What is the one thing you'd like to do in life, but haven't got around to yet?
This week, we get introspective and look at the things we'd love to do but haven't found the time to do yet. 

Brandon (Senior tech support and development)

Travel more. I've traveled a little bit, but there are still many many places I'd like to visit. Something tells me I'll need to wait for some of the kids to get older and move out first however.

Mark H (Tech support)

Take a vacation in Hawaii, as that will complete a goal I set in my youth: Visit all 50 States of the US.
Have vacationed, usually camping, in 49 of them so far.

Marc S (Tech Support)

I have a friend who I have spoken to in the US since I was about 13, through originally chatrooms, then ICQ, and these days Facebook. We have always said one day we will meet up, and thats something I certainly intend to do one day, but havent gotten around to it.

Rhett (Cloud Support)

A week in Phillip Island, Australia for the MotoGP Race. It's still on my todo list!

Matt (Senior Developer)

Write a book. Unlike my colleagues, I have no strong desire to travel. I've always wanted to write a book though. In my early teens I used to spend time in front of a mechanical typewriter (through choice, I'm not THAT old) and knocked out a few short stories. They were awful, obviously, but I do love the written word and have a few stories I'd like to get down.

Andy (Senior tech support and development)

Over the years I’ve started learning a few languages and know just enough French and Italian to be dangerous. I’ve never really focused on either though. I would definitely like to get around to becoming a proficient speaker in at least one other non native language.

Mark W (Senior Developer)

I'm going to go with everyone else and say more travel. Since I get to work from home I often get a niggling feeling that I could be doing this anywhere in the world rather than in my little office in Colchester. I've made some strides in that direction this year: I spent New Years Eve in Sydney, a somewhat interesting series of events led me to spend some time in Washington DC (but that's a story for another time), plus I visited Berlin and Krakow. 4 countries in one year isn't too bad I think, hopefully next year I can break it though!

Jennifer (Designer)

Visiting my Irish friend in the UK and attempting to go drink for drink with him to see what sort of shenanigans/trouble he gets me into.

Daniel (Senior tech support and development)

I want to sail around the world for at least one year (but preferable much longer) and visit as many countries as possible on this trip.
I would really love to spent my whole retirement on a sailing ship cruising around the world till i get bankrupt!

Stuart (Senior tech support and development)

I think quite a few people may have a similar answer, but travelling more is something I would really love to do but haven't got to it yet. I've been to USA many times. There are many places on the list I'd like to go at some point like Peru (Machu Picchu), Austraila, Dubai, Indonesia, Bali... Endless list really. A more realistic answer would be to finish some of my project cars that have been sat in a barn for years.

We'd love to hear what you would like to do, but don't have time for just yet. Let us know below!

This week's question is inspired by liquidfractals's reply to last weeks question.

What is your favorite music and which bands would you have loved to see live?
We learned many things; mostly that our team have poor taste in music.

Brandon (Senior tech support and development)

 I like a lot of different genres. I grew up with rap and pop, but I like R&B, country, electronic and rock too. Krayzie Bone of Bone Thugs n Harmony is probably my favorite rapper (and I've seen the group perform live), with Chamillionaire being a close second (and I've actually met him and talked to him one on one). I'd love to see Pentatonix live, that's on my bucket list I'd say.

Mark H (Tech support)

My tastes in music are quite eclectic. 
Given my age, "Rock & Roll" is at the top of the list, but after that it's "anything except Rap and Country". 
Who I'd like to see? Well.... I did have an invite from an older friend to attend Woodstock with him and his even older brother. Problem being, I was still very much a minor. Dad put the kibosh on that idea. I do wish I had gone.

Marc S (Tech Support)

I have lots of different genres of music that I listen to. Pretty much everything from Classical to hard trance, Whitney Houston to Marilyn Manson. I think if I was forced to pick just one, then it would likely be Progressive, or uplifting Trance. I could listen to this all day and night, and have produced some tracks, alongside one of my friends in the past.

Rhett (Cloud Support)

That's a hard one for me, I have kids, and a wife, we listen to all sorts of music, I'm not often in control of the station ?

Matt (Senior Developer)

Music is a huge part of my life. I listen to music all day while I work and I always have a pair of headphones in my pocket. My tastes change considerably depending on my mood but Sigur Ros, Radiohead, The National and Metallica are often on repeat. I quite like Apple Music as it often suggests bands that I've not heard of.  I used to be a guitarist in a Metallica cover band in school. Thankfully it was before the internet existed so no shameful footage exists of those days.

Mark W (Senior Developer)

<looks over to now playing... "Miley Cyrus"> Maybe I won't take part this week...

Jennifer (Designer)

I listen to a lot of different genres and artists. Honestly my music tastes depend on my mood and what I'm focusing on. Thank god for Spotify. I listen to nearly everything except for Death Metal and Country (although I'm sure there are exceptions to the rule for both of them). I tend to lean to female voices over male voices most of the time. I have a special love for Five Nights At Freddys Fan songs, Portal Music and Pink Fluffy Unicorns (dancing on rainbows). 

