Joel R

Some thoughts (as one of my communities is very image heavy): - Make sure you and your members know that you can drag and drop into the upload bar. You do not need to click on Insert. - As @Clover13 mentioned, you should target maximum image dimensions to control the idea display size. I've bucketed some different kinds of images posters: - The casual image posters. They wouldn't use the resize even if presented as an option. - The heavy image posters. These are my members who are posting 10 images per post, and making multiple posts They know about the resize option, but they're not using it. - The blogger. These are people writing specialized articles with custom layouts and offsetting images. They're the few people who actually care about image alignment and image resizing. - The admin or moderators doing announcements. We know all the tricks anyways.

As an aside, I can see one-on-one coaching discussions be very useful in the new Courses app too.

Pinging @All Astronauts to provide his S3 workbench which works with any S3 compatible storage providers, especially Backblaze.

I still use this Wasabi + Cloudflare setup. I cannot emphasize how much cheaper it is than Amazon S3 + Cloud front. The bandwidth fees would be hundreds of dollars (if not thousands) for my website that is media rich. Instead, I pay zero in bandwidth fees and $5.99 per terabyte of storage.

Pinging @ASTRAPI or @Driven 2 Services to see if they can help you.

Custom fields for every content type. I don't know why IPS gave us custom fields for Downloads and Page Databases, but not for other content types. I can see real value in adding custom fields to Forum Boards, especially if you have certain boards that are highly-organized that can be filterable, searchable, indexable, etc.

Can you articulate on what you mean by the image gets 'washed'? Like, a color photo becomes black and white? A color photo loses its color saturation and becomes duller? Can he capture a screenshot of the upload process where the photo becomes washed? Have you tested on other file types, such as PDF, TXT, JPG, PNG, or ZIP to see if any other abnormal behaviors exist in his upload?

I'm a heavy user of clubs on one of my Invision communities and wanted to provide some more information / clarification: 1. All members of your greater community are immediately and automatically members of Open & Public clubs. Those club types are, by definition, open and exposed to the entire community by default. It's literally in the name of the club type 🙂 . The difference between them is whether or not you need to join to post, but you will always view the content. Streams, by default, show all available content that members can see. This means they will see club content from Open & Public clubs, by default. 2. I am not a fan of editing the filter for Streams, because if you exclude club content, it will ALWAYS exclude club content even after they join the club. My assumption is that when members join the Microsoft club, they would want to see the Microsoft club in their stream when they return in the future. 3. I personally think your best solution is Closed clubs, which will more than suffice for your use case. By default, users (for example, brand new members to your overall community) will not see any content from any Closed club until they specifically join Closed clubs. Which is what you want. Everyone is happy. Even though Marc is correct that clubs of Private type will always prevent any public content, I want to explain that in order for Closed clubs to expose public content, the club owner would have needed to intentionally define that section to show public content. Don't do that, duh! Slap the hand of your club owner if he tries to define a new section that "anyone can view." If you stay away from the options of letting a section intentionally become public, then the content of your Closed club will stay private. Which is what you want. Members join the club, they see the content. Members who don't join the club, won't see the content. Make content public? appears when you add a new section for Topics in a Closed Club. I am not a fan of Private clubs and want to add a clear warning that Private clubs won't even show on the club list, so you lose all discoverability. It's literally hidden. It's like a private, hidden, secret club that is invite-only, and you will only see the club after you accept an invite. If you stick with Closed clubs, the club name and description will appear on the list of clubs, and members can browse the vendor user group they want. As you identified, the one custom coding you would need is to auto-approve member requests to join the closed clubs. 4. Some additional tips: You can choose to let club content areas co-exist with the normal content areas. For example, club forums that members joined can appear in your community Forums, and will append at the bottom. This allows your community to commingle content and makes it easier for your users to browse and participate, instead of needing to go specifically to the Clubs app. From a behavioral standpoint, this option is great once it's been set up. But users will need to navigate to Clubs app in the beginning. If you want to encourage discoverability, I would recommend you create a new forum of Redirect type, which directs users from the community Forum to the Clubs. If you have that many clubs, you may want to think about defining Extra Fields that can be filterable on the front-end. This could be things like industry vertical, industry application, user groups, etc. 5. Even though I've been talking about Clubs ad nauseum, I think it's important to holistically ask if Clubs is the appropriate solution if the only thing you're needing it for is discussion. Clubs are not another tool, it's an entire kit of tools. Just be aware that from a user's behavioral standpoint, Clubs introduces a layer of user complexity.

You're asking IPS, which develops software for a broad set of communities, to develop features they candidly only make sense from the lens of a very different philosophical outlook on digital currencies vs fiat currency. I've read a lot of interesting suggestions for feedback over the years in the IPS forums. Its not bad feedback, by the way! But I think it's important that you frame your request (and it's something that all clients should probably get better at) with context: "and by the way, we would need an overhaul of the entire economic world order for these features to make sense."

