What an exciting month we've had!

The big news is that it's all systems go on Invision Community 4.3, our big update to our apps.

We've already talked about Automatic Community Moderation, Emoji, Sign in from other sites using OAuth, blog updates, Scaleable search and interface improvements, Apple Pay (and more) support, Paid club memberships, and other club improvements and massive gallery updates.

Our team take a short breather to discuss their hidden talents, including the ability to solve a Rubik's cube in under two minutes.

In our community management series, we look at how you can brand your Invision Community in just a few minutes without knowing how to code.

This month's featured articles are:

You can see our full newsletter here.

Viewing and editing a member is probably one of the most frequently used features of the AdminCP. With the design unchanged for many years, and the tabbed interface starting to grow unwieldy, it was due for some love. We have not only dramatically improved the design but added many new features.

Let's look at some of the improvements:

Easy Toggle between Member and Customer View

If you have Commerce installed, you can now toggle between "Member View" (which shows the screen above) and "Customer View" (which shows the current customer page in Commerce with the user's purchases, invoices, etc.). This makes it much easier to view all of a member's information in one place.

If you don't have Commerce installed, the top tab bar will not show.

Basic Information

The pane in the top-left shows the member's basic information like name, email address and photos. You can now reposition a member's cover photo and crop the profile photo (functions previously not available in the AdminCP). To change the display name or email address, you just click and hold on the information and a textbox appears. The buttons below allow you to merge, delete, sign in as, and edit the preferences or password for the member.

In addition, this pane lists any social networks the user is logged in with. It shows you the member's profile photo and profile name on that network (for example in this screenshot, it is showing my Facebook profile's photo and name) and for many networks you can click on this to be taken directly to their Facebook/Twitter/etc profile. You can also edit the syncing options for the method and unlink the accounts, features which weren't available previously.

If you have Commerce installed, there is also an indicator if the user has an active subscription.

Alerts

If a member is validating, banned, flagged as a spammer, or locked, a large banner will display drawing your attention to this. For validating and banned, it will explain exactly what the status is (for example, if they haven't responded to the validation email yet versus they are awaiting admin approval, or if they have been banned manually versus are in a group without permission to access anything).

Locations & Devices

This pane shows you, on a map, all of the locations the user has been when using the community (based on their IP address) as well as the IP address they used to register and most recently.

While the devices tab shows the most recently used devices.

Content Statistics

Right in the middle of the profile you can see some statistics about the member's activity. This includes:

• A sparkline graph of their recent content.
• Their content count and reputation count (with tools to manually change or rebuild).
• A breakdown of the amount of content they have made across all applications.
• A visual indication of how much of their messenger and attachment storage they have used.
• If Gallery and Downloads are installed, the existing statistics overview provided by these apps are also available here.

Warnings & Restrictions

This block shows recent warnings on the account, and also highlights if any restrictions (i.e. content moderation, restricted from posting, or application-level restrictions) are being applied, which previously was difficult to see at a glance.

Account Activity

On the right is a pane which shows all of the latest account activity. While this was available in previous versions (called "Member History") we have made some significant improvements:

• The number of things that get logged has been significantly expanded. We now log photo changes, group changes, when a new device is used to login, if an account is locked (by failed logins or failed two factor authentication attempts) or unlocked, password/email/display name changes, when a user links or unlinks a social network login method, initial registration and validation, merges, being flagged/unflagged as a spammer, receiving/acknowledging/revoking a warning, restrictions being applied, two factor authentication being enabled/disabled/changed, an OAuth token being issued if Invision Community is being used as an OAuth Server, enabling/disabling receiving bulk mails, and accepting the privacy policy / terms and conditions, as well as all of the Commerce-related information that is already logged.
• Much more information is now shown such as who made the change (i.e. an admin, the user themselves, or if it was changed by the REST API or syncing with a social network) and how the change was made (for example, for a password change - if the user used the "Forgot Password" tool or changed it in their Account Settings) and what the data was before and after. This includes being aware of if the change was made by an admin after using the "Sign in as User" tool.
• You can now filter what information you are seeing to quickly find what you are looking for.

Extensibility

The new profile has been designed with extensibility in mind. Third party developers can easily add new blocks our even entire new tabs. Any apps/plugins which are currently adding a tab to the "Edit Member" form will retain backwards compatibility with their tab continuing to appear when clicking the "Edit Preferences" button in the basic account information pane.

Videos are everywhere. We shoot them on our smart phones, share them to social media, messengers and more.

Up until now, the only way to share a video to Invision Community was to use a service like YouTube or Vimeo. If you uploaded a video file it would be treated like an attachment, and if the user clicked the link it would download it to their computer.

In Invision Community 4.3 we've improved this. Now if you upload a video file (mp4/3gp/mov/ogg/ogv/mpg/mpeg/flv/webm/wmv/avi/m4v), it will embed similarly to an image.

When viewing an uploaded video, if it is in a format that the user's browser and platform natively supports, it will show an embedded player. This will have all of the features supported by the operating system - for example, almost all browsers support fullscreen, and Safari supports Airplay and picture in picture.

If the video is in a format not supported, it displays exactly as it does now - as a download link.

"The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data", the Economist wrote recently.

Invision Community software stores a lot of important data that can be leveraged to analyze and improve upon the traffic and interactions with your site.

While there are some various statistics tools in the AdminCP already, we spent some time with 4.3 enhancing and improving upon our existing reporting tools, as well as adding some new analytics tools you may find useful.

Chart Filters

Beginning with 4.3, any dynamically-generated charts in the AdminCP that support filtering will allow you to save those filter combinations for easier access in the future. When you open the Filters menu and toggle any individual filters, the chart will no longer immediately reload until you click out of the menu, and 'All' and 'None' quick links have been added to the filters menu to allow you to quickly toggle all filters on or off.

Here is the 'Sales' chart for Commerce, for example. You will see that the interface is now tabbed.

After opening the 'Filters' menu, selecting all of my products named 'test', and saving this filter combination as a new chart, I can quickly come back to this chart in the future.

Note that each user can save their own chart filter configurations independent of other users.

Top income by customer

Speaking of Commerce, we have also added a new chart to the 'Income' page, allowing you to view reports of your top customers. As with other dynamic charts, you can save filter configurations here for easy future access, and you can view the results as a table to get a raw list of your top customers' purchases. Further, we have tidied up the table views for the other existing tabs on this page.

Reaction statistics

We have introduced several statistic pages to expose information about the Reactions/Reputation system and how your users are interacting with it. For instance, you can now view information about usage of each of the reactions set up on your site.

You can also see which users give and receive the most reputation (which is the sum of their reaction points, keeping in mind that negative reactions can reduce a user's total reputation score), you can see which content on your community has the most reputation (which might prompt you to promote it to the 'Our Picks' page, promote it to social media, or otherwise continue to encourage interaction with the content), and you can see which applications reactions are given in the most. This could allow you, for instance, to focus more efforts in areas of your site to drive more activity, or to foster activity in areas you did not realize were as active as they are.

Additionally, when viewing user profiles on the front end you can now see a breakdown of which reactions each user has given and received when you click the "See reputation activity" link in the left hand column.

Tag Usage

Another useful statistic introduced with 4.3 is the ability to review tag usage on your community. As with other dynamic charts, you can filter however you like and save those filter configurations for easy future access.

Trend charts for topics and posts

When viewing the New Topics and New Posts charts, there are now tabs for "New Topics by Forum" and "New Posts by Forum", allowing you to see which of your forums are the most active. Additionally, you will see a trend line drawn on the chart to show you the trend (e.g. whether activity is increasing or decreasing). You can also filter which forums you wish to review, so you can compare your most active forums, the forums that are most important to your site, or the forums that need the most attention/may not be relevant, for instance.

Other Improvements

Some other miscellaneous improvements have been introduced as well, which you may be interested in:

• When viewing Member Activity reports, you can now filter by group. We have also added the content count column to the table so you can quickly sort by top posters if this is relevant to the report you are running.
• Device usage is now also tracked (mobile, desktop, etc.) and can be viewed on a new Device Usage page.
• Developers: Dynamic charts now support database joins

We're a cool bunch here at Invision Community.

You'll see us around answering support tickets, posting in our community and writing cool new features and hilarious blogs. But, you won't see what we get up to in our spare time.

This month, we asked the question "What is your secret talent?" To which Andy replied "I can't tell you, it's a secret" making me rephrase the question immediately.

Without further ado, lets dive in.

Andy Millne (Developer and owner of quick comebacks)
I can fly a plane, a desire that started as a child being allowed to occasionally take the controls of my parent’s light aircraft. This was then rekindled when the same aircraft fell into disrepair and was in need of restoration and I had the disposable income to take lessons. Unfortunately this is a very expensive hobby and not really one I can still justify though I occasionally fly with friends when possible. I can also fly model planes and helicopters but I’m almost as talented at crashing them as I am flying them. Luckily that skill hasn’t transferred to the real thing.

Editor: Andy lives in a different league to the rest of us.

