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Gamification can be a powerful way in which you can encourage your members to provide content on your community. Invision community provides this by giving you, the admin, the ability to give award points and badges, based on conditional rules. Below is an example of these, where achievements have been gained by Matt, on our own community here at invision Achievements on Profile Achievement Rules Achievement rules can be set up so that on certain conditions, a users is awarded points and/or badges. These can be set up in the following location Members -> Achievements -> Rules Example Rules List From here you can set up an initial 'When' condition, such as, when a reaction is given, or when someone posts an item of content, and many more. There are then 3 other types of additional conditions that can be added. Location conditions - For example you may add "A Comment/Reply is posted" and add a location condition of "It is a status reply" so that this only applies to status replies. Milestone conditions - For example, given the 10th reaction, or posted your 1st post Type conditions - For example, the reaction that was given, was a "thanks" reaction Which of these are available will depend on the initial item selected Conditions You can then select the 'Then' item, which is what you wish for it to do when these conditions are met. In the following full example we have chosen to give the "10 replies" badge (discussed later) and 10 points to the user, upon then reaching 10 comments/replies. New Achievement Rule Ranks Ranks are titles and images which can be applied to a member upon reaching a set number of points on your site. These will show up within the posts of a member. You can set these up from the following area within your admin CP: Members -> Achievements -> Ranks Ranks List Once you are in this area, you will see the default set which will look something similar to the below. You can edit any of these with the pencil icon, or alternatively select "Add new rank" Adding New Ranks These will also show in the menu under your members name, along with the current number of points needed to get to the next rank Rank Progress Badges Alongside ranks, we also have badges. Where ranks are based on a number of points, your badges are something based on a criteria, or even something that may be manually added. For example, you may be giving a badge From someone who has completed their profile, or has made 100 posts. Below is an example of ranks and badges. Badges are created in the following location of your AdminCP Members -> Achievements -> Badges Badge List You can see a list of any badges you already have set up from here, along with create any new badges that you wish to You can create a new badge using the "Create New" button at the top of the page. Note you can also mark these as manually assignable, which is discussed below Badge Creation Manully assigning badges & points You can manually assign badges and points, as a moderator who has permission to do so in their moderator permissions. You do this directly from the post by selecting the menu icon in the top right of any post, and selecting to reward that member Rewarding a member You can choose a badge, and points to award if you wish. Optionally a message can be added for the member, which you can also show publicly on the post Rewarding a member If you choose to show publicly on the post, an additional section will be added to the post as shown below. Award on post Other Settings In addition to the above, there are of course other settings which go with these. You can tweak these settings to your liking, such as maybe disallowing moderators from receiving badges, or limiting the amount of manual items that can be given. Achievement Settings

An important part of your forum is getting new members over to your site. Your existing membership will often be a part of this, and for this reason we have given you the ability to add invite sections to your sites, in which your members can use to invite new potential members, and, if set up, gain referrals from these. Invites The ability to invite members directly from the site is done via the "Tell a friend" block. When this is added people can email other potential members directly from the form, or selecting the share link will provide them with a link to the site (unique if referrals are switched on), and the ability to share to social networks. For more information on how to use the block manager, please see the following guide. Referrals Referrals are a system available with the commerce application, which allow you to give banner links to your members to use, and gain referrals for these. In turn you can, should you choose, give commission to those members if one of their referrals signs up, and purchases an item. You can read more about how to set up referrals in the following commerce guide.

