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PPlanet

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  1. Like
    PPlanet reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Twenty years of Invision Community   
    Twenty years ago today, Invision Community was founded and within months the first version of Invision Community was released. Little did we know, this would be the start of a remarkable journey spanning several decades.
    Our first version appeared shortly after we founded the company. It might be hard to imagine a time before social media and YouTube, but when we started out, the web looked very different.

    The first version of Invision Community was called Invision Board, reflecting the popular term for forums back in the early 2000s. It was full featured and you may recognise some elements that persist today.
    Like today, it even had a separate control panel where you could create new areas of discussion and customise the theme.

    Twenty years is a long time and we've continued to adapt with the ever-changing needs of community managers. We've seen the rise of social media impact how people consume content and found ways to compliment Twitter and Facebook by offering a place for long-form permanent discussion.
    Several elements remain from those early days but the concepts behind the theme have change significantly. New workflows, UI elements and views have helped the platform stay fresh and we've certainly innovated a few features that have since become industry standard over that time.
    I can't express how proud I am of what we've built together. From those humble beginnings working until 2am to growing a creative and talented team around our passion for community.
    I'm still as excited today as I was back in 2002. This year will see us build and release new tools to help guide and inform community managers. Our community platform continues to go from strength to strength.
    Of course, the platform is only one part of Invision Community. Over the last twenty years I've been grateful to get to know many of you and watch your lives unfold.
    This is as pure as community can get and I'm privileged to be part of it.

    We have a few other surprises to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. We can't wait to share them!

    I'd love to hear your memories of Invision Community! When did you first use our products and what was your community for? Please let me know in the comments below.
  2. Thanks
    PPlanet reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, The numbers don’t lie: Invision Community in 2021   
    2021 was a big year for Invision Community. 🎉 
    We launched no-code automation with our Zapier integration, added web push notifications, offline support, stock replies and new reporting metrics.
    We also improved spam management, SEO crawl efficiency, Clubs, Activity Streams and introduced a native gamification system named Achievements.
    Not to mention the team grew! 👋  @Matt Finger @Marshall Slemp (and me 🙋🏼‍♂️).
    We have lots to look forward to in the new year, but before we reveal more let's take a trip down memory lane. 
    2021 was one of our best-performing years ever! Here are some highlights:
     
    Community Activity 2021
    We saw an influx of members contributing to our community support forum. 3,832 members submitted new content, followed something, or reacted to something in the community.
     

     
     
    Points earned:
    Thanks to the introduction of the Achievements system, members had the opportunity to earn points for contributing to the support community. In total, the community racked up 361,363 points. 📈




     
    Topics created:
    Members fired off more than 4000 topics, including questions, feature suggestions and community management tips. 😳 



     
    New posts:
    Inside those topics included an array of replies. 31,488 posts to be exact. 😱 


     
     

    Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions given:
    Members also engaged with the community using our Reputation system (think of it as our "likes" 👍 system). Here are the top 10 members who gave the most Reactions. 


    @sobrenome @Jordan Miller @SeNioR- @Linux-Is-Best @OptimusBain @Matt @Adriano Faria @Davyc @Marc Stridgen @Unienc
     
    Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions received:
    If a member's topic or reply is well received, it earns Reputation using our Reactions system. Here are the top 10 members who received the most love. ❤️ 



    @Matt @Adriano Faria @Nathan Explosion @CoffeeCake @opentype @Marc Stridgen @Daniel F @Davyc @Jimi Wikman 
     
    Members who earned the most badges:  
    Participating in the community also earns members special badges. You get a badge and you get a badge! ✅ 
     

    @CoffeeCake @TAMAN @opentype @PPlanet @SUBRTX @Sonya* @Afrodude
     
    Top Marketplace contributors:
    Shout-out to our crazy talented third-party developers who take time out of their busy schedules to innovate and create downloads for other Invision Community clients to use! Here are the top Marketplace contributes: 
     

    @Nathan Explosion @Michael.J @Miss_B @IBTheme @Kirill Gromov @ReyDev @Adriano Faria @shahed 
     
     
     
    Most active forum:
    You have questions and we have answers. Our support system shifted to our help & support forum and it paid off big time! 
     

