Charles

All sites now have a disallow added to robots.txt to resolve this.

In 2025 we do not really recommend banning by IP address. It's incredibly easy to bypass. It is also something where you can accidentally ban real people. We have seen people ban IPs and end up banning entire networks.

Please use the bug tracker https://invisioncommunity.com/invision-community-5-bug-tracker/

I split this topic off because I didn’t want to distract from the more general v5 topic. I also wanted to say that it’s very strange to me that iOS doesn’t have pull to refresh as just a default thing. But, either way, as Matt said we do plan to improve on this.

I agree with all that. I do think that AI has a place to learn and help humans discover good content. Like AI might notice people searching for a specific term and then auto-feature that content or make other assumptions to “magically” get you to great insights by people. Another thing I think AI could be great at is curation. I don’t mean summaries. I think we’re all already sick of AI generated summaries. But imagine instead a topic with 100 replied. When the topic was new, those 100 replies were a great conversation discussing a solution. Now you read that topic 6 months later and you just want to get to the point. Sure, AI could generate a vague summary but what I would find more interesting is if it picked out the core most important human posts where I could get the point of the discussion while also reading the nuance of interactions that got people to said point. To me, that is an exciting use of AI.

I cannot disagree more. What we are seeing is a renewed interest from search engines and such in human generated content. Some of our largest clients are putting a lot more resources into fostering their communities as they see people tilting toward wanting to trust that they are interacting with other people rather than bots. This is not just my opinion: it’s backed up by metrics and money spent. You can get AI generated content literally anywhere which means it adds no value to a community experience. A platform like Invision Community creates a places where humans can share their knowledge, opinion, and experiences. There is a place for AI in what we do and you will see us adding more AI features soon. But we will focus on AI helping humans discover the best human content for you to enjoy.

We’ve got some exciting news! All communities hosted on the Invision Community platform will be switching to Cloudflare Enterprise edition for CDN and Firewall services. This transition starts now and will be complete by the end of January 2025. Don’t worry, you won’t experience any downtime during this transition. If you do see any issues, like a secure certificate warning, just clear your cache and try again. If your community keeps getting connection errors for more than 5 minutes, please reach out to our support team. We’re thrilled to offer you these improvements, including enhanced security, faster speeds, and more redundancy. We’ll also be able to better control bots and filter bad-bots while still allowing Google, Bing, and other safe search engines to crawl your community. AI content scrapers have become a real pain for communities, constantly searching for great human-generated content. This change will help us control those AI bots. We’re confident that this transition will be smooth and hassle-free. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We’re excited to see these improvements and many more in the coming months!

Our entire cloud network is on B2. Hundreds of terabytes.

Backblaze is S3-compatible. It, and every other S3-compatible service, can be used right now. However, we are adding a direct Backblaze integration for those who don't know that but it's really just a copy/paste of the S3 integration with wording changed to say Backblaze instead of AWS S3.

You should use a service like S3, B2, or countless others designed for mass-media storage.

We handle hundreds of terabytes of attachments without issue.

I might suggest you stop using the betas of version 5 if you do not understand what a beta means 🙂

It's possible it is related. Email support an example page. I looked at your site now and did not see any issues.

Over the next few days you will see some improvements for static resources served on our network. Static resources are items like images, videos, JavaScript, CSS, and any other file attachments. These changes do not yet apply to your actual dynamic community pages. We will follow up with more updates on improvements we are making there. Brotli Compression When your browser supports it, all static files will use Brotli compression. Brotli offers a higher compression which often results in faster page load times. WebP Images WebP is an image compression format that offers higher compression for images which also results in faster load times. Most images will automatically be served as WebP with no input from you. We will be also adding an option to opt-out of WebP compression for your community if your focus is on high-quality images. High Cache Hits We can now server a greater percentage of request as a cache hit which means responses will be more geographically centered where you are. More speed improvements. EU Restrictions For clients choosing to host in our EU region, your static media is already stored in the EU. Our new changes will also mean that the network layer will also be restricted to EU locations. If you are interested in moving your Invision Community to our EU region, please contact us. There is no charge to move to EU on the Creator Pro package and above. Better Analytics In a future release, you will be able to see static media storage, bandwidth, and traffic statistics in your AdminCP. Video Speed Viewing videos will be greatly enhanced with chunked buffering allowing for more responsive skipping to different parts of videos and faster encoding of newly uploaded videos. Enhanced Security Files that require a signed URL for download will be more secure and allow for more reliable signing. We will also be enforcing the latest version of TLS for connections and implementing connection rate limiting to disallow scraping. Finally, we will be implementing bot control to block unfriendly bots or things like AI bots that do not provide direct SEO benefit. We hope you enjoy these improvements. Look for more updates as we announce other back end improvements to speed, security, and stability.

Please submit a support ticket as this is not something we can assist you with in public.