organization at the time. “We had to be very careful with our resources and where we allocated our time.”

Continuing the TrevorSpace program would mean The Trevor Project needed to move to a solution that could be implemented and managed with very limited resources while still providing the quality of care that the community had come to expect. It also meant meeting the specific needs of the organization’s mission, particularly around safety.

After looking into the Invision Community platform per the suggestion of a team member, it became clear that they had all of the fundamentals TrevorSpace was looking for, like messages boards, social networking, and private messaging.

Here was a chance to save the platform.

Customers rarely have the opportunity to meet the people behind the technology they use. This wasn’t the case for The Trevor Project and the Invision Community team, who made it clear they believed in our mission to support LGBTQ youth in crisis and were willing to partner with us to realize our specific needs and figure out new solutions.

Through utilizing the Invision Community team’s applications and plugins, we were able to meet all of our community’s custom needs, adding functionality unique to TrevorSpace to protect our users, many of whom are especially vulnerable when it comes to their privacy. None of this would have been possible without the incredible support of the Invision Community team.

For just one example of how crucial TrevorSpace is to young LGBTQ people around the world, listen to Mani Cavalieri, the community’s product manager: “When the most prevalent forms of social media are so enmeshed with our in-person relationships, LGBTQ youth often lose a safe place to explore their identities. TrevorSpace is one of those special communities that balances anonymity (often a necessity for safety) with real, personal connections.” Since joining the team, Mani has already seen multiple instances of users finding lifelong friends - and even partners - over the years on TrevorSpace - and on the Invision Community platform, it is able to reach more users than ever before.

In January 2018, TrevorSpace received double the number of registrations than any other month in the program’s 10-year history. We continue to see more than a thousand new registered members each week.

As we begin international promotion of the program, we expect to break many more records in the coming year. As we continue to grow TrevorSpace, we also continue to rely on Invision Community’s extensibility.

Our mission is to improve support networks and mental resilience for our users. This requires us to understand our users’ behavior and needs from a different perspective than other online communities, and it will continue to require more custom solutions.

The marketplace of plugins, as well as the enthusiastic support of the Invision Community team, enable us to be bold in our ambitions, to build out a community that is truly unique in its class, and to improve the lives of those that need a supportive community the most.

As one user puts in, in their welcome message to each newcomer: “That's our little secret - there's some one here, going through what you're going through. Whether that be mental health, body issues, parents, friends, and whatever else life as someone who's LGBTQ+ can throw at you. Reach out, and someone will be there for you.”

- This entry was written by The Trevor Project team

https://www.trevorspace.org
https://www.thetrevorproject.org/

We want to ensure that converting from your existing community platform to ours is as seamless as possible.

While we do have a migration service available where we take care of everything for you, we do also offer a DIY option.

We took some time to overhaul the conversion process for those opting to convert using our free tools.

So you've just purchased your first copy of Invision Community, and you're ready to convert your existing site over from another software package. Great! We're glad you've made the decision to take your community to the next level!

You've already checked out our Migrations page, confirmed the software you wish to convert from is supported, and you're confident in your ability to work through the process. You install the Converters package and you're ready to go. 

Lets get started!

We have overhauled the converters to simplify the process. Beginning with 4.4, you will take the following steps to convert from another software package:

• Rather than choose the application you wish to convert first, you will now choose what software you are converting from, which is a much more logical start to a conversion.
• Next, you will supply the database details for your source database (the database you wish to convert into your new Invision Community).
• Then, you will see a list of all applications that can be converted for the software package you are converting from. If any applications cannot be converted (perhaps because you were not previously using the corresponding application in your source software), a message will be shown indicating there is nothing to convert. If any steps require additional configuration, you will be able to specify those details here.
• And finally, when you submit that form - that's it! You're done, and you can sit back and let the conversion process on its own. Each step for each application will be completed automatically, and the conversion will be finalized automatically at the end. A progress bar will be shown, along with a textual indicator that outlines exactly what is being converted.

