Davyc

I was an early adopter back in 2002 when the software was free and in direct competition with phpBB, though I have to say that there was no real competition as Invision Board was streets ahead and a far easier to manage piece of software.  It was the year of Pop Idol and the final was being fought between Will Young and Gareth Gates - Will Young won it and a community sprung up which I joined singing (no pun intended) the praises of Will Young.  It was on phpBB and whether it was the software or the server the site kept going down, much to the frustration of its members, so I offered an alternative using Invision Board.  I can't remember what I called the site, but everyone referred to it as Will's summer house and everyone used to flock to it when the other went down.  It was a fun time and it lit the fire beneath me that keeps me coming back and opening up sites - though none of them garner much interest these days because of DSM (that's dumb social media), but I could care less because I get as much fun out of engineering sites as I do seeing those few who join and use them.
My favourite site is one I dropped a little while ago and I am now feeling the pangs of regret infiltrating my mind to the extent where I may just bring it back and if no one uses it I don't really care, because I will get fun out of breathing life back into it and using it myself lol.
This software has come a long way since those heady days when opening a site saw hundreds of people joining up in a matter of days, the software has evolved greatly whilst the audience capacity has devolved, but there's a trend that often sees things go around in a circle and what once fell from grace becomes fashionable again and I can see this happening with forums when DSM is reigned in and the companies responsible for them are brought to task; that's starting to happen now, so who knows, we may see forum audiences flocking back to us in the near future (he says whilst not holding his breath lol).
Congratulations to the team for their persistence and endurance and bringing us to this momentous milestone 🙂

I was an early adopter back in 2002 when the software was free and in direct competition with phpBB, though I have to say that there was no real competition as Invision Board was streets ahead and a far easier to manage piece of software.  It was the year of Pop Idol and the final was being fought between Will Young and Gareth Gates - Will Young won it and a community sprung up which I joined singing (no pun intended) the praises of Will Young.  It was on phpBB and whether it was the software or the server the site kept going down, much to the frustration of its members, so I offered an alternative using Invision Board.  I can't remember what I called the site, but everyone referred to it as Will's summer house and everyone used to flock to it when the other went down.  It was a fun time and it lit the fire beneath me that keeps me coming back and opening up sites - though none of them garner much interest these days because of DSM (that's dumb social media), but I could care less because I get as much fun out of engineering sites as I do seeing those few who join and use them.
My favourite site is one I dropped a little while ago and I am now feeling the pangs of regret infiltrating my mind to the extent where I may just bring it back and if no one uses it I don't really care, because I will get fun out of breathing life back into it and using it myself lol.
This software has come a long way since those heady days when opening a site saw hundreds of people joining up in a matter of days, the software has evolved greatly whilst the audience capacity has devolved, but there's a trend that often sees things go around in a circle and what once fell from grace becomes fashionable again and I can see this happening with forums when DSM is reigned in and the companies responsible for them are brought to task; that's starting to happen now, so who knows, we may see forum audiences flocking back to us in the near future (he says whilst not holding his breath lol).
Congratulations to the team for their persistence and endurance and bringing us to this momentous milestone 🙂

First off, great interview. 
Secondly, who's next? please be @Lindy 😛 
Thirdly, since linux was mentioned in this thread, and having been a long time user and advocate of opensource software and using linux as my daily driver for the last 15 to 16 years. I must say, i'm glad to see the passion still out there for linux and the hopes of the "year of the linux desktop", it takes me back :). However, I don't believe linux is quite for everyone, or even sure it ever will be. I'm a very experienced user with it and there are things that i still run into that make me bash my head into  my desk.
Linux and its distro's (just being plural) shows how fragmented the linux ecosystem truly is. so much resources/code and developers are spread out over so many different things. Like example, the desktop managers, there are possibly hundreds of them (i'm including window managers as well). sure these things give users choice, but also at the same time, it keeps linux on the fringe. Not to mention some of the absolute state of some of the subsystems, like audio and display. 
The audio sub-system has been a mess for years, pulse was a bandage, but that bandage has been peeling off for years. I can't count how many times a week i have to switch back to my speakers from waking up or restarting, cause pulse thinks my micronphone is a speaker...I guess there are some new bandaids out there on the horizon, like pipewire that fedora is using, but i don't think it addresses the underlying problem, that audio is crap under linux and i don't really see it getting better.
Same with xorg and wayland, they are both in absolute embarrassing state. xorg cause it is bogged down by 1980's backwards compatibility and tacked on "modern" features, as well as its security issues. then you have wayland, which just completely lacks direction, the developers of it are hostile, and considering how much money and other resources that have been dumped into it, its debut date was suppose to be back in ubuntu 11.04, we are now on ubuntu 21.04 and it only supports a small fraction of gpu's out there and even less compatible with popular applications. sure we can get into a petty fight like apple does about how nvidia is the worst, but nvidia is like that, cause they are popular and on top and have been for a very long time, so they've sorta earned the right, where a project like wayland has no real credibility to be telling the largest gpu manufacturer in the world what they should be doing. 
Sure you can make a lot of things work with it, but as i've grown older, i've also become frustrated with linux. One reason why i am hoping wsl becomes a shiny beacon in the night in windows for development (cause development in windows just sucks, sucks so much that it has made me endure the inadequacies of linux all these years). 
I also just purchased a mac mini, god help me that i don't become one of "those" computer users 🙂. the appeal of the new architecture, with most of the benefits that linux offers, without most of the headache, is very appealing to me at this point in my life. 
on a finally note to steer the conversation back, I would like to add my two cents about anonymity and toxicity. I have over the years, as many of  you can attest, have been toxic myself. I will say things i would never say in real life to others, as well as try to purposely raise the temperature just to get a reaction out of people. A lot of that is cause i've always viewed the internet as sort of the "wild wild west", that it offered a level of "freedom" that polite society doesn't offer. It is also easy to forget that the avatar/username you are replying to, has a person at the other end, they lack humanity unless they are in your circle. as for a solution to that, i don't know if there is one. 
any way, good interview, will look forward to future ones. 