Mark Wade (VIP Developer and owner of scathing put-downs)
I can solve a Rubik's cube in under two minutes.

Editor: Pfft. Depending on how well the stickers are adhered, I can solve one in under a minute.

Brandon Farber (Developer and owner of impressive tools)
I don't know if I'd call it a talent, but I enjoy woodworking when I have time. I built a swinging day bed for my wife out of a couple of pallets and some misc wood and hardware, I screened in my back patio last year, I built a coffin for a Halloween party, and I built a desk two days before Christmas for my daughter as some recent examples. Right now I'm in the middle of building some planter boxes for our front porch.

Editor: I made an ash tray for my mum in school once. She loved it, even though she has never once smoked.

Daniel (Developer, T2 Support and Banksy protege)
My secret is art. I used to paint art in the streets of Vienna in summer.
Editor: If Daniel needs to work the streets to make ends meet, we should probably give him a pay rise.

Jennifer (Designer and owner of cool costumes)
I do custom cosplay for myself and my family and I like to make digital space scenes in photoshop.

Editor: Our legal department would like to point out that Batman was co-created by Bob Kane.

Ryan (Developer and owner of short hair)
I have an old one I can't really do anymore - I used to be able to do a pretty close Donald Duck impression. I've forgotten how to do it properly, though.
Editor: Interesting thing to share. Ryan has many talents. He can play guitar and bass. He looks a bit like Ethan Hawke. Yet he chose to share the fact he can do a Donald Duck impression.

Marc (Support and owner of things on wheels)
I'm very good on skates (quad skates, not this inline stuff people do now). Me and my cousin used to do freestyle speed skating and half pipe. Stopped doing so once I got to an age whereby I was breaking things more than bouncing. Something I miss doing, so much so that I still have my skates, even though I haven't been on them in about 20 years.

Editor: This is probably not Marc.

That's enough from us. To be honest we were all blown away when we learned that Daniel was a secret street artist and he paints amazing pictures.

We'd love to hear what your hidden talents are. Let us know below!

A picture says a thousand words, they say. If getting those pictures online is troublesome, some of those words might be a little choice.

Gallery has been an integral part of our community suite for just about as long as T1 Tech Mark Higgins can remember (and he has many years of memories). It has seen many interfaces changes as the years have rolled by. The most recent version received a fair amount to feedback on usability.

We've listened. We've re-engineered most of Gallery's key interfaces to make uploading new images to your community frictionless.

Lets take a look through the major changes.

Improved submission process
Submitting images has to be simple or else users will give up and your gallery will be underutilized. We have spent a lot of time simplifying and speeding up the submissions process for your users. The first thing that will be noticed is that the submission process is not presented as a wizard anymore, and the choice to submit to a category or album has been significantly cleaned up and simplified.

Here, I have chosen the category I wish to submit to, so now I am asked if I want to submit directly to the category, if I want to create a new album, or if I want to submit to an existing album.  Choosing one of those last two options will load the appropriate forms to create an album or select an existing album, respectively.

Afterwards, the modal expands to full screen and you will naturally select your images next, and there's a lot to talk about here.

First and foremost, the interface has changed significantly to both simplify the UI and to make actually using the interface easier. When you click on an image, the form is loaded to the right immediately without an AJAX request needed to fetch the form.

In addition to quickly setting the credit and copyright information for all images at once, you can now set the tags for all images quickly and easily without having to edit each image individually.

Images support drag n drop reordering in the uploader here, which means that you can drag n drop images to different positions to control their order. Many users previously would name images "Image 1", "Image 2", and so on, and then set their albums to order images by name in order to control the order the images were displayed in. This is no longer necessary now that you can manually reposition the images.

The default description editor is a pared down textarea box, but you can still use the rich text editor if you wish. The ability to enable maps for geo-encoded images and to upload thumbnails for videos is still supported as well, and those options will show up when appropriate in the right hand panel.

The 100 image per submission limit has also been lifted. You can now upload many more images in one go with no hard limit imposed.

Upon clicking submit images, you will see the typical multiredirector to store all of your images, however you will notice that it processes much faster than it did in 4.2 and below.

Better submission control
Administrators can now configure categories such that can accept only images, only albums, or both. This means you can now create categories that cannot be submitted to directly, and you can create categories that albums cannot be used with. This is a feature that has been oft-requested since the release of 4.0, and we are happy to report that it will be available in our next release.

Additionally, album creators (if permitted) can also now create shared albums.  When you create a new album, you can now specify (under the Privacy menu) who can submit to the album, with your available options being:

• Only me
• Anyone
• Only the users I specify
• Only the groups I specify

Prior to 4.3, albums have always been owned by one user and only that user could submit to them. Invision Community 4.3 will open up albums so that anyone can submit to them, dependent upon the album creator's preferences and needs.

New image navigation
Another major change with Gallery 4.3 is that clicking an image now launches that image in a lightbox to view it and interact with it. This lightbox is context-aware, allowing you to visit the next and previous images in the listing, whether that is a category or album listing, or the featured images or new images listings on the Gallery homepage, for example.

Firstly, I will note that you are seeing the image here with my mouse cursor over the image area, exposing the title, tags, and some various buttons. When you mouse away from the image those overlays fade away to highlight the image itself better.

As you can see, you can navigate left and right here to view the next and previous image in this context, and you can otherwise interact with the image as you would have if you had visited the older-style image view page (including the ability to rate, review and comment).

The new Gallery release will introduce a new advertisement location in the right hand column to allow you to show advertisements, even in the lightbox.

If you follow a link to a full image view page, the lightbox will automatically launch when the page loads, still allowing you to interact in a familiar manner. Additionally, if you move through enough images in the lightbox to reach a new page (for example, if you click on the last image in the album listing and then click on the next image button), the listing itself behind the lightbox will update for easier usability if the user closes the lightbox.

One final thing to note is that the interface has been made more mobile friendly, particularly through the introduction of swiping support. You can swipe left and right in the lightbox, and in image carousels, to see the next and previous images.

Notable performance improvements
As we mentioned at the beginning, we recognize there is a balance between performance, usability, and attractiveness, particularly with regards to an image Gallery. For that reason, we have made Gallery's performance a major focus in 4.3, and have implemented some changes that bring with them a noticeable performance improvement.

Firstly, we have adjusted the software to only store two copies of an image (in addition to the original), instead of four. In previous versions, we stored a thumbnail, a small copy, a medium copy and a large copy of an image, all of which arbitrarily sized and designed to best meet our layout needs without showing an image too large or too small in a given space. We have simplified this vastly by storing a slightly larger "small" image, and storing a large copy. Diskspace usage is reduced dramatically as a result, and bandwidth usage is actually lowered as well since only two copies of an image need to be delivered to the browser instead of four.

Next, we have implemented prefetching of the 'next' and 'previous' pages when you launch the lightbox image view. This means that when a user navigates to the next image in the lightbox, it loads immediately instead of waiting for the content to be fetched from the server. From a UX perspective, this provides a much snappier and responsive interface, making users more apt to interact with the site.

We have additionally sped up the submission process as previously mentioned. The order of execution for certain events that must happen during submission has been moved around a bit, resulting in a faster experience for the end user actually submitting the images.

Because we know the details matter, we have implemented other smaller improvements as well. For example, the link to rebuild images in the AdminCP previously resulted in a redirect process that rebuilt the images while you waited, but now a background task is launched so that you can continue with what you were doing while the images get rebuilt in the background.

From start to finish, the Gallery UI and UX has been touched on and improved, and we hope you enjoy these improvements when you start using the new version.

We released news of Clubs just under a year ago for Invision Community 4.2 and it has been the best received feature to date.

Clubs opens up new ways to run your community by allowing members to create sub-communities away from the central forum area.

Since the feature was released, we've collated an immense amount of feedback on the feature. Here's what we're improving for Invision Community 4.3.

Paid Club Memberships

If you have Commerce installed on your community, 4.3 adds the ability for members to create paid clubs. Users wishing to join the club will be required to pay a membership fee (which can be one off or recurring) which will be paid to the club owner, minus any commission you want to keep for the site. You can choose which groups can create paid clubs.

If enabled, the club directory will show the price for membership in each club.

The process for joining works a little differently depending on the type of club...

• For open clubs, the user will immediately be prompted to pay the joining fee. Once they have paid, they are added to the club as normal.
• For closed clubs, the user will need to request to join as normal. Once they have been accepted to join the club, they will then be able to pay the membership fee, after which they'll be added to the club.
• For private and read-only (a new type in 4.3, which we'll talk about below) users have to be invited to join the club
• Public clubs have no membership, and so cannot be paid.

Club leaders can also waive the membership fee, allowing certain users to join the club for free.

If a member fails to pay their renewal charge, they are moved into an "expired" state. The club leaders can see the status and renewal date for all members, and use the filter tools to just see active or expired members.

Paying out membership fees works just as it does with paid files in Downloads. Users receive the amount as account credit. If enabled, they can then request a payout of this via PayPal or a manual payout method you want to use.