     
     
    Thanks to everyone who contributed to making Invision Community a better place. Whether you're an active poster in our community support forums, or a customer who lives to learn and absorb, we greatly appreciate you. Cheers to the exciting ventures on the way in 2022! 🎉 
     
  3. Like
    PPlanet reacted to Matt for a blog entry, SEO: Improving crawling efficiency   
    No matter how good your content is, how accurate your keywords are or how precise your microdata is, inefficient crawling reduces the number of pages Google will read and store from your site.
    Search engines need to look at and store as many pages that exist on the internet as possible. There are currently an estimated 4.5 billion web pages active today. That's a lot of work for Google.
    It cannot look and store every page, so it needs to decide what to keep and how long it will spend on your site indexing pages.
    Right now, Invision Community is not very good at helping Google understand what is important and how to get there quickly. This blog article runs through the changes we've made to improve crawling efficiency dramatically, starting with Invision Community 4.6.8, our November release.

    The short version
    This entry will get a little technical. The short version is that we remove a lot of pages from Google's view, including user profiles and filters that create faceted pages and remove a lot of redirect links to reduce the crawl depth and reduce the volume of thin content of little value. Instead, we want Google to focus wholly on topics, posts and other key user-generated content.
    Let's now take a deep dive into what crawl budget is, the current problem, the solution and finally look at a before and after analysis. Note, I use the terms "Google" and "search engines" interchangeably. I know that there are many wonderful search engines available but most understand what Google is and does.
    Crawl depth and budget
    In terms of crawl efficiency, there are two metrics to think about: crawl depth and crawl budget. The crawl budget is the number of links Google (and other search engines) will spider per day. The time spent on your site and the number of links examined depend on multiple factors, including site age, site freshness and more. For example, Google may choose to look at fewer than 100 links per day from your site, whereas Twitter may see hundreds of thousands of links indexed per day.
    Crawl depth is essentially how many links Google has to follow to index the page. The fewer links to get to a page, is better. Generally speaking, Google will reduce indexing links more than 5 to 6 clicks deep.
    The current problem #1: Crawl depth
    A community generates a lot of linked content. Many of these links, such as permalinks to specific posts and redirects to scroll to new posts in a topic, are very useful for logged in members but less so to spiders. These links are easy to spot; just look for "&do=getNewComment" or "&do=getLastComment" in the URL. Indeed, even guests would struggle to use these convenience links given the lack of unread tracking until logged in.  Although they offer no clear advantage to guests and search engines, they are prolific, and following the links results in a redirect which increases the crawl depth for content such as topics.
    The current problem #2: Crawl budget and faceted content
    A single user profile page can have around 150 redirect links to existing content. User profiles are linked from many pages. A single page of a topic will have around 25 links to user profiles. That's potentially 3,750 links Google has to crawl before deciding if any of it should be stored. Even sites with a healthy crawl budget will see a lot of their budget eaten up by links that add nothing new to the search index. These links are also very deep into the site, adding to the overall average crawl depth, which can signal search engines to reduce your crawl budget.
    Filters are a valuable tool to sort lists of data in particular ways. For example, when viewing a list of topics, you can filter by the number of replies or when the topic was created. Unfortunately, these filters are a problem for search engines as they create faceted navigation, which creates duplicate pages.

    The solution
    There is a straightforward solution to solve all of the problems outlined above.  We can ask that Google avoids indexing certain pages. We can help by using a mix of hints and directives to ensure pages without valuable content are ignored and by reducing the number of links to get to the content. We have used "noindex" in the past, but this still eats up the crawl budget as Google has to crawl the page to learn we do not want it stored in the index.
    Fortunately, Google has a hint directive called "nofollow", which you can apply in the <a href> code that wraps a link. This sends a strong hint that this link should not be read at all. However, Google may wish to follow it anyway, which means that we need to use a special file that contains firm instructions for Google on what to follow and index.
    This file is called robots.txt. We can use this file to write rules to ensure search engines don't waste their valuable time looking at links that do not have valuable content; that create faceted navigational issues and links that lead to a redirect.
    Invision Community will now create a dynamic robots.txt file with rules optimised for your community, or you can create custom rules if you prefer.

