LiquidFractal

Looks nice 🙂
Any plans to add a search to that select in the future? I can imagine some people (like me) probably will have quite a few of those 🙂

Very near future 🤫 🙃

Yeah, I was very enthusiastic about this until I read that self-hosted clients like myself were left twisting in the wind on this. 😞
I, too, am concerned about a possible paradigm shift that would leave self-hosted clients more and more out in the cold.  Not that I distrust the cloud (for the most part), but I lease a VPS and I love having a VPS; I can run Invision, I can create test/developmental sites, I have root access and can experiment with other apps and platforms for resource management and other things.  I wouldn't have it any other way...and, to be quite honest (and no offense), with all of this taken into consideration it's currently cheaper than your services.
Now, I've been with Invision for 10+ years (since 2009) and there's a reason why I'm still here - I love the crew and the platform and have built my business (as well as my academic research) on it.  And while I have no plans to go anywhere, and I also remember Lindy saying somewhere that Invision has no plans to alter their availability to self-hosted customers, things like this do make me antsy.  At a time when I'm still building and soliciting clients, the thought of having to pack up and find somewhere else (even far into the future) almost makes me nauseous (you don't even wanna know the trials and tribulations I went through to finally arrive at a good VPS provider!!).
I understand that things evolve and change, but something as big as this in terms of trigger/action functionality for an Invision CMS?  Well, I don't get how you could simply leave us out and do truly hope that the "beta" release means at some point there will be some integration.  (NOTE: I can search the adminCP on my self-hosted install for "Zapier" and get one hit for [System] Community Enhancements, and when I follow that link there's nothing 🙃).  I'll be opinionated here and say that through my experience I believe that there are some things that simply shouldn't be left to third-party developers.  This is one of them.  So although I despise catchphrases and dogwhistle words with every fibre of my being, I'd love some "inclusivity" here.  There...look what you made me do! 😉

I can see this being an option for paid subscriptions/memberships for those who want to upgrade to have an option to post anonymously.
I'm assuming a user will have a choice on whether to post anonymously or not and topics/posts that are not anonymous will show on their profile pages? Hopefully they can edit their post to make it public should they decide to.

Unless you play games.

@Jordan Invision, first off, thanks for responding and taking into account what you call the "justifiable outrage" here.  For the record, I myself don't feel "outrage" so much as a bit of anxiety that this is the beginning of a larger trend, under the rubric of "business decisions," to exclude self-hosted clients - not so much from core apps, but from key improvements and developments that keep the suite attuned to the evolving needs of communities.  Tell me I'm wrong, because this isn't something I particularly want to be right about!
So I'm somewhat disappointed: I understand the necessity of "business decisions," but as a long-term customer I can say that I've been waiting for something like this for quite some time since Kevin Carwile's unannounced and profoundly disappointing abandonment of his apps.  Not to say I know what's best for Invision of course, and I get the appeal of outsourcing, but speaking as a customer I can't help but think that this particular aspect of gamification really is not something which should be outsourced, or should only be outsourced in the short term.
In the longer term, I suspect it may be a far more powerful selling point to be able to have (and advertise) it as a native feature, which would ensure its development in step with the Invision suite so that key parts of the CMS aren't beholden to a third-party company for whom Invision is just one of many clients.  I don't know the CMS market, but I ask the question out loud: could this put Invision in a unique position, having inbuilt gamification and triggers/actions?  I realise it isn't something you can just add to Invision overnight and that it would take extensive development, testing, troubleshooting etc., but I (and I think others here) believe that it would be well worth it in the long term.
Anyway, just my two cents.  I'm still here until they kick me out of the place!
EDIT: upon thinking this over, I want to ask if I'm talking about two different things?  Is Zapier Invision's answer to a point-system style "gamification," or is this separate from Zapier?

Here's an example of me manually giving a badge and/or points.


Here's the dialog the moderators can use:


One other thing we haven't spoken about is that you can allow your moderators to deduct points from a user when they are warned.

