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Outside your window, the leaves have burst into fiery reds and oranges.  A crisp breeze floats in the air.  The birds have long chirped their good-byes.
And you’re sipping a hot cup of apple cider, contemplating the change in season.
The holidays are almost here.
The end of the year is one of the best chances to take stock your community and provide an emotive experience for your members.  It’s a chance to reflect upon what you learned, what new initiatives you started, and what you still have ahead of you.  It’s a chance to provide a sense of closure to the year and to ignite one more burst of community-wide goodwill.  In short, the holiday season is an amazing opportunity to bring your community together one last time in 2018.

 
Here are 16 ideas for the holidays in four categories.  Try to select at least one idea from each category for a holiday plan that runs the gamut of the community experience.  Choose the ones that you especially like; gather your staff members to brainstorm; and put together a plan that’ll navigate you better than Santa’s reindeer through the holidays!
Design
One of the easiest and simplest things you can do is to update your community’s design for the holiday to provide an immediate visual impact.  Users love to see fun twists on your theme.

1.    Tweak your logo with falling snow or twinkling lights.
2.    Replace your forum icons with holiday ones.
3.    Go bold and install a whole new holiday theme from the Marketplace.
4.    Coordinate the holiday design across all of your social media and web properties.
Remembrance
Your 2018 was filled with emotional triumphs and tribulations. Did your community accomplish something great?  How many new members did you welcome?  Did you lose any members?  Create a shared experience that binds and connects your community closer together.

1.    Craft a year-end mailer that chronicles your community’s victories and struggles.
2.    Post a “Did You Remember This?” topic that reconnects with all the funniest, informative, and most poignant topics.
3.    Edit a “Top Moments of 2018” montage that highlights the biggest events that transformed your community in the past year.
4.    Memorialize members who have moved on or departed your community.
Appreciation
Holidays are all about demonstrating appreciation for your loved ones, and your community is no different.  Take the time to demonstrate an authentic and warm appreciation for all members who have shared the past year with you. 

1.    Promote new users who have done a superb job of supporting the community over the year.
2.    Send out physical or digital gifts as a token of your appreciation to key members.
3.    Write individualized messages for every staff member that highlights their wonderful contributions.
4.    Send a thank-you note to Invision Community in the comments below on how using Invision Community has helped propel your community’s growth in 2018.
Celebration
Finally, the holidays are a season of celebration.  Spread tidings of joy and merriment to all members in your community, social media, and offline for all-around cheer.
 
1.    Count down to the holidays with different daily announcement using the Announcements feature.
2.    Write a year-end “2018 Celebration Message” mailer to applaud all the great events from 2018
3.    Host a winter giveaway with special holiday packages or gifts.
4.    Throw a holiday party as a meet-up, using Calendar and Venues, to mingle with your members in person.
Reconnect your members one more time in 2018 with a rich and shared story of the past year.  The holidays are an intensely emotional time that can provide an occasion for remembrance, an occasion for appreciation, and most of all, an occasion of celebration of all great things that have happened and are yet to come.  Let your community be the gift that keeps on giving.  
Happy holidays to all Invision Community clients, and may your winter holidays be filled with joyous cheer and community friendship!
Joel R is a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. When he's not running his own successful community, he's peppering Invision Community's private Slack channel with his feedback, community management experience and increasingly outrageous demands (everything is true except the last part).

Ever since its first release, the REST API built into the Invision Community software has proven to be a very powerful and well-received feature.
We love seeing what our clients and modification authors are able to do with the level of integration afforded to them through this capability, and so it is only natural that we have looked to expand the functionality in our upcoming 4.4 release.
Poll Support
Beginning with 4.4, you will now be able to create and update polls for both topics and blog entries through the REST API. Of course, modification authors can use this new endpoint.
Warn Reasons
You will also now be able to manage warn reasons through the REST API. This includes fetching a list of reasons, as well as fetching an individual reason, creating warn reasons, updating existing warn reasons, and deleting warn reasons.
Event Venues
Event venues can now be listed and individual venues fetched through the REST API, and you can now add, update and delete event venues through the REST API.
Member Notifications
You can now retrieve a list of notifications for a specific member through the REST API, useful if you were to attempt to recreate the notifications menu on a third party website (for example).
Warning Users
The REST API will now expose the warnings a user has received through a new endpoint. Additionally, you can fetch individual warnings, issue new warnings, undo and/or delete issued warnings, and acknowledge warnings through the REST API. If you are building a site wrapper around your community, you can leverage this functionality to ensure that users are unable to post elsewhere on your site if they have unacknowledged warnings within the community (and also to provide them with a way to acknowledge those warnings right on your site).

The REST API Reference
Node permissions
Beginning with 4.4, you will now be able to set the permissions for a node when adding or updating it through the REST API (for example, you can now adjust the permissions for a forum or a downloads category through the REST API). Many clients noticed that while they could create new nodes through the API, the nodes would be unusable until an administrator manually went in and specified the permissions, so this change can eliminate this extra step in many situations.
Event filtering
You will now also be able to filter the events you pull through the Calendar REST API endpoints by start and end date (e.g. so you can show events within a specific time frame, such as the current week), and you can now also specify to sort the events returned by the event start date or the event end date.
Clubs
And finally, for those who leverage clubs on their communities, we have built in full REST API support for clubs. You can list all clubs, return a specific club, create new clubs, update existing clubs, and delete clubs through the REST API. Further, you can list all members in a club, add a specific member to a specific club, remove a member from a club, fetch the content types available for use within a club (i.e. so you can determine which applications are installed and have club support on a given site), fetch the nodes (displayed as tabs/sections within a club) created within a club, and delete nodes from a club. Important behind the scenes steps, such as generating invoices for members requesting to join paid clubs, are all handled automatically for you when using the REST API.
We believe these changes will help clients better integrate with our software and open up new possibilities with their websites.
Would you like us to add any other endpoints? Let us know in the comments below!

It might seem a little odd starting a blog on increasing Invision Community's speed with the word "lazy",  but I'll explain why this is a good word for performance shortly.
Earlier this year, Google announced that page speed is a ranking factor.
Simply put, if your site is slow, it will be ranked lower in Google's search results.
It is always a challenge making a large application like Invision Community as efficient as possible per page load. A single Invision Community page can pull in widgets from multiple applications as well as a lot of user-generated content with attachments, movies and images used heavily. 
This is where being lazy helps.
Lazy loading is a method by which attachments, embeds and images are not loaded by default. They are only loaded when the viewer scrolls down enough to make them visible.
This allows the page to load a good deal faster now it doesn't have to load megabytes of images before the page is shown as completely rendered.
I was going to take a fancy video showing it in action, but it's hard to capture as the system loads the media just before you get to it, so it looks fairly seamless, even with sluggish connections.

Not the most dynamic image, but this shows the placeholder retains the size of the image
In addition to image attachments, we have also added this lazy loading to maps and Twitter emoji images.
Improving non-image attachments
Once we had implemented the lazy loading framework, an area we wanted to improve was non-image attachments.
We have listened to a lot of the feedback we had on this area, and have now made it very clear when you add an attachment into a post. We've even returned the download count now it's being loaded on demand.