I'd say some of my top artist loves would be: Amanda Palmer, Janelle Monae, Lily Allen, Nicki Minaj, The Pretty Reckless, Muse, Black Veil Brides, Fall Out Boy, Maroon 5 and Skillet

Daniel (Senior tech support and development)

 All kind of electronic music (DnB, Electro, Frenchcore... literally everything)

Stuart (Senior tech support and development)

I listen mostly to classical music (being married to an Opera singer does that to you). I do also enjoy listening to rock and metal. One band I would have loved to see live is Queen, but unfortunately that was a little (not much) before my time.

Drop us a line and let us know what your favorite music is. If you have any questions for the team that you'd like to be featured, let us know and we'll queue them up!

This week, the team have been discussing the one thing they can not live without. Some found this a hard question to answer.

What is the one thing you cannot live without?
A tricky question for some. Could you pick just one thing?

Brandon (Senior tech support and development)

My family is my saving grace and escape, and even though they're (collectively) the ones typically causing me the most work I wouldn't trade them for anything.

Mark H (Tech support)

I believe my choice would have to be "good coffee". I can deal with no phone, even deal with no credit card. But no coffee? The horror.... the horror. (2 points for naming the reference).

Marc S (Tech Support)

For me, no matter how much I like my computer, and look around for my phone before I do so much as make a coffee, it would have to be speakers. Not because I have a decent set of speakers, and don't even have to be my own speakers, but something that can play music. Whether I'm doing tickets, developing, cleaning, driving, sat in my office or sat in a bar, its the one thing I cant do without. 

Rhett (Cloud Support)

The question really has two answers, On the tech side, it would be my iPhone, I can do anything from it you can think of really and my go to device for communication of all sorts.  In life in general, that's an easy one, "My children, they are the center of my life, and really all that matters is I have them by my side!"

Matt (Senior Developer)

The one "thing" means I don't have to say family or kids! So I definitely think it has to be my MacBook Pro. I switched from a traditional desktop set-up earlier in the year and haven't looked back. I like being able to pick up my MacBook and carry on working while out and about. When I'm home, I plug it up to my two external monitors and it performs as well as any desktop.

Jennifer (Designer)

My iPhone. There is no worse thing than leaving my house without being able to check my chat programs or to be able to play Pokemon Go.

Daniel (Senior tech support and development)

The nerd in me can't live without alfredapp to automate all the things! ( check out their great forum https://www.alfredforum.com  ) 
And the two hours a day of free time I get, I couldn't be without my son and bike.

Stuart (Senior tech support and development)

I pretty much couldn't be without my laptop, I use it for everything from Gaming, Films to Work.

Is there one thing that you can't be without? Let us know below!

This week, the team have been discussing their very first computing memory. This will probably reveal a lot about the age of some of our team. We recently worked out that when Matt and Charles first met and started producing community software, some of the younger members of our team were still in primary school.

What is your first computing memory?
An easy question for tech-heads as we've all been toying with computers since our earliest days.

Brandon (Senior tech support and development)

We had a VIC20 and a Commodore128 growing up. In 6th grade I got into BASIC a little bit and wrote my own home-grown computer program for my school's science fair on the Commodore. It had a 'moon' and a rocket ship sprite, and the sprite flew around the screen and landed into the moon, ending with a quit or play again option. I won the science fair that year.

Mark H (Tech support)

My first "Computing Memory"...... that would be the mainframe I got to play with in 10th grade, one which some wealthy benefactor donated to my Junior High School, 1970. Magnetic core memory and drum memory, and not a transistor to be found within it..

Marc S (Tech Support)

First memory of an actual computer, rather than just a games console, would be the Atari 65XE. My parents got me one for Christmas, along with a few different books and games. My parents were expecting me to hit the games the second I got it, and instead I was copying out the code for making the computer 'Do things'. I guess that was my introduction to programming at the time. 

Rhett (Cloud Support)

"Learning "Basic" on an Apple II in College with 5 1/4 floppies! followed by building my first PC, a 386DX 40, then doing home banking via dial up and dos prompts"

Matt (Senior Developer)

The BBC Micro. It was a computer developed for the classroom to encourage a nation of coders. My dad brought one home along with a magazine and we spent all night typing in a Star Trek game from the magazine and debugged it together. I still have nightmares over my brother reading it out and calling a full colon "a double dot". I loved that machine and often tinkered with it between playing games and using it for homework. I remember writing a Naughts and Crosses (tic-tac-toe) game in school that my teacher did not understand and assumed I had cheated. Special shout out to "Elite" the space trading game that stole most of my youth.

Ryan (Senior Developer)

My first real computing memory was on a Packard Bell running Windows 3.11. I performed my first "echo" at the MS-DOS Command Line, and it was all downhill from there. 

Andy (Senior tech support and development)

My first computing memory is probably playing Sim City on the BBC micro at school aged 6 or 7 but computers were a part of family life from before I was born so I must have had some interactions before this I can’t remember. My first Internet memories were getting home from school aged 10 helping dad build PC motherboards he designed from scratch. I would help place the components before they were soldered and then I would get to use the single machine set up in the corner which had the Mosaic browser and then later the first version of Netscape Navigator installed. I still have an original Internet Movie Database account from 1993. This was probably also my first “Job”. I’m still waiting for my first pay packet!

Jennifer (Designer)

My first really strong memory of computers in general was a Mac. It was Oregon Trails at school with those huge 5 1/2 floppy disks. I always remember how excited I would be to see that black and green screen with that 8 bit old west adventure. True facts. If there was a modern like Conan Exiles survival game that was Oregon Trail based I would most probably get it. If it exists don't tell me about it!

