Charles

I know many of you are very curious how our cloud services work and how we manage things when we service thousands of Invision Community-powered sites on our platform.
I am writing this quick post because I just got an alert from our monitoring systems and signed on to see what was happening.
We use AWS WAF with both managed rules and our own, custom rule sets. With those both combined, we are able to filter a lot of malicious traffic. Sometimes people do attempt a direct attack on one of the communities we host. That is what is going on today.
As I am typing this, our WAF setup is blocking 10 million requests per minute on our network. Yet, even with that huge amount of inbound traffic, our actual operations are not impacted at all. This is one of the advantages  of a robust network backing your community.

I just thought I would share because 1. our monitoring summoned our team to look at "abnormal traffic" and 2. I thought you might find this interesting.
 

I know many of you are very curious how our cloud services work and how we manage things when we service thousands of Invision Community-powered sites on our platform.
I am writing this quick post because I just got an alert from our monitoring systems and signed on to see what was happening.
We use AWS WAF with both managed rules and our own, custom rule sets. With those both combined, we are able to filter a lot of malicious traffic. Sometimes people do attempt a direct attack on one of the communities we host. That is what is going on today.
As I am typing this, our WAF setup is blocking 10 million requests per minute on our network. Yet, even with that huge amount of inbound traffic, our actual operations are not impacted at all. This is one of the advantages  of a robust network backing your community.

I just thought I would share because 1. our monitoring summoned our team to look at "abnormal traffic" and 2. I thought you might find this interesting.
 

If your host is defaulting to MyISAM, you need a new host 🙂
InnoDB has been the default since MySQL 5.5 release in July 2010. I would say if your host is 13 years behind the times then you need to move along.

In that case you would want to put those services in your third-party list if you are concerned.
We are looking into opt-in third party loading in a future improvement to privacy controls though. It's an ongoing project 😀

We are not adding support for MyISAM when MySQL itself defaults to InnoDB. You should either switch to our cloud services or get a competent host. It is so written.

We are not adding support for MyISAM when MySQL itself defaults to InnoDB. You should either switch to our cloud services or get a competent host. It is so written.

We are not adding support for MyISAM when MySQL itself defaults to InnoDB. You should either switch to our cloud services or get a competent host. It is so written.

Imagine a world where you no longer have to fight hosts, databases and server admin. A world where you can focus purely on building your community instead of hours of your life managing a server.
https://invisioncommunity.com/services/switch-to-invision/

If your host is defaulting to MyISAM, you need a new host 🙂
InnoDB has been the default since MySQL 5.5 release in July 2010. I would say if your host is 13 years behind the times then you need to move along.

Today would be the last day of access.

Our June release includes enhancements to our various statistics and reporting features included within the community.
Statistics are important for a community platform because they provide valuable insights about user engagement, preferences, and behaviors, which directly inform the platform's strategy and design. Furthermore, statistics enable the monitoring of the platform's growth and user retention, which are essential for maintaining a vibrant and active community.
In our June release, we have made some enhancements to those features that will allow you to more quickly monitor those trends.
Saved Charts
In Invision Community 4.3, we introduced the ability to save charts to allow you to view them multiple times without needing to reset your filters each time. This works well, however there are three notable downsides.
You could only save a chart if there were filters to apply, such as Warning Types, Device Types, Member Groups, etc. Any specified timescale was not retained in your saved chart. There was no centralized location to view every chart you have saved. In our June release, we have resolved both of those issues. Now, every chart can be saved regardless of if there are filters or not, and when saved, will now also retain your timescale as well. In addition to that, we have added an additional My Saved Charts page. This page will show you every chart you have saved, including all filters and timescales that have been selected.

From this page you can quickly review all charts, temporarily adjust their timescales and filters to quickly see other information, as well as download each individual chart as a CSV directly from this page.
Don't worry, though - your saved charts will also still show in their original locations just as they have in the past.
Content Level Statistics
Later on, in Invision Community 4.5, we introduced an improved Topic View that included various statistical information about the topic including the top comments, popular days, top commenters, and more. This, however, was only limited to topics in the forums, and not the rest of the community. In our June release, we have taken this and expanded it to content in every application. This includes Blog Entries, Gallery Albums, Gallery Images, and more.
Each content item (such as a topic, blog entry or image) will show a new button for those with moderator permissions which opens a full statistics and analytics modal, providing expanded statistical information related to that particular piece of content specifically.