Using attachments when posting
All the letters
When we first implemented the letter avatars in 4.3, we discussed whether to use CSS styling or use an image.
We decided to go with an image as it was more stable over lots of different devices, including email.
We've revisited this in 4.4, and switched the letter avatars to SVG, which are much faster to render now that the browser doesn't have to load the image files.
Other performance improvements
We've taken a pass at most areas with an eye for performance, here is a list of the most significant items we've improved.
Several converter background tasks have been improved, so they work on less data Duplicate query for fetching clubs was removed in streams Notifications / follower management has been improved Member searches have been sped up (API, ACP live search, member list in ACP, mentions, etc.). Stream performance has been improved UTF8 conversions have been sped up Elasticsearch has been sped up by using pre-compiled queries and parameterisation, as well as the removal of view filtering (and tracking) HTTP/2 support with prefetch/preload has been added Several PHP-level performance improvements have been made Implemented rel=noopener when links open a new window (which improves browser memory management) Several other performance improvements for conversions were implemented that drastically reduce conversion time IP address lookups now fetch IP address details from us en-masse instead of one request per address Cache/data store management has been streamlined and centralised for efficiency Many background tasks and the profile sync functionality have all been improved for performance Brotli compression is now supported automatically if the server supports it Redis encryption can now be disabled if desired, which improves performance Phew, as you can see, we've spent a while tinkering under the hood too.
We'd love to hear your thoughts. Let us know below!
This blog is part of our series introducing new features for Invision Community 4.4.

It's very easy to focus on a single metric to gauge the success of your community.
It's very common for community owners to look at page hits and determine if their SEO and marketing efforts have paid off.
Getting traffic to your site is only half the equation though. The most valuable metric is how many casual visitors you're converting to engaged members.
Invision Community already makes it easy for guests to sign up using external services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.
However, there has to be a conscious decision to click that sign-up button. For some, this may be a barrier too many.
Invision Community 4.4 reduces this barrier by allowing guests to create a post to a topic they want to engage with.
Once they have posted, they are asked to simply complete their registration. They are more likely to do this now they have invested in your community.
This will be incredibly valuable when you consider how much traffic a forum receives from inbound Google searches. With Post Before Registering, you'll increase your chances of turning that inbound lead into a registered member contributing to your site.
Let me take you through the feature and show you how it works.
When browsing the community guests will see the ability to submit a post, with an explanation that they can post now and complete registration later. The only thing they have to provide in addition to their post is an email address.

Posting as a guest
This works in any application for new content (topics, Gallery images, etc.) as well as comments and reviews. It will only show when a newly registered member would be able to post in that area - for example, it will not show in a forum that only administrators can post in. 
After submitting the post, the post will not be visible to any user, but the user will immediately be redirected to the registration form with an explanation to complete the registration. The email address they provided will already be filled in.

Registration form after posting as a guest
At this point, the user can either fill in the registration form, or use a social sign in method like Facebook or Twitter to create an account. After the account has been created, and validation has been completed if necessary, their post will automatically be made visible just as if they had registered and then posted.
If the user abandons the registration after they've submitted their post, an email will be sent to them to remind them to complete the registration.

Email reminding user to finish registering
 
Some Notes
Invision Community already has a feature that allows guests to post as guests without registration if granted permission. That feature has not been removed and so if you already allow guests to post, the behaviour will not change. This new feature is only available when a guest can't post in a given area, but a member would be able to. The entire feature can also be turned off if undesired. If the area the guest is posting in requires moderator approval, or newly registered members require approval of new posts, the post will enter the moderation queue as normal once their account has been created. Third party applications will require minor updates to support this feature. Once your casual visitor has invested time in your community by crafting a post, they are much more likely to finish the registration to get it posted. If you have set up external log in methods, then registration only takes a few more clicks.
This blog is part of our series introducing new features for Invision Community 4.4.

Yet again, Joel hijacks our company blog for another generous slice of knowledge from the front-lines of administrating a successful community.
Inspired by Invision Community client @Joey_M who discovered the emoji of serendipity and chief architect @Matt who literally knows everything about Invision Community in ACP Tips and Tricks, they both made me realize there’s always something to learn no matter your level of experience. 
You know how to post.  You know how to react.  You sometimes spice it up and make a poll.  And for the most part, you and your users go about your forum lives with a secure sense of certainty and satisfaction that you know how to interact with your community.
But what if I told you there’s a whole world of wonder at your fingertips, young grasshopper?  Your Invision Community includes stars to navigate by; magical pictures that appear and disappear; and little yellow men who giggle, laugh, and sometimes roll over in delight. 
Here are 5 hidden tips to help you discover a little more of the IPS magic for you and your users.  

How do you know what you don’t know?
1. Click-and-hold
Be sure to dazzle your users with this secret way of changing your content title.  Change titles of your content items such as topic titles, album titles, and download files by using the click-and-hold strategy. Go to your forums and click-and-hold down the mouse over any topic title until you see that you’re able to edit the title.  Surprise! Use this secret strategy as the perfect way to quickly mass edit titles.

Click-and-impress your users with the click-and-hold strategy
2. Stars and Dots
Active forum users jump around dozens of boards every day to stay involved.  And within a loooong topic with many pages, you need a fast way to jump to the most recent unread topic.  Before each topic is an icon: either a dot or a star.  Clicking these icons will always jump you to the latest unread post, so you can quickly dive back into the conversation.  Dot means unread; Star means you participated in the topic.

My forum icon constellation tells me that I’m most compatible with a Capricorn.
3. Emoji Short-codes
One of the newest features to be included in Invision Community is emojis.  While there are ways to insert emojis from both mobile keyboards and the editor, you can also start typing “:thumbs up:” to reveal the secret emoji menu.  Try it now in the comments of this article. Last person to give me an emoji thumbs up wins! 

Be a 💯 with 🙂 
4. Image Attachments
Forum posts come alive with image attachments that add color and vibrancy. But adding thumbnails to the bottom of your posts is a missed opportunity to enrich your post at the appropriate spots within the post.  After you upload an image attachment to a forum post, double-click on the image attachment.  You’ll be presented with a secret menu with options to align and resize, so you can create stunning forum posts with images.

Much color. Much alignment. So much wow.
5. Profile Banners
Banners play a prominent part in multiple parts of the community, such as the Calendar, Profile, Clubs, and Blogs.  But usually the page only displays a portion of the banner, and most of the banner is hidden.  If you ever want to see the full banner in all of its glory, click near the top of the banner to auto-magically reveal everything!  Now you see, now you don’t.  

The iceberg is a metaphor
How many of these five secret tips did you know?
If you knew all five, give yourself a round of applause!  It’s rare for even the most seasoned Invision Community administrator to know all five, and you’ve mastered them all.
Did you know four?  Congrats, you’ve done a great job of exploring your community suite and you should keep it up.
Did you know three or less?  You should do some serious soul searching. Kidding. 
But it’s a definite sign that your soul would benefit from reading Invision Community News for more useful tips.  
Becoming a great community manager is a combination of community strategy and product knowledge.  By empowering yourself with more functional knowledge and tools, you’re giving yourself the ability to leverage a bigger toolkit.  Whether you’re typing emoji short-codes to laugh with your members or inserting attachments into a tutorial on hidden tips for your community, I hope you learned something new, something surprising, and something perhaps even a little wonderful. 
Let us know in the comments below what hidden tip surprised you the most.     

