Maxxius

This is not done within the IPB software.  This is done though DNS with things like SPF and DKIMM.
Unless you have a registered trademark on your logo (this is supposed to be changing) and are prepared to spend north of $1000 a year for the BIMI VMC certificate, this can’t be done.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/10911028?hl=en
Each email provider decides what certificate companies they will accept. Google only supports Entrust and DigiCert currently. 

This. When I see something go to _https://example.com/2-%E3%82%A2 it looks like spam for me. It looks dirty, it looks not serious for me. I cannot read, what this %E3%82%A2 mean, something harmful, something inappropriate? I believe it makes no difference for SEO though as Wikipedia uses it. 

It'll be included in our January update.

This is a very interesting development on the SEO/Google Search side. I definitely hear the concerns about opening things up so wide, but on the other hand if it can help position my community's content on the same level as content posted on social media that can only be a good thing in my eyes.
Since we're talking about this, I figure it might be worth asking a (sort of) related question to IPS: are there any considerations being made as to how different node content is being served/displayed on Google Search results? For example, how prominently a community's forum topic might appear under a search result as opposed to an Event entry, or a CMS Pages record?
One reason why I ask, is that I have CMS Pages databases that have relationships with certain forums (so comments on the CMS Page record and the Forum Topic are practically identical), but in the case that someone searches for some terms I'd rather the CMS Page record be the primary result (and maybe a nested result for the forum topic version of that same content underneath). But I don't know how much control IPS has over that sort of thing, or whether that's something that it entirely in Google's power/wisdom to design.
So call it a question of curiosity rather than a proper SEO-related feature request. 😄

I don't believe in this instance that's the case. I believe it has more to do with all the garbage SEO content taking over search and it's getting even worse due to AI. As it continues to get tougher to distinguish between AI content and human content, first-hand experience and demonstration of real knowledge are becoming more of a focus in Google.
A Google Engineer has been advising on how to improve and better position forum content in search since March. Recently Google's been actively showing more 'Perspectives' content on mobile as well as highlighting Discussions and Forums. Until now, most of those results have been from Reddit and Quora. These changes should help showcase more variety.
Engineer's Quote:
"And most importantly, thanks for making changes. It heartens me to see forum platforms moving to expose their content better. I really would like to see this content more in search results rather than low quality, over-optimized rehash articles."
I work for a publisher that is investing heavily in AI. I see it across many other publishers as well and it's only going to continue to ramp up. I hate the direction publishers are heading in and if Google doesn't get ahead of it, searchers aren't going to be able to trust any of the results Google delivers. There's a reason so many people add 'Reddit' to the end of their searches now.
User-generated content and real-life experience are becoming more and more important.

We can provide the tools and you can decide how to use them. Google taking forum content seriously after years of "user generated content" being rated down can only be a good thing overall.

Sticky Icon tabs for emoji categories (instead of a single scrolling list for all categories) would offer the necessary UX.
This is from LinkedIn

Please provide an option to I turn off irrelevant emojis by category like country flags, food, activity, travel, symbols, etc. It would be nice to filter out everything except Smileys and Emoticons (first and last categories) to eliminate all other clutter.

Just for clarification, Pages is getting a substantial update for v5 and is a core part of our community platform strategy.

Yeah, until they scrap pages too 😄

I think thats the version where the admin CP manages you.

Subscriptions have been available for some time now and offer a good way to monetize your community. It would be nice if each subscription had the option of multiple offers - time frame/settings. Most sites these days offer a discount for an annual subscription. In IPS, you have to create an entirely new subscription/box rather than something like:

 

It will be available on https://ic-essentials.com within the next 2 weeks. Just need to test it myself, fix any open bugs and import the purchases.

Please give us a native feature to delete private messages and other content created by a known spammer.
 

Cross-posting of articles as forum topics functionality currently has some issues -
The entire article body along with a link to the original article is cross-posted into topic (the link to article will show the exact same full body content). Cross-posting the entire article body may get penalties from search engines for duplicated content. It is perfectly fine to post a link+snippet to another content in SEO terms. The content in the forum topic can also go out of sync if the original article is modified which is not graceful. A new option may be provided to post just an excerpt/snippet OR the full article body (current default) along with the link to the article. If possible, the link may be embedded in the topic so it will include an excerpt in the embedded box.
  If the article is posted by the Admin, it gets cross-posted as a forum topic automatically by the Admin user but the same Admin user is not able to edit the cross-posted forum topic (to convert its posted body content into an embedded link to the article). Cross-posted forum topic can only be edited if the original article was posted by a mod/user. However, this behavior of editability is inconsistent as it seems to be using some caching as it shows the Edit menu item at times but not always. Even if a user posted the article that got cross-posted to a forum as a topic, neither the user nor the admin are able edit the forum topic at times (but again, it works sometimes).
  Currently, it can cross-post every article to only "one" specified forum which is not optimal. The article posting form should have a Forum dropdown option to select to which forum the article should be cross-posted into. If the optional forum to cross-post is not chosen on the Article form, it should preferably not get cross-posted (this approach makes the cross-posting option dynamic per-article and the forum to cross-post setting at Articles level in ACP obsolete). Alternatively, if the forum to cross-post the article into is not chosen (in the optional forum dropdown on the Article form), it should cross-post to the default forum set in the Articles in ACP. TIA

Unfortunately, it's a pity that you're not improving interactions. By this, I mean dynamically adding content in real-time, for instance, when a post is published, so that a user who is currently in the thread can immediately see the added post without refreshing, and such interactions in the inbox as well.

