Joel R

This is an aside, but some general thoughts on reading and browsing multi-page topics: - in v5, there will probably be even less reason to be browsing all of the pages in a multi-page topic with newer features like Topic Summary, helpful, and solutions. For users who are goal-seeking and solution-oriented, they're going to want the fastest and easiest path to their query. For multi-page topics that are social in nature where each post is part of the story, they're going to want to read all the posts (or at least the most reacted posts) - the entire concept of a page with 25 replies (why not 26 replies? Why not 100 replies?) is so Internet 2000s. In a world of mobile first, we really ought to have infinite scroll up or scroll down of prior posts.

Some thoughts as someone who has had a license for 10+ years to both companies: 1. Exclude all of the other apps like Gallery, Downloads, Clubs, Blogs, Calendar, Pages, Elastic Search, Commerce, etc from both sets of software since those are irrelevant to you. Evaluate the merits of the IPS forum on its own with features like: Assigning specialists to certain topics, Topic summaries, Community Experts, Helpful answers, Mark as solved, Schedule topics, Trending content, Fluid view of topics, Editor stock replies, Highlight topics by staff members, Solved content, Forum views. It goes on and on. These are features available and specific to IPS Forums. Do you need these features? Do you want these features? Will these features make you and your community more successful? Do you appreciate the ongoing development of these types of features? Only you can answer this question, to justify the cost differential. For the communities that can leverage these features, these features are worth their weight in gold. IPS has a clear hypothesis about the future of independent community building and user behavior: helping users identify solutions faster; helping new members and visitors digest information easier; helping staff members and community managers navigate, assign, and respond in the limited time that they have. There's a forward-looking vision behind the company's development of features in an overarching theme of progress that you don't see in legacy developers. These features are not just more detailed or more complex; there's a real hypothesis by IPS on how these front-end features in the forums can build better communities. In short, not all forums are built the same. If you think they are, then SMF is still available to download. It's an oldie but a goodie 🙂 2. Above, I asked you to ignore all of the other apps and only compare the merits of Forums. With that said, there is value in the suite of IPS. It's extremely challenging to build a standalone site with only forums; modern independent communities usually need a mix-and-match of a site builder and forums. Even if you don't need Gallery or Downloads or Blogs or Calendar or Clubs, I've always believed that the true power of IPS is in the Pages application, a powerful multi-function application that allows you to build a site anchored by your Forums and supplemented with knowledge bases, directories, databases, articles, and more. 3. Finally, I leave this parting thought to you and any other client comparing the two. It's a small data point, but one that I think echoes volumes about the future. I recently asked the same question in the Xenforo community and the IPS community: "what advice would you give to a new community owner?" It was the same question, word for word, with the same exact topic and same exact text. Same question, two different client communities. The responses are a small sample size, but the responses could not be more more wildly different. There is only one community that is positive, enthused, and believes in the future of community building. The other has an existential crisis. https://xenforo.com/community/threads/what-advice-would-you-give-to-a-new-community-owner.222784/ https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/478848-what-advice-would-you-give-to-a-new-community-owner/

I'd like to add my support for AVIF in a future release. My users are starting to post in AVIF, and they're a broad proxy for image posters.

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?

Some thoughts: 1. For @SoloInter in ChatGPT, you can actually create your own model that references your own sites information and expertise. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpts/ 2. I think human authenticity (and proof of humanity) is going to be more important than ever in the future. It's ironic because one of the core benefits of forums was anonymity.

Price is one component. It's the most obvious component, but it's only one component. There were some major, structural differences between IPS and these other ecosystems (when IPS had the Marketplace). Even though IPS technically didn't set the prices, they strongly and indirectly influenced Marketplace pricing: - IPS used to act as the seller. While this provided significant convenience and trust for clients, it also meant that IPS took on all of the risk of a large third party Marketplace: chargebacks, fraudulent charges, clients stealing and sharing. There's a cost to this. - IPS used to do a basic code check. IPS removed 3rd party devs who failed to adhere to certain standards; some of those developers are actively developing for other software ecosystems. Other ecosystem developers still do dumb sh## like Ioncube encoding and secret ping backs. There's a cost to this. - IPS develops faster. This means 3rd party devs need to develop faster too. In some ecosystems, clients can stay on the same version for 4-5 years without upgrading. You get the benefits of a stable, slow moving code base; the downside is that, well, your next core major version is a glorified theme update that you waited 3 years on. There's a cost to this. At the end of the day, you're buying in to the totality of the ecosystem (the base software and the third party community, official support, community support, development of new features, how snappy their music is in their videos, etc). Looking at the price of plugins is one decision among many to choose IPS.

@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.

I personally find this to be a step in the right direction. I was always kind of confused at the layout of Q&A forums, and find the natural flow of discussions in a typical forum to be better. And with the ability to mark as helpful and solved, you get all of the primary attributes of Q&A.

Hi @Amy Pond As @Randy Calvert posted above, you are invited to check out an independent marketplace directory on Invisioneer.org, where I've provided a free directory for you to browse apps, plugins, and themes from authors that are still updating on 4.x https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/ Nothing is sold on Invisioneer.org, you will be redirected to the author's own site to obtain the latest version.