Club content throughout the community

Currently content in clubs is only visible within the club itself. In 4.3 a new setting allows you to show the content from clubs throughout the community - for example, if a club contains a forum, that forum can show in the main forum list.

This is a single toggle: if enabled, all content from clubs that each user has joined will show throughout the community, appearing below the normal categories/etc in that application.

New Club Type: Read Only

In addition to Open, Closed, Private and Public, we have added a new club type in 4.3: read only. In a read only club, everyone can (without joining) view everything in the club, but cannot participate unless they are invited by a club leader.

Following

Users can now follow a club, and will then receive notifications about all new content in the club - the same as if they followed every content area in the club.

List View

In addition to the current grid layout of clubs, there is a new list-style.

The admin can choose which views are available and what the default should be.

AdminCP Approval

You can now filter the list of clubs in the AdminCP to clubs requiring approval and approve clubs from within the AdminCP.

Deleting Content Areas

Club leaders can now delete content areas within their clubs. This can be useful if, for example, the leader added a club feature by mistake.

Content areas can only be removed if there is no content within it, or if you have granted club leaders the ability to delete content in their clubs (since they would be able to empty it).

Other Minor Tweaks

• You can now set per-group the maximum number of clubs a member in that group can create.
• A member invited to join a club can now delete the invitation if they do not want to accept it (rather than just ignoring it).

Often it's the smaller changes that can make a big improvement in the day to day use of your community. We have made quite a few updates that will make your community flow better for you and your members.

Update files in Pages Media Manager

Previously when you wanted to update a file in the Pages Media Manager you actually had to upload a new file and then change the references to that file to the new one. This was obviously not so great.

When you select a file there is now a replace option. We're not sure why we didn't do this earlier but as they say: better late than never!

Tag Input when Optional

On communities with tagging enabled, we have often noticed that people tend to feel the need to tag everything even when it's not really necessary. If your site is about cars you don't really need everything people post to be tagged "car" as that's sort of obvious.

So to make it a bit clearer that tags are not required we have hidden the input field behind a Choose link so people have to actively choose to tag if they really think it's necessary. We hope this cuts down on tag noise. If tagging is required then the normal input box will always show.

Google Invisible reCAPTCHA

The new Google Invisible reCAPTCHA allows you to prevent bot registrations without the need for all users to fill out the normal captcha process. As often as possible your members will never notice there is even a captcha happening on the page. It's another way to make the flow from guest to member easier.

Whitelist for Spam Service

The spam defense service Invision Community provides works very well at combatting spam signups automatically. The issue is sometimes it works too well!

Let's say you are at work and all your colleagues share the same public IP. You are excited about your new community (of course you are) and your whole office tries to register at once. Our spam service would probably see your office IP as suspicious with that sudden influx of traffic and may even block it.

The new whitelist tool allows you to specify IPs and email addresses to always allow on your community regardless of what score our spam defense gives it.

Reply as Hidden

Sometimes it would be nice if your moderators could reply to an item with a hidden reply. You might want to leave a note for other moderators or perhaps you have a database and want some replies public and some private.

If you have permission you will now see a hide toggle when replying. This works in all apps anywhere you can reply to a content item and have hide permission.

Exclude Groups in Leaderboard

You can now exclude certain groups from being ranked in the Leaderboard. This is very useful if your staff or RSS bot tend to get all the reputation points. By excluding those groups you can focus on your actual member participation which is a better reward to encourage engagement.

On a personal note this will make me very sad as I usually win reputation counts on our site. But, being such a great person, I am willing to make this sacrifice for you.  

Complete Your Profile Order

The Complete Your Profile feature introduced in version 4.2 has been a great success for clients. We have heard many reports of increased engagement as the system can walk people through the sign up process. Not having a big, scary registration form is always a huge plus.

For 4.3 we added the new ability to change the order of completion for your members. This will allow you to stress the items you really want them to complete first and move your less important profile options later in the steps.

Mapbox Support

Mapping has been a feature of Invision Community for quite some time but up until now has been limited to Google Maps integration. For 4.3 we have added support for Mapbox which is based on OpenStreetMap data. The maps are beautifully designed and bring greater flexibility with an alternative look. The groundwork is now laid for some exciting new features still to come!

Some of our existing customers also found Google policies and pricing structure incompatible with their own internal policies which this addition addresses.

Stripe is the most popular payment method in Commerce, allowing communities to take payments by card securely with easy setup.

While there's no doubt that credit cards are still the most popular methods of making a payment, digital innovations such as Apple Pay are increasing in popularity.

For 4.3 we've deepened our integration to support some of their latest features.

Apple Pay & Google Pay

Apple Pay allows users to pay quickly with their iPhone, iPad or Mac (with Safari and either a paired iPhone or using the MacBook Pro with Touch ID) using the card details stored on the device, authenticated with Touch ID or Face ID.

Google Chrome (on desktop or Android devices) supports a similar feature allowing users to pay with card details stored in their Google account with Google Pay, or stored in Chrome itself.

Both of these features are now supported through Stripe in Invision Community 4.3. Setup is simple - for Apple Pay you simply need to verify that you own your domain by uploading a file you obtain from the Stripe dashboard, and nothing special is needed for Google Pay - and then create the payment method in the AdminCP. Stripe does not charge any additional fees for either option.

Commerce will automatically hide the option if the user's device does not support either method.

3D Secure

Also known as Verified by Visa, Mastercard SecureCode, and other brand names, 3D Secure is a system that is used to verify a customer's identity before purchase is completed and transfers the fraud loss liability from the merchant to the cardholder bank in case of fraudulent disputes.

After the user has entered their card details, they are redirected to their bank's website and asked to provide additional verification.

Our integration with Stripe in 4.3 now supports this process. A new setting allows you to choose if you want to use 3D Secure just for cards which require it (i.e. cards which would decline the payment if 3D Secure is not completed) or for all cards which optionally support it as well.

Amex Express Checkout

American Express cardholders can use Amex Express checkout to pay by using their American Express login rather than providing their card information.  This is also now supported through Stripe in 4.3.

Alipay, Bancontact, Giropay, iDEAL, SOFORT

These are popular payment processors internationally (Alipay is popular in China, Bancontact in Belgium, Giropay in Germany, iDEAL in the Netherlands, and SOFORT in several European countries).

The checkout experience is similar to PayPal with the user being redirected to the appropriate site, authenticating the payment, and then being redirected back.

All of these are also now supported through Stripe in 4.3.

Dispute/Chargeback Handling

A dispute (also known as a chargeback) occurs when one a cardholder questions your payment with their card issuer, which causes the funds, plus a fee, to immediately be taken from your account until evidence is provided that the transaction was legitimate.

Anyone operating an online store knows how frustrating this experience can be. In 4.3, we've made dealing with this situation a little easier. When a dispute is created, Commerce will now mark the transaction as disputed, which will immediately revoke any benefits from the purchase (for example, if it's for a subscription that moves them into a different group, they will be placed back into their original group; if it's a Downloads file, they won't be able to download it any more; if it's for a physical item that hasn't been shipped yet, the shipping order will be placed on hold).

All transactions with currently open disputes can be accessed quickly from the transaction list. The transaction page will show you the status and reason for the dispute, and links to your Stripe dashboard where you can respond.

When the dispute is resolved, the transaction screen will be updated, with either the transaction being marked as refunded if the dispute is lost, or going back to paid if the dispute is won and the funds returned to you.

Radar

Radar is Stripe's suite of fraud detection tools using machine learning and customisable rules to help detect fraudulent transactions.

Stripe will automatically blocks transactions is considers highest risk already. However, for "elevated" risk transactions, while Stripe would alert you of them so you could review them, Commerce would process the transaction normally.

In 4.3, Commerce will place any transactions which Radar reports as having an "elevated" risk level on hold for manual review, so you can decide whether to approve or not before the funds have been captured.

In addition, the transaction details screen for Stripe transactions now provides some additional information about Stripe's checks on the transaction, including the Radar risk level, if the CVC check passed, and if the billing address provided matches the card's billing address.

If a fraudulent transaction does make it through, you will now have the option to indicate this when refunding the transaction to help Stripe's anti-fraud systems learn.

Search. Let's be honest, it's not the most exciting feature in the world. You ask to find things, and it shows you what it found.

Simple, right?

It's a lot more complex than that. After numerous tests, a few surveys and many discussions with customers, we've decided that there is no "right" or "wrong" way to search. Invision Community is used on many diverse communities and each has its own needs.

The bigger the community, the more of a headache search can be when you start hitting frustrating technical limitations of the database.

Happily, we've addressed all of these issues with Invision Community 4.3 and added a few extra treats.

Searchable Products and Pages
Products in the Store and custom Pages will now show in search results.

More Customisable Search Experience
One of the most difficult challenges with search is anticipating the scope of the search. If, for example, you're looking for something you know you've seen before, you want the search to be narrow - matching only the exact terms you provide, probably only matching against the title, in the specific area you know where the content is located. If however, you're just doing a general search about a particular subject, you want the search to be wide - matching any of the terms you enter, anywhere in the community, in both titles and content.