Daniel (Senior tech support and development)

My first coding experience was in the school with really, really old DOS computers.. No Basic, No Pascal ... it was the famous TURTLE aka LOGO!

Stuart (Senior tech support and development)

My first real computer related memory was having a Commodore 64 and an early Amiga with Theme Park. For some reason we also had an external drive for the Amiga that meant we could copy games. After that it was a steady progression of Windows based PCs and now I've got a "large" Laptop that everyone at IPS loves to joke about.

Welcome to the first of a new regular series we're calling "Question of the week". Each week, we'll ask our team a question and share the replies.

To kick things off, we posed a very simple question:

What is your favorite TV show right now?
We may have over-estimated how much TV the average geek watches. Here's what our team said.

Brandon (Senior tech support and development)

How do I answer this without writing an essay?! I really don't watch too many TV shows personally, and I definitely don't have any that I watch religiously. I'd say my favorite is probably Fixer Upper as I tend to like to have those sorts of home repair shows on in the background, and Chip and Joanna Gaines are just too hard not to love.

Mark H (Tech support)

Nova, on our PBS station, because it is not filled with speculation, half-truths, and fake news.

Marc S (Tech Support)

Have been watching misfits. It just seems to be its the more likely scenario around someone getting superpowers. Lets be honest, superman/spiderman etc just isn't what you would realistically do?

Rhett (Cloud Support)

"The Blacklist"  James Spader is excellent in this series! I've been hooked since it started in 2013.

Matt (Senior Developer)

I’m in Game of Thrones hibernation along with most of the world at the moment. I’ve just finished season two of Preacher which I really enjoyed. I found Eugene’s journey through Hell to be a highlight and enjoyed how a small character in season one was fleshed out some more. Also, who cannot love watching Hitler order plum cakes?

Mark W (Senior Developer)

RuPaul's Drag Race. Because I'm what? Sickening.

Ryan (Senior Developer)

I don't really watch a lot of TV - there isn't anything that really catches my eye nowadays, so I mostly just stick to watching my local sports teams with friends (Cincinnati Reds [baseball] and Cincinnati Bengals [football]). That being said, though, I saw a commercial for the Big Bang Theory spin-off "Sheldon" the other day, and I might get hooked into that. It looked pretty good.

Andy (Senior tech support and development)

I'm looking forward to the next series of Stranger Things on Netflix

Jennifer (Designer)

I'm personally in between shows at the moment. I just finished The Walking Dead Season 7 and I'm watching some Anime with the family. I'm the sort of person that bounces around binge watching TV shows and movies. I can say that I am really looking forward to the next season of Santa Clarita Diet though because a zombie housewife is just funny to watch the misadventures of.

Daniel (Senior tech support and development)

I've started watching Dexter.

Stuart (Senior tech support and development)

Star Trek TNG, Just because of Jean-Luc Picard!

Drop us a line and let us know what your favorite show is. If you have any questions for the team that you'd like to be featured, let us know and we'll queue them up!

Over the last month we have released several beta versions and feedback from those that have chosen to jump in on the beta has been great. We really could not be happier. Feedback has included amazement over how stable the beta is to reactions from community members enjoying all the new features.

Everyone here at IPS is very excited to get the full release out so everyone can enjoy it. Not everyone is comfortable using beta releases .

Back in March when we first announced 4.2 was coming soon we said that it would be out in mid-2017 and we are still on track for that. Be sure to keep an eye on announcements for the full release expected in the next 3 - 4 weeks.

We really hope everyone is as excited as we are about 4.2's full release. Based on the feedback from those already using 4.2 beta on their live sites we really think this will be a huge hit with your community.

Here is the roundup of what's new in Invision Community 4.2!

Highlights

There's a lot of new feature in 4.2 but here are a few of the highlights:

Promoting Content - A new way to promote content in your Community internally, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

Clubs - Clubs are a brand new way of supporting sub-communities within your site. Many people have requested social group functionality in the past and Clubs are our implementation of this concept.

Reactions - Offer more fine-grained sentiments towards content than a simple up/down or 'like'. They are now in common usage on social networks, and so users expect to be able to be more nuanced in their response to something they see.

Complete Your Profile - Encourage or require members to fill out the details on their profile. Also now allows for quick registration to encourage joining.

And a whole lot more..

It goes on... here is the full list!

• Leaderboard Enhancements
• Richer Embeds
• Group Promotion Improvement
• Fluid Forum View
• Member History
• Editor Uploading Improvements
• Authy Integration
• Commerce Improvements
• New REST API Endpoints
• Gallery Improvements
• Statistic Reporting
• Copy Topic to Database
• Downloads Index Page
• Blog Sidebar
• Promoting Content
• Clubs
• Reactions
• Calendar Venues
• Social Sign In Streamlining
• Calendar Add Similar Event
• Gallery Lightbox Navigation
• Letter Profile Photos
• SEO Improvements
• Device Management
• Delayed Deletes
• Calendar Event Reminders
• Content Messages
• Recommended Replies
• Complete Your Profile

Be sure to visit each entry above for more information and screenshots. We hope you enjoy Invision Community 4.2!

Completing long and complex forms online is tedious. It can be off putting having to fill in a lot of information before you can join a site or service. You may find that potential members never bother to convert from a visitor.