The system even remembers where you were at and automatically picks back up where you left off. Closing your browser, losing internet connectivity, or some other unforeseen issue won't stop you dead in your tracks and force you to start all over again.

We hope that these updates make it even easier to switch from another community platform.

Release parties at Invision Community are a fairly tame affair. You'd think after months of planning, coding and testing we'd want to cut loose and dance the night away.

The reality is we send each other a few amusing GIFs in Slack and then wait for support tickets to start appearing while our developers crack their knuckles and prepare for bug reports to be filed.

I did manage to find five minutes to ask the team what their favourite feature of 4.4 was.

Here's what they said.

Marc S
Support, Guides and Keen Cyclist @Marc Stridgen
I'm going to go with 'Post before registering', because it allows for more effective onboarding of new members on your site. People are much more likely to register after just having written a topic, then they are if they have to register before getting started. It also gives you the opportunity to see how many people are not actually registering, and maybe address that on the site.

Ryan
Developer, T3 support and reluctant AWS wrangler @Ryan Ashbrook
My favorite 4.4 feature is the progressive web app settings. I now have our site pinned to my phones home screen for quick access, and use our site on mobile even more now that I can just hit the icon to pull up our site.

Mark H
Support, Beta Tester and remembers this when it was fields @Mark H
While this isn’t “a” favorite feature, I most like the steady small improvements to Gallery in the 4.x series. Photography-centric sites should especially like the additions to extended EXIF data in 4.4 so that authors can provide the most detail about their submitted photos…. where it was taken, what camera, which lens, shutter speed and aperture, etc.

Daniel
Developer, T2 support and airport security fan @Daniel F
As IPS4 consumer, I'm going to say that Lazy Loading and mobile create menu are my favorite enhancement.
As community owner, I'm most excited about post before register and email advertisements.. That's going to bring the $$$

Brandon
Developer, Enterprise Support and proud of his thorough code reviews @bfarber
My favorite change in 4.4 (besides the overall performance improvements, as I'm a geek for that sort of thing) is the overhauled Conversion experience (which we haven't even blogged about). We took converters and flipped them on their head for 4.4, so you now choose what software you want to convert from, what applications from that software you want to convert, fill in any required details, and the conversion process just launches and runs from beginning to end right then and there. You no longer need to convert each application and each type of data within each application individually, making for an easier and overall smoother experience.

Stuart
Developer, Conversion Specialist and PC enthusiast @Stuart Silvester
This is actually hard to answer than it seems, there are so many great changes and features in 4.4. The combined performance improvements including HTTP/2 Push, More aggressive caching, SVG letter photos, lazy loading are definitely some of my favourites. After all, time is money. (A smaller favourite is the browser notification prompt change, especially with visiting as many customer sites as I do in Tier 2).

Jim
Support, Beta Tester and suspiciously quiet in staff chat @Jim M
The communities I run are about cars and very heavily image based. Whether it's "I have an issue" or simple sharing of car builds, topics get image heavy very quickly and doing anything to improve moving throughout that topic more quickly is going to go far. I feel a lot of communities can relate and why lazy load of images is my favorite 4.4 feature.

Jennifer
Designer, Enterprise Theme Specialist, owner of several super powers @Jennifer M
There are so many changes with 4.4 it's actually really hard to choose just one change that is my absolutely favorite. I would probably say a lot of the more micro features are my favorites. Colored usernames everywhere, lazy load for images, improved notifications experience, text or URLs for announcements, reordering of club tabs, ability to hide widgets/blocks from mobile etc. They are all quality of life improvements that I love and appreciate on so many levels.

It looks like Rikki's lazy loading is a clear winner. I'm not surprised, it's a real boost for page speed and reduces hosting costs. Personally I'm a fan of the progressive web app settings which, like Ryan, enables me to have our community on my phone's home page.

Let us know what your favourites are below! 

We're thrilled to announce that Invision Community 4.4 is available to download now.

