Charles

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
 

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.

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

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.

We have not posted anything formally, but you are free to create your own LMS if you like.

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:
 

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.

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.

We have not posted anything formally, but you are free to create your own LMS if you like.

For any issues with your cloud services, it is best to email in 🙂
I will send this issue in for you now.

We are currently in the beginning stages of developing a Courses and Lessons application within Invision Community. This will only be available on our cloud services as a value addition.
We receive regular requests for Learning Management System (LMS) capabilities in Invision Community and the Courses app will start us down that path. 
The Courses app is not going to try to be a full LMS. Not trying to run a university here 🙂
But we do think there is value in offering basic LMS capabilities within a community context. Some features we are already doing:
Ability to create Courses with multiple Modules Modules can have multiple content items that a member can read/engage (articles, videos, discussions) Courses can be made optional or required. Required courses can be defined as "do this first" or literally required as in you must take course within X days of joining community. Badges/points awarded on various completion events. Reports for those who enroll and/or complete a Course. Reports can be exported to CSV. As this is early development we are open to ideas and suggestions.
How might you use Courses?
What capabilities would you want to see?

I truly don’t mean this as a sales pitch 😀 but… have you considered moving to our cloud services where you never have to think about server management again?

We may bring Courses to Classic in the future. For the moment, Courses is a value addition to those on our cloud platform. 

Courses is a new, lightweight learning platform designed to help you provide a new learning experience for your members. 
Courses are perfect for requiring your community to read and understand documentation and to deliver training and lessons to your community.

Let's take a look at how it works!
Instructor led courses are comprised of separate modules, each containing lessons. New courses are created and managed through the AdminCP under Community. Each course has the option to be assigned one or more instructors. Instructors play a crucial role in developing the course content via the frontend, and they are available to assist members throughout their learning journey in the course.
Courses can be set to be optional, or required meaning members must complete this course before progressing to others. Furthermore, courses tie into Achievement Rules, so you have the ability to grant points and/or badges to a member once they finish a course.
Courses can be free or paid, and comprise of one or more modules, each of which contain multiple sessions and an optional quiz.
Modules and Lessons
Courses wouldn't be much without some lessons! Lessons are grouped into modules, that can have an optional quiz. Quizzes are a great way to verify members' learning progression and understanding.
You have the option to configure modules to be completed sequentially. This pairs nicely with quizzes as you would need to complete the current module before moving on to the next one, ensuring a structured and progressive learning experience!

The lessons themselves are the main content of Courses. Lessons are comprised of the material that students will engage with during their learning journey. Lessons can be designated as optional, so they can be skipped. This is handy when you want to provide organised supplemental information that is not essential.

Managing Enrollments
As an administrator or instructor, you may need to manage course enrolments from time to time. This can involve enrolling a member on their behalf, withdrawing a member from a course, or deleting an enrollment altogether. There are two ways for managing those enrolled in courses, either through the administrative control panel or the course roster on the frontend.
To access the course roster via the frontend - just click on 'View All Members' when on the course homepage.

Course Manager
Managing a course is handled via the frontend. Individuals such as instructors, admins, and other authorized members can create and edit modules, lessons and quizzes for a course. You manage quizzes and lessons from within the module view.

I hope that you have enjoyed this overview of Courses. This is just the beginning, we're already considering various possibilities such as integrating with Live Topics, incorporating discussion sections within a lesson, and enhancing the required courses feature so stay tuned!
The features discussed in this announcement are not available for Invision Community Classic. Click here to learn more about switching to our platform to get this and other benefits.

View full blog entry

Our May update brings Email Bounce Management to our Invision Community cloud platform. In this blog entry, I'll go over what it is, why it's important, and how you can use it when needed.
What is it?
For those who may not know, an email bounce occurs when an email message is sent and the recipient either doesn't exist (hard bounce) or they have blocked the sender (you!) in a spam complaint (soft bounce).
When an email message bounces we block that address at the cloud level so it cannot receive new messages from any community. This is considered good practice for email service providers, and ensures that we maintain a low bounce rate when sending emails on behalf of all the communities on our platform.
Please note this pertains to the Invision Community Cloud platform email service. If you use SMTP or SendGrid, email bounces are managed externally and may enforce different policies.
What Bounce Management Tools are we providing?
We're giving you the ability to see which members have blocked email addresses, and to unblock emails known to be safe.
Seeing which emails are blocked
In the AdminCP Members table (AdminCP > Members > Members), on cloud you will see a new filter: "Email Undeliverable". These are any member accounts that have emails blocked due to soft or hard bounces.

 
Additionally, on the front end, if a Member's email is blocked, they will see a warning indicator in the Nav/User Bar prompting them to change their email in their account settings.

 
Lifting Email Blocks
As stated earlier, when an email is blocked, it is blocked on the cloud platform level. If the block is not locked (which can happen if it's unblocked too many times), you will see a warning the Member's AdminCP Profile page.

 
Clicking into it you will see an option to unblock.

 
One final note on the Email Block Policy
If a situation occurs when an email is unblocked and gets blocked again a certain number of times, the block becomes permanent. In these cases, you will be able to see that the email is blocked but there won't be an option to unblock, and the member will have to change their email to resume receiving your Community's messages through us. This ensures that the Invision Community cloud platform retains a good email sending reputation.
Thanks for reading and as always stay tuned to for the latest and greatest upcoming features and insights!
The features discussed in this announcement are not available for Invision Community Classic. Click here to learn more about switching to our platform to get this and other benefits.
 
 
View full blog entry
 

We are getting many requests from clients looking for extra services from us. We are developing a enhanced services add-on package that we hope would do that. This would be a monthly addition to your current package plus an initial setup fee. Right now the inclusions being considered are:
Custom SSO setup Ongoing SSO maintenance  Theme design Ongoing theme design maintenance  2 onboarding Zooms 2 Zooms per year Priority email support Second package for use as a staging site. Ability to duplicate live site to staging. Private forum on community for direct Q&As and previews with us. Pricing is not yet firmed up but we were thinking in the range of $100 - $200 per month as an addon fee as you are getting quite a lot with the service.
Any thoughts or feedback? Obviously this is not for everyone but just thought I would see general impressions. Even if you are not personally interested please feel free to let me know if you think there is value here. Thanks!

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