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Joel R

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Everything posted by Joel R

  1. 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).
  2. I had the topic queued to publish this morning. It should be available today.
  3. 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/
  4. 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.
  5. Hi @WebCMS I know your question is related to fluid view, but to explain the broader difference of forums vs clubs vs the main community, clubs are meant to structurally exist at a level such that club forums are not the same as the main community's forums. It can be a matter of semantics to a degree (aren't they all stored in the database in the same way?), but IPS did not design club forums to be equivalent to regular forums. Main Community: - Forums - Gallery - Downloads - Clubs --- Club Forums There can be value to using club forums versus forums (micro communities of discussions, cohorts of users taking repetitive classes, niche areas that you intentionally don't want attached to your main forums). But if your only purpose is to divide your forums into subforums, then regular forums is probably the way to go. I liked your comment about the language around forums though. Clubs and Social Groups do certainly sound more intriguing and modern and compelling than Forums (Forums are like the Blackberry brand of online discussions at this point 😆.) One creative idea is to rename your language strings or forum board names to refer to Discussion Clubs, which will give you both the language and the navigation that you want.
  6. 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.
  7. I want to add for @My Sharona my ideas are not meant to reduce or detract from your specific feedback to IPS in any way. IPS reads everything. Sometimes people get defensive in the Feedback forum when other users chime in with alternate workarounds, but suggestions from the community are meant to be just that: helpful and friendly suggestions, as imperfect as they are. I just want to be clear that your suggestion has merit on its own, and it also opened up areas of opportunity and learning for clients to consider other creative approaches.
  8. I know you posted in Feedback, but some creative suggestions for the creative community managers out there: - You can reduce the # of posts that appear per page in a topic. Really! Most admins rarely change this number (and why is 25 posts the magic number anyways??) but if you insist on symmetry, reduce the # of posts to match your sidebar length. - Add relevant blocks for users that help with self-promotion or content discovery. In other words, utilize all of that emoty sidebar space! Add your guest sign in widget, newsletter sign up widget, Community Hive widget, popular content widget, our picks widget, recent comments widget, etc. to inspire and grab your user deeper into your ecosystem. - If the Topic Summary is the only item of your sidebar, think about switching to the Compact View that layers the Topic Summary into the posts. That will eliminate the sidebar completely and give you clean aesthetics.
  9. Fluid view is definitely still an option. You can see it in action on my website https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/ (It's actually my default view for guests). If you don't see it, switch to default theme and make sure you enable it for all groups.
  10. 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/
  11. Welcome to the spam waves! Many Invision Communities have been hit since spring with these massive spam waves. It's been frustrating. Some suggestions: - in hcaptcha, make sure you switch to difficult mode. - switch up and rotate your challenge questions. In my experience though, this only stopped it for 1 or 2 days - you may want to turn on automatic moderation - cleantalk plugin (which does have a small fee) does help tremendously but I also think it catches some false positive of actual users too.
  12. Hi @Valerie Huard 1. There used to be a third party mod for the Kraken.io image compression by @stoo2000. 2. If you are self hosted, you can take advantage of Cloudflare which offers image optimization of lossless and lossy webP.
  13. 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!
  14. Welcome to the support forums of Invision Community! Just wait until you discover the Block Manager ... 😃
  15. If you only need an extension for articles and news, I strongly encourage you to evaluate Pages and simply host your entire ecosystem within IPS. Pages is perfect for news and articles, and with a couple of good templates by third party developers, you can have a very robust news system that compliments your forum. You can even feed articles into your forums. My entire Resources section is built on Pages: https://www.invisioneer.org/resources/ It also means, more importantly, no maintenance of bridging or SSO. It means one unified login, one unified set of notifications, one unified activity stream, etc. WordPress is an unrivalled ecosystem, but if all you need it for is news, you may want to think about the native solution within IPS. As Marc mentioned, there is no downloadable trial. However, if you are self hosted, you can opt in to the new license terms (which you must agree to eventually anyways) and grab all the apps including Pages immediately.
  16. This is not something available in vanilla IPS. You likely have a custom plugin for group mentions.
  17. 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?
  18. 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?? 🤔
  19. Just because you change group permissions on applications (like blogs, calendar, gallery, etc) does not mean you hide or change permissions on blocks such as Popular Contributors, Members, etc. These are universal blocks to the entire suite. You could simply remove those blocks. If your goal is to show a totally empty page whose only content is your sign up information, then building a Page (using the pages application) is the way to go. You can custom build any Page you want.
  20. 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/
  21. 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/
  22. A broader thought: I know many of us focus a lot of time and attention to our homepage, which we think is the front door to our community. The reality is much more nuanced. The way that Google crawls our sites and shows sub-pages in search results means guests enter our communities directly into specific topics, not the homepage! In other words, every public page that Google crawls can potentially be the front door! On my bigger community, my homepage index barely makes the Top 10 most visited pages of my community. If you run a publicly-available site, you should spotcheck multiple pages as a guest, because all of those pages are potentially your chance for first impression.
  23. For the guest block widget, I recommend dragging it to the top of every major page of your community: on your forum index, on your topic listing, in the topic, at the top of gallery, at the top of your activity streams. Everywhere! The reason why is that guests will be presented with your customized message on all of those pages! The guest sign up widget should contain your call to action and incorporates your log in options. Once you drag the widget to any page, edit the widget. You only need to edit the widget once, and it displays the same message on all pages to which it's added.
  24. Are you looking to add the same set of tags all at once to, say, multiple topics? Tagging @Adriano Faria or @Makoto. I believe there might be a third party solution in the Marketplace about mass tagging multiple topics as a moderator permission
  25. 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?
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