After months of development, over 1650 separate code commits and quite a few mugs of questionable coffee you can now get your hands on the beta release from the client centre.

Invision Community 4.4 brings numerous new features, over 450 bug fixes and a lot of refinement.

We've been talking about the highlights since September on our blog.

Here's a recap of all that we've added.

We'd love to know which is your favourite feature so far!

Drop a line below and let us know!

Do you want to take our latest release for a test drive?

You already are!

We've upgraded our own community for wider testing.

A big focus has been on page speed, so you will notice that our community is significantly faster that it was on 4.3

If you need a recap of what was added, take a look at our product updates blog which takes you through the highlights.

As this is a pre-beta release, expect some funkiness as we scurry around and tidy up our custom theme wrapper and other areas as we spot them.

If you you find a bug, we'd love for you to report it with as much detail as you can muster in the bug report area.

We'd love to know what you think, let us know below.

Braintree is a payment gateway provided by PayPal which provides some great additional features for PayPal transactions including a significantly improved recurring payments model. We are delighted to be bringing full support for Braintree for Commerce in Invision Community 4.4.

What is Braintree?

Braintree is a payment gateway provided by PayPal which supports taking payments by credit cards (including Apple Pay and Google Pay) and Venmo as well as PayPal, providing a good option for communities wanting to use a single payment gateway, and also brings improved functionality for recurring PayPal transactions.

For PayPal transactions, there are no additional fees and the checkout experience uses the normal PayPal experience your customers are used to.

Recurring PayPal Improvements

Recurring payments / Billing Agreements in PayPal have up until now been initiated by PayPal. Invision Community tells PayPal what the renewal terms of a purchase are, but then it's up to PayPal to take that payment and notify your community when it succeeds (or fails).

This comes with a number of limitations and problems. It makes it difficult for you as an admin to modify an existing purchase or for the customer to upgrade/downgrade. It also means the customer has to create separate Billing Agreements for each purchase. Most significantly though, it means if there is a delay in receiving the payment (such as an expired card) it is sometimes unclear what should happen on your community's end, and how it can be resolved if/when the payment is received.

Other payment gateways work the other way around. When a customer pays by card, for example, they have the option of storing their card details. Later, if they make another purchase or a renewal invoice is generated, Invision Community can tell the gateway to recharge the same card - and if it fails, allow the customer to provide an alternative payment method. This allow both you and your customers to have much greater control, and is much more reliable.

Braintree resolves this by allowing customers when paying with PayPal to save their PayPal account in the same way they would save a credit card on file. When paying with PayPal, users will see a simple checkbox which, if checked, will allow future payments to be taken with PayPal automatically.

Other Features

In addition to an improved checkout experience, our integration with Braintree supports:

• Taking payments by Credit Card, including 3DSecure checking and the ability for customer to store card details on file. Braintree uses a fully PCI-compliant method of taking card details in a way that ensures the card information never reaches your server.
• Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Venmo, which also allows storing accounts in the same way as PayPal accounts.
• Offering PayPal Credit
• Handling chargebacks/disputes
• Support for Braintree's Advanced Fraud Tools

Existing Setups and Upgrading

The existing PayPal gateway will continue to be available for basic PayPal integration, and your existing set up will continue to work exactly as it does now after upgrading.

If you are using PayPal, especially if you are using Billing Agreements, we strongly recommend switching to Braintree after upgrading. While it isn't possible to convert existing Billing Agreements, you can allow existing ones to continue to work and use Braintree for new purchases.

Please note that while existing setups will work fine, from 4.4 it will no longer be possible to set up a new PayPal method with either Billing Agreements, or to take payments by card, as PayPal has deprecated the API this was using in favour of Braintree and it can no longer be enabled on new accounts.

As mentioned though, this does not affect any existing setups, which, if you do not switch to Braintree, will continue to work as they do now.

This blog is about our upcoming release Invision Community 4.4.

Famously, all Maria Carey wants for Christmas, is you. This is great news if you're a Maria Carey fan.