Great interview and fantastic to actually see a living breathing member of the Invision Community team that brings us what we have today and the memories we have of yesteryear.
In respect of the 'community' aspect I like to view a new community as a book with no pages and the community writes the chapters in their topics, article, images, posts and comments and so fills up the pages of the book to present everyone with something to be proud of.
I had no idea that Charles was part of LGBTQ+ community and props to both of you for just being who you are and just enjoying life.
Loved every moment of this and I hope we will see more interviews with other team members in the near future 🙂

Nice job guys - when all is said and done, it's the people behind the scenes that make it all real.

Great interview, by the way.

Great interview and fantastic to actually see a living breathing member of the Invision Community team that brings us what we have today and the memories we have of yesteryear.
In respect of the 'community' aspect I like to view a new community as a book with no pages and the community writes the chapters in their topics, article, images, posts and comments and so fills up the pages of the book to present everyone with something to be proud of.
I had no idea that Charles was part of LGBTQ+ community and props to both of you for just being who you are and just enjoying life.
Loved every moment of this and I hope we will see more interviews with other team members in the near future 🙂

That’s a rather misleading claim at best. Just because some people manage to get something like a certain version of a certain Adobe app (for example) running on a certain Linux distribution with Wine + third-party scripts and command-line actions, doesn’t mean that this matches in any way what millions of users can rely on with a permanent official support for an app on Windows or Mac OS. And funnily enough, we could have the same discussion about community software. My oldest site once ran with phpBB and MediaWiki, both free and open source. But I still deliberately chose to “upgrade” to a proprietary subscription-based product called Invision Community, because a product being “free, open source and almost as good paid competitors” isn’t necessarily my main concern. I knew what I did when I chose IPS and I know what I did when I chose my desktop operating system. It’s fine that you are happy with Linux, but just because we don’t share your passion doesn’t mean that we are too “set in our ways” or just don’t know enough about Linux. But that’s exactly the picture you are trying to paint here. And I find it somewhat annoying (since you assert false things about our knowledge and motivations) and it might even be counter-productive, when it’s this kind of “preaching” with questionable claims (such as “everything can be installed on Linux”.). 

Great interview and fantastic to actually see a living breathing member of the Invision Community team that brings us what we have today and the memories we have of yesteryear.
In respect of the 'community' aspect I like to view a new community as a book with no pages and the community writes the chapters in their topics, article, images, posts and comments and so fills up the pages of the book to present everyone with something to be proud of.
I had no idea that Charles was part of LGBTQ+ community and props to both of you for just being who you are and just enjoying life.
Loved every moment of this and I hope we will see more interviews with other team members in the near future 🙂

1. It's an endless cat and mouse game between companies and thieves who try to self-rationalize their entitled behavior. 
2. Because they're superior! 
3. Most of them. 
 

Spoiler alert: Not everyone. @Stuart Silvester and I use a PC.

Great interview and fantastic to actually see a living breathing member of the Invision Community team that brings us what we have today and the memories we have of yesteryear.
In respect of the 'community' aspect I like to view a new community as a book with no pages and the community writes the chapters in their topics, article, images, posts and comments and so fills up the pages of the book to present everyone with something to be proud of.
I had no idea that Charles was part of LGBTQ+ community and props to both of you for just being who you are and just enjoying life.
Loved every moment of this and I hope we will see more interviews with other team members in the near future 🙂

I watched and found out some new things. However, I missed some curiosities, statistics or funny stories, but for the first interview it was fine.
Charles seemed a little shy at first. 🙂 One small note, fewer questions about LGBTQ and more about IPS itself 👍
So who's next? Maybe @Matt? 
How do you deal with nulled software? what's your opinion on this? Why is everyone in IPS using a Macbook? :D How many people work at Invision Power Services?