Today, we're handing over our blog to long time client and friend to Invision Community, Joel R.
@Joel R is often found hanging out in our community offering his insight and wisdom when he's not harassing the team in Slack.
Over to Joel.
Invision Community releases a variety of blockbuster features in every major update, which usually hits once a year.  You may think those updates are not enough (it’s never enough!), but I wanted to spend some time talking about how to survey and incorporate those features into your community systematically. 
This blog post is not about any specific feature, but more a general and philosophical approach in integrating the newest features.  My goal is to help you get the most out of every new IPS update!      
You may think that many of the features in the updates are easy to assess.  You either want them or don’t.  But it’s not that easy. 


 
I was inspired by some recent personal experiences when I found myself revisiting features from 4.2 and earlier.  I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I still had so much to experience and learn from those features, all of which I had previously reviewed when they were initially released.  Invision Community comes packed with rich features, and no community manager is expected to be a master at everything.  But a systematic approach is your best chance at making sure you get the most out of every feature.
To give a personal example, I jumped into Social Media Promotion when it first came out in 4.2.  The new Social Media Promotion offers several powerful tools for social media cross-posting, and I immediately wanted to learn how I could use it to cross-post content to my Facebook and Twitter accounts.  It’s an easy drop-in replacement for services like Hootsuite or Windscribe and allows community managers to drip interesting content to their social media pages for constant advertising and social engagement.
Well, it turns out my Facebook and Twitter reach is nil because I have no followers (wish I was more Internet famous!), so I soon lost interest and dropped Social Media Promotion as a tool.
A couple of months ago, I was assessing my homepage versus other popular websites when I came across a startling realization: I could make a gorgeously visual homepage on par with Instagram using Our Picks – a feature of Social Media Promotion.

 
I would intentionally ignore the social media component, but use the other component of Our Picks for a beautiful new homepage.  The context of using Our Picks for a homepage opened my eyes to a whole new way to evaluate Social Media Promotion, and what was once a feature on the back burner is now – literally - the front page of my Invision community.  I love it!   
To help you incorporate new Invision features, I’ve brainstormed 5 strategies on how to make the most out of Invision feature updates.  Each strategy comes with a mini-lesson for an action plan. 
1.    Learn the knowledge, not the feature.
This is my personal motto when Invision Community releases a new feature.  I’m more concerned about the knowledge and broader usage of the feature than implementing the feature itself: What’s the potential scope of the feature?  In what context could the feature be used?  How did Invision Community intend for the future to be used, and what are other ways it can be used?  
I’ve never worried about the technical configuration of the feature.  You enable or disable some settings, and that’s it.  But what’s more important is how the functionality can best be integrated and in what context.  You never know when you might come back to the feature for the next great idea, and you can only do that if you possess the knowledge and application behind the feature.  
Lesson: Try every feature at least once, even if you don’t need it.
    
2.    When at first you don’t succeed, take a nap.
Some things take a while to think about.  Don’t try to cram through all new Invision Community features.  There’s too many to digest in one pass.
Assess the features you’re most interested in one by one, play with each feature until you’re satisfied, test them, find out how they work, and when you get frustrated, take a nap.  Eat some ice cream.  Go jogging.  And revisit in a month.  The bigger the feature, the longer you should think about it.
  
The biggest “aha” moments didn’t come to me right away.  When you try to rush through a feature, you can get rushed results.  Take your time to bounce ideas around your head and try to think through the context of how to best utilize the feature.   
Lesson: For features that you like, set a calendar to revisit after a month.  Then take a nap.  
3.    You’re running the marathon, not a sprint.  
Successful community managers have evolved with the changing needs of our audiences.  While our mission remains the same, the backdrop of user expectations and digital trends has dramatically changed.  
When you implement a feature, you should be evaluating it for both sustainability and longevity.
Is this a sustainable mechanism to keep up with? 
Is this something that I want to continue for the foreseeable future?  
It’s nice to play with new features; every major update is like a Christmas unwrapping of new features.  But you need to prudently pick-and-choose which feature is most appropriate and how it can give you an impact for the long-term.  Sometimes it’s better to do a few things very well than many things not well at all.
Lesson: Ask yourself if you see yourself using the feature 3 years later?
4.    Make it uniquely yours
Invision Community ships with default features ready to use out of the box, but those features are just that: default.  We like to dress up our theme with custom colors, designs, and logos.  You should apply the same flair for customization with your features.
Some features are ready to be customized: reactions, ranks, and group promotion.  Others, however, might take more thinking.  Here are some examples to spark your creativity:
•    Social Sign-in Streamline – are you using the default message, or did you customize it with a unique and clever introduction?  
•    Fluid Forum – did you activate fluid forum and hope it went well?  Or did you use it as an opportunity to re-analyze your entire forum structure for the modern web?  
•    Leaderboard – did you leave it as a Leaderboard, or could it be Genius board for a technology company, or Joyboard for a nonprofit, or Loyaltyboard for a consumer brand?
Lesson: Make the feature uniquely yours.
5.    Talk through your scenario
Every battle-tested community manager knows that the only thing constant is change – whether it’s our forum software, ACP settings, user expectations, and broader digital trends.  It’s important to find a trusted circle of friends and users who can help you steer and implement features.  It may sound great in your head, but other users may look at it very differently. 
On my site, I have a trusted group of users called “Champions.”  In my pre-planning stage, I float my ideas by them as early in the process as possible.  They’ve provided valuable feedback of user expectations with differing perspectives.  I’ve nixed certain features based on their veto, and I’ve tweaked continuously based upon their continuous input.  Talk through your scenario with your trusted friends, and not just with the voices in your own head!    
Community management is such a uniquely rewarding and challenging role because every community demands and needs a different set of features.   Invision makes it easy with regular releases of exciting features, but you also need to make the most out of those features on your own.  Don’t just turn on the next feature: turn on excitement, joy, and community.  
If you notice, I didn’t include a lesson yet in my last strategy when you’re ready to talk about your scenario.  And that’s because it’s the ultimate lesson:
Write the next guest post in the Invision Community Blog and share your own success story in how you adopted a new Invision feature.  We’d love to hear about it.
Thanks Joel!
We love this angle on how to best evaluate the myriad of opportunities the Invision Community software allows.
What is your biggest take-away from Joel's advice?
 

