Joel R

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.) 

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/

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/

Long ago, back in the dark ages, forums used the number of posts a member made and how long ago they joined to demonstrate trust and experience.
Is simply posting a lot and being a member for a long time the best way to know which community members are experts?
And is there a better way?
We think so.
 
 
What makes an expert, and why are they important?
Community experts are the keystones to any thriving community. You probably recognise a handful in your community. They tend to be active regularly, are often the first to try and help others with their questions and help set a positive example within the community.
Wouldn't it be great if newer community members could discover who these super users were a little easier? These members trying to find their feet in a new community could follow trustworthy individuals, absorb the positive tone of the community, and even get help a little quicker.
In the past, forums have shown trust and experience through basic metrics like post count and the years since they joined. However, these metrics only show that the individual has been around a long time and posts a lot. It doesn't show that they are potential role models or helpful and trustworthy.
Community Experts with Invision Community 5
Invision Community 5 identifies these experts through metrics such as the number of solutions they have, the volume of 'helpful' votes on their replies, the speed of answers and more.
Each forum will have its own experts, so if you have a very broad community, someone who is very helpful in a particular area will show as an expert in that area only.
When a member has been picked as an expert, they'll receive an email thanking them, and they can then opt-in to be shown as an expert along with a regular notification or email with any unanswered questions in forums they are experts in.

I'm absolutely killing it in the Test Forum
Every few months, the experts are recalculated to reflect the organic way communities grow and change. After all, there's little point in showing that a non-active member is an expert. It might even encourage new community experts to keep up the great work and remain active longer.

Community experts have a badge shown with their posts, along with the option to follow them. Encouraging new members to follow trusted community members should be a core part of any community strategy.
Settings and control
Of course, not everyone should be labelled as a community expert, and perhaps, in very rare circumstances, an existing community expert could have a bad day and not represent the community well.
Invision Community 5 gives you the ability to set which groups experts can be picked from and offers you the opportunity to block existing experts, ensuring they won't be selected again in the future.

Over to you
All communities have to be purposeful and provide value. That value may be in close friendships, or it may be in getting answers for problems you have. Either way, locating the most helpful members will help develop trust, provide guidance and increase knowledge within your community.
For transactional communities such as support-based communities, experts are vital in providing timely answers and demonstrating credibility and expertise to others.
As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Please let us know in the comments.
 

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Settings:

User Profile 👀

Marketplace contributors will need to set up their own site to handle selling and support.  
We are looking to put together a community directory that will at least make it easier to browse all of the files from all themers and developers.  We will announce in October.  Thank you to all of the contributors who have already started cross listing their files.  

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/

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/

Here ya go. This should run well on 4.4 and up to the latest 4.7.x as well.
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AlkpoKUiQwwznPFaoIXvY6w7QxpPvA?e=bLwjoy
@Moderators: not sure if it's allowed to post a OneDrive external link to share a free plugin, please remove if this is a violation of the TOS.

The first to reach the threshhold is shown 
No "most helpful" bar is shown at all.
Most helpful posts are shown in the topic summary sidebar🙂 

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.  

Forum platforms have a wide range of uses, from helping with support to sharing knowledge, ideation and social interaction.
Topics can span years, and once the initial explosion of replies has passed, the topic lives on in local search and search engines for future viewers to discover and get value from.
However, it's not always easy to get the best content from a very long topic.
You may have noticed that when you come to a topic seeking an answer, some replies are less than helpful.

How do I fix my Apple Watch? Like this!
It's common to find a lot of social content mixed in with useful replies. Jokes, GIFs and off-topic musings are all great while the topic develops organically in real-time. Having fun is critical to feeling a sense of belonging in a community. However, those coming to the topic a little later, say from a link Google has suggested, just want to get the useful content in the fastest way possible.
That's where 'helpful' voting comes in.

A very helpful reply
Invision Community can already mark a single post as the best solution for that topic. Still, not every topic gets a definitive answer, and some community strategies resist quickly marking a post as the best answer to encourage more discussion rather than effectively ending it.
Even when you have a definitive answer, there is often value in other highly rated posts offering more context, alternative solutions and more thorough explanations.
With Helpful voting, your members are encouraged to flag which posts they find helpful in the topic. When enough votes are added to a single post, they are suggested as a possible answer. You can also tune out the noise and view the most helpful replies only.
This is a powerful way to get the very best content from a topic in a short space of time.

Want to just view the most helpful replies? No problem.
If you eventually choose to mark a post as the definitive answer, the suggested post will be replaced with the answer you choose, but you can still see the posts voted as helpful to gain further context.
The helpful voting works independently from reactions, which tend to cluster around social content. Social media conditions us to add a like or funny reaction to content that gets an emotional response. Indeed, a lot of the most highly reacted content is funny content. Social reactions are valuable when building connections between community members but often don't reflect what is the most useful content.

The suggested most helpful post threshold is configuration via the Admin Control Panel.
Helping your members find the best content within topics helps them do more in your community with less time.
Forums continue to evolve, and while social content helps develop the community, content that solves problems and helps others is the rocket fuel you need to keep members and attract new audiences.
Helpful voting also feeds into picking Community Experts, a new feature for Invision Community 5, but we'll talk about that in a future blog.

A sneak peak at the new Community Expert badge
I hope you found this update ✨helpful✨, and if you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comments!

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https://www.ynwa.tv/files/file/20-ne-emoji-enhancements/

There are definite "best times" to send mass mail [ref 1, ref 2, etc.] but it's never convenient to have to be online each week at these times to "hit send".  This seems obvious -- but can we have a "scheduling" option for mass mail?  

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.  

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 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. 

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.  

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.  

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.  

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 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.  

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.