How to convert guests into regular members is an often asked question. The simple answer is to lower the barrier to entry. Invision Community 4 already allows you to register with Facebook, Twitter, and other networks with ease.

"Complete My Profile" is a system that will lower the barrier of conversion. Guests only have to complete a very basic form to gain membership. Members are then asked to complete any custom profile fields you require.

You can also set up steps that group items together to encourage existing members to add more information to their public profile.

Members with a complete profile and user photo provide others with much more engagement and personality.

Registering
If we look at registering first. Clicking "Sign Up" will only show a simple modal form with as few fields as possible.

If you have required steps, and after any member validation flow, the complete your profile wizard is shown.

This enforces required fields and the member cannot skip them or view other pages until completed.

Of course, you may have steps that are not set to required. These are available too, but are skippable. Members can complete skipped steps later.

A dismissible progress bar shows to members that have uncompleted steps. Once dismissed, it no longer displays in the header of the site.

This same progress bar is always shown in the members' settings overview panel, in the user control panel. This will prompt members with incomplete steps.

If you set up a new required step, members have to complete the step before being able to browse again. This will ensure that all regular members have completed profiles.

Admin Control Panel
You will create new steps in the Admin Control Panel. Each step can contain multiple elements of a single group. This step can be set to required to enforce completion or suggested to allow it to be skipped.

The basic profile group contains things like user photo, birthday and cover photo. Choose any of these for this step.

The custom profile field group contains any fields you have set up already.

You can switch off this system if you feel it does not fit your needs. When disabled, you get the normal registration form.

Reducing the complexity of membership can only help convert more guests into contributing members. Enforcing required steps ensures that you capture data across your membership.

We hope you enjoy this feature and you see an increase in guest conversion with Invision Community 4.2.

This entry is about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release

Top Members

For 4.2 we made some improvements to the Top Members section of the Leaderboard. A new overview page tab shows a selection of the top members across different criteria.

The filter menu allows you to view more members in any chosen category, and a new AdminCP setting controls which categories should be available.

In the AdminCP you can configure which categories are shown on the overview page, the filter menu, and how many results show for each.

Popular Contributors Widget

Another small change is the Popular Contributors widget now contains a link to the appropriate section of the Leaderboard.

This is an entry about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release.

You are probably already familiar with our content embedding feature in IPS Community Suite. When a link to content in the community is pasted into the editor (e.g. a topic, or a post, or a gallery image, etc.) it is automatically expanded into a preview of the content, usually with an accompanying image, allowing users to click through to that content if they are interested.

While it has proved a useful feature to members, each embed used essentially the same structure - a small thumbnail on the left, a title, and a few lines of text. This works fine for topics, but isn't ideal for other kinds of rich content that might be posted.

In IPS Community Suite 4.2, we greatly improved upon our embedding handling, giving every type of content within every application its own customized embed style, allowing that content to be displayed however works best. This means larger high-res previews of Gallery images, a button to download a file right from the embed for Downloads files, showing a map for Calendar events, and so on. We worked to keep a consistent overall style between apps, but allow each to display its own relevant information.

For users, things will work exactly as they do now - they simply paste a link to content, and it will continue to expand automatically. The changes are also backwards compatible. Any existing embeds in your community will automatically show the new styling you see below - no rebuilding necessary.

So with that in mind, let's take a look what the new embeds look like! I won't show every single embed here because there's a huge number, but I'll try and give you a feel for how we approached the embed styles for each app.

I hope that gives you a good overview of what to expect when your users try out the new embeds for themselves. As always, please share your feedback in the comments below!

This is an entry about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release.

The ability to automatically promote users from one group to another based on set parameters has been a staple of community software for some time. Traditionally, the most common determination of promotion has been post count. Additionally, the 4.x Community Suite supports promoting members automatically based on the time elapsed since the user joined the site and based on their total reputation count.

With 4.2, we have completely overhauled and enhanced the group promotion feature bringing many new options to administrators looking to promote members through different group levels.

To start with, the group promotion options have been removed from the groups configuration pages into their own area.

You will notice that rules are no longer strictly tied to a single group, and that rules can be sorted however you desire. When you create and edit rules, you can choose which groups the rule applies to, what parameters the user needs to meet in order for the rule to be activated, and then finally, which primary and secondary groups the user will be moved in to. You can also configure the rule to remove specified secondary groups, which can be useful if one rule adds a secondary group for users, and then the next rule should change them to be part of a different secondary group (i.e. add a new secondary group, but also remove the previously awarded secondary group).

The system uses the same member filters available when configuring bulk mail, and we have made some updates to the member filters area (and have introduced some new filters) in this release as well. For example, you can create a rule that only applies to members who have won the daily leaderboard at least once, or members who have created a blog.

Any time a member account is updated for any reason (a new visit, editing the member, the member makes a new post, etc.), the software will loop through all configured rules and the last rule in the list that matches the member will be applied. This approach allows you to create promotion levels, for instance when a member reaches 100 posted content items they will be promoted to a new group, and when they reach 1000 posted content items they will be promoted to yet a different new group.

Groups can be wholly excluded from any promotion rules, which is useful when you have administrator and/or moderator groups and you want to ensure that they are never moved to a different group. These groups will be disabled from selection when configuring group promotion rules, and these groups will be ignored if "any group" is selected for a promotion rule.