For a while, Invision Community has had the option to choose which areas to search, defaulting to the area of the community you're in (for example, if you're in a forum, only that forum will be searched by default). We also provide a number of suggestions on the search result form (in the form of "Didn't find what you were looking for? Try searching for..." followed by a number of options) which adjust the scope of the search.

In Invision Community 4.3, we have a new interface for the quick search feature which makes some of these options more visible so you're more likely to find what you're looking for on the first search.

Along these lines we have also:

• Changed the default "Search In" selection to "Everywhere", regardless of where the user is.
• Added a new setting which controls whether the "Any words" or "All words" option is checked by default.
• Added a new setting which allows you to adjust how much of a boost results receive for a match in the title, versus the content body, when searching both content titles and body.

You can set default and/or operator.

Elasticsearch
In Invision Community 4.3 we are adding native support for Elasticsearch, a third party search engine which offers a number of benefits over searching your MySQL database:

• Elasticsearch, being designed and indexing data in a way optimised for search rather than data storage, is generally able to match and sort by relevancy with better accuracy than MySQL.
• Elasticsearch is generally faster. One user performing a search doesn't slow down other users trying to read and make posts at the same time (when searching MySQL, the data has to be "locked" from changes when the search is being performed). It scales very well with very large datasets, and runs very easily on multiple servers.
• Elasticsearch understands language. If for example, you search for "community", it will also return results which contain the word "communities", understanding that these are the same. Supported languages are Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Brazilian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Dinnish, Drench, Galician, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sorani, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Thai.
• Elasticsearch supports custom functions on the scoring algorithm. In our initial implementation this has allowed us to add settings to allow you to control the time decay (allowing newer results to show higher) and author boost (allowing content posted by the user to optionally show higher in results).
• Unlike with MySQL, there is no minimum query length and a very small list of stop words.

When enabled, both searches and activity streams will be retrieved from Elasticsearch. The core_search_index database table in MySQL will no longer be populated, so you will not have to store the data twice.

To use Elasticsearch, you can either install it yourself on your own server, or use any of the many excellent hosted Elasticsearch options. The minimum required Elasticsearch version is 5.5.

REST API
Developers and those looking to integrate Invision Community features into their own sites will be pleased to learn that we've extended the REST API to accommodate searching. 

Good news!

We've taken Invision Community's Blog app by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into 2018!

There has been a growing trend for imagery to play a very important part of a blog entry. This update reflects that.

Introducing Grid View
We have added a new view that shows your blog entries as cards with space for a cover photo.

We've very visual creatures, and a good photograph can entice readers into your blogs to read more. 

As you would expect, you can disable this mode from the Admin CP for purists that prefer the traditional list format.

For those who's sense of adventure runs deep, the new grid mode allows you to show a list of latest blog entries as the blog home page.

This puts valuable and engaging content right in front of your audience.

This list view persists when you view a blog's entries giving a consistent feel.

Viewing an entry
We've given the blog entry page a little make-over by featuring the cover photo above the content. The slimmed down blog details bar allows your audience to focus on the content.

Default Cover Photos
You may have spotted that entries without a cover photo have a rather fetching geometric pattern in different colors.

This is a new micro-feature of Invision Community 4.3. Currently, if you do not have a cover photo on a blog, profile or event, the bar is a rather sad shade of black.

The new default cover photo feature makes it much more cheerful. Here's what a profile looks like.

Much better.

Here's a few technical details for those that love to know all the things.

• The grid view feature can be turned off in the ACP (but doing so will make me very sad)
• You can choose the default home page view: Latest Entries or List of Blogs.
• You can still view a list of blogs when you're on the latest entries page. This choice is stored in a little cookie (GDPR friendly, it doesn't contain any identifying data) so navigating back gets you the last view you chose.

Let us know what you think! We love it, and hope you do too.

The best way to convert guests into members is to make the onboarding process as simple as possible.

Over the years, we've added special log in methods for Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft. We've carefully hand coded these integrations to allow guests to sign up with just a few clicks using services they're already a member of.

These services used to use proprietary methods to link with other websites, but a new standard has emerged.

OAuth
You may not know it, but you're probably familiar with OAuth already. If you have enabled the ability for users of your community to sign in with their Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn or Microsoft account, you may have noticed that the process for setting up each of these is quite similar. This is because they all use the OAuth protocol.

In Invision Community 4.3, we are introducing several exciting new features:

• In addition to all of the existing social networks above, which retain their "easy setup" status, we have also added Wordpress. Users on your community can now sign in with any Wordpress site you control (you will need to install a Wordpress plugin to enable OAuth capabilities).
• As well as those "easy setup" options, we have also added the ability for you to allow users on your site to sign in with any OAuth 2.0 based provider. This means, for example, if your community is based in a location where other social networks are popular, if they use OAuth, you can set those up too. While the setup is a little bit more complicated, this doesn't require any custom programming - you'll just need to find out a few more pieces of information from the provider (an example is provided below).
• Invision Community itself can now also serve as an OAuth 2.0 server so you can set up other sites to be able to facilitate logins using credentials from your community. This works in conjunction with our REST API, allowing you to make API calls as an authenticated member, which will return just the information that user has access to.
• With the ability for Invision Community to serve as both an OAuth server and client, this now provides standard integration for multiple Invision Communities together, which will now replace the old IPS Connect feature.
• We have also taken this opportunity to make a few other minor tweaks to login, registration and account management features, especially for communities which rely heavily on non-standard login methods (more details below).

Setting Up a Custom OAuth Provider

For this example, I'm going to use vk.com, which is a popular social network in Europe. While Invision Community doesn't provide this as one of the "easy setup" options, it is based on OAuth 2.0 so we can use the new functionality in Invision Community 4.3 to set it up.

In older versions, the list of login handlers in the AdminCP had all of the providers listed with enable/disable toggles - because now you can add as many custom handlers as you like in 4.3, it's now a list where you can add/delete options:

When clicking the "Create New" button, you'll see all of the different handlers Invision Community supports. Since vk.com isn't in the list, but is still OAuth 2.0-based, I'll choose the "Other OAuth 2.0" option:

You'll now need to use the documentation provided by the site you want to integrate with to fill out this form. While no custom programming is required, the documentation is usually quite technical in nature - but you only need a few key pieces of information. We anticipate that for some of the more popular options, guides will be provided to help you find the information you need.

I have created an application in vk.com's developer center and so I will copy and paste my credentials into the form:

I then need to find the endpoints from vk.com's documentation and input those too.

Next I need to find the endpoint where I can access the user's information within their API and the parameters they are returned by. The only required piece of information is an ID, but you can also provide the parameters for accessing the display name, email address and profile photo. If display name/email address isn't available/provided, the user will be asked for this the first time they sign in. vk.com's API doesn't provide access to the email, but I can use the screen name as the display name, and they do provide access to the photo:

Finally, provide a logo and a color for the sign in button and some final settings:

And now vk.com login is set up. A button will now show up on the front end which I can use to sign in. I didn't provide a way to access the email address, so on the first sign in, the user will be prompted to provide that, but the screen name and profile photo from vk.com will be used:

Using Invision Community as an OAuth Server

You can also set up Invision Community itself to be an OAuth Server. This may be useful for two main reasons:

• If you want to integrate two communities together, or integrate with something else which supports adding custom OAuth clients.
• If you are a developer and want to use the REST API using OAuth for authentication rather than an API Key. You can either make requests as an authenticated user (by obtaining an access token) or using Client Credentials.

The screenshots below show the full capabilities which are quite technical and mostly aimed at developers. If you will just use this feature to link two communities, don't be concerned if it looks too complicated, an easy-to-follow guide will be available to achieve that.

You will set up the clients from the AdminCP:

When creating the OAuth Client, you can control which scopes are available, and which endpoints of the REST API they provide access to:

The login process is then the standard OAuth flow, and users have the ability to view authorisations in the account settings:

The REST API has new and updated endpoints to be aware of the authenticated user:

Other Login System Tweaks

• Users can now choose if they want to change their local display name or email address if it is changed by an external login method (or the administrator can choose this behaviour). If there is an issue with this (for example, it wants to change the email to one that is already taken), or profile photo syncing, this is now better communicated to the user.
• You can now control per-login-handler if new registrations are allowed using it. This addresses some confusion from previous versions as to if the "Allow New Registrations" setting applies to accounts being created by social network logins.
• The Standard login handler can be disabled if you rely totally on an alternate login method. To allow this to happen:
  •  All areas where a user is prompted to re-enter their password (some areas of the account settings) now allow reauthentication using any login handler.
  • You can disable local registration but still allow accounts to be created by other login handlers, or redirect users to an external URL to register an account.
  • You can also disable or redirect to an external URL for changing email address / password or the Forgot Password tool.
• You can now create multiple instances of the external MySQL database and LDAP login methods which have also had some other minor tweaks:
  • The external MySQL database handler now has PHP's password_hash() function as an available option for password encryption type, and defining a custom encryption method is now much easier, done entirely in the AdminCP without needing to modify PHP files.
  • You can now choose if changes to the local display name / email address / password is synced back to the external database / LDAP database.
  • You can optionally show these handlers in the Account Settings pages like other login handlers to allow users with an existing account to link their accounts.
  • You can define a Forgot Password URL for the external database which the user will be redirected to if they try to use the Forgot Password tool and that is how their account is authenticated. 