Appreciate this comment a lot 🥲 
Exactly the vibe we were going for! And I love your perspective on community. Thanks for the kind words, @Davyc!

Great interview and fantastic to actually see a living breathing member of the Invision Community team that brings us what we have today and the memories we have of yesteryear.
In respect of the 'community' aspect I like to view a new community as a book with no pages and the community writes the chapters in their topics, article, images, posts and comments and so fills up the pages of the book to present everyone with something to be proud of.
I had no idea that Charles was part of LGBTQ+ community and props to both of you for just being who you are and just enjoying life.
Loved every moment of this and I hope we will see more interviews with other team members in the near future 🙂

Great interview and fantastic to actually see a living breathing member of the Invision Community team that brings us what we have today and the memories we have of yesteryear.
In respect of the 'community' aspect I like to view a new community as a book with no pages and the community writes the chapters in their topics, article, images, posts and comments and so fills up the pages of the book to present everyone with something to be proud of.
I had no idea that Charles was part of LGBTQ+ community and props to both of you for just being who you are and just enjoying life.
Loved every moment of this and I hope we will see more interviews with other team members in the near future 🙂

Great interview and fantastic to actually see a living breathing member of the Invision Community team that brings us what we have today and the memories we have of yesteryear.
In respect of the 'community' aspect I like to view a new community as a book with no pages and the community writes the chapters in their topics, article, images, posts and comments and so fills up the pages of the book to present everyone with something to be proud of.
I had no idea that Charles was part of LGBTQ+ community and props to both of you for just being who you are and just enjoying life.
Loved every moment of this and I hope we will see more interviews with other team members in the near future 🙂

Instructions on what you did to achieve the results you mentioned 🙂
 

Hey there. Thanks for the comment! Do you mean show what my Topic feed block looks like in the admin panel? I'm down to share anything I've done to help you guys! 

May be share the steps on how you 'achieved' it. So if others who would like to use, they can do it as well. A tutorial would be helpful and I am sure @opentype will appreciate that as well. 

I prefer the term 'Mediator' or even capitalising on your own title @Jordan Invision an 'Advocate' I've even change the names of the groups on my own site.  Admin becomes Community Leader and Moderator becomes Advocate.  Takes the boardroom air off the titles and makes them more amenable. 
I prefer mediation to confrontation - the latter listens to both sides whilst the other just starts knocking heads together which leads to bitter feelings.  The name 'community' says it all - it means coming together not railing against each other over what (for the most part) are issues of a lesser degree than other things going on in the community.
I agree with you 100% that leadership starts at the top, but looks towards the bottom without prejudice 🙂
 

I prefer the term 'Mediator' or even capitalising on your own title @Jordan Invision an 'Advocate' I've even change the names of the groups on my own site.  Admin becomes Community Leader and Moderator becomes Advocate.  Takes the boardroom air off the titles and makes them more amenable. 
I prefer mediation to confrontation - the latter listens to both sides whilst the other just starts knocking heads together which leads to bitter feelings.  The name 'community' says it all - it means coming together not railing against each other over what (for the most part) are issues of a lesser degree than other things going on in the community.
I agree with you 100% that leadership starts at the top, but looks towards the bottom without prejudice 🙂
 

I've done this on my own community as well! 
 
🙌 
 
Appreciate this and you taking the time to check this out!

I prefer the term 'Mediator' or even capitalising on your own title @Jordan Invision an 'Advocate' I've even change the names of the groups on my own site.  Admin becomes Community Leader and Moderator becomes Advocate.  Takes the boardroom air off the titles and makes them more amenable. 
I prefer mediation to confrontation - the latter listens to both sides whilst the other just starts knocking heads together which leads to bitter feelings.  The name 'community' says it all - it means coming together not railing against each other over what (for the most part) are issues of a lesser degree than other things going on in the community.
I agree with you 100% that leadership starts at the top, but looks towards the bottom without prejudice 🙂
 

There is one hole in this line of thought, not that I totally disagree with it, but vulnerability can lead to exploitation, so you would need to measure this with some other form of displaying firmness.  How you would do that will depend on the individual.  Some people don't like to portray vulnerability, because of the issue of potential exploitation. I would replace the word and the meaning with "understanding" and finding out what leads to the toxicity.  It's extremely easy to ignore the root of an issue and react rather than discover.
Some people are just generally nasty, that's in their nature and these kinds of people will swarm on displays of vulnerability and exploit them to the full, which will raise the toxicity levels higher. So, show some understanding, discover why and then decide on how to deal with the issue.  It may be that some people will be toxic to get attention, their rational posts may be ignored whilst their toxic ones attract attention.
I don't believe there is a one-stop-shop-solution to people's behaviour and every case needs to be measured with the right kind of response. Of course, this means that Admins and Moderators need to be more understanding of people's foibles and ways and get to the root of an issue and then sort it from there.  Many Admins and Moderators may not see this as the right approach and deal with issues differently, it's about finding out what works best for them and whether their methodology actually works in turning toxic into enjoyable.