Joel R

1. Will Clubs show the Page that contains the database category, or only the Database itself. The Page that contains the database often contains elements like filters or custom widgets. Whereas the Database is, well, just the database template. 2. Show Club Content Areas - This setting is all or nothing to all content areas in all clubs. This is an overly broad setting. I can see how admins may want to show club Pages database in the Pages database, but perhaps not at all club nodes (or vice versa). 3. News - This is more of an observation, but it's clear that the overwhelming common usage - albeit not the only one - is simply the need for News. IPS may want to think about shipping a simple News function for clubs. I have several clubs where the owners have used Blogs for several years now as a news system. 4. Search - Will members who don't have permission see search results, profile activity, and / or activity stream from club database fields? 5. Choice of Databases - Will admins be able to choose which databases can be displayed in clubs, or is it all or nothing? I like the concept of integrating Database categories into Pages and its giving me some food for thought of building some foundational databases that any of my 40+ clubs can use.

Redactor! Project Gutenberg!

Does the new editor tie into a Page builder update? Any leaks on what new editor you're using?

It's going to be interesting to see how IPS plans to expand its digital monetization

Really like the improvement to Tabs on Profiles on mobile, with the horizontal scroll. The dropdown menu in v4 basically hid all of the tab options unless you knew of the tabs in advance.

My personal take is that we can wait for Google to scrape all of our content to start offering AI generated summaries on Google (which is already happening - hello Bard!), or we can start doing it ourselves. I'm sure there's a worthy existential debate about the importance of sourcing content from reputable sources or trusted people on forums, but at the end of the day, if I'm a user searching for the fastest and most accurate solution, do I want a condensed topic (because honestly that's all the topic summary really is) of 30 discrete replies that I still need to read through and interpret or do I want an actual well-written summary that's short, sweet, to the point. There's a race to convenience that LLMs are unleashing on our public content. We can either own those summaries ourselves, with links and references to other parts of our community, or we can let Google do it for us without ever giving us any traffic.

I suppose this is the difference between: - A returning member at large who wants to quickly scan for interesting and missed content - A returning member who posted in the topic and is therefore more invested In regards to the second point, Ive always believed that members like seeing their own content. Ideally, the topic summary would always include that specific members contributions (to a point). There's a psychology of reinforcement of seeing your own contributions or posts, which could be a powerful way of encouraging even more engagement.

1. For social discussion, I wonder if slowly catching up on all posts is part of the fun? Like if you miss a month of your favorite TV show, do you skip through the highlights reel of the missed episodes, or binge watch and catch up on every missed moment? I'm going to be curious how my users actually utilize this in the real world, especially on the social side. 2. For topics that are solutions oriented, I think this is a very thoughtfully implemented and builds upon a clear trend by IPS of helping us build communities of success that are solution oriented.

Oh my gosh, I cant believe there's more! IPS stretches out their features like stores stretch out Black Friday shopping. You start in August and end some time in December. Whew! This is a ton for an initial release, and while theme refreshes and design are always nice, I'm excited that the most community-impacting features are yet to come.

This is serious / not so serious - why not make everyone a Community Expert? Like, upon their first helpful post, they get an automatic invite. What's the actual harm in the long run, if the platform automatically removes / recalculates / kicks them out in a Game of Thrones shakedown? Conceptually in terms of a member lifecycle, if a user joins brand new (so there's no past history upon which to make a decision on their expertise), you need enough involvement - whether that is time, posts, engagement, helpfulness, whatever - to make an assessment anyways. I see this feature allowing community managers to sidestep that assessment (since it's not automated or tied to group promotion) and potentially accelerate the user journey to expert. How fast can you accelerate users to Expert? Why not accelerate users at their first sign of helpfulness? (Note to everyone: I'm not actually recommending this tactic in the real world. This is meant to be an extreme example. If all it takes is a badge and an email with two emojis to turn your users into experts, your community probably shouldn't be using experts anyways.)

