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BomAle

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  1. Like
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    So you’re a small/medium sized business who purchased one of our plans and launched a new community. The topics, replies and views will start to rack up any time now, right? Riiight?!
    Perhaps you’re a major brand wanting to give your customers a place to connect, ask questions and get more information, but aren't sure how to inspire them to join.
    Maybe you haven’t even pulled the trigger and launched a new community just yet because you fear your hard work won’t be seen so what’s the point? 
    You feel confident nailing down the color scheme, header, navigation and forum categories, but the dreaded “0 replies” is casting a gloomy shadow over your bright and shiny new community. A lack of initial momentum is one of the scariest hurdles a new community builder faces. 
    Here are a few tips to kick off your community in style and start receiving engagement right away.
     

     
    Be visible.
    As your community’s leader, it’s important to be accessible to your members. Make yourself available to them so they know you’re willing to lend a hand. This helps forge meaningful connections with your community and fosters trust. 
    Being visible looks like creating topics, responding to members’ posts, answering private messages, enabling a contact form and including a profile photo.  

    Use your voice.
    You can’t expect your members to speak up if there isn’t a community leader or brand ambassador doing so first. Lead by example and use your voice in your own community.
    This is also a great opportunity to shape the tone of your community, whether that’s informative, casual, snarky or funny. 
    The tone of your community: 
    Sets a precedent for how members respond.  Broadcasts your brand’s values. Defines how a member can connect. Inspires guests to silently react. Expressing your community’s tone adds character, helping you differentiate from competitors. 

    Create content that invokes an emotional response.
    This is one of the best kept secrets! Creating content that inspires a feeling from your members is a surefire way to keep them continually participating and returning. 
    It's one thing to make content, it's another to create valuable content. Value enhances a member’s life, quantified by whether it produces a positive effect.
    Publish content that invokes an emotional response and watch how quickly your engagement rate climbs.

    Provide a great user experience.
    Generally speaking, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but when it comes to community building, a slick user interface helps facilitate a great user experience. 
    In case you missed our blog post about the importance of your brand’s look and feel, creating an immersive visual experience for your community matters. 
    A few quick design tips:
    Ensure your navigation is easy to use Employ a beautiful color scheme that reflects your community’s tone Add spacing in between components  Include a logo
    Promote your community
    You likely have some type of presence on social media. Use that as a tool to drive traffic to your community (versus what most people do: use social media as the be-all and end-all for promotion). 
    If you have a following on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, you’ll want to entice and mobilize your existing base to join your community. 
    Do this by being visible, using your voice, creating content that invokes an emotional response and offering a great user experience (see what I did there?). 

    How do you engage your community? Drop us a line in the comments. We’d love to engage with you!
  2. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt Finger for a blog entry, Giving you control with Email Bounce Management   
    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.
     
  3. Like
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, Improved spam defense in 4.7 with hCaptcha   
    As the Invision Community platform continues to evolve, so do the precarious ploys of pesky bots. 
    Oftentimes spammers, whether they are bots or actual humans, spam your community with links in an effort to boost their website’s SEO. 
    There are already a number of ways in the Invision Community platform to fight against spam, including…
     
    Our native Spam Defense built into the platform that scores a newly-registered member Placing new registrations into a moderator queue Adding word filters that, when triggered, put the member in a moderation queue
    We also integrate with various CAPTCHAs. You might be unfamiliar with the term, but you’ve definitely participated with one. It’s a digital gatekeeper in the form of an interactive puzzle that asks you to find patterns or similar images in order to evade malicious bots from taking action, whether that’s submitting a spam email, comment or registering an account. 
    Our existing CAPTCHA defenses include:
     
    Invisible reCAPTCHA where the system intelligently detects if the user is human in the background reCAPTCHA V2 where the user simply clicks an "I'm not a robot" checkbox keyCAPTCHA where the user must complete a jigsaw puzzle
      In our latest update, version 4.7, we’ve included yet another defense to block spam from seeing the light of day: hCaptcha
    hCaptcha is one of the world's most widely used independent Captcha services. 
    We’re incorporating it in a few places where spammers can prepare their attacks.

    Registering:
    Prevent spammers from joining your community. If enabled, the hCaptcha will stop spammers in their tracks before even creating an account in your community.