Work smarter, not harder is a motto we hear a lot of in our modern age.
This is of course great advice. Invision Community's Admin CP is packed full of tools and settings to help you configure your community to your needs.
In this short video I show you how you can work smarter in the Admin CP.
Dashboard Blocks
I show you how create a dashboard perfect for your needs. The dashboard is perfect to show a snapshot of what is happening with your community.
Search Bar
The search bar is the most powerful tool in the Admin CP. From finding members, settings and Commerce tickets, it's something I reach for every day.
Re-order the Menu
Prioritise the menu to put often used sections of the Admin CP within easy reach.
Copy Settings
With a few clicks, you can copy a single setting from a forum across multiple. This saves a lot of time moving between the forum list and forum settings. This of course works across the suite including downloads, blogs and more.
Copy Nodes
Got a forum or blog category set up perfectly and want to add one more like it? Just hit the copy button and save the hassle of filling in the form again.
These are our tips for using the Admin CP as effectively as possible. Do you have any tips? Let us know below!

We often get asked how to create a portal-like home page for a community.
A homepage has many benefits including:
Showing your best content first
By using the "Our Picks" blocks, you can display your best content first. This content sets the tone for the site and will encourage engagement across your site.
Display multiple areas of the suite
Each application has its own feed blocks that can be used to display content on the home page. If your members use Gallery heavily, then showcase those photos on the homepage. If you use Calendar a lot to schedule events, then show event feeds.
By displaying feeds to content is a great way to showcase all areas of your site on a single page.
Reduce confusion
For those of us that grew up with forums are used to viewing a list of categories and forums. We find it easy to scan the list of forums and dip into the ones that interest us.
For those that are not so familiar, a homepage displaying easily accessible content reduces the confusion and invites true content discovery.
In this short video, we show you how to create a homepage in under 5 minutes using the Pages app.
Pages is available with all Cloud plans and is available to purchase when buying a self-hosting license.
 
This video shows:
How to set Pages as the default application How to create a Page Builder page How to configure blocks to fine tune the feeds As you can see, it's a straightforward task, and you do not need to know any programming or design to create a compelling homepage.
Do you have a homepage like this? We'd love to see it!
 

A positive community is a wonderful thing. It's fun to read and almost irresistible to join. You instantly feel welcomed and quickly make new friends.
Carefully managed communities tend to be respectful. Individuals may occasionally argue and disagree, but these are short term incidences that do not affect the community.
Is this by chance or by design?
Your role as a community leader will make all the difference in how your members react to each other. Your community boundaries will have a direct impact in the number troublemakers that infiltrate your community.
I'm sure you've come across trolls and troublemakers on your digital travels. You may be unlucky enough to have met some on your own site. Some trolls may be quite benign and productive members of the community. That is, until something or someone triggers them.
Some trolls like to annoy others because they are bored. Others because they are angry. Whatever the reason, they can be a handful to manage well.
A well managed community offers excellent protection against trolls that may join only to cause trouble. The troll has no fun against a charming community unwilling to engage in hateful behaviour.
Therefore, a positive community is essential in protecting your members, as much as it is making a welcoming atmosphere for new members.
Community Leaders
Your community leaders are there to model good behaviour.
How your leaders speak to your members is very important. If they are rude or offensive, then the community will view that as the culture you endorse and act likewise.
It's important that your leaders refrain from becoming embattled in aggressive discussions. An ideal leader is cool, calm and impartial. If members see your leaders engaged in heated debate, they may follow suit.
A good strategy is to use a leader's forum or Pages database where they can discuss contentious topics in private and agree on a way forward together. Forcing your leaders to remain impartial and discuss the topic elsewhere is a great way to retain professional separation.
If your leaders want to engage in debate, then allow them to create a personal account. This allows them to air their personal views inline with your boundaries.
It is vital to remember that your leaders carry your brand and message at all times.
Create a strong terms of service
Invision Community's terms of service feature is ideal to outline your community and what is acceptable.
Be positive with your terms and rules. Creating a positive culture from the earliest interaction with your site is important. This sets out boundaries in a friendly way.

Invision Community's build in terms editor
Avoid using negative words such as "don't" and "can't". People tend to skip over these words. It is better to be positive, for example:
"A signature CANNOT have more than one image"
Could be better explained as:
"Your signature may have a single image".
This positive interaction feels better but still enforces your rules.
Keep the number of rules to a minimum. Visitors connect better with sites that aren't laden with rules and threats for stepping out of line. Indeed, reading a terms of service that outlines punitive action for every minor misdemeanour makes the site look unruly and embattled.
Even good productive members have bad days and may display out of character behaviour.
Weeding out the early signs of trouble
Not all arguing is bad. We've seen some dynamic and informative topics that have flowered from an initial disagreement.
The first step is identifying which behaviours you find unacceptable. Your community and culture will define these boundaries. What is acceptable for a casual community with a very young demographic may not be acceptable for a very formal conservative site.
Is this member trolling? A classic troll is someone who seeks to derail rational conversation through abuse, hectoring or needling. A troll isn't someone that disagrees with you, your product or your choices. Civil disagreement is the foundation for any rich discussion. A troll is less tolerant and their end goal is to aggravate others.
Is the member new? Perhaps they are unfamiliar with the expectations of your community. New members can often be eager to impress veterans and may come across as over excitable. 
It is worth noting down topics which have the potential to derail and check in on them often. You can add hidden replies that do not trigger notifications. This is an ideal way to leave notes to other community leaders.
The best judge is often experience. It may take a while to develop your sixth sense with your community.
Motivation through rewarding good behaviour
Invision Community is equipped with a reputation system which is linked to the number of positive reactions a piece of authorered content obtains.
The simplest expression is the humble 'like'. To encourage members to like and thank others for useful content empowers individuals and motivates them to post more good content.

Thumbs up!
You may wish to send a personal message offering thanks for exceptional content to your members. A brief personal note is a welcome gift in today's world of often impersonal automation.
We have seen communities that post up weekly topics linking to great content. Likewise, you can leverage featured posts to draw attention to your good content.
The Our Picks feature is yet another way you can promote great user submitted content. It must be very rewarding to see your hard work showcased to the rest of the community.
Avoid special forums for 'unmoderated discussion'
Some communities try and address the balance between the need for rule enforcement through moderation against the desire to offer a venue for raw discourse. This usually presents as a special forum often labeled as "Unmoderated", "The flame zone" or similar.
The intention is a good one and the logic makes sense. Provide a venting space for your community in one area to keep the rest of the community friendly.

Don't make your members bring boxing gloves to a topic!
In our experience, this plan quickly backfires. The unmoderated area becomes hateful, toxic and very unpleasant. Basal desires that are kept in check by your rules and boundaries are left to run amok. 
It's very likely that these discussions become so heated that members leave your site for good. That isn't a desirable outcome!
It's much better to keep your rules consistent throughout all areas of your site. Encouraging contentious discussion is rarely a good thing.
Punitive tools are the last resort
Invision Community is loaded with excellent moderation tools to handle persistent offenders.
We would encourage you to try speaking with a troublesome member first via the personal message system. Give them a chance to explain themselves and remind them of the rules.
If you have exhausted all avenues, you have several options to choose from.
1) Warning
Invision Community's warning system allows you to pre-set different warning thresholds which trigger specific actions.
For example, you may decide that after 10 warns, the member is set to full moderation. This means that their posts are hidden to other community members until you review and approve them.
This is an excellent tool and has success in rehabilitating hot headed members that react quickly and often find themselves in hot water with your community leaders.
Invision Community 4.3 introduced crowd sourced moderation. This allows the administrator to set up thresholds for actions based on the number of reports a content item receives from other members.

