FanClub Mike

That's always a risk with sharing tentative dates and timelines. Over sharing can cause issues as well since things can change before being finalized. Along with that, you never know what setbacks (or opportunities) will pop up. I'm always checking for the next update (we were spoiled last fall), but with such a major overhaul, let's let them cook. Reading between the lines, it feels like there are some updates being made to core features that should help IC5 hang with some of the more well-known CMS's out there. The initial goal I saw was releasing a beta before the end of 2023 with a Q1 2024 release. Planning to be an early adopter, I shared with my community an update would be coming in 2024 and hopefully before the college football season in September. Either I'm clairvoyant or I've been involved with too many development projects 😂 I hope this didn't come across the wrong way. It can be very difficult to provide regular updates when there's so much liable to change.

Thanks for the reply, @Marc Stridgen. You can see it reflected in the source code as well. Best practice is to have the canonical be self-referencing, which would include the forward slash, here. You can access the source code by pasting this into the address bar: view-source:https://invisioncommunity.com/ Example of a self-referencing canonical: The extension I'm using is mostly for spot-checking on the fly, but it's been an excellent resource for quickly checking on-page elements.

This isn't 100% related to the first message, but also not enough to warrant a new topic, imo. The homepage canonical is set to the url without the forward slash at the end, which looks to be the case for all Invision Community homepages. I don't believe it influences indexability, but thought it was worth sharing.

This is another super helpful addition. Thank you!

I've been having this issue since the recent beta. For what it's worth, I reported it and it was tagged as a known issue. I've switched to the standard view for now.

When I enable the combined fluid view, it shows topics from throughout the community. I'll leave it enabled on one of my forums for reference. Example: https://www.fanclubs.org/forum/707-bulletin-board/ Please let me know if there's anything you need from me, and thanks again!

Hey Invision Team, I have a proposal for a settings change, which I think makes sense for sites that feature clubs. This is the current setting. Show Club Content Areas: Only within Clubs Throughout the community I have a setup that allows members to join numerous clubs and I would like to allow members to only see their club's content throughout the community. I think the simple approach would be to use a filter like this. Clubs to show throughout the community: Public Open Clubs member has joined Read Only All / None If this problem isn't unique to me, I think the flexibility here would add value to the clubs. Thanks!

Didn't expect to follow-up so soon, but it seems to be resolved. This member was having the problem for weeks. They just uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox and said that did the trick. 🤷‍♂️

I have a member having a similar problem where they're constantly getting logged out. They're using Firefox as well, and they're on Rodgers Internet. Before are my enabled plugins and applications if you want to see if there's any overlap. Applications: - Topic Thumbnails - Font Awesome 6 - Antispam by Cleantalk Plugins: - Delete all system logs button - Legend News - Live Topics

This is a very pleasant surprise and something that I planned on looking into in the future. Thank you. You all are amazing.

I can't wait to see what new pages are added to the story! 🙈

Although I've been okay regarding spam registrations (knock on wood), I got an email from Cloudflare this evening about a big spike in automated (bot) traffic.

I agree that Clubs are underutilized by many communities, but it's up to the Community Admin to determine if adding clubs would add value to their users. I've seen some very active communities that have had clubs for years, but zero activity in them. Clubs are critical for my site, and the the direction I'm heading with Fan Clubs. Just because it makes sense for me doesn't mean that's the case for everyone, though. Managing a community is a lot of work and it doesn't always make sense to dilute your often limited resources to build something many may not use. However, for the communities it does make sense, it's absolutely worth exploring.

Thank you for your help with the rewrite issue, @Jim M. I knew it probably had to do with Cloudflare and I wish I reached out sooner. Regarding the images, my theme is up to date, but even after switching to the default IPS theme, it still loops between two photos after a certain point. I also enabled the default theme as an option for guests if you wanted to replicate it. I tested multiple galleries but so far I only noticed the issue on the one gallery I shared above. Thank you again for your help.

I've been having an issue with the URL rewrite option that I can't seem to resolve on my site, despite having everything setup the right way from what I can tell. I'll share some notes and what I've tried so far. Warning I'm receiving: The rewriting does not seem to be working. This may be because you have not uploaded the .htaccess file, but may be a false error if your community is not generally accessible. Check friendly URLs are working, and if they are not, ensure you have uploaded the .htaccess file correctly or contact technical support for assistance. Notes: The issue is present on fanclubs.org Despite getting the error, URLs are rewriting. Redirects in the htaccess file are also working I don't have any custom URLs in place I'm not sure if this is related, but some galleries begin to loop while scrolling. Example here A few troubleshooting attempts: Disabled all 3rd party plugins and applications Reverting to the default .htaccess provided in AdminCP made no change Disabling and re-enabling the rewrite options didn't resolve it. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it. I know the IPS team's hands are full too, but if you get a chance to jump in, my IPS Access info is up-to-date. Thanks

Creating an app and submitting to the app store is definitely on my roadmap for Fan Clubs, and I'd like to do the same for my other community as well at some point. I don't expect to get to that until at least 2025, however. If it's helpful, I have submitted a web app of my site to the Google Play store packaged as an APK site years ago with no issues. Back then I was on WordPress and I'm sure a lot has changed since, though.