 

Yes, the badges you see here will be included by default in Invision Community 4.6.
There are many pages in the ACP. On the front end, viewing a member's profile shows you which badges they've earned.
I'm not sure if we are going to do a "here's all the possible badges you can earn". I'm not sure of its value. We don't want to turn the community into a game. It's designed to reward good contributions and not encourage pure engagement for engagements sake to win points and badges.
Yes, it does work across all apps. The profile link is also in this screenshot 😄
Not yet, but we already have this down as a future expansion idea.
You can rebuild points and ranks at any time including post upgrade. It's what we did here. We had 21 million data points to look at, and it took about 5-6 hours.
Reputation and points are still separate. One thing to keep in mind is that we don't want to turn a community into a game. An early rule I put in place was that we were not going to show point logic and show people how to specifically earn points, and which actions earned the most points because that will start to erode the purpose and people may decide, if you said that you earn 5 points for a post and 10 points for a gallery image, to reduce posting and start uploading random pictures just to earn points and rank up.

We do not want this. The achievements system is meant to be a reward for great contributions, and not the purpose of the community.

To this end, we will not be showing how you can earn points, and the rank thresholds.

We do have on our list a way to give you a weekly update about how many points you earned, so you may get an email with "You earned 205 points last week, that's 20 more than the week before" for example to keep you updated on your progress.
You can opt in to notifications to get a push notification / inline notification / email when you rank up or earn a new badge.
You are seeing the entire system from the perspective of a user. There is a "recognise" system that allows you to manually award points and/or badges for content.
Yes you can manually give points and/or badges.
Yes, you can add a "location" "and" clause to specify just forums, or whatever app and set up points per thing differently.

Looks great!
I know I've gone on about this before, but: are there any plans for a more standalone Points system which isn't specifically tied into community participation, i.e., blocks of Points/hours/tokens which can be purchased in the Store for various services which may or may not be directly linked to the website?
I'd also like to know: what is the messaging interface with all of this?  That is, is there (or will there be) the opportunity to set up email schemes where members are automatically emailed to notify them they have X amount of points, they've earned X Badge or whatnot?  That would be a(nother) major selling point IMHO.  But I get it if that's down the track....you can only do so much at a time, and this looks great! 😀
EDIT: right after posting this I got an in-site notification that I received a Poster's Badge or something like that!  😄 Very cool...but does this sort of thing extend to email?

Looks great!
I know I've gone on about this before, but: are there any plans for a more standalone Points system which isn't specifically tied into community participation, i.e., blocks of Points/hours/tokens which can be purchased in the Store for various services which may or may not be directly linked to the website?
I'd also like to know: what is the messaging interface with all of this?  That is, is there (or will there be) the opportunity to set up email schemes where members are automatically emailed to notify them they have X amount of points, they've earned X Badge or whatnot?  That would be a(nother) major selling point IMHO.  But I get it if that's down the track....you can only do so much at a time, and this looks great! 😀
EDIT: right after posting this I got an in-site notification that I received a Poster's Badge or something like that!  😄 Very cool...but does this sort of thing extend to email?

Looks great!
I know I've gone on about this before, but: are there any plans for a more standalone Points system which isn't specifically tied into community participation, i.e., blocks of Points/hours/tokens which can be purchased in the Store for various services which may or may not be directly linked to the website?
I'd also like to know: what is the messaging interface with all of this?  That is, is there (or will there be) the opportunity to set up email schemes where members are automatically emailed to notify them they have X amount of points, they've earned X Badge or whatnot?  That would be a(nother) major selling point IMHO.  But I get it if that's down the track....you can only do so much at a time, and this looks great! 😀
EDIT: right after posting this I got an in-site notification that I received a Poster's Badge or something like that!  😄 Very cool...but does this sort of thing extend to email?