As the holiday season draws closer and our staff chat channel turns to egg nog, twinkly lights and why is wrapping so hard, we asked the question:

What would you like for Christmas?

Brandon
With so many children, Christmas is more focused on them and the family than myself. My eldest son who started college this year just returned home for the holiday season yesterday which has been awesome. You don't realize how it's like a piece of you is missing until they're back. I guess you could call that a Christmas present for me. Also, my wife and I took a quick 2 day cruise to the Bahamas as a gift to ourselves. My children have not requested very much for Christmas this year either, so my wife and I have decided we're going to plan a trip to Disney/Orlando for some time later in 2019 as a family gift instead of focusing on a bunch of little toys the kids will quickly get bored with. The family time together is the best Christmas gift to me.

Mark H
In truth, what I’d like for Christmas isn’t something Sanata could provide. At my age I already have most of the “things” I simply want, and the things I really *need* I already have; family and friends. But… I wouldn’t object to Santa dropping off a new gaming computer with a motherboard for an Intel core i9, an RTX 2080 Ti video card, 16 GB of RAM, and one or two NVME SSD’s.

Andy
I’ve been trying to de-clutter my life for most of the year so hopefully I won’t get much in the way of stocking fillers and things that are fun for a few days and then pushed in a drawer. I’m not a total Scrooge though, honest. I’m really looking forward to spending time with family and friends, Christmas Day walks in the snow and coming home to a toasty warm fire and a few beers… just the simple things really.

Marc S
I think you get to the point with Christmas where presents become largely unimportant, and its more a time for family to get together and have fun etc. But I guess if I'm going to choose anything particular that I know I would use, I would probably go for a new iMac pro with all the extras. LOL. Seriously though, I'm happy with the break, a few drinks and games. This is what Christmas is all about. Lost a couple of family members over the past 12 month, and unfortunately none of us live forever. Brings home the realisation that there is more to life than material items, as much as we all enjoy them.

Jennifer
I don't really celebrate Christmas traditionally in my house. Like almost everyone in my house has already gotten all of their Christmas gifts. I would probably want just a quiet night with a long hot bath, my favorite bath bomb and a glass of wine.

How I became a cliche mom that wants bath stuff for presents. I have no idea.

I'd likely love to get Metro Exodus pre-order. I know my BF doesn't pre-order games anymore because of some of the new pre-order issues with games with un-dedicated developers but it's a game I am excited for and hope to have come February when it comes out.

Rhett
A week in Hawaii, no phone, no computer, feet in the sand and a beer in my hand!  Is that too much to ask for Santa?  I've been good.

Jim
I'd say world peace but I think a 2019 Chevy Corvette ZR1 would be easier!

Mark Wade
A couple good bottles of wine, or I'd also quite like a new iPad Pro.

Matt
Like others here at Invision Community, I've reached the grand old age where material possessions aren't what I long for. I'm happy watching my two children open their gifts on Christmas morning and then share a meal with family.

Or maybe a new iPad Pro because if Mark is getting one, I want one too.

Yet again Charles and Lindy declined to comment, so in the spirit of Christmas generosity, I've written their answers for them.

Charles
I would like a butler because it is what I deserve.

Lindy
I would like a panic room like in that Jodie Foster movie. I don't think for a second I'm going to be attacked in my own home. I just need a place to hide from the kids now and again. I'll kit it out with fresh kombucha, artisanal popcorn and poetry books. I'll be happy for hours.

So, that is what we want for Christmas. What about you? Have you been naughty or nice?

I really enjoy writing about the new features the development team have been slaving over for weeks (and sometimes months.)

It's a real joy to be able to share the finished product after we've seen it through inception, discussion, planning, assigning to a developer, coding, peer reviewing and final group testing.

Although sometimes, the features can be explained in a few screenshots, which makes for a pretty thin blog entry.

With that in mind, I've grouped together 6 of the best new micro-features for Invision Community 4.4.

Browser notifications
We introduced browser notifications in a previous version of Invision Community.