Finally, if a user is moved to a new primary group by Commerce because they have purchased a product which moves them to a new group, they will also be excluded from group promotion rules (however, Commerce purchases that only adjust secondary groups will not exclude users from being checked by group promotion rules).

Developer note: You can add your own filters for group promotion rules (and bulk mails) by adding MemberFilter extensions in 4.2, available in the Developer Center for your application.

When you have a diverse range of topics within your community, it makes good sense to separate topics within forums and categories. This will ensure that the viewer can find relevant content by scanning the list of forums first.

If you have a more focused community with fewer forums, presenting your community with a list of them can be daunting. This is especially true for less experienced visitors raised on social media.

Fluid forum view allows your visitors to get right to the meat of your community; the topics.

A fan site for a band is a good example of a community that will benefit with fluid view. There will likely be forums for album reviews, tour dates, general discussion and so on. Even though there are many forums, the common topic is the band. This makes fluid view ideal as your members can see all those related topics in one view. If your members wanted more specific topics, they could select a single forum to view.

Let us take a look at fluid view in action. We will then break it down and explain how it works in more detail.

The video shows the topic list and the forum filter box. As you can see, it is easy to change the topic list by changing the selected forums. This view replaces the traditional list of categories and forums.

Of course, you can permit your members to change the view to better suit their way of working.

You will notice a "grid" option. We have moved the grid forum theme setting into the main forum settings. This makes it an option for your members to choose, if the administrator permits it.

You have full control over the display options. This screenshot shows that the control panel option to choose the default view. There is also an option to control which views your members can select. You may also decide to not allow your members to switch views at all. This will ensure that they all use the view you choose.

You may have spotted that forum names have a colored background in some screenshots. We added the ability to define a feature color per forum. This feature color helps the forum stand out in a more visual way. This is especially useful when you select many forums in a single view.

This feature color also works on the table view.

We added a feature color hint to topic view to enforce the association between the forum and its color.

This screenshot also shows the removal of the forum breadcrumb in fluid view mode. Fluid view remembers your last forum selection so you don't lose your place when you go back to the listing.

The benefit of this feature is easy to see. It removes a potential barrier of entry for your audience. It puts the spotlight on topics themselves, and not the hierarchical forum structure. Your members will enjoy viewing many forums at once and switching between them without leaving the page.

We hope that fluid view is an asset to your community and your members enjoy this new functionality.

Technical notes.
The database stores the members' view choice. This remembers the selection across devices. Guests are not permitted to change between views.

In previous versions of IPS Community Suite we have had an account history feature in our Commerce application. This feature showed many important actions that may be relevant to the customer such as when an invoice was generated or when a customer changed their account details.

In IPS Community Suite 4.2 we have expanded this functionality and moved it into the core functionality of the suite.

Member actions that will be logged include (but are not limited to)

• Email address change
• Display name change
• Password change
• Account merge
• Primary group change (The reason will be shown when triggered by an automatic group promotion)
• Secondary group change
• Flagged/Unflagged as spammer
• Multi-Factor Authentication (Enable / Disable / Opt-out)
• Social media (Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, Google, Twitter, IPS Connect) for enabling, disabling and which (if any) were used to register an account.

The Commerce customer account page will now show actions that may be related with a transaction or account.

Discoverability

Each action is also discoverable via the IP Address tools built into IPS Community Suite 4

We’ve also made the data table filterable

Notes for developers:

• The new Member History system has been designed with interoperability in mind. In IPS Community Suite 4.2 you will be able to integrate your own applications into this system.
• Member History replaces the display name changes system.

IPS Community Suite has supported drag and drop uploading to the attachments area at the bottom of the editor since 4.0. In 4.2 we're pleased to add the ability to drag and drop right into the editor, so you can drop your attachment exactly where you want it to show without having to add it afterwards.

If your browser and OS supports it you can also copy and paste, either from the desktop or from other content on the web:

Naturally this works for ordinary files as well as images:

In 4.1.18 we added Two Factor Authentication. Already in 4.2 we have announced a new setting to trigger 2FA when logging in from a new device, and in 4.2 we are also adding Authy as an authentication handler.

Authy can send a user a text message, make a phone call, or send a push notification to a smartphone app to authenticate the user. You can enable whichever of these options you like.

Set Up

To set up Two Factor Authentication with Authy, the user will enter their phone number. To verify their phone number they will then enter a code shown in the Auhy app or have a code sent by text message or phone call. The system will automatically show an appropriate interface based on what options you have enabled - for example, if you don't want to enable the app as an option, it will not reference Authy.

Verification with Authy

When the user needs to verify their account, the system will automatically show an appropriate interface. If you allow verification with the Authy app and either it is the only option you allow, or the system knows that the user has installed the Authy app, the system will prompt them to use the app. This can either be done using Authy's OneTouch option (where the user will receive a push notification to the app, and when they click approve, the screen will automatically refresh) or their SoftToken option (where the user will be instructed to open the Authy app and enter the code they see). If you allow authentication by text message and/or phone call as well, the user will also see options for using those instead.

These screenshots show the process for OneTouch authentication:

Once the user has approved, the waiting screen will automatically refresh with the user authenticated.

For SoftToken authentication, the user is prompted to enter the code shown in the Authy app:

Phone Verification

If you have disabled the Authy app as an option, or the user does not have it installed, they will be prompted to choose from the available options how they want to authenticate.