When moderating content, it will often be a good idea to be able to add a staff note to that conversation, either for other staff only, or for your members to see. This can be done using staff notes. https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/staff-and-moderation/creating-administrators-and-moderators-r31/ Any member who is a moderator on the site can use staff notes, provided they have permission for that feature. For more information on setting up moderator permissions, please see the following guide You can add a message by selecting the "Add Message" function, within "Moderator Actions" Add Message Option Once selected, you will be shown the form below, where you can select whether or not you want "public" to see this (if not only moderators can see these), the message content, and the color of the message. Add New Message Below is an example where we have added a bright red message to catch the attention of staff visiting that topic Message Example

What is Pixabay? Pixabay is a stock image site with over a million images, which require no attribution and are not hampered by the usual copyright issues. We have integrated this, using their API, into many areas of the suite, so you can add these at the click of a button. Where can I use this? Pixabay integration can be used in any location that you can upload, provided you have permissions set to do so within your group permissions. This includes (but not restricted to) the following: Within content items such as posts/topics As cover images for profiles and blogs Selecting logos or header within forum setup screens in the ACP The following short video shows an example of its use in action How is this added to my site? This can be added from the "Community Enhancements" area of your ACP, by visiting the following location System -> Site Features -> Community Enhancements Select "Enable" under the Pixabay option in this area, and then select "Create a new key". This will take you to the pixabay site where you need to create a new account (or login if you have an account already). Once logged in, you will see the key you need to enter into your ACP on the documentations page. Add this, choose which groups you wish to be able to use stock photos, and then save. API Key Location

This guide has been put together to give a general direction on how to improve the performance of your site on a self-hosted environment. However, while we make continuous performance improvements at a software level with each release, most issues such as this are the result of an underperforming, overloaded or misconfigured server. As a software manufacturer, our ability to troubleshoot this is limited and your host has the best tools and access to the most resources to troubleshoot the issue for you. We would recommend that you consult with your host and if they identify an issue with the software such as a particular query that seems to be posing an issue, please pass along such information and we will be happy to investigate the concern further at that time. Please also note, IPS provides turnkey Community in the Cloud services. Please see https://www.invisionpower.com/buy/cloud for more information. General Performance The first thing you should look at when it comes to performance, is that you are utilizing the latest versions of items such as PHP and MySQL, that your hosting company provides. This can often provide a performance benefit in of itself. In addition to the above, ensure you are using any recommended items shown in your admin CP, and ensure you have applied any patches. To check this, go to System>Support>Support, select "Something isnt working correctly" and click on next. If there are any items showing here to be addressed, you should do this before any other item. MySQL and INNODB MySQL on a lot of servers will tend to use the old MyISAM table engine. While this may be fine for many applications, we recommend that you use INNODB as your table engine for the Invision Suite applications. This can improve performance on applications that have a lot of both read and write actions, such as the Invision Community Suite. This is due to the way in which locking is handled by the MySQL instance, as INNODB supports row level locking, rather than only table level locking. If you are unsure how to switch to INNODB, you should contact your hosting company on this. The general syntax for changing a table to INNODB is as follows ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=InnoDB; You can see more information about converting to INNODB in the MySQL documentation at the link below https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/converting-tables-to-innodb.html Running Tasks Within the Invision Community platform, there are tasks that are performed by your site on a periodic bases. These can be everything from updating views, to creating cache items, or deleting logs. Your sites performance can be affected if these tasks are not run properly, at the times it needs to. By default the task system runs 'With Traffic'. This means that a little bit of the tasks will be run each time a user does something on your site, or even views a page. We recommend that this is switched to use cron on your server. cronis a scheduled task system available on most servers, which can run the tasks for you. This means it is then no longer running with traffic on the site. You can read more about tasks, and how to change methods, including cron and Webservice methods, in the following guide External Services