Once you've opted in to receive them, you'll get a fancy browser notification when new content is posted while you're off browsing other sites.

However, the browser prompt to ask for permission to push notifications isn't subtle, and it attacks you the second you log in for the first time.

In Invision Community 4.4, we've made it, so you're only asked to opt-in once you open the notification drop down.

Widget display settings
One of the most popular features we've added to the front end in recent times is the drag and drop widgets.

We see these used on almost every site we visit.

A popular request, though, was to be able to hide them from specific devices. By default, the sidebars appear under the main content when viewed on a smaller device such as a phone.

There may be times where you wish to show a block for those on tablets and desktops, but remove it for phones, so it doesn't take up precious retail space.

Happily, you can now do this on each block with 4.4.

Club Navigation
Clubs are relatively new to Invision Community but they incredibly popular as they allow you to run micro-communities within your main community.

You're not limited to just forums either; you can add gallery albums and more to each club.

We've added the ability to re-arrange the club tabs allowing you to prioritise what you members see first.

Announcement URLS
Announcements have been a core feature for a long time now. We use them whenever we have a holiday so we can notify our customers about reduced support on those days.

We've made it so you can now link to an item, rather than have to provide new copy for each announcement.

Time Frame selector
We noticed that in numerous areas around the Admin CP we had time input boxes. These would sometimes be used for seconds, minutes, hours and even days.

We've seen customers forced to enter things like 86400 seconds when they want the time frame to last a day. The lack of consistency wasn't great either.

In Invision Community 4.4, we've added a new Time Frame selector which is used as standard on all areas we ask for a time frame to be entered.

No more taking your socks off to work out how many seconds in a month.

Group Name Styling
For about as long as I can remember (and as I get older, this is not an impressive amount of time), we've allowed group names to be stylized when shown in the online user list.

A very popular request is to extend that same group highlighting throughout the suite.

Finally, Invision Community 4.4 brings this to the suite.

These features may be micro in nature, but we hope they make a significant improvement to your community.

Which are you most looking forward to? Drop a comment below and let us know.

It's easy to think that email is a relic from the past; from simpler times long before social media and the rise of phone apps.

And it's reasonable to think that way. Your phone constantly pings at you, and your laptop OS constantly pings at you, so why bother with email?

Because it's still a hugely powerful medium to get and retain attention.

In 2017, over 269 billion emails were sent and received per day. Of those, 3,360,250,000 are opened, read, and a link clicked.

Email is still very much a critical tool in your quest for retention.

Invision Community knows this. We have options to notify members of replies by email, weekly or monthly digests by email and members can opt-in for bulk emails sent from your community team.

Given how important email is, it was only fair that we invested in some love for our email system for 4.4.

Email Statistics
Just above, I mention that 269 billion emails are sent, and 3.4 billion are opened, read and clicked.

How many emails are sent from your Invision Community daily?

(No cheating and checking with SendGrid)

You probably have no idea as we didn't record email statistics.

As of Invision Community 4.4 we do!

We now track emails sent, and the number of link clicks inside those emails.

Email Advertisements
Email notifications are a powerful way to get your members to revisit your community. The member welcomes these emails as it means they have new replies to topics they are interested in reading.

While you have your member's attention, you have an opportunity to show them a banner-style advertisement.

When creating a new email advert, you can choose to limit the advert to specific areas such as topics, blogs, etc. - and even which forums to limit by.

This is a new way to reach your audience with your promotions.

Unfollow without logging in
Despite spending most of this blog entry shouting the virtues of email, it's inevitable that one or two members may wish to stop receiving notification emails.

In previous versions, the unfollow link would have taken you to a login page if you were signed out. For members that haven't been back in a while, this may cause some annoyance if they do not recall their login details.

Invision Community 4.4 allows non-logged in members to unfollow the item they received an email about or all followed items without the need to log in.

Respecting your member's inbox is vital to keep on good terms with them and to keep them engaged in your community.

We'd love to know which of these features you're most keen to try in 4.4. Please drop a comment below and let us know!