Hi, I'm just another IPS client but curious about some of your suggestions. A user signs up to your community with a certain email and username. They can voluntarily fill out profile information like address and phone. Are you suggesting that the user would be able to insert a different email, different phone, different address? Why would a user need a QR code to withdraw money? I could see one QR code for the entire community that redirects to the websites withdrawal page, but why would each user need one? You have some interesting suggestions that are underpinned by an interesting philosophy.

Hi @NSPN Someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but the ordering of widgets in the Block Manager is based on the ordering of apps in the ACP: Move Pages to the first position. This also impacts ordering in other areas on the front-end such as Search.

I've never seen any Guest Messages that encourage members to sign-up for instant updates. But maybe we should! If you're hosting a community that has major events (like sporting events), it could be a best practice to have an Announcement ready and prepped and targeted to Guests, so that when the event starts, you simply activate the Announcement. Speed of news - not just the content of news, but how quickly the news is breaking - has value. And maybe that's something we should be leveraging more as independent communities.

Here's another good example from a random site that shows different payment options in case IPS needs inspiration on this commonly-accepted practice:

Hi @Seylerg Sort of related and this might help with new user onboarding is the feature of Profile Completion announced in 4.2, which guides users through basic profile steps such as uploading an avatar or filling out profile fields. Help Article: https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/member-functions/profile-completion-r312/ Blog Article: https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/new-complete-your-profile-r1029/ Otherwise, as other members have stated, you would need to come up with your own Help articles for users. I wrote a robust set of Help articles for some of my apps, and in my experience, the only ones who read them were my most dedicated users. Majority of new and casual members just want something intuitive that works.

Slightly offtopic, but I wanted to share that I did do exactly what you want to do for several years: turn Our Picks into a homepage. My members loved it! It's a beautiful and media-rich method of surfacing content from across the community. It especially works well if your items come with a cover image, or if you take the time to upload a cover image per promoted item. It's a pain to keep up since you have to keep manually promoting, but you can set an auto-scheduler to promote at certain times of the day. It's a very nice way of highlighting content in one unified stream, and promoted content is also integrated into email and other widgets. (In fact, Our Picks promotion is much more useful and robust than the legacy Featured, which doesn't do a lot v4. It's probably why these two are combined in v5) In regards to your feedback, ne workaround that I've done (but I never considered this to be a major pain point to begin with) is to promote a reply or a comment instead of the main content item. For example, if there was an ongoing announcement about the Holidays, instead of repromoting the Topic, I would promote a post within the topic, which would be counted as a separate content item for Our Picks.

Ah okay, this makes sense. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but you are on a cloud plan that does not allow Databases. See comparison of the cloud plans: I'm sure if you contact Sales, they will be more than happy to charge you an additional $720 / yr to give you access to "Page Builder Full Access" (aka Databases).

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

Not quite. What I was asking for is if to confirm if you see the databases appear in the ACP > Pages > Content > Databases. You should see a list of your database(s) and a count of the number of articles (or records in each database). This is what the ACP looks like in my community Invisioneer.org: This makes it look like there is no database to populate the page. No, the page does not connect to your self-hosted installation. It's all dynamic and wholly self-contained, whether you are cloud or self-hosted. You should panic. Your screenshot makes it look like there are no databases to add to the page Don't panic if you have backups of your site. Did this problem occur when you switched from self hosted to cloud?

Some things to check: 1. In your ACP, check the databases to see if the records still exist. 2. On the front end, open the Block Manager which will allow you to edit the page. Do you still see the widgets or databases of articles on the page?

Some other points to consider: 1. You can click on the big dot / star in front of the topic. That will take you to the first unread. This requires some (unintuitive) training to your users. 2. There's a plugin where any clicks to the topic titles will take you to the first unread. This is what I use in my community.

An observation on my end: one of the fundamental issues is that IPS has siloed the applications. And while IPS offers a feature to push Articles over to Forums, the reality is that we have the same content item in two different locations. Should you go to Articles to read?? Or should you go to Forums to read?? One approach that I've seen from a competitor is to offer a long form article layout directly in the Forums. So you're still in the Forums, but the layout of the topic is designed for articles. If you go to page 2 of comments, the Article is condensed. It's an elegant approach to consolidating everything in one hub (aka the forums). And I find that simplicity is more important than ever to offer a simple and easy navigation.

Some thoughts: - if the attachments are secondary to the actual post, it may be worthwhile to simply ignore them. The main content (the topic) is still present. - if the attachments are the main content, you may want to think about deleting / archiving / fixing, depending on how much effort you want to put in. Unfortunately, communities that have been online for many years are simply going to have broken links over time unless you control all attachments on your own server.

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.

Dumb questions, but do the files ever upload? Are you uploading more than 100 MB, which is prohibited on all but their $$$ enterprise plans? I use Cloudflare Pro on my primary community and we upload things daily in Files, and you do see the progress bar.

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.