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.

The short answer is yes, you can build a standalone and independent page. It looks like you built a database, and attached a page to the database.

Some thoughts in no particular order (and this is not directed at anyone in particular, but some food for thought for everyone) 1. The new classic terms can be more expensive - or less expensive! - for clients based on your existing selection of apps. With that said, for clients who will be paying more, I want to point out that you're getting access to all the apps at an incredible value without buying the apps (I remember when I was buying the apps, it was something like $850. To upgrade and be able to access all of the apps at only $199 is an absolute steal). 2. On a more important note, you're getting the IPS ecosystem of apps. Even if you have no intention of using most of them, independent communities of the future really need to think about building a website of content and resources around their forums. Having a true standalone forum in this day and age is very hard for new starter communities. Pairing the crowd sourced conversations in Forums with the organized publishing in Pages or Blogs maximizes the organic and the organized. At the same time, part of the energy that IPS has invested is in building you a multi-app approach. One example is in the activity streams: other developers have hard coded lists like New Threads or New Posts or New Images. IPS is generationally ahead in letting you pick and choose content to craft your own activity streams, which is much more advanced.

Now would be the time to remind him of that promise 😀. I think tagging is going to be one of the unexpected surprises that clients will have on v5.

1. My understanding is that IPS will roll over any existing tags in your community. 2. This is one of those situations where I think IPS is putting forth a very bold new vision, but not giving existing communities the right tools to manage our existing content. For example, how do we consolidate and merge in existing tags? How do we delete frivolous tags? How do we bulk apply a new tag to thousands of new content items in various apps? 3. A closed taxonomy assumes the forum admin can identify a comprehensive taxonomy in advance. The only way that happens is if you make the taxonomy broad and generic (and this might be the original vision of IPS, when they were only going to roll over the top 25 most used tags). But you lose any of the nuance of detailed tagging. I'm still wrapping my head around this new taxonomy vision by IPS. My personal take at this time is this new closed system only works best for new communities without a lot of content.

Lol I wasn't trying to answer your question! I'm a client just like you with my own questions 😃

Timeframe on rollout to cloud?

1. I'd like to second the comment above, to ensure we have filter / permission options per widget. The idea is to build a truly customized community as a user grows in their user journey. New members might see more introductory and popular topics; returning members might see content that they started or participated in. 2. Will IPS consider some basic meta options for widgets such as: - enable / disable Widget title - widget title is a link - enable / disable border As a use case, in my Downloads section, I've built simple widgets for each category to to showcase the latest files per category. It would make sense that clicking on the widgets title would go to respective file category. 3. We're still going to have options to hide / display individual widgets on mobile vs tablet vs desktop? I can see community owners building more elaborate widget areas for desktop, but more streamlined for mobile. (In my community, I've studied how my superusers are on desktop, my sales conversions happen the most on desktop, but 60% of my regular traffic is mobile. ) 4. I'm curious about other clients thought process around spacing between widgets. Is there a widget area where you would want tightly clustered widgets versus spread out widgets? 5. Are these widget display options are available for database records? Any changes to default list options or display options of databases?

@opentype said something that was very insightful, which was something that I was struggling with. I actually think the true value of this new tagging page is not your biggest and broadest top dozen tags. Community admins already designed their forums to be organized by their biggest and broadest categories. Where I see the true strategy value in the IPS tagging pages is in the following areas: Consolidating content from different apps - Especially for rich communities that leverage multiple apps like Calendar and Gallery and Pages and Blogs and Clubs and Downloads, the new Portal page will be amazing to pull them together and truly emphasize IPS as a suite of content. Surfacing "ingredient" tags - These are tags like players on a team, components in a manufacturing process, parts of a car, or literally ingredients in food recipes. Forums, by design, are usually top down in the approach. We already start with our broadest and biggest categories and then break them down into categories and boards and subboard. Where I think tagging can shine is to help discover with a bottom up approach. Creating another form of taxonomy - For example, if you're a sports-focused community and you organize your boards by leagues, you can now create an independent taxonomy by geography, or by player position, or by year. This is going to sound contra to the vision of IPS of 10 large plastic crates, but I want the 200 or 500 or 1000 small lunchboxes! This new tagging page actually makes these smaller tags more worthwhile and easier to browse. If I only wanted 10 large plastic crates, my forums already organize in that manner. (Also, this is literally all digital, not space in my garage, so going from 10 tags to 1000 tags leverages the scalability of technology, etc etc). Tagging is very philosophical.

Will IPS consider a function on 4.x to help us convert individual open tags to closed tags? I'm willing to embrace this vision, but I can't start a closed tags system from scratch on a community that already has 6+ million content items.

Some thoughts: - This really is a bold vision. This isn't some copycat, incremental change to a feature. This is a vision statement by IPS to challenge us, as community admins: What are your core competencies and major topics of discussios, how are you identifying them, how are you organizing them, how are you presenting them, how are you leveraging the suite of apps around those competencies? This is interesting in the sense that there's yet another new way of presenting content. There's Our Pages for featured content, there's this new Tagging for tagged content, there's Leaderboard for popular content, there's Activity Streams for recent content, and there's the traditional navigation. - This approach is very top down, which poses significant pros and cons. The beauty of the open tagging system was that, quite frankly, it required no administration on my end. You want to mistype a tag? Go ahead. You want to create a new tag? Go ahead. As an admin, I now have the opportunity - and more candidly, the burden - to maintain, update, and cleanse a master list of tags. This brings up questions like: what is the threshold for when a topic is popular enough to deserve a tag? Who is going to maintain and update the tag among my staff (with ACP security access)? How am I going to publish and promulgate a new tag to inform users? Who is going to consistently monitor content to ensure content is tagged and tagged properly? How do I backtag content if I introduce a new tag? Should a tag's relevancy or usefulness ever go away, and what would I do then? None of these are necessarily new questions, but a closed end universal system sharpens all of these questions for the community admin. - For existing sites, we will be particularly challenged in trying to adopt this new vision. We are not equipped to update our existing content at scale: tools to batch add tags to certain sections, remove tags, batch edit / rename / merge tags, etc. My first impression is that vision seems impressive and amazing. But it requires more upfront strategy, more upfront thought, and more ongoing work. And this new system only works if the execution is there.