I'm very curious about the UX improvements made to uploading/cropping profile photos especially when using mobile devices.
Perhaps you could do some blogs from the perspective of an iPhone/Android user in the future?
 

I truly appreciate all the effort that was made to simplify the code to keep it lightweight, while in the meantime modernizing the UI. It looks very sleek.

As showcased in our past blogs, Invision Community 5 introduces a brand new, modern interface which brings improvements to performance, aesthetics and mobile usability.
An optional side navigation panel, new view modes, light/dark modes, customizable header layouts, a search modal and a mobile navigation bar are some of the things we've showcased previously. Today, lets take a closer look at some other miscellaneous changes that we've been working on while developing Version 5, including some of the code reductions and performance improvements that we've been able to achieve in the process.
For those of you who are developers, we'll also give some simple explanations of how (and why) we've implemented these changes.
 
Widgets
Sidebar widgets are perfect for displaying content feeds, featured members, announcements, advertisements and more on your page. In version 4 however, the widget column would often become an empty space once the widgets had been scrolled past:
  widgets-v4.mp4  
In version 5, widgets now stick to the screen once the last widget has been reached, ensuring your readers have more convenient  access to your widgets rather than a void space:
  sticky-widgets-v5.mp4  
 
Messenger
The Messenger is a great way to reach out to members when a private chat is more appropriate than a topic. Inspired by modern email clients, the messenger in Version 5 has been revamped with a full-height, sticky inbox, a longer message snippet, mini profiles and a more polished UI - all with a 25% reduction in CSS and a 100% reduction in Javascript.
messenger-v5.mp4
 
Sticky elements
We've mentioned sticky elements a couple of times now, so lets take a look behind the scenes at how they're created, and some of the performance improvements with Version 5. Traditionally, sticky elements were created using Javascript which would calculate the position of the element on the page and adjust it's stickiness every time the page was scrolled. Scroll events can be quite taxing for browsers, and when it comes to Javascript, the less, the better (especially when aiming for great page speed scores)!
With that in mind, all sticky elements are now handled using sticky positioning via CSS, which is a native and much more performant way of controlling these elements. We've been able to replace an entire 400 line Javascript component with just 3 lines of CSS.
 
Grids and Masonry
Grids have previously been handled in a similar fashion. Javascript would scan all elements within a grid to determine how many could fit on a single line, and would then shuffle these elements into position after the page was loaded or resized. CSS has since introduced its own grid properties, which has allowed us to replace more than 350 lines of Javascript with just a few lines of CSS, resulting in more performant page rendering and nicer looking grids (especially on small-medium displays such as mobiles and tablets).
 

 
Fun fact: We first introduced a similar performance improvement to "masonry grids" in our Gallery update from January this year, by replacing more than 400 lines of Javascript with, you guessed it, just a few lines of CSS.
 

 
 
 
Click targets
We wanted to make Version 5 as simple as possible to navigate, and one way of doing that has been by implementing larger click targets. Clicking anywhere inside an entry in a table or grid will now take you to that entry (you can still click on other links like normal within the click target, such as subforums or profile links). Click targets are optional and can be disabled via your theme settings if necessary.
 
click-targets.mp4
 
Data Lists (tables)
Speaking of tables, they too have been revamped. Tables automatically adapt to the space they've been assigned to (for those curious, this is done using CSS container-queries), so they're always neat regardless of the screen size, with no overflow or squashed layouts. Behind the scenes, the two columns below are created with identical code, yet they're quite different visually due to the size which they've been allocated. Even with these improvements, tables have received a 25% reduction in CSS.
 

 
Profiles
Profiles have been polished for Version 5 and include some nice improvements such as sticky widgets and tabs. 
profile-desktop.mp4
 
On mobiles, the side column collapses into a carousel, and the sticky tabs allow you to easily flick between content types without scrolling to the top of the page.
profile-mobile.mp4
 

Tabs
You may have noticed in the above clip that tabs on mobiles are now scrollable, compared to a dropdown menu from version 4. We made this change to ensure that tabs are given more equal exposure on small devices, and have managed to reduce the CSS by a whopping 80%.
 