These screenshots show the process for authenticating by text message:

Management

If the user changes their phone number they can reconfigure the system in their account settings. The system automatically shows "Phone Verification" rather then "Authy" if the app is not available as an option.

Improved Stripe Integration

Stripe is a popular payment gateway that supports card payments. In IPS Community Suite 4.2 we have made some improvements to our integration:

• When viewing a transaction in the AdminCP, it will show the last 4 digits of the card used, and the result of Stripe's risk evaluation.
• More information is sent to Stripe for easier cross-reference between Stripe's control panel and your AdminCP. This includes the customer's name, billing and shipping addresses, email address, associated transaction/invoice/customer IDs, and the invoice title.

Anti-Fraud Improvements

Anti-Fraud Rules now have some additional filters:

• Products being purchases includes...
• Account was registered more/less than [x days] ago
• Customer is/isn't in group
• Customer has previously spent more/less than
• Time since last purchase is more/less than [x days] ago
• Custom profile fields (both at member and customer level)
• IP address is x (exactly, contains or matches regular expression)
• Customer has previously made transactions that failed (opposed to "were blocked by fraud rules")
• Email address matches regular expression

MaxMind per gateway

A new setting has been added that allows you to run MaxMind only against transactions using particular payment gateways.

Transaction Search

You can now enter the transaction ID provided by the payment gateway in the AdminCP search box to find a transaction.

Renewal Savings

If you have a product with multiple renewal terms, a new setting allows you to show alongside each option how much is saved. This can be shown either as a monetary value, or as a percentage.

We are expanding on the already available REST API endpoints to include more support for nodes. This significantly increases the flexibility of the API and now allows forums, downloads categories, calendars etc. to be created programmatically via external sources.

 As is usual with the existing content item endpoints, access for nodes is configured via the admin control panel for each API key that is generated.

For those new to the REST API, documentation can be found in the developer resources section and within the admin control panel.

New endpoints in 4.2 include;

• GET /core/groups - Get a list of groups
• GET /core/groups/{id} - Get information about a specific group
• DELETE /core/groups/{id} - Delete a group
• GET /forums/forums - Get a list of forums
• GET /forums/forums/{id} - Get information about a specific forum
• POST /forums/forums - Create a forum
• POST /forums/forums/{id} - Edit a forum
• DELETE /forums/forums/{id} - Delete a forum
• DELETE /blog/blogs/{id} - Delete a blog
• GET /calendar/calendar - Get a list of calendars
• GET /calendar/calendar/{id} - Get information about a specific calendar
• POST /calendar/calendar - Create a calendar
• POST /calendar/calendar/{id} - Edit a calendar
• DELETE /calendar/calendar/{id} - Delete a calendar
• GET /downloads/category - Get a list of downloads categories
• GET /downloads/category/{id} - Get information about a specific category
• POST /downloads/category - Create a category
• POST /downloads/category/{id} - Edit a category
• DELETE /downloads/category/{id} - Delete a category

We are continuously looking for ways to improve developer functionality so if you have any ideas for additional endpoints or suggestions for improved documentation please feel free to share them in the comments below.

We are really looking forward to seeing the new and imaginative ideas 3rd party developers can create using these additional capabilities.

We are happy to introduce several changes to our Gallery application to both refine the existing capabilities and to introduce new useful functionality; particularly for Albums.

We have clarified how to submit images directly to a category on the first step of the upload form in Gallery.

When submitting images to the Gallery, a simple "Add more images" button has been added to the wizard. While it has always been possible to add more images by dragging and dropping them on to the upload area, or by clicking the "Choose files" button again, the addition of this button should help add some clarity for users who overlooked these capabilities.

Applying the same details to all of the images you are submitting has been made much simpler. When you begin entering the details for the first image, you can specify a template to use for the caption name leveraging a special replacement "%n". A small help icon next to the caption field label explains how to use this capability. When you are done supplying the details, you can click "Copy details to all images" and your submission will start instantly, using all of the details supplied for the image you are editing. You can quickly set tags, an image description and a caption name template (for instance "Aquarium %n") to all images using this new capability, useful when submitting 50+ images at once. Of course, you can still supply the details for each individual image as well, if you wish.

In addition to improvements for submitting images, albums have been updated to include many new features, including:

• Commenting
• Reviews
• Reactions
• Messages
• Featuring
• Hiding
• Locking
• Reporting
• Searching

A new Gallery widget (sidebar block) to show albums anywhere throughout the Community Suite has been added as well.

Going along with these changes, we've improved how groups of images that are submitted to an album are handled in searches. If you submit multiple images to an album, you will only see the album listed in activity streams, and similarly if you follow a bunch of images in an album these are grouped as well, making activity streams more useful and easier to follow.

The changes to albums and image submissions will simplify your users' interaction with Gallery in 4.2, and make submitting images and new albums, and working with those albums more useful and robust.

Statistics can be an important part of monitoring your site and ensuring it grows and responds to your marketing and promotion efforts effectively, and several new statistic tools have been added to the 4.2 Community Suite which we know you will be excited to learn about!

A simple tool has been added that will allow you to look up and list all member accounts that have last visited the site within a specified time period.

Additionally, online user (both logged in user and guest) counts are now tracked every 15 minutes and graphed in the AdminCP for you to reference. You can view online user trends over a specified date period, view just guest counts or just member counts (or both), and view the graph in multiple different modes (such as an area chart or as a column chart). By default, the data is retained for 180 days, however you can control how often to prune this statistical data in the AdminCP.