Some thoughts: - Is there any concern about signing up a member as a community expert in multiple forums? For example, @opentype and @Nathan Explosion tend to be helpful not just in one forum, but in ... all forums. Reputation tends to be universal for people. Does this mean that I would (hypothetically) send them an invite to 10 different forums, and they would receive 10 different notifications and 10 emails every week on all the questions they could helpfully answer? Ideally, regardless of they activate for one forum or ten forums, the notifications will aggregate into one. - I'm assuming there are language strings associated with this, so I can see communities customize the title to things like Ambassador, Champion, Product Expert, Support Specialist, etc. - This was not designed as a special membergroup (but it kind of is! Almost like a secondary membergroups with special privileges!). The drawback is that you can't automate the pathway, when factors like time in the community, number of helpful posts, number of total posts, or completing a course are actually good signifiers and steps of success to community expertise. Another drawback is that you can't have different variations of these. We're assuming Community Experts will act and help in only one manner in our communities (aka to answer support topics).

I had the topic queued to publish this morning. It should be available today.

While this post has received far less the reactions than the prior feature announcements on theming, this post is far more consequential to the future of our communities and a vision of the future. It speaks to an evolving shift in strategy and purpose behind our online communities. IPS talks about the value of social conversation, where users use humor and are rewarded with Reactions. But for users who want to cut out the social conversation and jump directly to informative and insightful answers, users can use Helpful and Best Answer signals. IPS has been building upon these signals of expertise, authority, and solutions for many years now. The future is clear: independent communities cannot solely rely upon social conversation, when larger and better platforms ( Reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc) can host social conversations infinitely better. Pivoting into an authority site that provides support and solutions might help you survive. For more analysis along with some easter eggs, check out my deep dive: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/topic/371-deep-dive-into-ips-quickly-find-the-most-helpful-answers/

What happens when: - 2 or more posts with the same max number of helpful reactions? - no posts are marked as Most Helpful yet? How does that display in the Most Helpful comment box? How does all of this integrate with the Topic Summary? This is like a separate way of summarizing the topic.

Every IPS client at launch of v5 immediately changing all of their color schemes just to play with the theme editor. Nice job with the theme editor controls. There are so many options to customize the theme. I'm personally most excited about mobile views and header controls to control the placement of logos, menus, and breadcrumbs. Menus and above the fold placement is especially important for a mobile world, and we need to be judicious with how space is allocated.

Several developers have opted in to the Providers designation, which provides a reasonable level of trust within the IPS ecosystem. You'll recognize many of the same names who have been around for years. When you do buy third party mods or themes, one of the easiest things you can do is check that they're a Provider. https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/

Some questions and / or observations: - the Sidebar Menu offers a lot of links. The (regular) browse menu on mobile offers much less links. I'm guessing you have an option per link on whether to show on mobile? - Bottom mobile menu is nice. This is a well established design theory by Luke Wrobleski from Google product design, but I actually thought many mobile apps were moving away from the bottom menu because it overlaps with some built in browser or phone options. Thoughts? I don't think there's one right answer, just more interested in your perspective. - traditional view of menu only offers single row. I already do this on my primary community today (not because of any special study on design theory, but for simplicity!) but would be interested in your perspective in why you're imposing this approach. The current Menu structure already encapsulates this and more. Why change it? - performance improvements. You removed JavaScript and a lot of CSS. But then we also need splashy grid pictures of our latest trip to Australia and croc suit for the new Forum Feed / Big Grid view!

Questions: Search modal - Does this entirely replace the Advanced Search? I like the new search. Modern users are accustomed to simpler search bars with contextual filters, not full page searches with 20 options. Forum Icons - The little houses. Are those icons or uploaded photos? In generla, support for FA6? Website Slogan - I'm guessing this is static? Like, can we have rotating messages "G'Day Mates" and five seconds later "Where's your croc suite?" Visible Focus Rings - This came out from nowhere, would love to understand the company's perspective behind this feature. I'm scratching my head because it's not applicable at all for mobile or tablet. This benefits power users on desktop and ... maybe developers? Mobile Bottom Navigation - Customizable per group or hardcoded?