    The new robots.txt generator in Invision Community
    Analysis: Before and after
    I took a benchmark crawl using a popular SEO site audit tool of my test community with 50 members and around 20,000 posts, most of which were populated from RSS feeds, so they have actual content, including links, etc. There are approximately 5,000 topics visible to guests.
    Once I had implemented the "nofollow" changes, removed a lot of the redirect links for guests and added an optimised robots.txt file, I completed another crawl.
    Let's compare the data from the before and after.
    First up, the raw numbers show a stark difference.

    Before our changes, the audit tool crawled 176,175 links, of which nearly 23% were redirect links. After, just 6,389 links were crawled, with only 0.4% being redirection links. This is a dramatic reduction in both crawl budget and crawl depth. Simply by guiding Google away from thin content like profiles, leaderboards, online lists and redirect links, we can ask it to focus on content such as topics and posts.

    Note: You may notice a large drop in "Blocked by Robots.txt" in the 'after' crawl despite using a robots.txt for the first time. The calculation here also includes sharer images and other external links which are blocked by those sites robots.txt files. I added nofollow to the external links for the 'after' crawl so they were not fetched and then blocked externally.

    As we can see in this before, the crawl depth has a low peak between 5 and 7 levels deep, with a strong peak at 10+.

    After, the peak crawl depth is just 3. This will send a strong signal to Google that your site is optimised and worth crawling more often.
    Let's look at a crawl visualisation before we made these changes. It's easy to see how most content was found via table filters, which led to a redirect (the red dots), dramatically increasing crawl depth and reducing crawl efficiency.

    Compare that with the after, which shows a much more ordered crawl, with all content discoverable as expected without any red dots indicating redirects.

    Conclusion
    SEO is a multi-faceted discipline. In the past, we have focused on ensuring we send the correct headers, use the correct microdata such as JSON-LD and optimise meta tags. These are all vital parts of ensuring your site is optimised for crawling. However, as we can see in this blog that without focusing on the crawl budget and crawl efficiency, even the most accurately presented content is wasted if it is not discovered and added into the search index.
    These simple changes will offer considerable advantages to how Google and other search engines spider your site.
    The features and changes outlined in this blog will be available in our November release, which will be Invision Community 4.6.8.
  4. Like
    PPlanet reacted to Matt for a blog entry, 4.3: Commerce Subscription Manager   
    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!
     
  5. Like
    PPlanet reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Happy 16th Birthday To Us!   
    This month, we turn sweet sixteen!

    We made our own card this year.
    I know, it's hard to believe with our youthful looks and energetic personalities, but it's true. Charles and I have known each other longer than I've known my own children and we still make each other laugh on a daily basis.
    Over the past 16 years we've seen a lot of trends come and go.
    When we started, AOL dial-up was the preferred method of choice (and probably the only method of choice). Compuserve were flying high and I think I'll stop this walk down memory lane before I turn into my own grandfather and start talking about how things were better in my day.
    A lot has changed. We've seen the rise of social media and how it disrupted habits. We've seen MP3 players become iPods, and iPods become iPhones and iPhones become iPads (other digital devices are also available).
    It's crazy to think that our company pre-dates Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