Emoji: built in to Invision Community 4.3! ?

Invision Community has a long history. We remember the early days of forums, back when graphical "emoticons" or "smilies" were added.

We have always shipped our products with a basic set of emoticons with the ability to add your own images and has supported emoji from mobile devices.

Emoji has become a standard across mobile and desktop devices so it made sense to bring them to Invision Community fully.

You can choose from 3 different styles of Emoji:

• The native style provided by the user's operating system (if you choose this option, users on different platforms will see different styles)
• Twitter style
• EmojiOne style

Once you have chosen one of these options, all of the available Emoji will show in the emoticons selector when making a post. Unlike in older versions, the entire list is scrollable (the categories drop down will jump you to the category rather than filter), you can search, and standard Emoji features like skin tone modifiers are fully supported, and of course, you can make them as big as you like.

Autocompleting Short Codes

In addition to using the selector, you can also use optionally enable standard :short_codes:. These will be autocompleted as you type.

You can also enable more conventional ASCII emoticons to be automatically replaced too:

Don't Worry: Custom Emoticons Aren't Going Anywhere!

You can use custom emoticons either instead of, or even alongside Emoji. If you give your custom emoticons a text replacement starting and ending with : they will even show in the autocompletion alongside Emoji.

Technical Details 

Whichever style you choose, Emoji is stored in the database as the actual Unicode characters, so you can even change the setting and all Emoji, even those in existing posts, will immediately change.

If you choose to use the native style (so the Emoji will match the style provided by the operating system), the system will automatically detect which Emojis are supported and the selector will only try to show the ones the platform can render.

One huge benefit of running your own Invision Community is the moderation tools.

Out of the box, Invision Community allows you to turn members into moderators. Better still, you can define what these moderators have permission to do.

Part of this moderation suite is the report system. The report system allows your members to flag posts that need a moderator's attention.

There comes a time when your community is so successful that it can be a little tough to keep up with all the content and reports.

Community Moderation
This new feature leverages your member reports to automatically remove objectionable content from public view.

You as the admin will define thresholds for the content. For example, you may say that to hide content, a post needs 5 reports.

This reduces the workload for your moderators and enables you to crowd source moderation.

Let's take a look at this feature in a little more detail.

Reporting Content
When a member reports a piece of content, they now have the option to set a type, such as "Spam" or "Offensive". These options can count towards the threshold. Once the threshold has been passed the item is hidden.

The threshold can be set up by creating rules in the Admin CP.

Admin Set Up
At its heart of the system are the rules. You can create custom rules in the Admin CP to determine the thresholds.

For example, you may decide that:

A member with less than 10 posts only needs 5 reports to hide the content.

But you may want to give more experienced members a higher threshold as there is more trust.

You simply add a new rule:

A member who joined over a year ago with over 500 posts needs 10 reports to hide content.

You can do that easily with the rules system as it will scan them all and pick the one most suitable for this member.

It's as simple as that.

Notifications
Once an item has received enough reports to match the threshold, it is automatically hidden from view.

A notification is sent to all moderators who opt in for notifications. This notification shows inline in the notifications center.

It can also optionally be sent via email for those who want to know without checking the site.

Restoring the content
Of course, a moderator may decide that the content is fine and un-hide it. Once a piece of content has been un-hidden, automatic moderation will not hide it again.

Report Types
Depending on your community, the default types may not be suitable or relevant. You may also want to set up other report types.

You can do this via the Admin CP.

Preventing Abuse
Your first thought may be that a single member can report a single item multiple times to force content to be hidden. 

The system will only count a unique member as one point towards the threshold. This means a single member can report an item 5 times, but they are only counted once towards the threshold.

You can also set a time limit between reporting the same item. This will prevent a member reporting a single item multiple times in succession.

Of course, the member can delete their report if it was in error.

Report Center
The Report Center is the hub for all reported content. Invision Community 4.3 adds a filter to view a specific report type. The reports themselves also show the type of report.

We hope that this new feature will be a huge help and time saver for you and your moderators.

We'd love to hear your thoughts, please let us know what you think and if you have any questions.

We are happy to announce the new Invision Community 4.3 is available!

Some highlights in Invision Community 4.3 include...

Improved Search

We now support Elasticsearch for scalable and accurate searching that MySQL alone cannot provided. There are also enhancements to the overall search interfaces based on your feedback.

Emoji

Express yourself with native emoji support in all editors. You can also keep your custom emoticons as you have now.

Member Management

The AdminCP interface to manage your members is all new allowing you easier control and management of your membership.

Automatic Community Moderation

You as the administrator set up rules to define how many unique member reports a piece of content needs to receive before it's automatically hidden from view and moderators notified.

Clubs

The new Clubs feature has been a huge hit with Invision Community users and we are expanding it to include invite-only options, notifications, exposure on the main community pages, paid memberships, and more.

Custom Email Footers

Your community generates a lot of email and you can now include dynamic content in the footer to help drive engagement and content discovery. 

New Gallery Interface

We have reworked our Gallery system with a simplified upload process and more streamlined image viewing.

The full list follows. Enjoy!

Content Discovery

• We now support Elasticsearch which is a search utility that allows for much faster and more reliable searching.
• The REST API now supports search functions.
• Both MySQL and Elasticsearch have new settings for the admin to use to set search-defaults and default content weighting to better customize search logic to your community.
• Visitors can now search for Content Pages and Commerce Products.
• When entering a search term, members now see a more clear interface so they know what areas they are searching in and the method of search.

Member Engagement

• Commerce can now send a customizable account welcome email after checkout.
• You can whitelist emails in the spam service to stop false-positives.
• REST API has many enhancements to mange members.
• Ability to join any OAuth service for login management.
• Invision Community can now be an OAuth endpoint.
• Wordpress OAuth login method built in.
• Support for Google's Invisible ReCaptcha.
• Groups can be excluded from Leaderboard (such as admins or bot groups).
• All emails generated by Invision Community can now contain admin-defined extra promotional text in the footer such as Our Picks, and Social Links.
• Admins can now define the order of Complete Your Profile to better control user experience.

Clubs

• Option to make a Club visible but invite-only
• Admins can set an option so any Club a member is part of will also show in the parent application. So if you are in a Club that has a Gallery tab then those image will show both in the Club and in the main Gallery section of the community.
• Club members can now follow an entire Club rather than just each content section.
• There is a new option on the Club directory page for a list view which is useful for communities with many Clubs.
• If you have Commerce you can now enable paid memberships to Clubs.
• Admins can set limits on number of Clubs per group.
• If a group has delete permission in their Club, they can now delete empty containers as well.
• Members can ignore invitations.

Moderation and Administration

• Unrestricted moderator or administrator permission sets in the AdminCP are visually flagged. This prevents administrator confusion when they cannot do something as they will be able to quickly see if their account has restrictions.
• You can choose to be notified with a new Club is created.
• Moderators can now reply to any content item with a hidden reply.
• Download screenshot/watermarks can now be rebuilt if you change settings.
• Support for Facebook Pixel to easily track visitors.
• Moderators can now delete Gallery albums.
• Automatic moderation tools with rules to define when content should auto-hide based on user reports.
• Totally new member management view in AdminCP.
• More areas are mass-selectable like comments and AdminCP functions for easier management.

New Features

• Commerce now has full Stripe support including fraud tools, Apple Pay, and other Stripe features.
• Commerce packages can now have various custom email events configured (expiring soon, purchased, expired).
• Full Emojii support in the editor.
• Complete overhaul of the Gallery upload and image views.
• Announcements system overhaul. Now global on all pages (not via widget) and new modes including dismissible announcements and top-header floating bar option.
• Many new reports on traffic and engagement in the AdminCP.
• Blog has new view modes to offer options for a traditional site blog or a community multi-member blog platform.
• The content-starter can now leave one reply to Reviews on their item.
• Commerce now makes it much easier to do basic account-subscriptions when there is no product attached.

Useful Improvements

• Forums has a new widget where you can filter by tags.
• If tags are not required, the tag input box now indicates this so the member knows they do not have to put in tags.
• Member cover photos can now be clicked to see the full image.
• Any item with a poll now has a symbol on the list view.
• Twitch.tv embed support.
• You can now update/overwrite media in the Pages Media Manager.
• Mapbox as an additional map provider to Google Maps.