    Guest posts:
    Community leaders have the option to allow guests to reply to topics. This could potentially open up the floodgates for spammers, but the hCaptcha effectively mitigates this by asking the entity (hopefully an actual person) to problem solve. If the sequence is not successfully completed, the guest post won't be published.



    hCaptcha is available in the new 4.7 Beta 1 release.
    Give it a shot and let us know what you think in the comments… just be sure to successfully select all the traffic lights if you’re a guest! 😉 
     
  4. Like
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, Interview with the founders of Invision Community (VIDEO)   
    To celebrate Invision Community turning 20-years-old (an eternity in Internet years), I interviewed the company's founding fathers.
    Ahh the good ol' days. Remember simpler times?
    This new video interview touches on Invision Community's past, present and future thanks to the invaluable insight from  @Charles, @Matt and @Lindy. 
     
    In our chat together, these gentlemen...
     
    Take a nostalgic trip down memory lane and reflect on the company's origins Explain the power of community amidst the social media boom Offer advice for new community leaders on how to grow Share some of the biggest changes to the platform Recant fond memories from the earlier days Reveal a teaser of what's next for Invision Community  
    Noteworthy quotes:
    Charles:
     
    Lindy:
     
    Matt:
     
    Thoughts on the interview? We'd love to hear from you in the comments! 🎂 
  5. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Improve forum SEO by viewing topics in child forums in one view   
    Improving SEO with your community is a hot topic with community managers. Many minor tweaks can move the needle in the right direction, but the most significant changes come with increasing crawl efficiency.
    I recently wrote about changes we made to Invision Community to improve crawl efficiency. By removing thin content pages and being laser-focused on what you want to be crawled, you present a more efficient site ready for crawling.
    Crawl depth is another metric that impacts crawl efficiency. The more 'clicks' Google and other search engines have to make to get to your content; the less efficient your site is for crawling. With a community, this can present problems because using forums and child forums segments content and places it an extra click or two away from the home page. Segmenting is ideal when your community has defined content boundaries, but it can mean Google has to work harder to find your content.
    We introduced a "fluid view" in a past release, which streams all of your community's topics into a single filterable view. This streamed view works well when you have a small number of forums, but it is less valuable when you have a more significant number.
    Wouldn't it be perfect if you could have a fluid view per forum or category so you can stream the forum's topics with any child forum's topics in a single view?

    With our latest release, you can do just that! In this example, I have a forum called "Ideation", and there are two child forums. The new feature enabled on a per-forum basis in the AdminCP allows the topics from all three forums to be streamed in a single view. As with the global fluid view mode, your members can toggle the filters to refine which forums you want the stream to include.

    Showing the topics from multiple forums in a single unified stream is not only helpful for search engines as it reduces the crawl depth, but it also reduces helps your members find valuable content faster.
    Update (July 14, 2022):  You asked and we listened! Thanks to valuable client feedback, we made an update to our fluid view feature included in our latest release, 4.6. To better the user experience, we improved the fluid-mode per forum filters to remove a page reload! We also reversed the filter checkbox status to make it clear which filters are being viewed. 
    The Fluid View updates are available now. We'd love to hear your thoughts below!
  6. Like
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, New feature! A friendly reminder before posting   
    There’s a fine line between freedom of speech and censorship. 
    Invision Community always aims to empower community leaders with options to encourage an open dialogue within a community, while including barriers for members who choose to ignore the guidelines. 
    Invision Community’s latest release, 4.6.11, includes a simple but powerful new feature to help you shape your community’s tone. 
    It’s called Block Submission.
    Block submission stops a member’s message from being posted if it includes any word(s) added to your Word Filters list with the “Block Submission” option enabled. 
    Word Filters, a previously existing feature, allows community owners to prohibit profanity in the community. If a member types a word included on the banned words list, the platform will automatically either...
    Replace the word with something else you set Hold the post for moderation Or, with our new Block Submission feature, notify the member they must amend their post.  Located: ACP -> System -> Settings -> Posting -> Word Filters -> Add Word Filter
    Here is an example:
    I added the word “hate” to the Word Filters list in the Admin Control Panel and selected the Block Submission option. 
     

     
    Now, when a member tries to post the word hate, a message pops up indicating it wasn’t published and why. 


     
    The member must modify their comment in order for the post to go live. In this scenario, that would look like taking out the word hate.
    Feel free to change the default warning message (the text located in the orange message bar above) to something better suited for your community - it's located in the Languages settings in your ACP. 


     
    Why did we create Block Submission?
    This feature not only helps automatically moderate content, but more importantly, it sets a precedent to members regarding what is (and isn’t) accepted. 
    Gently notifying members that their comment doesn’t align with your community’s guidelines helps maintain the existing culture you’ve worked hard on cultivating, as well as your initiative to keep the language and sentiment positive. 
    Interested in trying our block submission feature out? Please upgrade to 4.6.11!
    If you don’t have an Invision Community license yet, please reach out to me and I’ll help get you started. 
    Thoughts on our latest feature? Sound off in the comments (just make sure it passes our new vibe check 😉). 
     