The warning system
For example, you may decide to hide a post after it receives reports from five or more different members.
2) Full moderation
You have the option to enforce review and approval of all members topics and posts. The downside is that it increases the workload of your moderators, so should be used sparingly.
It is a very effective tool when used for a short time after a heated debate gets out of control. It allows you to enforce a time out until the situation has calmed down.
3) Short term banning to cool off
Invision Community allows you to temporarily ban a member from your site for a specified number of hours.

It is especially effective to enforce a break from your site. This allows an otherwise good and productive member time to cool down and reflect on how they wish to contribute. In most cases, the member comes back calmer and ready to post productively.
4) Permanent banning
As a true last resort, you can exclude the member from accessing your site completely. A banned member can no longer access forum lists, topics or posts. They can of course log out and view the community as a guest.
In most cases, members can be rehabilitated through personal messages, moderation or an enforced cooling off period.
A permanent ban can be lifted by an administrator at any time.
Conclusion
Cultivating a positive community can take a little work from your community leaders but the benefits are numerous. A fun engaging community of respectful members is a real joy. The infectious spirit of the members makes it very easy to join and contribute.
There is always a learning curve, so use any issue as a learning experience and give your members the benefit of doubt.
You wouldn't want to punish an overzealous and excitable new member and make them feel unwelcome by reaching for a moderation tool too soon.
Try and guide conversation by using your community leaders to model good behaviour. Try and keep a sense of fun and take the time to get to know your members.
Above all, enjoy the journey! Taking the time to engage in your community is a great experience and offers many opportunities to learn and grow as a leader.
Invision empowers you with the tools to manage and reward behaviors, but it's ultimately your stewardship to thoughtfully design a positive community.
We'd love to know which of these tips you already practise. Let us know below!

Pages is one our most flexible applications.
We use Pages on this site for our news blog, our release list and our bug tracker. We also use it internally to track customer suggestions, knowledge base articles and more.
The most common use for Pages is as a simple articles database. With its built in templates, you can create interesting and engaging pages in just a few minutes. This is how we have it configured for this news blog.
In this entry, we'll be looking at something a little out of the ordinary.
In just five minutes, you can create a simple curated YouTube video gallery on your website using Pages. All of this functionality is built in. You won't need to learn code, or install any plug-ins.
Check out the video below for a walk through which covers:
Creating a database and page Using the 'Easy Mode' page editor to drag and drop the database into place Setting up the database's custom fields for YouTube You can take this further by tweaking the built in templates to create something unique for your site. You may wish to use a different listing page and show thumbnails of the videos to entice your visitors into the site.
This is ideal for sites which use YouTube heavily but wish to keep the discussion on your site. The built in comments and review sections display just under the video.
Pages opens up many different ways of curating and displaying content.
We'd love to see how you're using Pages, let us know in the comments!
 

You have probably spoken to us in support tickets and on our community forums, and you've likely seen our photos.
But what about our workstations? What do they reveal about our personalities? Do none of our team have lights in their office?
Mark H
This is an old picture [Not as old as your Facebook photo -Ed], I now have a 4K monitor in the center, attached via Thunderbolt to my MBP. But that image was taken when I used my PC, a now-old EVGA x79 Dark mobo, i7 3930k, twin GTX 580's, and all watercooled.
When I game, I swap out the leads so the PC can use all 3.
At the moment I'm revisiting an old, but still apparently very popular game. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Where's the light switch?
Marc S
For my main machine I have a late 2014 iMac with 2 x iiyama external monitor, which I spend most of my day on.
When out of the house or just generally wanting a break from the office, I have a MacBook pro. Great for what it is, but I hate sitting on a laptop [You're supposed to sit in front of it -Ed], so I'm generally found hiding away in my office.
When I'm not responding to tickets from you lovely lot, I'm generally doing some of my own development. As a Windows developer primarily [That explains a lot -Ed], I have parallels desktop set up so I can work with visual studio and sql server as if they were native mac applications. I also spend a fair amount of time with Ableton live and Logic, where I play about with trance production, as its something nice to immerse yourself in during spare time.

Who let the dogs out?
Jim M
The few, the proud, the Windows users of IPS [We only keep them so we can assign all IE bugs to them -Ed]. Love my two 27" Dell monitors. Plan to add a third eventually. I may also be a big Tom Petty fan.

Our Tom Petty fan
Matt M
I switched from a desktop only set up to the new retina MacBook Pro last year. It's nice to work in the office with the LG monitors but have the flexibility of unplugging and taking the MacBook with me to work elsewhere [What? Like the garden? -Ed]. 

Clowns, Drug Lords and Funny Men
Daniel
It took hours to clean up for a picture. [This is literally all Daniel supplied as text for this month's blog. For example, he could have pointed out the little keypad thing shown under the right hand monitor which acts like an app launcher, but didn't. So thought I would -Ed]

Precise angles and a lot of work to clean up
Ryan
My office is actually going through a slow renovation process so that it can double as an office as well as a studio, so this will all likely change in a few months (you can see color swatches for paint options on the left) [We can't see anything. You have an expensive Philips Hue set up but clearly never switch it on -Ed]. I'm currently working through a Late 2014 iMac Retina 5k, and apparently I'm one of the few that doesn't have any external monitors (I used to, but I find them cumbersome most of the time, so I took them down [Were you holding them up yourself? -Ed]). When working remotely, I use a 2011 13" MacBook Pro.
My favorite thing, though, is the "poster" I have on the right - my father gave it to me for my thirtieth birthday this year, and it's actually a sheet of uncut one dollar bills (funnily enough, though, there are actually 32 rather than 30).

Coke and Coffee
Mark W
I'm currently in the process of moving from the UK to Australia so I don't really have an office right now, but this is what my office back home looks like [it's always this tidy. He is obsessive -Ed]:

Captain Raymond Holt
Jennifer
2 x 32" inch curved Samsung Monitors a 4K Samsung Smart TV. Razer Chroma Keyboard, Razer Chroma Death Adder, Corsair Yellow Jacket Headphones and a really awesome PC.
I am basically surrounded by screens [FYI, keep an eye on J.A.R.V.I.S, he has a Vision -Ed].

Tony Stark's first set up
Stuart
Up until this month my wife has been studying in Cardiff, so half of my time has been spent working on a dining table in our apartment [Can't wait to see how the table turned out, if you've spent a month on it -Ed].
Now, back home I have my desk set up with the worlds largest laptop [Dear reader, you have no idea -Ed](i7-4720HQ, GTX960M, 16GB Ram, 17.1" 1080p)  connected to an external 22" 1080p monitor. We're still in the middle of restoration so my office is really the lowest priority buy my long term plans include a standing desk, Surface Book 2 (or similar) with twin external 4k displays. Those two PC towers aren't really used anymore (one is Windows Server 2008 which used to be used as a local file server, the other is my old gaming PC)

We're huge fans of LEGO®
Andy
Like Mark I’m constantly on the move so my working environment tends to be wherever I can find that’s quiet with a good Internet connection. When I’m “home” though my office looks like this: [Seriously, switch on a light -Ed]

Dark and moody, just like his coffee
So there we go. We've exposed our team's set ups, expressed our concern about a lack of lighting in many offices and found out who had to tidy up their desk before taking a photo.