Another +one for Club categories!
A mod for it exists on 4.4 but the developer left. So really it would be smart to introduce categories in 4.6 🙂 @Jordan Invision

Categories would be nice, especially if you want to create blocks in Pages based on certain criteria 🙂

I plan to expand my use of Clubs ("Spaces" on my site) so that clients who need tuition or mentoring over a longer period can have a private space with multimedia galleries, a writing blog, and a versioned file storage space for essays etc.
But because I also use Spaces for academic reading groups my only setback is that I really, REALLY need categories for Clubs so that I can organise things, as different classes of student use the same resources independently of each other.
So, yes....great additions, and I'm looking forward to them.  But hey - you wanna see me reach for a cigarette after upgrading (and I don't even smoke!)?  Clubs categories!!

(Come on...you even made me do a social media cat thing when I have Hegel to read!)

I plan to expand my use of Clubs ("Spaces" on my site) so that clients who need tuition or mentoring over a longer period can have a private space with multimedia galleries, a writing blog, and a versioned file storage space for essays etc.
But because I also use Spaces for academic reading groups my only setback is that I really, REALLY need categories for Clubs so that I can organise things, as different classes of student use the same resources independently of each other.
So, yes....great additions, and I'm looking forward to them.  But hey - you wanna see me reach for a cigarette after upgrading (and I don't even smoke!)?  Clubs categories!!

(Come on...you even made me do a social media cat thing when I have Hegel to read!)

@Jordan Invision, first off, thanks for responding and taking into account what you call the "justifiable outrage" here.  For the record, I myself don't feel "outrage" so much as a bit of anxiety that this is the beginning of a larger trend, under the rubric of "business decisions," to exclude self-hosted clients - not so much from core apps, but from key improvements and developments that keep the suite attuned to the evolving needs of communities.  Tell me I'm wrong, because this isn't something I particularly want to be right about!
So I'm somewhat disappointed: I understand the necessity of "business decisions," but as a long-term customer I can say that I've been waiting for something like this for quite some time since Kevin Carwile's unannounced and profoundly disappointing abandonment of his apps.  Not to say I know what's best for Invision of course, and I get the appeal of outsourcing, but speaking as a customer I can't help but think that this particular aspect of gamification really is not something which should be outsourced, or should only be outsourced in the short term.
In the longer term, I suspect it may be a far more powerful selling point to be able to have (and advertise) it as a native feature, which would ensure its development in step with the Invision suite so that key parts of the CMS aren't beholden to a third-party company for whom Invision is just one of many clients.  I don't know the CMS market, but I ask the question out loud: could this put Invision in a unique position, having inbuilt gamification and triggers/actions?  I realise it isn't something you can just add to Invision overnight and that it would take extensive development, testing, troubleshooting etc., but I (and I think others here) believe that it would be well worth it in the long term.
Anyway, just my two cents.  I'm still here until they kick me out of the place!
EDIT: upon thinking this over, I want to ask if I'm talking about two different things?  Is Zapier Invision's answer to a point-system style "gamification," or is this separate from Zapier?

I'm just going to be upfront with you.
I will remain slightly bitter until the automation and gamification options we could build with Kevin's app become a fully integrated core feature. I cannot overstate just how crippling losing the 30+ custom rules I spent hours building myself was to our site. I'm a broken record about this, but you can go into my post history and find examples of how I used this app to really get Invision going to its full potential based on the needs of my community, which was a lot.
I'm not talking about just "fun stuff" either, I'm talking about automation that increased the staff workflow tenfold, boosted engagement with custom emails and front-end notifications for too many things to list, added extra functionalities to downloads, commerce, and groups (clubs) that were missing that should come standard (in my personal opinion), etc.  And the biggest kick in the throat is that we also were able to improve on the apps that Invision barely updates, like the gallery for example. That's one of the most used apps in my community, second to pages which features a lot of gallery based content.  I know they just do basic maintenance on the other apps because forums is their bread and butter, but god damn they treat the gallery like their red-headed step child. Since moving here in 2017 I have suggested so many improvements that have fallen on deaf ears it seems.
We've had to backtrack so much that when I heard of the Zapier integrations, it almost brought a tear to my exhausted, frustrated eyes.  Finally a light at the end of the tunnel for my community... but now it's locked behind their cloud service. 
Invision charges $590/m for 100GB storage in their cloud service (that's the option I would have to select if I were to switch)... that is more than my yearly server and storage costs combined, and that's PER MONTH.  I pay $7/m for 1TB storage, and if I go over that, it's only an additional $6 per TB.  I don't want to leave Invision.  I'd rather just stick with the software even if it's not perfect to save my community the hassle of having to move again, but that is just very unrealistic.