You can also view a graph of member activity on the site. Member activity is defined as any "activity" beyond simply browsing, such as submitting a new post, reacting to any content item or comment, or following any content item or node.

You will also be able to define keywords that you would like to monitor and then see both a graph of usage of those keywords, as well as a table listing all usages of those keywords. You can use this to track usage of competitor names, find out if hash tags you define are trending, or learn if promotional materials are making an impact on your membership.

Along with these additions, we've cleaned up the menu and wording for the rest of the existing statistic options to make their functions more clear.

We hope these additions help you better track and control your community, making the most of your time and money.

Note for developers: A new chart class has been added which allows you to populate dynamic charts using callbacks, in addition to the standard methods that already exist for pulling data directly from a specified database table.

We have introduced a feature which will allow moderators, with permission, to copy topics from the Forums application, into any custom database in the Pages application.

This feature will copy the contents of the first post of a topic, and copy it as the body of the new record. The moderator copying the topic will then be given a pre-populated form which will have the Title and Content fields automatically filled with the topic title and first post contents, which then can be modified to add any additional notes (such as an editors note at the bottom). The form will also include any custom fields that can be filled in, as well as all moderation options you would normally see when creating a record.

In addition to all of the normal options you would typically see, there are two additional options. The first is the ability to copy all posts in the topic as comments on the new record. The second is the ability to post the record as the original topic author, or as the moderator copying the topic.

This new feature is very useful when you might see a topic in the forums that you want to copy to an article or keep in a permanent knowledge base.

In IPS Community Suite 4.2 we have added a bunch of new settings for the Downloads Index Page.
 

With 4.2 you'll be able to hide any of the boxes. 

Another often requested feature was that people want to be able to choose the categories from where the files should be fetched
This way you'll be able to hide files from some very old categories.

In IPS Community Suite 4.2 we have added some additional customization options for Blogs

The sidebar now features a space reserved for Blog owners to add a little further info, add links to social network sites, contact info, or anything at all they desire.

The sidebar will show across all of the Blog pages (unlike the Blog description) and uses the standard built in text editor which supports all of the usual features such as embeds, images, links, and all other editor plugins you have enabled.

Editing the sidebar is as easy as editing the Blog info via the Manage Blog menu. It's then a simple matter of toggling the sidebar on and entering the info.

The Blog sidebar content is controlled by the owner of the Blog and is only available if the administrator activates the option. If set, the content shows above any other widgets placed in the sidebar.

This has been a frequently requested change and we are happy to add this to make Blogs more individual and engaging.

IPS Community Suite 4.2 puts a new tool at your disposal: promotions.

There’s no denying the popularity of social media. Worldwide, Facebook has 1.86 billion users active monthly. Every day, millions of people are using Facebook to speak with friends, to talk about their interests and to find new people to connect with.

Of that 1.86 billion people, a good portion of those are actively discussing topics your forum covers. There is a huge opportunity to tap into social media to join in the discussion and to promote your community and provide a venue to carry on the discussion.

For a while, we’ve had social media log in extensions, which means that your users can sign into your community simply by clicking a relevant button. We’ve also had the ability to share things to a personal Facebook account. These tools are great for your users, but how do they help you, forum owner?

IPS Community Suite 4.2 introduces a way to promote your content directly to your brand’s Facebook page and your brand’s Twitter account.

You can curate fun and engaging topics and share them. The workflow is simple. Simply browse your community and queue up interesting topics, comments, gallery items, blog posts or database articles for posting throughout the day to your brand’s social media accounts. You choose the schedule, the hashtags and the wording to send.

Let’s look at the feature set in more detail.

Your first stop is to set up the feature from the admin panel. The system will guide you through the necessary steps of connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Once Facebook has been set up, you can select any page that you are an administrator of on Facebook.

The admin panel also offers scheduling options and permissions.

You can pre-set the times for when content will be posted. Facebook and Twitter both have analytic tools to determine when your visitors are most frequently online. A good tip here is to set the time to a slightly odd number, so 11:45am is better than 12:00pm as you are likely to catch the attention of someone waiting for lunch, or a lunchtime meeting.

You have full control over who can promote items to your social media accounts. You can specify by group or pick individual members who may not be in those groups.

Now that you’ve set up the backend, we can get promoting.

Each item, that is a topic, gallery album, blog entry or article has its own Promote button.

Each post and comment can also be shared individually, which is an easy way to share great content your visitors add to existing conversations.

Clicking this brings up the sharer.

This is where you can customize the text that is sent out to each social media channel. You’ll also notice space to promote this item within your own community in addition (or instead of) Facebook or Twitter, we will explore that shortly.

The sharer is smart enough to pull attachments already added in the post, and you can upload your own images to be sent. Generally, shared items that have an image get better organic reach than just text alone so you’ll almost always want to choose or add an image. Twitter can use up to 4 images, and Facebook allows 1000 pictures per album, but you’ll never want to upload that many!

Once you’ve filled out your content and picked your images, you can schedule the promotion. Generally, you’ll want to use the auto schedule option as this allows you to just stack up multiple items and let the auto scheduler post the items according to your pre-set schedule. You can also set a specific date and time if you are looking to run a promotion or other time sensitive event.