We'd love to see your workstations too, post them below!

Do you have a community but are looking to move to a more modern and feature rich platform?
There's a lot of ways Invision Community can breathe new life into your community. With our engagement features, advanced promotion features and mobile ready responsive themes, your members are going to love the changes.
Invision Community can power your entire site, from the content management front end right through to your download areas and shopping carts.
Imagine not having to juggle a dozen plug-ins and make several different applications talk to each other.
We offer a range of migration tools for vBulletin, xenForo, phpBB, Vanilla, bbPress and more. These tools convert your data such as members, passwords, forums, topics, posts and more across to Invision Community.
But first, let's look at how to make your migration a success.
Take our demo for a spin
Hands down the best way to get a feel for Invision Community is to take out a free demo. Once you are comfortable with the suite and know what it can do, the more confident you will be in discussing it with your members.
There's a lot of functionality to discover. Keep in touch with our sales team to get the most from the demo.  We recommend that you consider three uses.
Your community. Look at how they will settle in with the new interface and how they will use the new features on offer.
Your moderators. Take a moment to look in the Moderator Control Panel. Run through all the tools that are available, such as the warning system and content review system.

Moderator Tools
Your administrators. Probably the largest change between platforms will be in the Admin Control Panel. It's worth spending a little time getting familiar with it and looking at what's new, and where common tools are such as forum and member management.

Tip: Invision Community's Admin Control Panel has a global search bar to look for settings, members, invoices and more. If you ever feel a little lost, enter in what you're looking for.
Make your plan
Using the demo and speaking to our sales team will help you draw up a migration plan. You'll know which apps you'll need, and what data can be migrated over.
You may want to browse the marketplace to look for apps, plugins and themes to extend the functionality even further.

Tip: We offer a VIP migration service where we work closely with you to draw up your plan and take care of the conversion for you.
Educate your community
Keep your community up to date with your migration plan. Show them the platform they'll be using. Take videos and screenshots showing them the exciting new features coming soon. Make it a positive and fun experience.
Post something new every few days to get your community used to the idea and get them involved by asking them if they have any questions. Our sales and support teams are here to help you if you have any further questions at this point.
Getting the majority of your community excited about the change is the best way to make the transition a smooth one.
Make sure you explain the benefits of the switch too. If there's a good reason for it, your community will get behind it quickly.
Some benefits may be:
It works better on your mobile device and tablets, so you don't need to struggle with pinch and zoom to get around.

Mobile ready out of the box
The built in embed system allows you to post images, YouTube videos more easily and you can preview it instantly as you type.
The crowd sourced moderation makes reporting bad content more beneficial. It'll help to keep the community clean from undesirable comments and moving a positive direction.
More features on the way. Invision Community is always adding new functionality based on our customers' wishes. These releases happen often so there's always something to be excited about.
Pick a day
The best migrations are planned down to the date and time when the data conversion will occur. Our team can give you a rough idea of how long the data conversion will take. It will vary but we can give you a ballpark. 
Your members will feel happy knowing what is going to happen and when. There will be some downtime while the data is converted, so it's always best to announce this well ahead of time.
Set up a test site
Once you are committed to switching, set up a test site. A single Invision Community license can be used for a development installation as well as a live installation.
This is the perfect time to work on your theme and look at any tweaks you'd like to make.
Invite in your team and a trusted few from your community to offer feedback and advice. It's worth taking the time here to make sure everything is perfect for when you do the final conversion.
Make it comfortable
Take some time to theme your new Invision Community so it has a similar look and feel to your existing community. Change resistant members will feel more comfortable if there are areas that are familiar to them.
Ensuring your branding is up, and the colours match what you had before is a good start.
The easy mode theme editor is a great place to start.
Mind your language!
There are always little differences in the interface language that may throw some of your older members off. For example, some systems use "threads" instead of topics and "messages" instead of posts.

The easy language editor
Invision Community has a built in translation system so you can change our interface language to match your existing site.
Help your members
Set up a temporary questions and answer forum where your members can ask how the new system works and give you feedback.
Pin a handful of topics explaining where common items are now, such as how to edit your profile, how to send personal messages, how to mark the site as read and so on. Think about the daily activities your members make and explain how to do them with Invision Community.
You can use the pre-move time to ask your community what actions they do daily and may need assistance with on the new platform.
Be patient
Some of us dislike change. We are creatures of habit. You may find some members are very resistant. That's OK, they'll come around in time as long as you continue to make them feel valued and understood. Take the time to explain how the new system works and what the benefits of Invision Community are.
In our experience, members love the following Invision Community features:
Notifications
Invision Community has a variety of granular notification options, from browser to email so you're sure to not miss a thing.
Mobile Friendly
We're mobile friendly right out of the box. Our theme has a responsive framework, which means that it resizes perfectly to any device you're using. No need for extra themes or styles, it's all baked in.
Gamification
We all love a little friendly competition don't we? Invision Community has features like the leaderboard and member titles to reward activity. Who doesn't want to win the day?

 
Reactions
Liking content is fun, but being able to express thanks, laughter and more is even better. It's all baked into the system ready to use.
Educate your team
Invision Community has a whole host of moderation tools that your team will love as it makes their daily routines much easier.
From the comprehensive warning system, to the crowd sourced moderation feature, which can automatically hide content and notify moderators once it has been reported multiple times, Invision Community makes your moderators lives easier.
The best approach is to pin topics in a team area that explains how to use these new features and where to find them.
Summary
Investing in a new community platform and migrating your community across is a big decision. With the right planning and forethought, it will be a smooth and positive migration with lots to look forward to once complete.
We offer free conversion tools for you to use, or we offer a VIP conversion service where we take care of it for you and you get one-to-one help and support throughout the process.
We'd love to hear from those who have successfully migrated across from other platforms and how they made it a positive experience for their members.

 

Unless you've been living under a rock, or forgot to opt-in to the memo, GDPR is just around the corner.
Last week we wrote a blog answering your questions on becoming GDPR compliant with Invision Community.
We took away a few good points from that discussion and have the following updates coming up for Invision Community 4.3.3 due early next week.
Downloading Personal Data
Invision Community already has a method of downloading member data via the member export feature that produces a CSV.
However, we wanted Invision Community to be more helpful, so we've added a feature that downloads personal data (such as name, email address, known IP addresses, known devices, opt in details and customer data from Nexus if you're using that) in a handy XML format which is very portable and machine readable.
 

You can access this feature via the ACP member view
The download itself is in a standard XML format.

A sample export
Pruning IP Addresses
While there is much debate about whether IP addresses are personal information or not, a good number of our customers requested a way to remove IP addresses from older content.
There are legitimate reasons to store IP addresses for purchase transactions (so fraud can be detected), for security logs (to prevent hackers gaining access) and to prevent spammers registering. However, under the bullet point of not storing information for longer than is required, we have added this feature to remove IP addresses from posted content (reviews, comments, posts, personal messages, etc) after a threshold.