    Click on this image to see it unless you have excellent eyesight
    We're still here because we are always innovating and adapting. The software we're working on right now is vastly different from the one we started out with. And that is how it should be. We listen to our customers and we implement the great ideas.
    Of course, we'd not have lasted a year without our customers. We're genuinely thrilled to still be doing a job we love and serving customers who have trusted their community with us.
    Thank you all for choosing us and we're looking forward to the next 16 years.
  6. Like
    PPlanet reacted to Matt for a blog entry, 4.3: Welcome to the future, blog!   
    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.
  7. Like
    PPlanet reacted to Matt for a blog entry, 4.3: Automatic Community Moderation   
    One huge benefit of running your own Invision Community is the moderation tools.
    Out of the box, Invision Community allows you to turn members into moderators. Better still, you can define what these moderators have permission to do.
    Part of this moderation suite is the report system. The report system allows your members to flag posts that need a moderator's attention.
    There comes a time when your community is so successful that it can be a little tough to keep up with all the content and reports.
    Community Moderation
    This new feature leverages your member reports to automatically remove objectionable content from public view.
    You as the admin will define thresholds for the content. For example, you may say that to hide content, a post needs 5 reports.
    This reduces the workload for your moderators and enables you to crowd source moderation.
    Let's take a look at this feature in a little more detail.
    Reporting Content
    When a member reports a piece of content, they now have the option to set a type, such as "Spam" or "Offensive". These options can count towards the threshold. Once the threshold has been passed the item is hidden.

    The threshold can be set up by creating rules in the Admin CP.
    Admin Set Up
    At its heart of the system are the rules. You can create custom rules in the Admin CP to determine the thresholds.

    For example, you may decide that:
    A member with less than 10 posts only needs 5 reports to hide the content.
    But you may want to give more experienced members a higher threshold as there is more trust.
    You simply add a new rule:
    A member who joined over a year ago with over 500 posts needs 10 reports to hide content.
    You can do that easily with the rules system as it will scan them all and pick the one most suitable for this member.

    It's as simple as that.
    Notifications
    Once an item has received enough reports to match the threshold, it is automatically hidden from view.

    A notification is sent to all moderators who opt in for notifications. This notification shows inline in the notifications center.

    It can also optionally be sent via email for those who want to know without checking the site.

    Restoring the content
    Of course, a moderator may decide that the content is fine and un-hide it. Once a piece of content has been un-hidden, automatic moderation will not hide it again.
    Report Types
    Depending on your community, the default types may not be suitable or relevant. You may also want to set up other report types.

    You can do this via the Admin CP.
    Preventing Abuse
    Your first thought may be that a single member can report a single item multiple times to force content to be hidden. 
    The system will only count a unique member as one point towards the threshold. This means a single member can report an item 5 times, but they are only counted once towards the threshold.

     
    You can also set a time limit between reporting the same item. This will prevent a member reporting a single item multiple times in succession.

    Of course, the member can delete their report if it was in error.

    Report Center
    The Report Center is the hub for all reported content. Invision Community 4.3 adds a filter to view a specific report type. The reports themselves also show the type of report.

    We hope that this new feature will be a huge help and time saver for you and your moderators.
    We'd love to hear your thoughts, please let us know what you think and if you have any questions.
  8. Like
    PPlanet reacted to Rikki for a blog entry, 6 reasons why you shouldn't just settle for a Facebook group community   
    Whether you run an existing community or are taking tentative first steps into setting up an online community forum around your brand, an important choice you need to make is between social networks like Facebook or having a community you own and control.
    Let's take a look at the benefits of an owned community versus a Facebook group - as well as how you can still use Facebook (and other social media platforms) to your advantage.
     
    You own your data
    The biggest point to consider when using Facebook groups is that you do not own your own data. Facebook owns it and does not even allow you direct access to it. If you decide later to move to a different platform, need to run reports to extract meaningful insights, or otherwise work with your community data: you are out of luck.
    In contrast, with an Invision Community, your data is your data. You can use it in any way that makes sense for your goals; be it analyzing trends, sending promotions to users, or generating reports and statistics. We never hold your data hostage and there's no fee to get it.
    Beyond owning the data, you also control how it's used and presented. Facebook is notorious for changing algorithms for when (or even if) people see your posts. When you run your own community the experience for your and your users is in your control.
     