  7. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Twenty years of Invision Community   
    Twenty years ago today, Invision Community was founded and within months the first version of Invision Community was released. Little did we know, this would be the start of a remarkable journey spanning several decades.
    Our first version appeared shortly after we founded the company. It might be hard to imagine a time before social media and YouTube, but when we started out, the web looked very different.

    The first version of Invision Community was called Invision Board, reflecting the popular term for forums back in the early 2000s. It was full featured and you may recognise some elements that persist today.
    Like today, it even had a separate control panel where you could create new areas of discussion and customise the theme.

    Twenty years is a long time and we've continued to adapt with the ever-changing needs of community managers. We've seen the rise of social media impact how people consume content and found ways to compliment Twitter and Facebook by offering a place for long-form permanent discussion.
    Several elements remain from those early days but the concepts behind the theme have change significantly. New workflows, UI elements and views have helped the platform stay fresh and we've certainly innovated a few features that have since become industry standard over that time.
    I can't express how proud I am of what we've built together. From those humble beginnings working until 2am to growing a creative and talented team around our passion for community.
    I'm still as excited today as I was back in 2002. This year will see us build and release new tools to help guide and inform community managers. Our community platform continues to go from strength to strength.
    Of course, the platform is only one part of Invision Community. Over the last twenty years I've been grateful to get to know many of you and watch your lives unfold.
    This is as pure as community can get and I'm privileged to be part of it.

    We have a few other surprises to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. We can't wait to share them!

    I'd love to hear your memories of Invision Community! When did you first use our products and what was your community for? Please let me know in the comments below.
  8. Like
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, The numbers don’t lie: Invision Community in 2021   
    2021 was a big year for Invision Community. 🎉 
    We launched no-code automation with our Zapier integration, added web push notifications, offline support, stock replies and new reporting metrics.
    We also improved spam management, SEO crawl efficiency, Clubs, Activity Streams and introduced a native gamification system named Achievements.
    Not to mention the team grew! 👋  @Matt Finger @Marshall Slemp (and me 🙋🏼‍♂️).
    We have lots to look forward to in the new year, but before we reveal more let's take a trip down memory lane. 
    2021 was one of our best-performing years ever! Here are some highlights:
     
    Community Activity 2021
    We saw an influx of members contributing to our community support forum. 3,832 members submitted new content, followed something, or reacted to something in the community.
     

     
     
    Points earned:
    Thanks to the introduction of the Achievements system, members had the opportunity to earn points for contributing to the support community. In total, the community racked up 361,363 points. 📈




     
    Topics created:
    Members fired off more than 4000 topics, including questions, feature suggestions and community management tips. 😳 



     
    New posts:
    Inside those topics included an array of replies. 31,488 posts to be exact. 😱 


     
     

    Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions given:
    Members also engaged with the community using our Reputation system (think of it as our "likes" 👍 system). Here are the top 10 members who gave the most Reactions. 


    @sobrenome @Jordan Miller @SeNioR- @Linux-Is-Best @OptimusBain @Matt @Adriano Faria @Davyc @Marc Stridgen @Unienc
     
    Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions received:
    If a member's topic or reply is well received, it earns Reputation using our Reactions system. Here are the top 10 members who received the most love. ❤️ 



    @Matt @Adriano Faria @Nathan Explosion @CoffeeCake @opentype @Marc Stridgen @Daniel F @Davyc @Jimi Wikman 
     
    Members who earned the most badges:  
    Participating in the community also earns members special badges. You get a badge and you get a badge! ✅ 
     

    @CoffeeCake @TAMAN @opentype @PPlanet @SUBRTX @Sonya* @Afrodude
     
    Top Marketplace contributors:
    Shout-out to our crazy talented third-party developers who take time out of their busy schedules to innovate and create downloads for other Invision Community clients to use! Here are the top Marketplace contributes: 
     

    @Nathan Explosion @Michael.J @Miss_B @IBTheme @Kirill Gromov @ReyDev @Adriano Faria @shahed 
     
     
     
    Most active forum:
    You have questions and we have answers. Our support system shifted to our help & support forum and it paid off big time! 
     

     
     
    Thanks to everyone who contributed to making Invision Community a better place. Whether you're an active poster in our community support forums, or a customer who lives to learn and absorb, we greatly appreciate you. Cheers to the exciting ventures on the way in 2022! 🎉 
     
  9. Thanks
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, What successful communities do   
    The holy trinity of successful communities intertwines cause, experiences and value together. Create these and your community will no doubt hold a special place in peoples’ hearts. 
    Before we unpack this special trifecta, let’s define what success means through the lens of community building. 
    While success is subjective, there are a few things we can all agree on: 
    Communities that can consistently deliver value while also connecting people to one another will prosper. 