The default is 'Never', so don't worry. Post upgrade you won't see IP addresses removed unless you enter a value.

This new setting is under Posting
Deleting Members
Invision Community has always had a way to delete a member and retain their content under a "Guest" name.
We've cleaned this up in 4.3.3. When you delete a member, but want to retain their content, you are offered an option to anonymise this. Choosing this option attributes all posted content to 'Guest' and removes any stored IP addresses.

Deleting a member
Privacy Policy
We've added a neat little feature to automatically list third parties you use on your privacy policy. If you enable Google Analytics, or Facebook Pixel, etc, these are added for you.

The new setting

 
Finding Settings Easily
To make life a little easier, we've added "GDPR" as a live search keyword for the ACP. Simply tap that into the large search bar and Invision Community will list the relevant settings you may want to change.

 
These changes show our ongoing commitment to helping you with your GDPR compliance. We'll be watching how GDPR in practise unfolds next month and will continue to adapt where required.

Invision Community 4.3.3 is due out early next week.

We're thrilled to announce that Invision Community 4.3 is available to download now.
After months of development, over 2500 separate code commits and quite a few mugs of coffee you can now get your hands on the final release.

You can download the final release from your client area.
If you need a recap of what was added, take a look at our product updates blog which takes you through the highlights. These include:
 
We'd love to know what you think, let us know below.

To monetize, or not to monetize, that is the question that preoccopies our administrators!
Ok, I'm no Shakespeare, but a vital question community owners are faced with at some point is: can we and should we make some money from our community?
Let's first look at the "should we?"
Absolutely! You don't need to frustrate your users or risk goodwill by starting monetization. Running a community comes with tangible costs in terms of paying for the monthly cloud plans or license and hosting costs.
Not to mention your own time which must be factored into this decision. If the community sustained all or part of your income, could you commit more time to help it grow?
Now lets look at the "can we?"
Absolutely! You made a great choice by building your platform with Invision Community. We have built in monetization tools that allow you to collect micro-payments from third party systems; and we have tools for selling products and services.
Advertisements
An obvious choice, many sites will turn to advertisements through Google Adsense or a similar service to generate income from their community. Whether this approach will work for your community or not is dependent upon many factors.
Do you generate enough traffic that you will actually earn an income from advertisements?
Do enough of your audience browse your site without tools such as Adblock installed?
Is your site compatible with any of the many advertisement services out there? This is worth checking to make sure.
Advertisement services are a relatively easy solution for generating micro-payments. It's unlikely you'll be able to retire any time soon on advertising payments alone though.
An alternative approach to using advertisements is to sell advertisement space on your own site through Commerce.
This can be an especially attractive option if your site holds a captive audience in a specific niche, as advertisers will be certain their ads are targetting the niche they are aiming to target effectively.
Viglink
Viglink is a service that looks for commercial product references in user-generated content, and links to those products using referral links that can generate revenue. Generally speaking, there is no real harm in using such a service as the functionality is transparent for most users.

 
Invision Community features integration with Viglink out of the box. You simply need to enter certain account information into the AdminCPand the software will handle the rest.
Charging for products
If you sell digital or physical products, you can leverage Invision Community to help facilitate the sale of such products through your community site.
If you are an expert or leader in your field, then why not write a short e-book on your subject and put it up for sale? Low cost e-books under $10 tend to sell really well and it's a great way to generate some passive trickle income.
Sale, renewals, invoicing, shipping, customer support and more are all possible through our Commerce product with powerful features that allow you to easily sell products locally and around the world.
Charging for additional access
The simplest way to monetize your community is to charge for VIP access.
This may be for elevated permissions, such as being able to upload larger files, post more content per day and access specific features like user signatures, special badges and so on.

 
You can also set up VIP forums that regular members do not have access to. 
In fact, Invision Community can be tailored towards being an e-learning platform simply by setting up a subscription in Commerce and creating a private forum only the VIP group can access.
Simply post a new topic with each learning module. Topics can contain embeds from YouTube and Vimeo if you prefer to deliver training over video.
Be sure to give previews of such areas if you do sell access to additional areas of the community.
For example, you can allow all users to "see" that a forum exists, but show an error message to regular members who attempt to read topics in the forum, while allowing subscribers full access to those topics. This helps naturally entice users into subscribing to gain additional access by allowing them to see what they will gain access to.
Charging a fee for facilitation
Another possible avenue to monetize your community is by charging a fee for facilitating file sharing between your members. The Downloads application allows users to upload and even sell their files to other users on the community, while also allowing the administrator of the community to retain a percentage of all sales. 
If your community serves a niche that may see online sales of files in a marketplace-type setting, you can earn some money by administering such a marketplace.
As you can see, there are several opportunities available with Invision Community to monetize your community.
Do you use any other methods of monetizing your community?

We're thrilled to announce that Invision Community 4.3 Beta is available to download now.
After months of development, over 2500 separate code commits and quite a few mugs of coffee you can now get your hands on the beta release.

You can download the beta from your client area.
Be sure to read the full information on support and service limits that go along with beta releases. You will see this in client area prior to downloading.
If you need a recap of what was added, take a look at our product updates blog which takes you through the highlights.
If you you find a bug, we'd love for you to report it with as much detail as you can muster in the bug report area.
We'd love to know what you think, let us know below.

As we come close to wrapping up development of Invision Community 4.3, we wanted to let you know of a few smaller improvements we've made to increase engagement to your community.
Email
Despite fancy new things like social media and push notifications, trusty old email has been proven to be highly effective at getting repeat visitors to your website.
It's one of the reasons Invision Community has built in email support for notifications that can be sent instantly, or via daily or weekly digests.
Email should form a part of every community marketing strategy but curating content and building newsletters can often be a labor intensive task.
With Invision Community 4.3 we have added some additional automated email tools to help your users discover more of your carefully crafted content.
Highlight the best content from throughout your community
In 4.2 we introduced the concept of curated content with promotions and “Our Picks”. With 4.3 we’ve taken this a step further and these promoted items will now appear directly in your content related emails. 
This allows for your audience to be enticed back to your community with items that they may not have read but holds interest.

Capture return visits with interesting content
Social media links in email footers
If you look closely in the image above you will also see that you can now optionally include links to all of your social media sites within the footer of all of your outgoing emails.
Both of these new features are enabled by default but can be disabled in the email settings section of your admin control panel.
Email may be as old as the web itself, but it is a very powerful medium to get your audience coming back for more.
Respond to Reviews
We added the ability to leave a review to Pages articles, download files, calendar events and in other areas early on in Invision Community 4. The concept was to allow your members to engage in new ways with your content. Reviews on Commerce store items and purchasable downloadable goods is a great way to inspire others to purchase.
New to Invision Community 4.3 is the ability for the content creator (be that a download file, store owner, etc) to respond to a review. This is a great way to address reviews that may be considered unfair or extreme.