It's been said that the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google.

While we can't promise to get you to page 1 for a generic search term, we have taken some time for Invision Community 4.4 to do an SEO sweep.

Moz.com defines SEO as "a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines."

We have the technical skills and were fortunate enough to have Jono Alderson of Yoast lend his time, knowledge and vast experience to improve our SEO.

This blog article gets a little technical. It's completely fine to leave at this point with the comfort of knowing that Google will be a little happier on your site with Invision Community 4.4.

The majority of the changes are designed to send stronger signals to Google and friends over which content to slurp and which to look at a bit later.

Still here? Good. Let us roll up our sleeves and open the hood.

Pagination
The most visible change is that we've taken pagination out of query strings and placed it in the path.

For example, the current pagination system looks a little like:
yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/?page=3

Which is fine but it gets a little confusing when you add in a bunch of sort filters like so:
yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/?sort=asc&field=topic&page=3

A better approach would be to make a clear signal to both Google and humans that pagination is a separate thing.

Invision Community 4.4 does this:
yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/page/3/?sort=asc&field=topic

Not only is this good for search engines, but it's also good for the humans too as it is more readable and no longer confused with filter parameters.

Of course, we ensure that the old style pagination is redirected (via a 301 header) to the new pagination URL automatically so nothing breaks.

Canonical Tags
These tags are a way of telling search engines that a specific URL is the 'master copy' of a page. This helps prevent duplicate content from being indexed.

Without it, you are leaving it up to the search engine to choose which is the master copy of the page.

For example:

yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/ and yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/?sort=desc&field=time may show the same content but have different URLs.

By setting the canonical tag to point to yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/ regardless of filters sends a strong signal to the search engines that this is the page you want to be spidered.

Invision Community sets these tags in many places, but we audited these in 4.4 and found a few areas where they were missing.

For example, viewing a member's profile doesn't always set a canonical tag which may confuse search engines when you click on "View Activity" and get a list of content items.

Soft 404s
When an application or website wants to tell the visitor that the page they are looking for doesn't exist, it sends a 404 header code along with a page that says something "We could not find that item" or "No rows available".

If a search engine spiders a page that looks like a 404 page, but it doesn't have the 404 header code, it logs it as a "soft 404".

Given the short amount of time Google has on your site to discover new content, you don't want it to hit many soft 404s.

Invision Community 4.4 omits containers (such as forums, blogs, etc.) that have no content (such as a new forum without any topics yet) from the sitemap, and also adds a 'noindex, follow' meta tag into the HTML source.

Google will periodically check to see if the status of the page has changed and happily slurp away when content has been added.

Other changes
Although the changes listed here don't deserve their own section in this article, they are no less important.

We have audited the new JSON-LD markup added to Invision Community 4.3 to help search engines better understand the relationship between pages.

The "truncate" method that is used to display a snippet of text in areas such as the activity stream now only sends the first 500 characters to the javascript method to reduce page loads and page 'noise'.

The profile view in Invision Community contains a mix of information pertinent to the member and content they've authored.

We've ensured that the content areas are using a specific URL, with appropriate canonical tags. This will help reduce confusion for search engines.

If you made it this far, then well done. It's time to slam the hood closed and mop our collective brows.

These changes will certainly help Google and friends spider your site a little more efficiently and have a clearer idea about what pages and data you want to be indexed which can only improve your ranking.

Sun kissed beaches or snowscapes? Bustling cities or quiet villages?

The question we posted this month was: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

In theory we could work from anywhere in the world that has a decent internet connection, but where would we choose to live?

Mark Wade
It was only a few months ago that I was asking myself this exact question! I've always enjoyed telling people that of the great things about working on the Internet is that I can work anywhere in the world, all I have to do is bring a laptop - and yet, despite saying that, I was still living in the little English town that I was born in. At the end of last year I decided it was time to actually take advantage of that so I moved Sydney, Australia.