Carousels
Last and certainly not least, are carousels. Carousels are great for displaying large amounts of data in a confined space and they've been rewritten from scratch for version 5. Previously, a Javascript library was used to create the "scroll effect", however this has never been the smoothest experience on laptop trackpads and touch devices.
In version 5, carousels are powered by native smooth-scrolling and scroll-snapping, which results in a much nicer user experience, especially on touchscreens. We've been able to remove a staggering 95% of the Javascript, substituting it with just a few lines of CSS.
 
carousel.mp4
 
To be honest, we've only just scratched the surface here! In addition to these changes, we've modernized (and reduced code) in almost every component throughout the suite including avatars, cover photos, dropdown menus, forms, inputs, buttons, lists, off-canvas menus, side menus, columns and more!
Combined, these changes result in not only a significant reduction in code, but also a polished UI that performs smoothly on desktop and touch devices. We're excited to continue modernizing Invision Community well into the future as new technologies and techniques become available to us, and are looking forward to getting it in your hands in 2024.

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I still think that a summary will rob the community of its character and voices. 
It’s still important to see the author next to their content IMO. 

I hope you never do AI generated topic summaries. I’d rather use the ReaderView in Safari to read topics. If I want summaries of the topic, I’ll use one of the many AI tools available for MacOS to generate AI summaries of text in the browser. Browser makers are starting to build AI into their browsers to do these summaries. Check out Arc’s AI features. I’m pretty sure that Apple and Google will integrate more AI features in the coming year. As long as IC5 supports Reader View in Safari, I’m pretty sure that AI built into the OS will generate these summaries for the user. Use your developers time supporting ReaderView and properly printing Topics including all replies to a PDF for topic archiving on the user’s device. I bet next year’s MacOS release will build in AI features such as article summaries directly into Siri or ReaderView where they belong. 

This reminds me of websites that used to build in spell checking which never worked very well. What a waste of developer time. Some features really belong to the OS or browser so they are well implemented and generally available. 

I clicked into this very excited, thinking you'd be showing off an AI-generated 'executive summary' of topics. Genuinely curious: why not feed those posts with high impact signals into an LLM to summarize? Not long ago your approach would have been great, but now I think will be in danger of feeling pretty clunky, manual and old fashioned. This seemed like it'd be the perfect opportunity to use a modern tool to solve the problem.

We’re already providing support for  ProfilePage and DiscussionForumPosting.
I have also made recently some adjustments to the QA stuff which will be included in a future release.

That is great to hear!!
It is mostly getting the Zap to trigger.  Let's say I post a webinar on the community calendar for June 10th, 2024.  The current setup will fire the Zap as soon as the event is added (let's say today) and that isn't exactly ideal.  Now I need to add more steps to the Zap to try and schedule the further steps for 7 months from now.  The only way I found to do this with success is to have the Zap schedule the tasks in either a spreadsheet or a social media manager, but now it will not accept edits to the event.  So, if I change the start time, the Zap has already fired and is not going to process the changes to wherever it went.
If I wanted the change based on a group change in my community, yes.  But I cannot flip that and have my community make a change based on something else.  We only get an Update Member action and that is just a few options (name, email, password).  I can add/remove secondary groups, but it a fairly limiting in potential.

Just six short weeks ago, Ehren hit record on a video that changed everything for Invision Community.
The blog was called "Introducing a fresh new vision for Invision Community 5," and it ripped up the rule book on what forums should look like and revealed a slick new look featuring a new forum home feed view and sidebar navigation.
A lot has been discussed, but we're not even close to done!
Before we bring you news of more features after Thanksgiving, I wanted to take a mid-season break to recap what we've seen so far.
First up was the introduction video, which gave a broad overview of the new UI Invision Community 5 would be sporting. Ehren takes us through many new elements, including the sidebar navigation, forum feed view, simplified post view and more.
 
 
Up next was a focus on dark mode, accessibility and mobile views. Invision Community 5 features the ability to have native dark mode without additional themes or complex variables to set up. Our aim with Invision Community 5 is to hide the complexities and technology and just let you focus on creating a great community experience for your audience.
 
 
Bringing complex theming to everyone was the message in the blog talking about the new theme editor. Now, you can make wide-ranging changes to your theme without the need to edit CSS or manage HTML templates, all driven by a smart and simple interface.
 
 
Next, it was my turn to talk about a new feature. I introduced two new features designed to help those who run support-based communities. Finding the most helpful answers and identifying community experts help your members do more with less time and frustration.
 
 
Last week, Ehren demonstrated our new icon and badge builder, which is an amazingly powerful tool to produce slick and professional badges along with the ability to customize your community further with emojis and icons for menus, reactions and more. Building ways to reduce the barrier to customization has been a strong theme for Invision Community 5.
 
 
Phew!
We can all agree that we've showcased a lot of impressive functionality coming with Invision Community 5 already.
But what does the future hold?
Lots! We have a lot of new functionality that we're putting the finishing touches on, and we can't wait to show you more. These new features further help to reduce noise in topics, make the community feel alive and bring long-needed updates to core components such as the editor. Not to mention, there is a significant update to Pages underway.
We also have a lot of less flashy updates, such as the new consolidated Feature/Our Picks feature, which is now a single feature.
 
Feature-window.mp4
 
An improved Moderators Control Panel brings a more uniform experience across deleted, hidden, and content waiting to be approved.
 

We're still on course for a release of Invision Community in early 2024 and can't wait for you to experience the future of forums.
What has been your favourite feature so far? I'd love to know; drop a comment below!

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