Matt is talking to himself again
One more thing...
Not content with resurrecting the Subscriptions manager from 2009, we've brought back a small detail from previous versions of Invision Community. The famous "this person is typing a reply" indicator in the online list.

 
We can't wait to release this latest update. With new ways to monetise your community, new ways to engage your audience and better promotion tools, we're excited to see how it's going to benefit your community.
 

We've recently spoken about how we've brought our Gallery and Blog apps up to date with interface overhauls to bring them inline with the high standards our customers expect.
Keeping this in mind, we're thrilled to announce that we've taken Commerce right back to 2009.
This needs an explanation.
Way back in 2009, Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President. Minecraft was put into beta, Slumdog Millionaire was released to critical praise and we had a product called IP.Subscriptions.
IP.Subscriptions was a lightweight member subscriptions manager that allowed members to purchase elevated permissions via a user group upgrade.
It was a fine little app. However, on the horizon we had a brand new eCommerce app in development. Then called Nexus, now called Commerce (we took months to come up with that).
It made sense for us to merge the products into one app given they both had overlapping functionality. They both could create packages to promote members to a new user group. Commerce was much more developed as an invoicing and billing system.
Everyone was happy.
Almost.
Commerce has grown to be an incredibly powerful app. It can sell anything from physical products like t-shirts, to digital products such as license keys and it can even manage your hosting set-up.
We use it for our support and billing systems, so we know how robust it is.
While it's an incredibly powerful commerce system, setting up basic subscriptions packages became a little more complex.
Over the past few years we've received a lot of feedback on this.
We've listened.
Commerce Member Subscriptions
We've built a brand new section into Commerce specifically for membership subscriptions.
Let's take a look at this in more detail.
On the front end, there's a very clear and easy to understand page for membership subscriptions.

The main subscriptions interface
Here you can see all the available packages, which one you're currently subscribed to and the upgrade and downgrade options.

A simple way to upgrade
There's several choices for costing upgrades in the Admin CP, here we have chosen to charge the difference between packages.

Get to your subscriptions easily
Your subscriptions are easily found in the user menu.
If the Admin allows, the package you're subscribed to appears as a badge on your profile.

 
There's also a little widget showing the packages which you can drag and drop to the sidebar for an additional prompt for non-subscribers.

 
This gives Invision Community a very clear and easy to understand interface for subscriptions which lives outside of the Commerce store and its packages.
Now, let's dive into the Admin CP
The main engine for this feature is the package list. This is in a separate area within Commerce.

 
The list also shows the number of currently active and inactive subscribers. This links to the list of subscribers.

 
Other than Bob having a total nightmare, you can easily view which members are currently active. The buttons link you to the Commerce invoice and purchase.
If you wish to add a member to a subscription without charging them (you generous soul, you), then that is easily possible.

 
Creating a new subscription package is very straight forward. We've built a new form which is stripped down to the fundamental items you'll need for a subscription.

 
As you would expect, there are several settings to control the system.

 
A few things worth mentioning here:
You can force new members to purchase a subscription on sign-up You can show or hide the profile badge indicating which package they purchased. You can choose to allow upgrades or downgrades. You can choose how you'd like to charge for upgrades or downgrades Thank you to everyone who has provided feedback over the years. We're really pleased to present this new feature and hope that it'll make your daily lives just a little easier.
Let us know what you think!
 

We have a very important announcement to make!
There are times where you need to get the attention of your visitors. You might be closed on certain days of the year, performing server maintenance (if you are consider our Cloud Plans, they're excellent) or running a competition.
Invision Community has always had an announcements feature baked in, but we felt it could be improved.
Okay, maybe this feature isn't as flashy as some of the others we're introducing in 4.3, but these useful features should make managing your community easier.
The new look announcement feature replaces the old widgets enabling you to display customisable announcements in any of the following locations;
Top of the page Above the page content In the sidebar
The three new announcement locations
Each location has some slightly different features; the page top banner is dismissible by the member if they no longer want to see it, whereas the banner above the content and the sidebar announcements cannot be dismissed.
Most of the original customisable features are still available, including the ability to select which applications and pages show certain announcements and which member groups can see them. Combining this with the three new locations gives you much more flexibility for different types of announcements and we've also included the option to customise the color of the announcement.

New customisable options
 
The announcements have also been improved to contain more information. Rather than showing an unformatted snippet along side the title, announcements can now be tapped to open a modal showing any further details.

Modal showing announcement content
We hope you'll enjoy these useful improvements in Invision Community 4.3. Stay tuned for further announcements (pun intended)!

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.

New AdminCP Member Page
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.
  
Basic Member Information Pane
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.

A member with 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).

A member that has been locked



Other possible alerts
 
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.

IP Address Locations
While the devices tab shows the most recently used devices.

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.
Content Statistics
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.

Warnings & Restrictions Block for an account which has content moderation in effect
 
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.
Recent Account Activity
 
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.

Uploading a video
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.

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

An uploaded video in a browser without playback support for that format

"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.

Commerce's Sales chart
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.

Specific filter configurations allow you to run reports easily
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.

Looks like brandon is my top customer
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.

Yes, I'm definitely confused a lot
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.

Some areas of the community aren't as active as they could be
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.

Apparently I'm not so much confused, as I am confusing
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.

Not all tags are equal
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.

Viewing new topics by forum

New posts by forum, but viewing only a subset of my most important forums
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

One of the advantages of running your own community is that you get to control the branding.
Branding is important as it defines and re-enforces your customer's experience. Branding also promotes recognition, it sets you apart from your competition and it provides motivation and direction for your staff.
Invision Community has many built in tools to change the look and feel of the community. If you are a savvy coder, you can dive right into the HTML and CSS templates to create truly unique themes. You might also look at an off-the-shelf theme from our marketplace. There are some great themes you can use as a base for your branding.
Easy Mode Editor
One tool that is often overlooked is the Easy Mode Editor. It's a great way to make some simple changes to reflect your brand's identity. It offers a great deal of control, but I want to show you how you can brand your community in just a few short minutes without knowing a line of code.
The presentation below takes you through creating a new Easy Mode theme, and using the Easy Mode Editor on the front end to dynamically change the colours. You'll also learn how to upload your logo.

How to brand your community presentation
Email Branding
Another area to consider is outgoing emails. Invision Community leverages emails for notifications, as well as the bulk email system in the Admin CP. These emails look fine by default, but adding your logo and primary color re-enforces your branding.
The presentation below shows you the few simple steps needed to brand your emails.

How to brand your emails presentation
As you can see, Invision Community offers simple tools to change the look of your community without knowing how to code.
We hope you find this useful. If you have any questions, please let us know below!

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:

Login Handlers List
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:
 
Choosing a Login Handler
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:

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

Inputting vk.com endpoints
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:


Inputting vk.com User Information Endpoint and response parameters
Finally, provide a logo and a color for the sign in button and some final settings:

Inputting vk.com Logo and Button Color
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:

Signing in with vk.com
 
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:


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

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

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

A new REST API endpoint which returns details of the currently authenticated user

An updated REST API endpoint which, when called using OAuth authentication, will only return data the authenticated user has access to
 
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.