@Jordan Invision, first off, thanks for responding and taking into account what you call the "justifiable outrage" here.  For the record, I myself don't feel "outrage" so much as a bit of anxiety that this is the beginning of a larger trend, under the rubric of "business decisions," to exclude self-hosted clients - not so much from core apps, but from key improvements and developments that keep the suite attuned to the evolving needs of communities.  Tell me I'm wrong, because this isn't something I particularly want to be right about!
So I'm somewhat disappointed: I understand the necessity of "business decisions," but as a long-term customer I can say that I've been waiting for something like this for quite some time since Kevin Carwile's unannounced and profoundly disappointing abandonment of his apps.  Not to say I know what's best for Invision of course, and I get the appeal of outsourcing, but speaking as a customer I can't help but think that this particular aspect of gamification really is not something which should be outsourced, or should only be outsourced in the short term.
In the longer term, I suspect it may be a far more powerful selling point to be able to have (and advertise) it as a native feature, which would ensure its development in step with the Invision suite so that key parts of the CMS aren't beholden to a third-party company for whom Invision is just one of many clients.  I don't know the CMS market, but I ask the question out loud: could this put Invision in a unique position, having inbuilt gamification and triggers/actions?  I realise it isn't something you can just add to Invision overnight and that it would take extensive development, testing, troubleshooting etc., but I (and I think others here) believe that it would be well worth it in the long term.
Anyway, just my two cents.  I'm still here until they kick me out of the place!
EDIT: upon thinking this over, I want to ask if I'm talking about two different things?  Is Zapier Invision's answer to a point-system style "gamification," or is this separate from Zapier?

Yeah, I was very enthusiastic about this until I read that self-hosted clients like myself were left twisting in the wind on this. 😞
I, too, am concerned about a possible paradigm shift that would leave self-hosted clients more and more out in the cold.  Not that I distrust the cloud (for the most part), but I lease a VPS and I love having a VPS; I can run Invision, I can create test/developmental sites, I have root access and can experiment with other apps and platforms for resource management and other things.  I wouldn't have it any other way...and, to be quite honest (and no offense), with all of this taken into consideration it's currently cheaper than your services.
Now, I've been with Invision for 10+ years (since 2009) and there's a reason why I'm still here - I love the crew and the platform and have built my business (as well as my academic research) on it.  And while I have no plans to go anywhere, and I also remember Lindy saying somewhere that Invision has no plans to alter their availability to self-hosted customers, things like this do make me antsy.  At a time when I'm still building and soliciting clients, the thought of having to pack up and find somewhere else (even far into the future) almost makes me nauseous (you don't even wanna know the trials and tribulations I went through to finally arrive at a good VPS provider!!).
I understand that things evolve and change, but something as big as this in terms of trigger/action functionality for an Invision CMS?  Well, I don't get how you could simply leave us out and do truly hope that the "beta" release means at some point there will be some integration.  (NOTE: I can search the adminCP on my self-hosted install for "Zapier" and get one hit for [System] Community Enhancements, and when I follow that link there's nothing 🙃).  I'll be opinionated here and say that through my experience I believe that there are some things that simply shouldn't be left to third-party developers.  This is one of them.  So although I despise catchphrases and dogwhistle words with every fibre of my being, I'd love some "inclusivity" here.  There...look what you made me do! 😉