Technical Changes

• Direct support for Sparkpost has been removed. Anyone currently using Sparkpost will automatically have their settings converted to the Sparkpost SMTP mode so your email will still work.
• Your cache engines (like Redis) will be checked on upgrade and in the support tool to ensure they are reachable.
• Third-party applications will now be visually labeled to distinguish them from Invision Community official applications.
• The queued tasks list in the AdminCP is now collapsed by default as queued tasks are not something people need to pay much attention to during normal operations.
• When upgrading from version 3 series you must convert your database to UTF8 and the system saves your original data in tables prefixed with orig. The AdminCP now alerts you these are still present and allows you to remove them to reclaim storage space.
• On new installs there are now reasonable defaults for upload limits to keep people from eating up storage space.
• Categories in all apps (forums, gallery albums, databases, etc.) no longer allow HTML in their titles. This has been a concern both in terms of security and usability so we were forced to restrict it.
• Large improvements to the Redis cache engine including use for sessions.
• The login with HTTPS option has been removed and those who were using it will be given instructions to convert their entire community to HTTPS.
• Images loaded through the proxy system now honor image limits for normal uploads.
• We now consider BBCode deprecated. We are not removing support but will not fix any future issues that may come up.

There's a lot to talk about here so we are going to lock this entry to comments so things do not get confusing. Feel free to comment on upcoming feature-specific entries or start a topic in our Feedback forum.

As we make our final commits, merge in the last of our branches and wait for Charles to move more tasks to the development list, we pause to reflect on our year together as a company.

Pour some egg nog, grab some snacks and lets take a look at our journey this year.

Our year in numbers

In 2017 we made 72 Invision Community releases, 6584 code commits, read 157,203 customer replies and made an average of 177 staff replies to tickets per day.

Our year in dates

We were certainly busy this year. We launched Invision Community 4.2, started work on Invision Community 4.3, started two new blog series and a newsletter. Lets take a look at the key dates.

March 10th
We started talking about our upcoming release, Invision Community 4.2 which saw us drop "Invision Power Services" in favour of the sleeker and less awkward "Invision Community".

March 28 - 30th
During our series of blogs on 4.2, we launch a triple whammy of blog entries outlining reactions, clubs and social media promotions. Three new tent-pole features that drove 4.2 to be our most successful release.

July 19th
We release Invision Community 4.2 to deafening applause (most of it was our own, but it still counts). We give the development team a 15 minute break and then drop the 4.3 task list internally.

September 15th
We start a new blog series "Team Talk". The idea is to show that we're not a bunch of code writing robots, but we're real people with personalities, hopes and dreams. So far, it's proved that we're mostly a bunch of code writing robots without personalities. The irony.

October 18th
Not content to just talk about silly things in Team Talk, we launched our new long form blog series "Community Management". Here we give our many years of community building insight to help you become successful in running your communities. We've tackled a number of subjects from SEO to security so far with many more planned for 2018.

October 30th
Our development team have been busy working on Invision Community 4.3 and we announce it to the world. And being the huge tease we are, we've said nothing since. Rest assured, we've got a lot done and its shaping up to be another great release. We'll be talking about it in more detail next year.

It's all about you

Of course, we couldn't finish without saying a massive THANK YOU to all our customers. We are so lucky to do something we love for a living and that is only possible because you choose to use us to build your community.

We are committed to keep moving forward to ensure that we serve you in the best way possible. We'll keep innovating to give you the tools you need to succeed and we'll keep posting blogs packed full of tips and advice.

Here's to 2018 and all the adventures it brings.

The Christmas lights are twinkling, the mince pies baked and the egg nog has been poured. With Christmas just around the corner, we turn our thoughts to what 2018 may bring.

Marc Stridgen (Tech support and kettlebell enthusiast)

I'm just looking forward to 2018 being less of a mixed year, as 2017 has been a bit of a bad one on the side of family, yet good with regards work and personal achievements. So here goes for my 2018:

• Looking forward to 4.3 and beyond. 4.2 I feel has been a great release for people, and will be nice to expand on the 4.x platform over the next year.
• Getting my wife and daughter to a happier place in life. Various things this year have meant they really haven't been.
• I have 3 events so far this year that I'm attending. 1 x 5k obstacle course, 1 x 10k obstacle course, and a 60 mile ride from Manchester to Blackpool. I always look forward to these, as its always a good sense of achievement when they are done, and a good excuse to get that little more in shape.
• Dev, dev, dev!! Whilst I am currently tier 1 support here at IPS, I'm actually a developer by trade. Currently I write .NET windows applications/services, and vast experience with TSQL. My aim this year is to update my own skillsets to web based development, and mysql. Something I have already started to do, but I'm going to be pushing myself more on over the coming year. It's fun to learn new things!

(Editor: Marc is a highly skilled SQL specialist. Even Wade has been known to ask Marc for advice)

Ryan Ashbrook (Developer, T3 specialist and guitar collector)

My life is actually pretty boring (Editor: nope, it's not) - I don't have a whole lot planned going into 2018, though I am looking forward to my 30th birthday in March. People think I'm weird for that.

I plan on getting back into music, though, as I've actually stopped playing throughout all of 2017 (aside from a few rare instances here and there), so it'll be nice to pick that up again as a healthy hobby.

I also wouldn't mind traveling more, and make a return trip to New Hampshire with my friends, which I haven't done in four-ish years now.

For IPS, I'm looking forward to seeing how 4.3 evolves and matures, as well as the new Community in the Cloud infrastructure.

Mark Wade (Senior Developer and praise withholder) 

• Obviously 4.3 and onwards ?
• I have some cool stuff (at least by my standards) planned, including weekends in Edinburgh and Berlin at the beginning of the year, and Country To Country Festival at the O2 in March ? and, best of all... Shania Twain at the O2 in October ?
• Prides! ?️‍? This year I only did Manchester... a terrible effort. I need to get at least 2 in in 2018
• New TV seasons, especially Black Mirror and GBBO.

(Editor: That's Great British Bake Off, the most British television show on the planet. People make cakes and then discuss cakes while drinking tea)

Brandon Farber (Developer)

For 2018 I'm most looking forward to:

• Watching my beautiful baby daughter grow. Even with 6 kids, the baby phase is always such a special and enjoyable time.
• Wrapping up some various challenges in real life that are finally coming to an end.
• Watching my eldest son start college in the fall (UNC most likely)
• Taking one big family vacation. We're hoping Disney World but we'll wait and see what's in store as the year gets going.

Stuart Silvester (Developer and property mogul) 

I'm looking forward to 2018 being a better all around year for my close family, 2017 wasn't the best. I'm definitely looking forward to taking some more trips abroad, most like back to Italy and Madeira (Where my Wife and I spent Christmas 2016). I'm also looking forward to hopefully finding some spare time to work on other things such as renovating my home and putting my classic car back on the road. Learning new things is always useful, I've been wanting to start working on something such as an App or Node.JS (I've used it a little in the past, but not a lot), the issue however is the lack of spare time this year.

Mark Higgins (Tech Support and part-time Phil)

For 2018, I am hoping for an early warm Spring, then a mild Summer. Also hopeful that I can get my pop-up camper fixed so I can have a relaxing vacation in the Fall somewhere "up north" in one of our fantastic State Parks. That, and good health for me and my relatives.

(Editor's Tip: if you hear banjo music, get in your car and get out of there)

Jennifer Merriman (Designer and owner of the only pink avatar in chat)

What do I have to look forward to in 2018? Well this one was difficult because I prefer to live pretty spontaneously. However, I thought about the things in my life that I know will transpire this year.

• My youngest child will turn 10 and my eldest 13... I'm terrified but excited to see them as they grow more independent.
• Loosening up the mom reigns by letting my kids start to do things a little more out of my control more regularly.
• A few million new movies like Aquaman, Jurassic World, Deadpool 2 and Incredibles 2.
• Otherwise just improved situations for myself and those around me. Both health and whatever else needs improved upon.

Daniel Fatkic (Developer and owner of a store with sauna)

2018 is going to be a very busy year with my 3 jobs ( IPS, Dad and Handyman renovating a lot in the house) where I look forward in getting better in all 3 of them.  
Right now I'm working on my new home-office which will hopefully be finished soon, in spring I want to start the work on the outdoor area and create a patio and a rooftop terrace and the next winter project is the gym/spa area which won't leave much spare time or money for anything else.
So what I really really look forward to is 2019 where I can then finally relax and enjoy the stuff which was built in 2018.

(Editor: If you're wondering where your spare money went, look at your two LG 27" 5K monitors)

Rhett Buck (Hosting expert who needs a ladder to get into his car)

I'm looking forward to some time off and a trip to Texas with just the wife and I, top down, no phones, and a few days on the road to get there via Las Vegas, Arizona and a few other stops along the way. Spending a few days with friends relaxing watching MotoGP in Austin Texas, then a few days of relaxing on the open road on the way home. We had planned to go last year, but due to nasty weather, torrential rains, and flooding locally, we were displaced for a couple weeks which ruined our plans.

