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.
In line with our aim to make incremental improvements in each release, I wanted to go over a few of the small but useful changes to the personal messenger that you'll find in our next release, 4.1.13.
Read/unread filtering
The first improvement is that you can now filter the message list by read and unread, making it a little easier to browse through just the messages you're interested in.
Search improvements
Next up, the messenger search has been improved in a couple of ways; first, you can now also search the names of both the recipients and the senders, and second, we've added a menu so you can specify which fields in particular you want to search by.
Easier moving
Finally, we've added a popular request - the ability to use the mass-move tool inside the messenger. You can now check multiple messages, and the usual mass-action toolbar will appear that will allow you either move them to another folder, or, has been the case in the past, delete them.
While these are each small improvements by themselves, we hope the incremental changes in each release add up to a more pleasant experience for users.