I imagine this "Cloud and Enterprise Community customers exclusively." is down to requirements on Zapier's side, I have worked with Zapier in the past and know you have to pass their compliance, self-hosted versions of IC would each have to go through that process, so IC have taken the easy route and made it just made this for the single "Cloud" version.
But yes I agree, it's not a great direction and I'd hate to see this same pattern on future releases, self-hosting is critical for us as we have many custom applications and privacy requirements to deal with where the cloud version is not appropriate.
I built our own "webhook" application using the standard IC "hooks" available, so if you have the skills/developers, you can roll your own app integration like this if you need to.... also Zapier gets expensive pretty quick, I use http://n8n.io/ - so building generic "webhooks" rather than "Zapier" would have been the better feature to develop IMHO.
 

"Zapier is the first smart community enhancement available for Cloud and Enterprise Community customers exclusively."
Not liking this direction...

Yeah, I was very enthusiastic about this until I read that self-hosted clients like myself were left twisting in the wind on this. 😞
I, too, am concerned about a possible paradigm shift that would leave self-hosted clients more and more out in the cold.  Not that I distrust the cloud (for the most part), but I lease a VPS and I love having a VPS; I can run Invision, I can create test/developmental sites, I have root access and can experiment with other apps and platforms for resource management and other things.  I wouldn't have it any other way...and, to be quite honest (and no offense), with all of this taken into consideration it's currently cheaper than your services.
Now, I've been with Invision for 10+ years (since 2009) and there's a reason why I'm still here - I love the crew and the platform and have built my business (as well as my academic research) on it.  And while I have no plans to go anywhere, and I also remember Lindy saying somewhere that Invision has no plans to alter their availability to self-hosted customers, things like this do make me antsy.  At a time when I'm still building and soliciting clients, the thought of having to pack up and find somewhere else (even far into the future) almost makes me nauseous (you don't even wanna know the trials and tribulations I went through to finally arrive at a good VPS provider!!).
I understand that things evolve and change, but something as big as this in terms of trigger/action functionality for an Invision CMS?  Well, I don't get how you could simply leave us out and do truly hope that the "beta" release means at some point there will be some integration.  (NOTE: I can search the adminCP on my self-hosted install for "Zapier" and get one hit for [System] Community Enhancements, and when I follow that link there's nothing 🙃).  I'll be opinionated here and say that through my experience I believe that there are some things that simply shouldn't be left to third-party developers.  This is one of them.  So although I despise catchphrases and dogwhistle words with every fibre of my being, I'd love some "inclusivity" here.  There...look what you made me do! 😉

Yeah, I was very enthusiastic about this until I read that self-hosted clients like myself were left twisting in the wind on this. 😞
I, too, am concerned about a possible paradigm shift that would leave self-hosted clients more and more out in the cold.  Not that I distrust the cloud (for the most part), but I lease a VPS and I love having a VPS; I can run Invision, I can create test/developmental sites, I have root access and can experiment with other apps and platforms for resource management and other things.  I wouldn't have it any other way...and, to be quite honest (and no offense), with all of this taken into consideration it's currently cheaper than your services.
Now, I've been with Invision for 10+ years (since 2009) and there's a reason why I'm still here - I love the crew and the platform and have built my business (as well as my academic research) on it.  And while I have no plans to go anywhere, and I also remember Lindy saying somewhere that Invision has no plans to alter their availability to self-hosted customers, things like this do make me antsy.  At a time when I'm still building and soliciting clients, the thought of having to pack up and find somewhere else (even far into the future) almost makes me nauseous (you don't even wanna know the trials and tribulations I went through to finally arrive at a good VPS provider!!).
I understand that things evolve and change, but something as big as this in terms of trigger/action functionality for an Invision CMS?  Well, I don't get how you could simply leave us out and do truly hope that the "beta" release means at some point there will be some integration.  (NOTE: I can search the adminCP on my self-hosted install for "Zapier" and get one hit for [System] Community Enhancements, and when I follow that link there's nothing 🙃).  I'll be opinionated here and say that through my experience I believe that there are some things that simply shouldn't be left to third-party developers.  This is one of them.  So although I despise catchphrases and dogwhistle words with every fibre of my being, I'd love some "inclusivity" here.  There...look what you made me do! 😉

