Joel R

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.

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.

You know you're IPB old school when you recognize Nexus! Totally nominate IPS to give us a walk down memory lane with some of their deprecated apps over the years.

#2 Custom fields per forum is not a default feature. There is a Marketplace mod for it. You can browse Invisioneer.org's Marketplace Directory to see if you can find it. #3. If your account has the proper permissions, you can use the Block Manager. You should see a small arrow on left hand side of screen, which contains menu of several default widgets and blocks you can add anywhere to the page. One of those is the forum statistics.

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 not to provide feedback on the feedback (how meta!), but to provide some conceptual philosophy around communities vs social media for other Invision Community owners. Social media, at its philosophical core, is meant to be 1-to-many. Its a single user broadcasting his thoughts or feedback at large to the world ("look at this interesting thing I did today!"). It is most similar to Status Updates in IPS. Forums are meant to be many-to-many. It's many users who publish their collective thoughts ("what do you think about X?"). When you enter the forums, there is an intrinsic understanding that you agree to the public discourse, whether you agree with the opinions or not. You voluntarily opted in to the community at large. I view it like a workplace. You may not like all of your coworkers, but you coexist because you have a unified and larger purpose. Targeted ignores at one person should be applied only in areas where the publication of content is meant to be 1-to-many. This means areas such as: personal messages, status updates, private albums, private blogs. Targeted ignores in other areas, such as forums, don't make sense. Just because you ignore a person doesn't mean that his contribution to the conversation - and the quotes and requotes and related conversation - will stop. The conversation continues, and the contribution is part of the public discourse. In a community, the philosophy of ignore should be held to the standard of the community level, not the single user level. Does the user break the community standards that are universal to all members? This standard is in contrast to: do I personally like or want to tolerate this other person? On a final note, I want to emphasize that i share these thoughts not because I'm trying to stop any feedback of Ignore. There are some great suggestions in there! But I also think community managers need to not let technology be the go-to fix of human behavior all of them time. Community management is ultimately people management more than tech management. Sometimes we need to talk - openly and bravely - about tolerating people we don't like in the pursuit and conversation of a larger goal.

Glad to see I'm not the only one. I've abandoned hundreds of posts on my community on mobile because I haven't been able to delete quotes.

Hi @Square Wheels My community uploads hundreds of PDF resources and files too. If users are uploading PDFs, one of my personal favorites for third-party tools is Boxoft PDF to JPG Converter. It's a free Windows program to batch convert PDF files into JPG, which you can use as screenshots for Downloads. I find this to be more useful than a generic PDF icon, since you can upload the first X pages of the resource. There are some very, easy settings http://www.boxoft.com/pdf-to-jpg/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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!