Clicking this new button opens up the statistics and analytics modal. Our Classic customers will see the following view:

Cloud Powered Historical View Tracking
For our Invision Community cloud customers, we have expanded our infrastructure to allow for storing historical views for all content.
On the previously mentioned Statistics and Analytics modal, a chart will be shown that outlines the amount of views that content has gotten every single day over a period of time, to allow you to see when specifically content was popular. This chart allows you to view trends for up to a year in the past.

Additionally, we have expanded this to content containers Forums, Downloads Categories, Blogs, Blogs Categories, Gallery Categories, and more will all report their own historical view trends.

Finally, these trends can be exported as a CSV file for your own personal processing if desired - and if needed, you can choose to only include certain types of content if you are focusing on one particular section.

We hope these changes help you to identify trends from within your own community to help you promote and grow it further.
The features and changes presented here are available in the following packages:
Saved charts and content item level statistics: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise, Community Classic (Self Hosted). Saved charts, content item level statistics, analytic report generation, content level historical view tracking, container level historical view tracking: Beginner, Creator, Creator Pro, Team, Business, Enterprise. If you do not see your product or package listed, please contact us to talk about upgrading your Invision Community.

View full blog entry

Courses is available on the following packages:
Creator Pro Team Business Enterprise Courses is not available on:
Beginner Creator Classic (self-hosted) Feel free to reach out about upgrading your services. You can PM me or contact sales 😀

Yes, you can choose to anonymize content. In fact, that is what I recommend to clients 🙂 

Courses is available on the following packages:
Creator Pro Team Business Enterprise Courses is not available on:
Beginner Creator Classic (self-hosted) Feel free to reach out about upgrading your services. You can PM me or contact sales 😀

I never thought I would see the day that Apple actually did this.

Totally feel where you are coming from but it's only a handful of people panicking over nothing. The vast majority of people pay attention to their own communities, not what is going on here 🙂
We expect it will calm down when people see that Classic is not going away. Also, as people understand cloud and Classic are different product lines it will be clearer. The next several months of additions will be available on both cloud and Classic lines too.

Full information:
 

In that case you would want to put those services in your third-party list if you are concerned.
We are looking into opt-in third party loading in a future improvement to privacy controls though. It's an ongoing project 😀

Yes, you can choose to anonymize content. In fact, that is what I recommend to clients 🙂 

In that case you would want to put those services in your third-party list if you are concerned.
We are looking into opt-in third party loading in a future improvement to privacy controls though. It's an ongoing project 😀

Yes, you can choose to anonymize content. In fact, that is what I recommend to clients 🙂 

Courses is available on the following packages:
Creator Pro Team Business Enterprise Courses is not available on:
Beginner Creator Classic (self-hosted) Feel free to reach out about upgrading your services. You can PM me or contact sales 😀

In that case you would want to put those services in your third-party list if you are concerned.
We are looking into opt-in third party loading in a future improvement to privacy controls though. It's an ongoing project 😀

Courses is available on the following packages:
Creator Pro Team Business Enterprise Courses is not available on:
Beginner Creator Classic (self-hosted)  
Feel free to reach out about upgrading your services. You can PM me or contact sales 😀
 

🌷 Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! 🌷 
Thank you for checking out this weekly round up post. I hope you have had a lovely week! 😉 In the comments below, I'd love to hear what is happening with you and your community. Are you trying any new features or functionality for your members or maybe you want to and don't know where to start? We'd love to hear.
 
From the Invision Community team, this week ...
 
Current Happenings
New Version
Our May release is out and ready for you to upgrade your community. As you know, we recommend that you keep your community up to date each month to keep it running smoothly and so you can enjoy the latest updates.
Review the release notes to see what is included in the May release, version 4.7.10.
Key changes include:
Introducing Courses Giving you control with Email Bounce Management  
@Charles and I talked about the release in our May Release Chat last week.
You can watch the video and participate in that discussion in the converted live topic.
 
Courses is here as part of the May release! 🎉
What a powerful feature! Want to create a short onboarding experience for your members? This could be a Welcome note, Did you know? bullets to help members know where to start, and then a mandatory acknowledgement piece if that is required for your community. This is all possible with the new Courses application. How are you hoping to use this feature? Check out our latest blog post for the details:
 
 
Email Bounce Management in the May release. 🎉
For Cloud customers, we are adding the ability for you to view reports on bounced/complaint emails, take action on member accounts (purge them or mark them as no notifications), and unblock emails that our platform may be refusing to email. Check out our latest blog post: 
 
On Deck
New Privacy and PII Data features will be included in our June release. 
 
Statistics and Reporting will be included in a release in the coming months. 
 
Finally, for those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the week for version 4. Changes are limited for now as we focus attention on version 5. More information will be shared about version 5 at a future date. 
Changelog