Sydney has everything you could ever want. First, obviously it's a major city with all the conveniences and excitement of that, and even moreso than a lot of places it always has stuff going on (the first time I was strolling past Darling Harbour on a Saturday evening and had this conversation: "oh wow a fireworks display, what's the occasion?" / "...it's saturday?" - I knew I was in a good place). But for when you want some quiet time, there's some of the world's most gorgeous beaches on one side of the city, and mountain forests on the other. It's perfect.

Jim Morrissey
So recently (last 2 years) have been doing some traveling during winter months and I've seriously underestimated previously how much living in Florida for the past 20 years has ruined me. This has led me to where I can't live anywhere else but a tropical climate with 100% humidity now. As well, the thought of driving my cars in the snow/salt is even more unappealing than the cold/dryness. In short, I've come to realize, I'm quite happy in Florida.

Brandon
I would move to Costa Rica. Not because it's exotic, and beautiful, and has tons of fun things to do and see. But because I could have health care without having to pull out a second mortgage.

Matt
I'm rather fond of the UK but I do love America, so I think I'd split my time three ways. Spend the UK in the summer (that may be about 3 weeks based on an average year), spend the winter somewhere warm, perhaps on the south coast of America with the exception of a few weeks around Christmas where I'd take the kids somewhere filled with snow.

Mark H
If I could live anywhere I wanted to (and financing was not an obstacle), that would be Hawaii. First because its average temperature doesn’t change much over the year and is nearly tropical year-round, but also because it’s the only State in the U.S. that I have not yet visited. Having lived in Minnesota nearly all my life, as I get older the less I can tolerate Winter each year.

Jennifer
So I love where I live currently. Arizona (particularly in the valley) is amazing. It's mostly hot but absolutely no snow (albeit sometimes it gets cold enough that there is frost on cars). I think out of the 20 years I've lived here I've only truly seen snow in the valley 1 time and it didn't last long.

My secondary location would be Australia. It has a similar climate, some really awesome people and Amanda Palmer visits their regularly so I'd finally be able to see one of her shows.

Overall, as long as it doesn't snow you can basically consider it an ideal location for me.

Andy
I’ve always had a strong attraction to Scandinavia and particularly Norway. There’s something quite appealing about the remoteness, nature and freedom to make your own life choices. Unfortunately I’m not at all tolerant of the cold so I don’t think I could live there permanently. Am I allowed to split my time between Norway and Italy?

Marc S
I think if I could live anywhere in the world, I would probably live in Australia. Simply because I hate winter. I don't like the cold, and prefer 30c+ every day if I had the option. In fact if I went back in time, I would certainly have done that knowing what I know now. Having children and family around, it's not something I would likely do at this stage in my life.

Where would you like to live? Let us know in the comments below.

Ever since its first release, the REST API built into the Invision Community software has proven to be a very powerful and well-received feature.

We love seeing what our clients and modification authors are able to do with the level of integration afforded to them through this capability, and so it is only natural that we have looked to expand the functionality in our upcoming 4.4 release.

Beginning with 4.4, you will now be able to create and update polls for both topics and blog entries through the REST API. Of course, modification authors can use this new endpoint.

You will also now be able to manage warn reasons through the REST API. This includes fetching a list of reasons, as well as fetching an individual reason, creating warn reasons, updating existing warn reasons, and deleting warn reasons.

Event venues can now be listed and individual venues fetched through the REST API, and you can now add, update and delete event venues through the REST API.

You can now retrieve a list of notifications for a specific member through the REST API, useful if you were to attempt to recreate the notifications menu on a third party website (for example).

The REST API will now expose the warnings a user has received through a new endpoint. Additionally, you can fetch individual warnings, issue new warnings, undo and/or delete issued warnings, and acknowledge warnings through the REST API. If you are building a site wrapper around your community, you can leverage this functionality to ensure that users are unable to post elsewhere on your site if they have unacknowledged warnings within the community (and also to provide them with a way to acknowledge those warnings right on your site).

