4.5: User Interface Improvements

Invision Community has certainly changed a lot over the years as we've moved through major updates and large user interface changes.

While large scale changes offer a dramatic difference, it is sometimes the smaller changes that bring the most satisfaction when using your community daily.

This blog entry rounds up some of the UI improvements Invision Community 4.5 brings.

Content View Behavior
What do you want to happen when you click a topic link? Are you taken to the first comment, the last comment or the first comment you've not read? If you speak to 100 people, I'm pretty sure you'll get a good spread of votes for each.

Invision Community has always offered subtle ways to get right to the first unread comment. Our infamous dot or star allows you to do this, but it is so subtle almost no one knows this.

Invision Community 4.5 now allows each member to choose (with the AdminCP offering a default).

Now everyone wins!

Who Reacted?
Invision Community has had reactions for a long while now. Although finding out who exactly reacted without clicking the counts has proved irksome.

We've fixed that in Invision Community so simply mousing over the reaction icon reveals who reacted.

Sign In Anonymously
For as long as I can remember, Invision Community has offered an option to sign in anonymously via a checkbox on the login form.

However, as we've added faster ways to log in via Facebook, Twitter, Google and more it's become less straight forward to ensure your anonymity.

Invision Community 4.5 removes this login preference and moves it to your members' settings.

Now your members can resume hiding as they move around your community across multiple logins.

Resize Before Uploading
One of the most popular requests we've had in recent times is to resize large images before uploading. It's quite likely that your giant full resolution image will be denied when attempting to upload, and it's a bit of a faff to resize it in a photo editor.

Invision Community leverages the uploader's ability to resize before uploading, which makes it a much happier experience.

Switch Off Automatic Language Detection
Invision Community attempts to map your browser's user-agent to a specific language pack.

When you visit a site, your browser lets the site know which language our browser is set to (often dictated by your operating system) and we use that to show you the correct language if the community you're visiting has multiple languages installed.

However, it might be that you don't want this to happen because although your computer's OS is set to a specific language, it doesn't always follow that is the one you wish to use on a website.

Invision Community 4.5 allows this automatic detection to be switched off.

Quote Collapse
We will finish with another popular feature request; the ability for long quotes to be collapsed, reducing the amount of scrolling one has to do.

Quite simply, Invision Community collapses long quotes with an option to expand them to read the entire quote.