It is possible to configure external services, in order to support the performance of your site. This may be that you offload your search facility, or move some of your stored files to another location to gain a performance benefit. Elastic Search Elastic search allows you to offload searching to a dedicated elastic search instance, either on your own server, or a server elsewhere. Being a dedicated platform for this, the performance is greatly improved, and affects many other areas of the site such as activity streams. Setting up of elastic search itself is not something that is within the scope of this guide. You should contact your hosting company, or an external provider of elasticsearch, in order to use this service. Once you have this set up, you switch to elastic search by selecting this option, and adding your elastic server details, in the following location System -> Settings -> Search Storage Methods The Invision Community platform allows you to move the location of stored items, to another location should you wish to do so. This means you can take load off your own server in some cases such as S3, or even moving items to other drives on your own server. The methods allowed are File System - Default option which is sufficient for most environments. Amazon S3 - Remote storage system recommended for very busy sites. Database - Use if you do not have much file storage space available or file writes are undesirable for your server environment. Will require more server resources to display a file. You can read more about these methods in our guides below

As Azure AD uses OAuth 2.0 for its connectivity, we can set this up as a login method using our generic OAuth 2.0 setup. The below guide shows a basic setup of Azure AD, with a standard Invision Community setup. Before you continue, this guide assumes that you already have an Azure account and organisation already set up. If you do not yet have this, you should go ahead and ensure you have this set up first. Setting up permissions The first thing we will need to do in order to get our oauth setup working, is to create the relevant permissions within Azure. Within your Azure services screen, select the "Azure Active Directory" link as shown. Account Services Now we are in the Active Directory area of your Azure setup, select "App Registrations" from the left so we can register a new application App Registration Menu Option Click on New Registration, to register a new application New App Registration You can give the user facing display name of the application anything you wish. You can change this later if you decide you want to name it something differently, so we have just used Azure OAuth Test for the time being. Select the "Supported account types" option that relates to how you want your login setup. The Redirect URI can be found within your admin CP if needed, by visiting the following location to start setting up the admin CP side System -> Settings -> Login & Registration ->Create new -> Other Oauth 2.0 By default the URL to enter will be as follows. Replacing the yourURL with your own sites URL - https://yourURL/oauth/callback Callback URL Example How this is set up, we can add the API Permissions. Go back to the overview screen, and select "View API permissions" View API Permissions You may find that there is already the User.Read permissions set up, as shown below. If there is, you can skip the next step. Example Permissions If this is not already set up, select "Add a permission". This will then ask what type of permission you wish to add. For the purpose of our setup, we will be selecting "Microsoft Graph" Permission Type Selection You will then be asked which type of permissions you require. You need to select "Delegated permissions" Select Delegate Permissions Then select the following permissions User->User.Read User Permission Options The Client Secret Now we have the permissions set up, we need to create the client secret. This secret will then be used for the setup in your admin CP. Select "Certificated & secrets" from the menu on the left. Client Secret Menu Item Once you are in this area, you need to Select the "New client secret" button Select "Never" on the expiry Add a name for your secret (can be anything you wish) Client Secret Setup Click on Add, and you will then see the secret at the bottom of the page. You need to copy this secret for use in subsequent sections of this guide. Copy Secret Key The Admin Side Now we have the Azure side set up, we can set up the Auth setup within the admin CP. If you have not done so already, visit the following area in the Admin CP to start the setup System -> Settings -> Login & Registration ->Create new -> Other Oauth 2.0 The first thing we will enter, will be a the basic settings. It doesnt matter what you call the login method, as long as its something you can recognise in the ACP, should you need to revisit this area in the future. Leave the other 2 items as default Basic Settings The next section is "Application Settings". This is where you will add the relevant information for your azure setup. All items should be left as default unless stated here. Your client and tenant ID locations are shown in the image below for when needed Client ID and Tenant ID Client Identifier - This is the "Application (client) ID" that you will see at the top of the overview page. Client Secret - This is the secret key that was copied out in the previous section of this guide Scopes to Request - Enter "user.read" (without the quotes) Authorization Endpoint - This should be the following URL. However replace where it states "tenant_id_here" with your tenant ID. This can be found on the overview page of azure active directory named "Directory (tenant) ID" https://login.microsoftonline.com/tenant_id_here/oauth2/authorize?resource=https://graph.microsoft.com/ Token Endpoint - This should be the following URL. Again you should replace where its states "tenant_id_here" with your own tenant id https://login.microsoftonline.com/tenant_id_here/oauth2/token?resource=https://graph.microsoft.com/ User Information Endpoint - Please ensure the following URL https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me User ID Parameter - Enter "id" (without the quotes) Display Name Parameter - Enter "displayName" (without the quotes) Email Address Parameter - Enter "mail" (without the quotes) Profile Photo URL Parameter - Leave blank Application Settings The final part is to fill in the 'Appearance Settings', and 'Account Management' settings. What you add for these would be your own preference, depending on how you wish for the login button to be displayed, and the action to be taken in various scenarios with user accounts. Appearance and Account Settings This now concludes the azure setup. You can test this by logging into the site on the front end from a valid account Login Button

A great way in which to monetize your community, can often be to sell subscriptions to your members, in exchange for Benefits around the site (or indeed off the site). The commerce application allows for this with a simple subscriptions system. It is important to know, this is meant as a walk through to show example of use. More extensive guides on commerce, and its features, can be found under the Suite Applications section on the left of this guides area. Introduction In this guide we will be creating a subscription system for our fictional site, that will allow our members to pay to increase their attachment storage space, gain access to a new forum, and create private/restricted gallery items. There will be 3 tiers, of which offer more features the higher the subscription that is purchased Bronze Subscription Silver Subscription Gold Subscription Creating Groups The first thing we wish to do is to create some new member groups. We will create groups corresponding to the subscriptions we will also set up. So therefore as Bronze, Silver, and Gold group. For more information on the creation of member groups, please refer to the following guide On the creation of these groups, they will have the same basic settings of the member group, with the exception of the following items. Bronze - Set "Total Maximum Storage" to 1000kb (Content Tab). Switch on "Can create private albums?" (Gallery Tab - Requires the gallery application) Silver - Set "Total Maximum Storage" to 5000kb (Content Tab). Switch on "Can create private albums?" (Gallery Tab - Requires the gallery application) Gold - Set "Total Maximum Storage" to 5000kb (Content Tab). Switch on "Can create private albums?", and also "Can create restricted access albums?" (Gallery Tab - Requires the gallery application). Sorting Permissions Now we have created the groups, create a new forum for Subscribers. We have named this "Subscriber", but you can name the forum anything you wish. Please see the following guide on how to create new forums When creating the forums, you will need to set up permissions so that only members of Bronze, Silver, or Gold have access to this new forum. You can read more about permissions in the following guide Creating Subscriptions We are now going to create some subscriptions for the new groups. Here we want to achieve the following Allow someone to purchase a subscription for Bronze, Silver or Gold Promote to the relevant group on purchase To create our first subscription, we go to the following location within our AdminCP Commerce -> Subscriptions -> Subscription Plans Here, we click to create a new subscription plan in the top right. In the box provided, give it the name "Bronze Subscription". We are going to create monthly subscriptions. So we want to set an initial charge for this of $5, and then $5 every month afterward. For this you need to switch on "Renews". You should have something set up as the following so far. Name and Price Setup Now we have the name and price set up, we need to tell the system what to do when someone purchases the item. We set up here that we want these users to be moved into the Bronze Group, when they purchase this item. In addition, we want them to be moved back to their original group if they stop paying for the item. Once done, add a cover image if you wish, and a description for your new subscription. The final part of your setup should look like this. Subscription benefits Complete these steps for a silver and gold subscriber set, and you will then have a set of subscriptions. The subscription system automatically allows users to upgrade/downgrade between subscriptions, if allowed to do so within subscription settings. You can read more about that in our full subscriptions guide Further Reading Our full subscriptions guide can be found in the following location of our guides area For information on setting up payment methods for your users to use, please see the following guide If you have not yet purchased our Commerce application for your site, you can add this on simply and easily, by following the instructions in the guide below. If you are a cloud hosted customer, you already have this product, so you are good to go!