Beginning with 4.4, you will now be able to set the permissions for a node when adding or updating it through the REST API (for example, you can now adjust the permissions for a forum or a downloads category through the REST API). Many clients noticed that while they could create new nodes through the API, the nodes would be unusable until an administrator manually went in and specified the permissions, so this change can eliminate this extra step in many situations.

You will now also be able to filter the events you pull through the Calendar REST API endpoints by start and end date (e.g. so you can show events within a specific time frame, such as the current week), and you can now also specify to sort the events returned by the event start date or the event end date.

And finally, for those who leverage clubs on their communities, we have built in full REST API support for clubs. You can list all clubs, return a specific club, create new clubs, update existing clubs, and delete clubs through the REST API. Further, you can list all members in a club, add a specific member to a specific club, remove a member from a club, fetch the content types available for use within a club (i.e. so you can determine which applications are installed and have club support on a given site), fetch the nodes (displayed as tabs/sections within a club) created within a club, and delete nodes from a club. Important behind the scenes steps, such as generating invoices for members requesting to join paid clubs, are all handled automatically for you when using the REST API.

We believe these changes will help clients better integrate with our software and open up new possibilities with their websites.

Would you like us to add any other endpoints? Let us know in the comments below!

It might seem a little odd starting a blog on increasing Invision Community's speed with the word "lazy",  but I'll explain why this is a good word for performance shortly.

Earlier this year, Google announced that page speed is a ranking factor.

Simply put, if your site is slow, it will be ranked lower in Google's search results.

It is always a challenge making a large application like Invision Community as efficient as possible per page load. A single Invision Community page can pull in widgets from multiple applications as well as a lot of user-generated content with attachments, movies and images used heavily. 

This is where being lazy helps.

Lazy loading is a method by which attachments, embeds and images are not loaded by default. They are only loaded when the viewer scrolls down enough to make them visible.

This allows the page to load a good deal faster now it doesn't have to load megabytes of images before the page is shown as completely rendered.

I was going to take a fancy video showing it in action, but it's hard to capture as the system loads the media just before you get to it, so it looks fairly seamless, even with sluggish connections.

In addition to image attachments, we have also added this lazy loading to maps and Twitter emoji images.

Improving non-image attachments
Once we had implemented the lazy loading framework, an area we wanted to improve was non-image attachments.

We have listened to a lot of the feedback we had on this area, and have now made it very clear when you add an attachment into a post. We've even returned the download count now it's being loaded on demand.

All the letters
When we first implemented the letter avatars in 4.3, we discussed whether to use CSS styling or use an image.

We decided to go with an image as it was more stable over lots of different devices, including email.

We've revisited this in 4.4, and switched the letter avatars to SVG, which are much faster to render now that the browser doesn't have to load the image files.

Other performance improvements
We've taken a pass at most areas with an eye for performance, here is a list of the most significant items we've improved.

• Several converter background tasks have been improved, so they work on less data
• Duplicate query for fetching clubs was removed in streams
• Notifications / follower management has been improved
• Member searches have been sped up (API, ACP live search, member list in ACP, mentions, etc.).
• Stream performance has been improved
• UTF8 conversions have been sped up
• Elasticsearch has been sped up by using pre-compiled queries and parameterisation, as well as the removal of view filtering (and tracking)
• HTTP/2 support with prefetch/preload has been added
• Several PHP-level performance improvements have been made
• Implemented rel=noopener when links open a new window (which improves browser memory management)
• Several other performance improvements for conversions were implemented that drastically reduce conversion time
• IP address lookups now fetch IP address details from us en-masse instead of one request per address
• Cache/data store management has been streamlined and centralised for efficiency
• Many background tasks and the profile sync functionality have all been improved for performance
• Brotli compression is now supported automatically if the server supports it
• Redis encryption can now be disabled if desired, which improves performance

Phew, as you can see, we've spent a while tinkering under the hood too.

We'd love to hear your thoughts. Let us know below!

This blog is part of our series introducing new features for Invision Community 4.4.