Hey Superaven. Welcome back to the fun! I also love the direction things are heading with Invision Community. I'll do my best to answer your questions, below, but in a slightly different order than asked 😁 IC5 is still in development and not yet publicly available. It will be released this year, but may still be a few months away based on recent comments from management. There will be self-hosted and cloud plans for IC5. Some features will only be available on the Cloud plans Invision Community 4 will be supported until 2025/2026 according to the Depreciation Tracker. I'm looking forward to everything in the pipeline as well. Glad you're here for the next step / (r)evolution 😎

Hey @LFIWebMaster. Clubs are the bread and butter of one of my communities, so I'll go ahead and share some things that work well for me. If you want to see how the filters work (option 1 below) or see how I'm managing an insane amount of Clubs, my site is fanclubs.org. The site is still a work in progress, but the fundamentals and structure are mostly finalized. Option 1 - Create Extra Fields for Clubs This option is native to Invision Community and will allow members filter clubs by the fields specified. For simple categorization, I would recommend using the Radio Field Type. New clubs would be required to select a category when they create the club. Existing clubs can be updated using the club settings. A few alternative fields that would work Checkbox Set - Club owners can select multiple checkbox options Select Box - I find this to be better for an expansive list of options If you use this feature, make sure you enable filtering when you set up Extra Fields. Not only can members filter by these options, but Club widgets as well. A look at my Extra Field for Categories Option 2 - Clubs Category Application (Adriano) I was using the Clubs Category application shared above until I figured out how to structure Extra Fields for my community. For a plug-and-play solution, the Clubs Category App is a great option. With the Clubs Category application, navigation links are added to the sidebar on the Clubs page for easy navigation, you can add font-awesome icons, and it's easy to link to since the categories have SEO-friendly URLs.

Hey @Joel R, I hear you on that front and I don't think there's a right or wrong answer regarding the AI-generated summaries. Maybe "Topic summary" isn't the best terminology if it's causing some confusion. The way I'm looking at the Topic Summary is as if it were a 'Cliffs Notes' version of the topic. Also, to quickly touch on the point that I bolded above - If used the way its intended, the new Helpful classifier should help users get to the most accurate solutions quickly. I think the AI Topic Summaries is absolutely worth more discussion and consideration, but it's something that needs to be done right if or when it is implemented.

Sorry for the confusion, I completely misinterpreted your message. Thanks for the follow-up!

I don't believe in this instance that's the case. I believe it has more to do with all the garbage SEO content taking over search and it's getting even worse due to AI. As it continues to get tougher to distinguish between AI content and human content, first-hand experience and demonstration of real knowledge are becoming more of a focus in Google. A Google Engineer has been advising on how to improve and better position forum content in search since March. Recently Google's been actively showing more 'Perspectives' content on mobile as well as highlighting Discussions and Forums. Until now, most of those results have been from Reddit and Quora. These changes should help showcase more variety. Engineer's Quote: "And most importantly, thanks for making changes. It heartens me to see forum platforms moving to expose their content better. I really would like to see this content more in search results rather than low quality, over-optimized rehash articles." I work for a publisher that is investing heavily in AI. I see it across many other publishers as well and it's only going to continue to ramp up. I hate the direction publishers are heading in and if Google doesn't get ahead of it, searchers aren't going to be able to trust any of the results Google delivers. There's a reason so many people add 'Reddit' to the end of their searches now. User-generated content and real-life experience are becoming more and more important.

Sorry for the false alarm in that case, but that is great to hear it's already implemented. Thank you! In that case, glad that GOOGLE is finally catching up with the times 😃

Changes to Q&A markup Google also updated its Q&A markup to say if you are already using Q&A markup for your question and answer user forums. The company is updating the Q&A structured data documentation to be more in line with the richness of the new discussion forum guidelines. You don’t need to use both types of structured data on the same page. You should instead use the one that’s best suited to your use case: Q&A forums: If your forum is structured by a question that’s followed by answers, use Q&A markup. For general forums: If your forum structure is more general and isn’t strictly question and answer content, use DiscussionForumPosting. Documentation: Q&A (QAPage) structured data

This is a big move by Google with the potential to showcase more forum content in search as well as highlight members of the community. Sharing this here hoping it can be natively added to IC5 🤞 Snippets below ----------------------------------- New in structured data: discussion forum and profile page markup Today we're announcing support for profile page and discussion forum structured data for use in Google Search, including new reports in Search Console. This markup works with Google Search features that are designed to show first-person perspectives from social media platforms, forums, and other communities. Implementing this structured data will help ensure what Search shows in these features is as accurate and complete as possible. ----------------------------------- Discussion forum (DiscussionForumPosting) structured data In general, we recommend nesting comments under the post they relate to. If the forum has its own threading structure, use a tree of comments to represent its structure If it's more linear in nature (for example, an original post followed by a series of replies), nest them all under the original post as comments. Ideally, later pages of content in multi-page forums include the original post with the main page URL ----------------------------------- Profile page (ProfilePage) structured data The primary focus of the page must be a single person or organization that is affiliated with the overall website. Here are some examples of profile pages: Valid use cases: A user profile page on a forum or social media site An author page on a news site An "About Me" page on a blog site An employee page on a company website Invalid use cases: The main home page of a store (usually contains lots of non-profile info) An organization review site (the organization isn't associated with the website) ----------------------------------- @Daniel F - Tagging you in case you haven't come across this yet. I know you make THE SEO application and probably have as much SEO knowledge as anyone in the space.