It’s easy to see the status of your queued and sent items from the moderator view.

This area allows you to see previous promotions and modify pending promotions.

Earlier, we mentioned that the system has the ability to promote content internally. Promoting items to your own community lets you, the community manager, curate interesting items and comments and present this to your community. This is a great way to allow your visitors to explore content you think they’d enjoy.

Promoting content to your community via Our Picks also allow you to promote content if you cannot or choose not to use social networks. It has the advantage that social networks do not have over a community platform like IPS Community Suite: consistency. The content on your community is always there whereas a social network is all about right here right now. Miss it and you miss out. On your community you can engage and re-engage a subject all you want. 

Of course, we’ve built a widget that you can drag and drop to most pages to make this curated list more visible.

IPS Community Suite 4.2 gives you, the site owner and community manager the tools you need to reach out and engage new users already discussing the topics on social media your community covers. With single click sign in and the built in retention functionality the suite offers, you’ll have a powerful way of growing your user base. It furthers that goal by created a list of that promoted content for continual reference and promotion for visitors already on your site.

We’ve got lots more to discuss on this subject, and in the coming months we’ll be putting together some guides on social media best practices and how to leverage Facebook’s excellent post promotion / pay per click tools to further boost your site’s visibility to social media users.

We’re here to help you make a success of your community and to give social media users a venue for when they outgrow Facebook.

We are happy to introduce the next major feature that will be available in IPS Community Suite 4.2 - Clubs.

Clubs are a brand new way of supporting sub-communities within your site. Many people have requested social group functionality in the past and Clubs are our implementation of this concept. Let's take a look at a few screenshots, and then go over what they are capable of doing.

There's a lot to digest there! Let's go over the basic functionality.

Club Types

Four types of club are available:

• Public clubs
  Clubs that anyone can see and participate in without joining.
• Open club
  Clubs that anyone can see and join.
• Closed club
  Clubs that anyone can see in the directory, but joining must be approved by a Club Leader or Club Moderator. Non-club-members who view the club will only see the member list - not the recent activity or content areas.
• Private club
  Clubs that do not show in public, and users must be invited by a Club Leader or Club Moderator

As the site admin, you can of course configure which club types can be created and by whom. You could, for example, allow members to create public and open clubs, but allow a "VIP" group to also create Closed and Private clubs.

Club Users

Each club has three levels of user:

• Leader
  A leader has all of the permissions of a moderator, and can add other moderators. They can also add content areas (see below). The club owner is automatically a leader.
• Moderators
  Moderators, as the name implies, have the ability to moderate content posted within the club. As the site administrator, you can define which moderator tools can be used. You could, for example, prevent any content being deleted from clubs, but allow it to be hidden. Moderators can also remove members from a club.
• Users
  Anyone else that joins the club.

Your site administrator and moderators, with the appropriate permissions, are able to moderator content in any Club regardless of whether they are a member of it. 

Clubs can be created by any user who has permission. As you would expect, this is controlled by our regular permission settings.

For closed clubs, there's an approval process. Users can request to join and the request must be approved by a leader. Leaders get a notification when a user requests to join; the user gets a notification when their request is approved or denied.

Club Content

Club Leaders can add a variety of content areas to their club - forums, calendars, blogs and so on. It's important to note that these content areas are fully functional just as if they existed as a top-level admin created area. They will appear in search results, activity streams, users can follow them, embed links to them, and so on. If a user has permission to see a forum (for example) within a club it will behave exactly like other forums they see - and the same for all other kinds of content.

Each content area a leader adds can have a custom title, and will appear in the club navigation. This means, for example, that you can have multiple forums within a club, and give each a different name.

Club Custom Fields

Clubs also support custom fields. Custom fields are defined by the site administrator and can be filled in by Club Owners. The values they enter are shown (along with the club description) on the club homepage.

On the Club Directory page, users can filter by the custom club fields.

Club Locations

Clubs have built-in support for Google Maps, allowing users to specify a physical location for their club. Let's say you run a community for car enthusiasts; each club might be tied to a particular region's meetup. The Club Owner specifies the location when setting up the club, and clubs are then shown on map on the directory page:

And within a club, the location is shown too:

Club Display

We offer two ways to display club headers within the club - the standard way, shown in the screenshots you've seen up to this point, but we also have a sidebar option. This is something the admin sets globally for the site, rather than per-club. This is useful where your site design doesn't facilitate another horizontal banner taking up valuable screen real-estate; moving the club banner to the sidebar alleviates this pressure on vertical space.

Using Clubs in Other Ways

There's a lot of scope for using clubs beyond allowing users to create their own groups. You do not even have to call them "clubs" if that does not suit your use case. For example, on a company intranet you could rename Clubs to "Departments", and create a private group for each of your main roles. This would allow each department to have its own community, with its own forums, gallery, file sharing and so on, private and separate from other departments.

Similarly, they'd also work well in situations where you as the site admin want to create entire micro-communities. Take for example a video game publisher. Using Clubs, they could create a micro-community for each of their games, complete with forums, galleries and so forth, and then set the Clubs directory as their overall community homepage. Immediately, they have a setup that hasn't until now been possible out-of-the-box with IPS Community Suite.

We expect our clients will come up with some really innovative uses for the new Club functionality, and we can't wait to see what you do. We'd love to hear your feedback - let us know what you think in the comments.