Charles

Someone asked and I wanted to clarify: the data stored centrally is just metrics. There's no member PII in that. It's simply the raw numbers and activity data.

We will soon be announcing some statistics and reporting improvements that will be available to both Cloud Platform and Classic self-hosted editions of Invision Community. Look out for a blog entry on that soon!

I did want to talk about one addition to reporting and statistics that will not be available on Classic and do a quick preview: per-item reports.

You will be able to see a view of the popularity of a section (specific forum, gallery album, download category, etc.) or item (forum topic, gallery image, file, etc.) over a time period. For example, you could see a graph showing which hour/day/week/month had the most views in an individual topic. Right now, stats only show total views and has no count for by hour or otherwise when that view was made.

Cloud's backend systems handle the tracking, counting, and logging of views. This data is stored centrally outside of your master database so if you ever wish to go from Cloud to Classic, this data would not convey. Report data can include possibly millions of data points so, for performance, some larger reports may be queued. This means that Cloud will calculate the report and deliver it to you in a few minutes. This ensure that intensive data reporting does not cause timeouts for you.

This is the first step in several other reporting and statistics improvements we have planned. We are also working to tie statistics into actions in the future. Think things like: stats discovers a previously dormant member has become active again and initiates a process to welcome them back. Or maybe stats discovers a member who previously only posted in Product A forum is now looking at Product B forum so stats tells your CRM to flag a possible sales lead.

We are excited to be able to offer these enhanced services by leveraging the backend power of the Cloud platform!

This is one of those behind the scenes improvements that you do not know happen but we still like to tell people about.

All media that is uploaded to your community (images, videos, any sort of files) is now automatically replicated to a write-only backup within 5 minutes of upload. This means that backups of your media are basically continuous now.

This part is not new but as a review.... For databases, we have two levels of backups: daily and weekly. Our daily snapshots are for catastrophic recovery and are extremely robust as they are replicated internally. The weekly backups are what I call "convenience backups" which might sound strange but let me explain.

The weekly backups are not as robust as the daily snapshots but they are more easily restored. This allows our team to easily diagnose issues, assist you with recovering accidental deletions/configuration issues, and compare today to last week/month (we store several weeks for recovery purposes before old backups purge). We find having these two types of backups lets us be more agile in restoring service for both "major" events and "whoops" events.

As always with Invision Community, your data is your data. At any time you contact support and we can send you a full export of all community data for your archives.

Can confirm this will have Commerce integration for paid courses. 

Also for sure will do integration with Live Topics in a future release but we want to wait for Live Topics standalone to mature a bit first.

We have soft launched this service at $129/month plus an implementation fee that varies a bit based on needs. We will post more information soon!

31 minutes ago, annadaa said:

will the LMS support SCORM, xAPI, cmi5..?

concerning gamification, would it also be possible to integrate the groups that we wish in order to allow the existence of learning also between groups of learners. add points to certain groups...

We are actually being very careful to avoid the term "LMS" because we do not intend to support those options you're listing there 🙂 

A true LMS is a very complex thing. We are going more for LMS-light so to speak.

That is correct, private messages are designed to be totally viewable to anyone who is in them. You can of course limit the number of people in a PM to just 2 to prevent others inviting. 

We are actually going to be removing the support system in a future release. As an alternative, you could use third party systems via APIs, normal email, PM system, or even create a forum where only the original poster and your staff can see posts. There are lots of ways to communicate in private to your members 🙂 

When you say view complains, are you referring to the report center? You would also be able to select moderators too if they have permission to manage reports.

1 minute ago, Randy Calvert said:

@Charles... where do you plan to have this management done?  Is this going to be in the Client Area or from within the ACP?  

ACP and front end.

We use a combo of Redis, DynamoDB, and also pre-processing results that are stored at the system level. So like some statistic reports not available on Classic are calculated at the cloud level and then stored for the community use. This is particularly true for intensive calculations that would time out if you try to do it live.

There's also a lot of delayed requests that go into queue when processing a request or data in real time is not needed.

We are deploying updates to our backend cache layer today. This change should see decreased latency for logged in members. While a small change, multiplied over every click for every member it will make a noticeable difference.

This change does not impact guests/bots (those not logged in) as those views are handled by the CDN.

You may see up to 10 minutes of slowness at some point today while the change deploys.

Yeah subscriptions are extremely popular on all types of communities. Their use ranges from basic support to running an entire business in a community. 

2 minutes ago, AlexWebsites said:

Subcriptions is good, but there are feature and enhancement opportunities.

Yes it’s a big focus area for upcoming Commerce update. 

4 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

Thanks Olivia! I like these simple, weekly updates! Light, quick and easy to keep up to date. 🥰

Thanks for letting us know you find these valuable 🙂 

Can you provide the actual url to one of your mp4 files there?

Just now, Chris027 said:

Hi Charles, I've created folders in the pages media ares of AdminCP. I see that the folders aren't duplicated in the Pages Media directory on my server. Is this on purpose and could it lead to issues with tons of files in the same directory down the road? 

The folders are just for human organization. The system still saves the files as it sort of sees fit on the backend.

8 minutes ago, SJ77 said:

HI, That makes sense. Thank you for taking time to elaborate. 🙂

All support on the forums do get our staff's attention. If anything cannot be handled here then we sometimes convert them to a ticket via email.

What do you mean by "DB file" in this context?

Just now, David N. said:

For cloud customers, I suppose SSO isn't useful? I mean we can't add anything on top of our Invision Community software, right? 

Many clients need to integrate with external platforms. They might have a website or some sort of client login system. It's actually our most common customization we do 🙂 

How long does it technically take to convert to topic? Is it a quick process?

Once I click "End Event" in the Live Topic it's within a minute or so.

Join us for our March release chat live!

On 2/23/2023 at 1:34 PM, Charles said:

That was the part I was like "ok this isn't very good" 😀

I embedded that "media" it in a page to get the path. Promise we will address that in next release!

Just to confirm: we added a way to see the Pages media full URL. It will be in the April release.

femvoxcommunity@gmail.com was blocked in our system because when you originally tested it did not exist. I have removed the block.

https://invisioncommunity.com/services/switch-to-invision/

It's included in your service 🙂 

Interesting. The staging site was a little "oh we could do this too" most people are interested in design and SSO.