Yeah, I was very enthusiastic about this until I read that self-hosted clients like myself were left twisting in the wind on this. 😞
I, too, am concerned about a possible paradigm shift that would leave self-hosted clients more and more out in the cold.  Not that I distrust the cloud (for the most part), but I lease a VPS and I love having a VPS; I can run Invision, I can create test/developmental sites, I have root access and can experiment with other apps and platforms for resource management and other things.  I wouldn't have it any other way...and, to be quite honest (and no offense), with all of this taken into consideration it's currently cheaper than your services.
Now, I've been with Invision for 10+ years (since 2009) and there's a reason why I'm still here - I love the crew and the platform and have built my business (as well as my academic research) on it.  And while I have no plans to go anywhere, and I also remember Lindy saying somewhere that Invision has no plans to alter their availability to self-hosted customers, things like this do make me antsy.  At a time when I'm still building and soliciting clients, the thought of having to pack up and find somewhere else (even far into the future) almost makes me nauseous (you don't even wanna know the trials and tribulations I went through to finally arrive at a good VPS provider!!).
I understand that things evolve and change, but something as big as this in terms of trigger/action functionality for an Invision CMS?  Well, I don't get how you could simply leave us out and do truly hope that the "beta" release means at some point there will be some integration.  (NOTE: I can search the adminCP on my self-hosted install for "Zapier" and get one hit for [System] Community Enhancements, and when I follow that link there's nothing 🙃).  I'll be opinionated here and say that through my experience I believe that there are some things that simply shouldn't be left to third-party developers.  This is one of them.  So although I despise catchphrases and dogwhistle words with every fibre of my being, I'd love some "inclusivity" here.  There...look what you made me do! 😉

Yeah, I was very enthusiastic about this until I read that self-hosted clients like myself were left twisting in the wind on this. 😞
I, too, am concerned about a possible paradigm shift that would leave self-hosted clients more and more out in the cold.  Not that I distrust the cloud (for the most part), but I lease a VPS and I love having a VPS; I can run Invision, I can create test/developmental sites, I have root access and can experiment with other apps and platforms for resource management and other things.  I wouldn't have it any other way...and, to be quite honest (and no offense), with all of this taken into consideration it's currently cheaper than your services.
Now, I've been with Invision for 10+ years (since 2009) and there's a reason why I'm still here - I love the crew and the platform and have built my business (as well as my academic research) on it.  And while I have no plans to go anywhere, and I also remember Lindy saying somewhere that Invision has no plans to alter their availability to self-hosted customers, things like this do make me antsy.  At a time when I'm still building and soliciting clients, the thought of having to pack up and find somewhere else (even far into the future) almost makes me nauseous (you don't even wanna know the trials and tribulations I went through to finally arrive at a good VPS provider!!).
I understand that things evolve and change, but something as big as this in terms of trigger/action functionality for an Invision CMS?  Well, I don't get how you could simply leave us out and do truly hope that the "beta" release means at some point there will be some integration.  (NOTE: I can search the adminCP on my self-hosted install for "Zapier" and get one hit for [System] Community Enhancements, and when I follow that link there's nothing 🙃).  I'll be opinionated here and say that through my experience I believe that there are some things that simply shouldn't be left to third-party developers.  This is one of them.  So although I despise catchphrases and dogwhistle words with every fibre of my being, I'd love some "inclusivity" here.  There...look what you made me do! 😉