Joel R

It's fascinating to see Corsair forums move to Reddit and Discord. This follow the larger community trend in recent years of Community Everywhere (aka meeting the users where they already hang out, instead of trying to force them to your own instance). This is a real dilemma for enterprise community teams. It's disappointing for Invision Community communities to see that move, in the sense that Corsair clearly could not justify (or find enough value) in keeping their own independent forums.

This is an entirely conceptual observations on mega-threads: I would posit that most members actually only care about the first few pages and the last few pages. The middle 98% is skipped. You might need to glance at the first few pages to understand the pattern in how people reply (eg. A forum game) You will usually glance at the most recent page before you add your own reply. All of the middle is skipped. These are not the types of topics where you are thinking profoundly about concepts or ideas in prior posts in order to reply; your new reply is usually independent of prior posts. Mega-threads are an interesting phenomena of forums. Some other thoughts: Whether forum games or social updates, these long threads reveal something fundamental about human behavior: humans are social creatures. We like playing with each other and we like sharing our news to others. Humanity shines through in mega-threads. We can't stop ourselves from socializing with others over years and years and thousands of pages. IPS called them trivial social updates. That understates the power and importance of these mega threads and life updates. Mega threads may be trivial in substance and content, but they are far from trivial from a sense of community and belongings. Why is this important? In a rapidly approaching world of AI Overviews, LLMs providing immediate answers, and Google Zero, communities that don't lean into this sense of community and common identity are going to be crushed. Professional community management is already measuring drops in engagement. If you're one of the 0.05% of IPS customers that have nurtured this incredible sense of community and belonging, that's a huge accomplishment.

I find it interesting how IPS provided the justification to lock and split large topics as a technical one (which is a totally valid reason on the part of IPS, but usually technology should be designed to follow human behavior, not the other way!). There's some very interesting behavioral thoughts behind thread duration - most normal conversations do have a natural beginning and ending, which should be enforced. It's definitely a design flaw of forums to allow topics to go on theoretically forever, and if there's a line to be drawn in the sand, then 100,000 / 4000 pages seems to be as good of a milestone as any other number. I do think bringing a finality to topics with 100,000 replies will be a shock and will disrupt the psychology of users who post in mega threads, where part of the premise behind reply after reply is the soothing lull of continuation. There is comfort in responding to these topics, because you've already responded a thousand times already. In fact, I would argue that users who have posted into the 90,000+ are used to the slowness of the website, and consider it a given of the site at that point! When you give them a fresh new topic that loads a split faster, they're going to be taken back. It's different. It's not the same. They're not going to like it. This is going to unsettle some of your community's most prolific and long term members. (They've literally posted thousands and thousands of replies!). If I were a community manager with some of these topics on my board (and I probably am), a small but impactful takeaway is to proactively reach out to these members and let them know about these changes - that the good times will continue, just in a related topic. On a related note, I do wish IPS would embrace the behavioral side of human conversation that ebbs and flows and digresses. They've build a simple and elegant concept to show "Topics in this discussion" can be easily applied to topics that have split, merged, etc.

The native, app like drop downs are very modern. These are the kinds of touches that will make our forums, which are 20 year architectures, reframed for modern browsing.

Clubs - Download category How do I adjust the file size of screenshots? I've looked into both the Downloads app settings and the club's Download category, and did not see any setting to edit the screenshot file size. Please advise. After 8 years on IPS 4, I thought I finally knew where everything was located!

You can also use: Announcements in moderator panel Widget that only shows to Guests One of the design gaps where I see legacy community solutions - including Invision, but not just us - is that the system is entirely passive. The system waits for users to follow other users, the system waits for users to follow topics, the system waits for users to follow tags. One of the interesting design choices of social media is that it pushes you to follow other users, it pushes you to follow groups or content: you might know these people, you might be interested in this content, etx. Facebook has studied that you need to follow a certain number of people to generate enough interesting personalized content , since they only surface 15% of content. To put it another way, Facebook knows that most of what humans post is boring and uninteresting. So it only shows the most interesting 15% of content, but that also means you need to follow enough people so you have enough content that is personalized to your feed. Every major modern social platform asks you to choose your interests or people you might know as part of its onboarding. They understand that personalizing content makes the platform that much stickier .

This is a really exciting feature for communities of all sizes to measure their health and vibrancy. Some of these metrics are really interesting; the Author Diversity is quite nice. For Responsiveness and First Time Reply, I would suggest that you allow communities to exclude / include certain forums. There are some boards, such as Off Topic, that may skew the data.

Just curious, when you look at your most used tag, is it actually useful? One observation I have about tag popularity - especially in large communities such as yours where you're starting to reach audience saturation - is that the top set of popular tags are probably so generic and so broad, it's almost meaningless. It would be akin using the tag "Invision" here in this community. It's the second tier of tags that start to provide meaningful taxonomy. I am most worried about the thousands of long tail, unique, and niche tags that are highly structured that will be lost in the upgrade. Yes, there are misspellings, variants, and mistakes in there, but the corpus of our tagging will be lost if only the top X tags are retained (whatever that number is).

This is entirely an off handed observation, but there's a certain exquisite irony in theme design. The positioning of the community menu to the sidebar is to take advantage of larger resolution and wider screens. Here we are with massive, curved screens with extra large resolution and bigger monitors yet at the same time we also need our communities to appear on handheld smartphones. I'm waiting for the day that we can navigate our communities (or at least new notifications) on my smartwatch!

I'm a little taken aback that IPS is referencing Backblaze as a formally supported solution by the company. Was this ever announced in your documentation? I would have strongly considered them as a storage solution if I knew. I was always under the impression that IPS only supported Amazon S3. And although the third party community provided an informal plugin for S3 compatible storage, this was never officially supported by IPS. To the topic at hand, I could care less if IPS wants to group all storage into one. My only ask is that IPS retains top-level folder categories of at least Attachments vs Gallery vs Downloads. This is the one benefit that I currently have of different storage buckets, and I periodically need to investigate content / DMCA takedowns so this organization helps tremendously.

How will this be handled in the upgrade from 4 to 5?

I want to say that the overall level of communication and transparency (with the dashboard guide in the ACP) is a huge step forward. I appreciate how IPS continues to evolve and push the ACP experience. I had one of those realizations several years ago that I candidly spend more time on the ModCP and the ACP than the front end. That's where the troubleshooting, the reports, and the moderation occurs - which are all of the areas of first level triage for community management. Other thoughts on the dashboard Prepare: - Tagging. This is going to be one of those unexpected surprises for current community owners if we can't retain or migrate our tagging.

I'm going to take a step back in a very meta manner and point out that this is exactly the kind of repeat topic that forums should do a better job of addressing: New users asking the same question over and over again. How do we drive them to the right information (that is official, that is published, that can be referenced)? How do we upcycle related or existing topics? How do we give authority to answers and users? How do we capture these trending questions?

I would like to nominate this topic to be memorialized in the Beta upgrade information. There is some great information in here.

Some thoughts regarding the new design options in v5: - Stylistically, the vertical menu allows all of the menu links to be shown. Before, we would inadvertently hide a lot of the sub menu links into drop downs or hover menus. Behaviorally, this means menu links will be more readable and more accessible, and therefore easier to navigate especially for new users. I really think the vertical menu is going to really help new users. - The most creative designs are those that tap into a broader range of apps and widgets, which leverages the full strength of the suite. They're doing things beyond just forums, and building custom pages with blog widgets, events widgets, and more. Even though IPS will never match the algorithmic personalization as Facebook, I do believe we can start building more customized pages for each user entirely with widgets.