If you have an active community that is running 4.x, you can also go to the ACP > Get Support. IPS provides a very robust dashboard of live suggestions and recommendations:

I feel a lot of sympathy for you as a fellow client, because many of us were hit with massive spam waves. Like nonstop spam for several weeks. Some thoughts: 1. In the future, if you ever see this new incoming spam, use the Word Filter feature. For example, you can add a keyword like QuickBooks, which will hold any new content that contains QuickBooks in moderator queue, while you adjust your registration and captcha settings. 2. I know this is now after the fact. If your site really is totally overrun from a certain point, at least on the front end your moderator permissions should allow you to delete an entire page of topics. That's 25 topics at a time. Click on Select Rows > All. One other thing you can do is change the # of topics to 50 or 100! In the ACP > Forums, go to Forum Settings and change "Topics per Page." So now you're deleting 100 topics at a time! You'll still be clicking a lot, but hopefully this might make it a tad easier.

A tangent discussion but one that's related. There's almost a philosophical discussion on what kind of service you're providing and how users engage or own their content. Are you offering a platform where users own their content? You may want to give them direct ability to delete. Are you offering a community, where members contribute to the commons? You should be much more selective about deletion, because deleting would disrupt the flow of conversation. Or is your website a mix of both, where they may "own" things like user blogs and user albums, but their forum discussion is part of the commons?

What about this: 1. You upload your presentation to YouTube or Vimeo. Configure options such as not allow download and private or unlisted. 2. In IPS, create a paid file that links to the video. Users will need to pay for the file. When they do, they will be redirected to the YouTube video. You're not selling the file, you are selling access to the video. You only need 1 member group that can access all of your downloads. You can also create categories in Downloads that correspond to your events. For example, category for April 2024 would contain all of the presentations for sale.

In the editor, as you type a name, add the at symbol (@) before a name to mention the user. For example: @Gary Lewis

Just wait until you discover how to mention other users @Gary Lewis!

Some thoughts: 1. There is a third-party ecosystem of developers, many of whom may be able to perform a data conversion / migration for you at a cheaper price. When using a third-party, be aware that those who have the most reviews may not be the ones who are the best suitable / technically competent for the job, and you'll need to conduct much deeper due diligence. You can check out the Providers Directory here: https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers-directory/ 2. Nabble is not a common forum, and will likely require a custom migration - whether you use IPS or a third-party. This does mean it will be more expensive than normal. 3. I took a peek at your website and really liked your Platform Comparison page; it was very thoughtful in how you identified what you cared about. Some extra notes for you: IPS offers the Blog product, which allows users to create and self-run their own blog. IPS doesn't offer a Saved Draft button per se, but the editor does actually simply save the draft in the browser. You can try it yourself by typing something, not hitting Submit, and refreshing the page. Be aware that IPS is a paid product versus phpBB or Nabble, so it won't just be the initial migration that will be much more expensive, but there is the expectation of a license renewal. Your self-hosted classic software will still work (and IPS can't stop you from not renewing), but you will lose access to things like being able to view / post in the client forums, spam protection, etc. IPS is not shy about reminding you that you're missing out on important security updates if you don't renew your license. 4. Perhaps the biggest reason for switching to IPS is that you will have the unique ability to rebuild your entire website in the IPS ecosystem: not just the forums, but you can rebuild all of your Documentation, Library, About page, and Truck Shows completely within the IPS community suite using the Pages application (which is a very powerful, but also very complicated app). It will be hard, it will be long, but you will get your money's worth 🙂. You are exactly the kind of site that can maximize the full capabilities of Invision Community beyond just a forum, and build an entire suite of resources, help article, databases, galleries, blogs, and more along with forums. This means a unified experienced for users: one theme, one set of notifications, one set of bulk mail, one organized hierarchy. You're not embedding Word documents into a Weebly page with phpBB forums.

Some thoughts: 1. Google is going to do what Google wants. 🤪 2. You can try to be proactive and to streamline your registration. This means: setting up more social sign-ins like Microsoft, Apple, and Google; allowing post before register; making sure that your guest widget is on all pages; choosing the simple registration versus the full page registration, etc.

You can use Google Analytics to give you the list of most visited pages.

Just curious, and off topic from the feedback (which I do believe has merit), why would you not create a category in the same database with permissions that are private for your review team? Why do you use a private club and then transcribe?

This is not a perfect solve, but set up Word Filters for keywords. Also: - Prepare and warn your moderator team. They can mark users as Spam. - Change your registration and security challenges (especially hcaptcha to the highest setting) - Drink lots of alcohol 🥃 I dealt with the spam wave back in October: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/474157-site-being-overun-by-spammers/?do=findComment&comment=2956377

5. This won't make sense to anyone except IPS people, but IPS considers Clubs to be part of the Core application, which is available for everyone. Core also includes Status Updates, Messenger, Community Hive, and other foundational features. 1. You're getting all of the applications, except for Courses. You also won't have access to cloud-specific features like Live Topics, Community Experts, etc. But the basic applications themselves, such as forums and galleries and blogs, will be fine. For people who are new to the IPS ecosystem, the app that I would point you to is the Pages app, which is the most complex but also the most powerful.

Someone from IPS should confirm my interpretation but you only need to create new forums where you want different experts. Experts are assigned to forums. Different forums means you can assign different experts. If you plan on having the same set of community experts, then you can build your forums any way you want. If you plan on having community experts that specialize in different areas (eg. Product support vs ideation), then you will need at least two separate boards.

Cover photos in IPS are tricky, because as Marc has pointed out, the cover photos are responsive and will stretch depending on the size of your window. In all the years that I've seen people struggle (myself included), the best ones that I've seen are where you have a repeating pattern which work regardless of the dimensions. The cover photos where you have one large focal point will always be either too small or too large.