Andy Millne (Developer and international man of mystery)

Continued learning mostly. I’m looking forward to further improving my basic Italian language knowledge that I started taking a lot more seriously (It’s not just about waving your arms around). I would also like to fit in some more travel and to visit some old friends I haven’t seen in a while. There’s still so much of the world left to see though! Where to start? 

On an IPS related theme, I’m of course looking forward to 4.3 and seeing new features we’ve been working on released into the wild, and the stuff that hasn’t even been dreamt of yet.

Matt Mecham (Senior Developer, social media stuff and object of ridicule)

I'm really looking forward to 2018, personally and professionally.  I'm really excited about launching Invision Community 4.3 which is shaping up to build on the great foundation that 4.2 built and add some cool functionality. (Editor: yes, that's enough of the sales pitch, people want to read about the team).

As a dad of two, I enjoy watching my kids grow. My nine year old is becoming more independent and my two year old is getting more confident with speech. I love watching them grow up. We've also booked to take them to Disneyland in Paris in April which we're all looking forward to.

We would love to hear what you're looking forward to in 2018. Let us know in the comments below!

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation (EU 2016/679) that is intended to strengthen and unify data protection for EU residents from 25th May 2018.

How can Invision Community help?
While Invision Community enables you to collect and store information, it's important to note that you as the site owner are the data controller. If your site can collect data from EU citizens, then we recommend that you research your responsibilities.

We have introduced several new tools in Invision Community 4.2.7 to help you with compliance, and we'll run through them and the relevant sections of the regulation in this blog.

Individual Rights (More information)

Right to be informed

Quote

• The right to be informed encompasses your obligation to provide ‘fair processing information’, typically through a privacy notice.
• It emphasises the need for transparency over how you use personal data.

Invision Community has an area for you to edit your own privacy policy. This is found in the Admin CP > Settings > Terms & Privacy Policy.

Guidance on what the policy should contain can be found here.

Right to erasure (More information)

Quote

The broad principle underpinning this right is to enable an individual to request the deletion or removal of personal data where there is no compelling reason for its continued processing.

Invision Community allows you to delete a member from the Admin CP. If the member has left posts or comments on your community, you can elect to delete the content, or keep it but remove the author's details thereby making the content anonymous.

Lawful bases for processing (More information)

Consent (More information)

Invision Community now features a setting to not automatically opt in to administrator emails such as those sent by the bulk email system often used for newsletters when registering a new account on your community.

This feature is found in the ACP > Members > Registration Settings

Part of the consent regulation is to record when consent was given. The consent to opt-in for administrator emails such as bulk emails sent via the Admin CP is recorded at registration, and each time they change the setting. This record can be found in the member history log when viewing a member in the Admin CP.

If you change the Terms & Conditions, or the Privacy Policy, you can request that members accept these changes when they next log in thus giving their consent for those changes.

Cookies (More information)
Invision Community stores a small amount of data in cookies. These are used to authorize you when you re-visit a community. Other cookies are used to provide a service at the user's request, such as changing a theme or using Commerce's cart.

We have added additional features for Invision Community 4.2.7 to permit acknolwedgement that cookies will be set, and a brief page outlining the types of cookies that are set.

Invision Community has a feature that shows a small message to new visitors to the community. This is found in the Admin CP > Terms & Privacy Policy page.

We have pre-configured a cookie acknowledgement message using the short-tags {cookies}.

This will display as follows:

This links to a new page showing brief information about the types of cookies that Invision Community stores.

Although at the time of writing this blog entry, the regulation states that there is no exact information that you need to show on the cookie page, you can edit it to add more detail if you wish.

Summary
We hope these new tools available with Invision Community 4.2.7 make it easier for you to seek compliance with GDPR if you choose to do so.

It's worth pointing out that we are awesome at making community software and know a huge amount about making communities successful, but we are not experts in EU regulation. We offer this blog entry as a way to assist you in seeking compliance but you must do your own research and are responsible for your own community.

Invision Community 4.2.7 is currently in beta testing. We're aiming to release it early next week.

We hope this is a good starting point for you!

Matt was recently invited onto the Community Signal Podcast, where he spoke with host Patrick O'Keefe.

Everything from how Matt got started with online communities right up to the possibility of a post Facebook era was covered in their 45 minute chat. Matt also gives a little insight into how Invision Community works behind the scenes.

From Community Signal:

Quote

Matt Mecham’s code has powered far too many online communities to count. Developing popular online community software since 2001, he worked on YaBB and founded Ikonboard, before co-founding Invision Power Services, the company behind Invision Community.

Given his long view of the industry, Matt sees the timeline of online community as progressing through a few eras: The early years, when he began developing software. The middle years, where platforms became more cognizant of UI considerations and SEO. The recent years, Facebook opening to the public and the resulting impact. And now, which he refers to as the “post-Facebook era.” Where will online communities go in that era? Plus:

• The community software business shift from licensing to SaaS (software as a service)
• New features vs. bloat
• Why he turned down a job offer from vBulletin

 

Check out the podcast now!

It's hard to believe that we're close to wrapping up 2017 already. It seems like only yesterday we were putting the finishing touches to Clubs, Fluid View, Profile Completion and all the other new features added this year. We're not resting though, Invision Community 4.3 is well underway and we'll be releasing news of its new features soon.

Our developers have been busy squashing bugs and release Invision Community 4.2.6. Regular visitors to our own community may have noticed that we've been running several search tests to improve the results search brings.

Our latest community articles continue to be well received. This month's highlights are:

In team talk we post a simple question that proved hard to answer.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think of our articles. If there's anything you'd like covered, just let us know below!

Thanks!

It's that time of year again!

Have you been thinking about starting your Invision Community? Or perhaps you're currently using another service and want to take advantage of our modern, mobile ready and social media equipped platform?

This has been a great year for Invision Community. We've added many new features including Clubs, Fluid View, Profile Completion and more.

We've been adding useful articles such as the benefits of owning your own community versus a Facebook Group, how to optimize your community's SEO, and how to stop spam.

And we're already working on our next major release due out early 2018.

To celebrate, we have two new coupon codes for you!

20% OFF ALL CLOUD PACKAGES
Start with Invision Community today with our hassle free cloud packages. There's nothing to upload and nothing to install. You don't need to know your FTP from your MySQL. We do all that for you!

Use coupon code during checkout: CICBF2017

15% OFF SELF HOSTED LICENSES
Prefer to manage your own hosting? No problem. Grab your downloadable license today.

Use coupon code during checkout: SHBF2017

The small print
These coupons are valid from today right through to midnight Monday 27th November (EST). Note, the self hosted coupon is not valid for renewals.

Thanks and happy shopping!

This month we ask a very simple question that got our team thinking hard.

“If you could only keep five possessions, what would they be?”

Now, this doesn't assume that there is a disaster, so you don't need to think about things like food and water. It also doesn't need to include humans or pets. This is also not a "Desert Island" question so survival tools are not required.

This got us really thinking about what material possessions are important to us. It also made us realise how much technology has made a lot of things redundant. We might have said "CD collection and my favourite books" ten years ago, but with a phone, that's no longer the case as so much is handled on the device.

Ryan (Developer & Guitar showroom owner)

In terms of just packing up and moving on, I actually don't own a lot that I would consider critical / prized / irreplaceable. My dad's 50 year old acoustic guitar is all I would take with me, as it's the only thing that *isn't* directly replaceable. Maybe include iMac and iPhone to have some sort of connection to the outside world at all times, but I really don't need anything else I own.

Brandon (Developer & Jet ski owner)

I guess if I were to pick five things I couldn't live without I'd have to narrow down the list to my phone, my wallet, my TV (I unwind by zoning out on movies or home repair shows), my car (I can't walk to anything but the ICW here which wouldn't do me much good), and coffee (with International Delights Cold Stone Creamery creamer).

Marc S (Support technician & cycle injury enthusiast)

Top 5 is hard, and makes you realise that despite living in a world of material possession, we actually rely on very few things. Albeit tending to be expensive things. So here goes.

Mobile Phone - Despite the calls (which I could do without), and facebook (which I probably should do without), I have a problem with sleeping. For years now I have been using the audible app on my phone to listen to audiobooks. Usually factual stuff, so it doesnt really matter if I lose position. It helps me with my sleep, and therefore my sanity.

Computer - This isn't just because I work on one. I tend to spend a lot of hours at it, even when I am not working. Whilst I do support here at IPS, I do a lot of development in my spare time, on my own projects, and quiet enjoy it. Currently working on an app for my brother which tracks horse racing points for a game that he runs, which is just something a bit different to do of an evening.

Kettlebells - I'm trying to get a little fitter than I am at the moment. I spent a long time being a very unfit person, and sitting at a computer 24/7. Never a good thing to do, and it eventually starts to catch up with your wasteline (honestly. You in your 20s reading this, it does!). I joined a gym before I moved house, and got quite into working out with kettlebells, so when I moved, I bought some to use myself. I now have a PT who creates sessions for me each week.