    Branding opportunities
    This is a big one. An owned community gives you the tools you need to make your community a seamless part of your user's interaction with your business. This naturally includes your brand styles (your logo, colors, site navigation and so on) but also your community web address (URL). With an owned community, your URL will be easy to find - customers normally opt for something like forum.yourname.com or community.yourname.com. 
    Users will have more confidence that they're in the right place, and more closely associate your community and your message with your brand.
    Emails sent out by your owned community can also carry your branding, consistently reinforcing that connection between your business and your community.
    And, of course, when users share content from your community to Facebook and other social networks, they're sending users directly to your website where you have the opportunity to lead with your most important call to actions.
     
    More control over user experience
    All Facebook groups are, essentially, the same experience and yet your business needs almost certainly aren't the same as every other. One size doesn't necessarily fit all when it comes to community!
    When you control your own community, you have the ability to control your user's experience. Need to show specific types of data in specific places? You can do that (and more) with Invision Community's easy to use Blocks feature. Need to create a custom community application to serve as a resource center for product support? You can do that too.
    Another huge benefit of this control is that, unlike a Facebook Group, users won't be seeing ads and 'recommended content' from competing businesses and communities. With user attention being pulled in so many directions these days, the last thing your community needs is for users to leave because Facebook has suggested a competitor!
     
    No barriers to monetization
    Not all communities require a monetization strategy. In many cases, the community is part of a larger customer relationship strategy rather than a revenue-generating destination in its own right.
    But for those communities that do plan to monetize, options with a Facebook group are at best difficult to act upon, and at worst practically non-existent.
    In contrast, Invision Community gives you the opportunity to explore monetization strategies that work for you. These might include paid subscription plans (a particularly attractive option for fan club communities), traditional advertising through Google AdSense and other networks, or sponsorship deals with other businesses that might be relevant to your members. Invision Community has tools for each of these approaches built in, allowing you to start monetizing with minimum fuss.
     
    Fine-grained permission controls
    Facebook groups struggle to reflect the real-world roles that staff members play in your organization, limiting your choices to 'administrator' or 'moderator'. And the same is true of users, too - your options for recognizing different levels of user (such as VIPs, or brand ambassadors) are limited.
    Invision Community is different. Since you are creating and configuring each member group, you can precisely control who can see what, and how they are recognized within the community. You can even sync these roles via Single Sign-On (SSO) making setup and assigning users to groups painless.
    For staff groups, you can limit access to key community functions based on roles or responsibilities, ensuring access is granted on an as-needed basis only.
    For users, you can get creative and find a group structure that works best for your specific needs. For example, support communities often find that recognizing the most knowledgeable and helpful members with a new member group (complete with elevated permissions) is a great way of engaging users.
    And finally, with this control over access, it's very easy to create restricted areas of the community. Whether you want to create a private subforum that staff can use to coordinate tasks or a file repository that's only available to subscribers, Invision Community can achieve it.
     
    You can still reap the Facebook benefits
    Setting up your community within Facebook's walls might not be the best approach for you. That doesn't mean you should ignore Facebook, however. On the contrary, it's an influential platform and there's a very good chance your users are already using it.
    Invision Community offers a number of tools that allow you to benefit from Facebook while avoiding the drawbacks we discussed. We'll go into more detail on utilizing social media in a future article, but to summarize:
    Invision Community features social sign-in options, enabling users to register and log in using their existing social media accounts, substantially reducing onboarding friction. Content can promoted by staff back to your social network pages, automatically and on a schedule you decide. Invision Community supports automatic embedding of a wide number of social networks (and other services), allowing users to share their favorite Facebook and Twitter posts and spark a whole new conversation - but this time in your community.  
    Summary
    When you are creating an online community for your business or hobby it is important to think about your goals and future growth by choosing a platform that is there to work for your needs.
    When you establish your community on Facebook, you're helping to grow someone else's business (including, potentially, your competitors!) and hoping that some of those spoils fall to you. With an owned community, the rewards of your hard work belong to you and your business alone.
    Invision Community has been enabling users and businesses to communicate online since 2002, and we're proud of our reputation as a platform that puts control in your hands. Contact us if you'd like to discuss how we can help you too.
     
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