Such a great idea! So happy to see others have the same lightbulb go off of crafting smarter menus of links. The hard thing now is how do we customize and craft those menus for different member journeys?? 🤔

Surprise leaks from the second teaser video: Change in topic layout Online indicator Did you catch anything else? Continued in-depth commentary on the second teaser video on Invisioneer.org and what it all means for clients: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/topic/218-deep-dive-version-5-teaser-ii/

Surprise leaks from the video: Change in location to Mark site read Easier access to Subscriptions Iconography for +Create and Report Not yet identified features related to Helpful Check out my in-depth commentary (with screenshots!) on Invisioneer.org, where I break down what clients can expect not just in the upcoming release but potentially as a larger theme on v5 (hint: start making suggestions about Subscriptions!): https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/topic/217-deep-dive-a-very-brief-look-at-invision-community-5/

Some thoughts: 1. This is only an observation. I find it interesting that IPS approaches time spent on a community from a position of scarcity. To be clear, this makes sense - we have busy lives and many sites that we visit, so we need to optimize the time spent on the community to make it impactful. Get me to what I want in the most efficient manner. On the other hand, I encourage IPS to also approach it from a position of (maybe just a little) greed. Yes, get me to what I want to read or reply as quickly as possible, but also encourage and push and motivate me to also get involved or read something extra. Help me go down a rabbit hole. That's the only way to grow my involvement in the site. Not asking IPS to adopt a full blown social media orientation where attention is the only point, but adding attention hooks and pushing engagement can only help our communities. 2. The prototype of the topic as stated above is highly limiting. It matches a support topic. But it doesn't match topics where the discussion and commentary are the point. For example, this topic! This topic doesn't have a "right answer" that anyone can Mark as Solved. The breadth of conversations by clients and the diverse things we care about - developer updates, the edit button, content denseness, polite fanboy applause - is the point and the noise at the same time. Going to be curious how IPS innovates on these social and conversational topics. 3. I wonder how we can cut down on the noise and distraction of a question by helping users ask a better question to begin with?

Talking more to myself: So, the Sidebar Menu gives more space. And more space means more opportunity to share links. And more opportunity to share links means we can customize the menu experience for different journeys of users: the new you, the returning you, the future you. For the new you, I can see the first 3 menu links be things like "best of", "top guides," or "must read" types of links. Essentially, items to help a new user get oriented. For the returning you, I can see the first 3 menu links be things like "what's new", "my content" and trending content. Essentially, items to help the returning user catch up and jump back into the latest conversations. It's hard to do that kind of personalization with the horizontal style, but I can see the Sidebar Menu empower community admins to create "personalized" menus in a way that most admins haven't done (or thought about!) before. This is some food for thought that I think all IPS admins should consider as a takeaway when we re-envision our communities on 5. This is all assuming IPS keeps group permissions on menu items as is.

One of the more unexpected and interesting new design choices is the highlight of nodes in the menu, not just the apps (eg. popular forum boards). Would love to hear more from IPS on best practices and what inspired this. Community owners can already do this manually. The current Menu Manager allows us to insert a link to, well, any URL. I doubt most of us actually utilize it to highlight our popular nodes though! I'm starting to realize that the vertical menu gives more space for menu options versus the horizontal menu, so owners can add options like popular forum boards that we couldn't before. There's some interesting experimentation and innovation community owners can do with the new vertical menu.

I want to add that for a new lifecycle, this theme looks amazing. I remember the 4.0 Social Suite (raise your hand if you used 4.0!), and while no one doubts that 5.0 is its successor, this theme looks and feels so much more polished out the gate and it will only get better on this cycle.