Bike - Whilst I havent used it half as much as I would like lately, I trained for, and completed, a 100 mile bike ride earlier this year, along with a few friends, including Andy Milne. This made be realise just how much I enjoy riding a bike. To the degree we're now planning our next bike challenge.

Kettle - I'm pretty sure I would die without coffee. There is little else to say about that!

Andy  (Developer and Support technician)

I realise I have far too much clutter in my life answering this question but I managed to come up with 4 things;

Running Shoes
Bike
Watch
Laptop

I’m going to make a conscious effort to be a bit more minimalist now and switch to a standing desk and a Paleo diet or go barefoot or whatever other healthy lifestyle choice @Matt recommends this week.

Mark W (The Senior Developer)

To answer this question I opened up my travel checklist - having taken off the things you said are excluded like clothes and toiletries, the only thing I have is my meditation stool, my laptop, my iPad, my phone, and my watch... so I guess that's my 5!

Matt (Developer and object of ridicule)

It's a hard one to answer. Years ago, before the internet, I could have listed many things but digital devices and "The Cloud" replaces so much. Here's my five.

Macbook Pro. This is my daily work machine and uses iCloud to sync up my work and personal items like photos, etc. I'd have this packed first.

iPhone. It's never far from my hands and with Netflix, Amazon, Audible, iTunes and Kindle contains books, music, favourite TV shows and more. I use Audible most nights to help me switch off and get to sleep.

Sleepphones. I like to look really cool while sleeping, so a grey fleece headband is a must. Fortunately, they also double as bluetooth headphones designed to not dig into your ears while you sleep. I couldn't be without these.

Air Pods. Yes, another pair of headphones. But these little beauties fit in my pocket and I use them when out and about. The lack of cable is a real plus although they're easy to lose.

Concept 2 Rower: Ok, so it's not really going to fit in my hand luggage but I thought about which bit of fitness equipment I'd keep. It's a tough one between kettlebells, weights, the treadmill and the rower but I think the rower wins as it can be used many ways for a good workout.

Mark H (Support Technician and part-time Phil)

Macbook, iPhone, E-cig, suspenders, and my .357 Magnum.
(Editors note: I'm genuinely not sure if this is a joke answer or not but didn't like to ask. Either way it's the best list of things I've ever seen.)

Daniel (Support Technician and Developer)

My five are: Phone, watch, laptop and 1000kg of headache medicine. That's it, i don't need a fifth item since it's only about "stuff" and not family.
(Editors note: I'm hoping that 1000kg is just a guess. I'm starting to regret asking this question.)

Jennifer (Designer)

Computer - This is my work, play, entertainment, and more device. Plus it's a beast.

Mobile Phone - When I'm not on my PC I'm on my phone. It keeps me connected to my communities when I'm out. Plus Zombies, Run is on it.

High heels - If I had to choose a specific pair it would one of these two.

Bed - It is wonderful and has all of my blankets. I couldn't live without my blankets.

Dix It - Because I really couldn't think of another thing and this game is hilarious and fun.

This really got us thinking about what is important to us and how much "stuff" we have. What would your five things be?

Our recent release of Invision Community 4.2 was the most well-received version ever! The feedback we received on new features like Clubs, Reactions, and Promotes was better than we could have hoped and we really enjoyed seeing all the creative uses as people implemented them on their own communities.

We have been hard at work on version 4.3 with a goal of improving on all the great new features. It is well under way and we are happy to able to start announcing what's new over the next few weeks.

Invision Community 4.3 will not only contain new features but also have a core focus on refinement from 4.2's new features. You will see many improvements to Clubs, new integration options, large application improvements, new promotional features, and more changes large and small.

You can expect to see news posts about new features and changes very soon with a release date in early 2018. Follow our news section or subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates.

This week, we were inspired to discuss home automation after @Joel R raised the question in a topic.

With so many commercial options available now, such as Alexa, Siri and Google Home, we started discussing what automation we have in our homes. This week we'll focus on the a few team members who have heavily automated teams. Although @bfarber's answer "I have kids to help automate the home" was a clear winner.

Marc S (Support technician & cycle injury enthusiast)

For me I just have Hive, which is automation for my central heating system, and an Echo. So I can tell my heating to switch on and off by speaking to the echo if I wish, but to be honest its very rare that I do so. I tend to just use my phone, as it would rely on me being in the same room as my echo. 

I have some lights which are on sensors in my en-suite, and in my entrance hall. I have thought about getting bulbs I can switch on and off with voice control, but I'm honestly not sure how much they would be used in comparison to what they cost to buy. Because of the way my lights are configured, it would cost a fortune to do (for example my living room would need 5 bulbs for the main light). If I decided to go down that route, I would be looking for lightswitch adaptations, rather than bulbs.

Andy  (Developer and Support technician)

This is a hobby of mine so might be a long answer! When I fully renovated my apartment I took the opportunity to go wild and put structured cabling and do all the prep work for a complete system. I use a system designed and manufactured by a company in my local area (Idratek.com) as the “controller” which handles heating, lighting, presence detection, intercoms, door locks etc and binds everything together. I installed everything myself and in total used about 2km worth of cat5e wiring with hidden magnetic reed switches recessed in door and window jams. I’ve then extended this by adding integrations with other things such as Hue lighting, automated curtains, zoned heating, a smart kettle and cameras etc. A particular favourite of mine is the integration with Logitech Squeezebox. If somebody rings the doorbell or calls me on Skype then the volume automatically decreases in the room I’m in so I can take the call.

This system goes beyond the mainstream ad hoc automation kits such as Hue and other retail “smart” products in that it’s not just motion detection but presence. So for example if you’re in a room and the doors and windows are closed the system knows you are in that room until the door is opened. So if you’re sat still reading the light won’t turn off on you but it will still turn off automatically as soon as you leave. There’s no relying on extended 10 minute time outs. Lighting is controlled using internal and external light level sensors too so there’s no messing about adjusting the on/off times with seasonal changes.

The system has all the usual smartphone controls but the idea is that it is truly “smart” in that once set up there is little intervention required. Heating is weather compensated for example and although curtains open automatically once the sun comes up, they won’t do so if you’re still in the room to prevent inadvertent flashing to neighbours. If you open a window in a room then the radiators in that room and connecting rooms are automatically switched off so you’re not wasting money heating the outside. I like to kid myself that I’m saving money but in reality the money I have spent probably exceeds any savings I will make in two lifetimes. So if I’m not saving money at least I’m being eco friendly whilst having some fun seeing how far I can push the tech.

Mark W (The Senior Developer)

I'm not as crazy as Andy, but I do have quite a bit of stuff:

• All the lights in the house are Hue. These are coupled with motion sensors (Hue motion sensors which also handily double as temperature and light sensors) but for completeness, I took all of the light switches off the walls, replaced the switches with a blank plate which I then added Hue Dimmer Switches on top of - this means that I can still use "normal" light switches when I want to.
• I have a Hive thermostat, and wrote a Homebridge plugin (https://github.com/mark-wade/homebridge-hive) to allow me to control it with Homekit, which is what I use to tie all my stuff together (Homebridge itself is running on a Raspberry Pi)
• I have a coffee machine and kettle from Smarter, which I also have Homebridge plugins for.
• Every room has a Sonos (Play:1 in bedroom and bathroom, Play:3 in office, kitchen and living room), again with Homebridge plugins

I have automation set up to:

• Turns the lights and music on and off as I move throughout the house
• Turn the coffee machine on after I go into my office in the morning
• Turn everything off and turn the thermostat down once everyone has left the house

But, because I use Homekit to tie it all together, I also use Siri quite a lot. "Hey Siri, turn the coffee machine on" literally never gets old.

I'd really like to get a smart door lock and window blinds, but I'm still waiting for products that are actually decent to arrive on the market (there's a lot of US-centric stuff available, but here in the UK we normally need to wait a bit longer).

Mark H (Support Technician and part-time Phil)

I use an ISY-994i by Universal Devices, which controls *almost* all lights in the house, the door locks (Schlage Z-wave), and is integrated with my: 

• Elk security system
• OneLink fire/CO alarms
• 3 Raspberry PI's with temperature sensors (DS2482-100 I2C to 1-Wire IC) 
• Logitech Harmony
• Davis weather station (Vantage Pro 2)

The mobile App I use to control this all, is Orchestrated Mobilinc.

Daniel (Support Technician and Developer)

A Raspberry Pis running HomeBridge
2 Amazon Dots + 3 Logitech Harmony Hubs & Elite Controllers allow me to control everything via remote controls, phone or voice.

Lights: Hue
Sound: Sonos in all rooms
I have also dozen of homekit compatible sockets to control some none smart devices via the system.
The Harmony Hub but also the Raspberry allow me also to control Dyson Fans.
Since I moved to a Samsung Phone it's quite a mess because I had to find an alternative to control the homekit stuff

Quite clearly, giving developers a box of gadgets and some spare time can lead to very creative things. Do you have any home automation? Do you prefer Alexa to Google Home? Do you also want to move into Andy's house? Let us know.