     
    Cause
    Cause is your ‘why.’ Why does your community exist and why should anyone care to join?
    It sounds obvious, but many businesses have trouble understanding who their audience is or how their community can help them.
    Can you answer this?
    My audience is ___________________.
    An important component of cause is justifying your community’s existence. If you can define why your community helps people, you’ll see success. That may look like:
    Offering guidance Answering questions Sharing information Selling a product or service A community that stands to elevate a group of peoples’ lives will eventually break the threshold from ordinary to extraordinary. 
    There’s a number of ways to utilize the Invision Community platform to assist with your cause.
     
    Create a niche forum for your members to engage with one another using our Forum application. Sell a digital product or physical item using our Commerce application. Create an event with our Calendar application. Share news, information and blogs using our Blogs and Pages applications.
    How to create a cause: creating and nurturing your community takes a lot of hard work and determination. Having a passion to serve is a must; without it you will burn out. 
    If you have yet to define your community’s purpose, don’t fret – reading this blog post about how to create a successful community is a perfect starting point. However, if you’re a small or big business and ready to take that next step, start by answering the following:
    My community will help people by ___________________.


     
    Experiences
    Members participating in a shared experience together is what takes your company from just a business to a community. 
    Your community’s cause inspires experiences.
    A lively community isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it medium. While you’re consistently chucking wood into the community campfire, you’ll need time on your side. That’s a nice way of saying be patient! The compounding effect of shared group experiences is something a company or brand can’t manufacture, however it’s essential for a meaningful history. Oftentimes, a business owner expects their community to flourish in a year or two. It’s possible, but uncommon, because there likely wasn’t enough time to generate an impact across a population. Be in this for the long haul. 
    How to create experiences: tap into people’s emotions. Create content that takes the member on a journey of highs and lows – encourage them to follow suit when creating their own content.  
    My community will make a long-lasting impact because ___________________.
     

     
    Value
    We’ve all heard the recycled marketing adage, ‘people come for the content, but they stay for the community.’ There’s a reason content is king; it’s a vehicle to drive new audiences to your community while also making your brand more valuable. However, content is only one of several value modalities. 
    This is when value comes full circle with experiences. A brand does this by easily explaining its cause, creating experiences then adding value by justifying its existence through offering guidance, answering questions, sharing information or selling a product/service. 
    How to create value: A community platform alone won’t create value. It requires thoughtful intention, inspired action and follow up.  
    Offer a world class experience by consistently over-delivering: 
    Offer premium, information-style content (like blog posts, YouTube videos, newsletters, social media outreach). Engage with your members in the community (reply to their posts, feature their content, reward them with public recognition using our Achievements system).  Touch base outside the community with email outreach, respond to their social media posts, even monthly calls.   Creating a community is single-handedly one of the best decisions you can make for your business. 
    My community brings value to the world because ___________________.
     
    We’ve helped serious hobbyists, small businesses and enterprise giants give their super fans/customers/clients the ability to create meaningful connections with one another. 
    Ready to bring cause, experiences and value to your company? 
    Get in touch with us!
  10. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Your members don't want you to grow (and what to do about it)   
    Every time I checked in with a newly launched running community, it seemed like there were more and more new people posting.
    As a result, I found it harder to find my friends' latest run write-ups and even harder to reply directly to them. Speaking with other early adopters, they felt the same way, and we all eventually drifted out of the community's orbit. 
    It's natural to want your community to grow; indeed, a lot of community management strategies are based on increasing registrations and scaling upwards.
    However, your early adopters may feel very different about growth as they watch their close friendship circles dissolve as more members join and begin posting.
    A small and tightly connected community is very different from a large sprawling community, and often our business goals as community managers can be at odds with our member's goals.
    Let's take a look at the problem and then the solution.

     
    A new community is small and personal. Your early adopters will make friends fast by sharing their experiences and stories. They start to learn about each other and actively look forward to new posts and content. It's easy to keep track of the conversations and people in those early days when memberships are still in their infancy.
    Before themes and topics drive your community, the primary reason your members return is to strengthen burgeoning bonds.
    As your thriving community grows, more names appear, generating more posts and content. It can become harder to keep track of those personal conversations and friends. For those early adopters, it becomes overwhelming, and the feel of the community changes.
    The key to growth is to do it with consideration and understanding by allowing your members to retain smaller friendship circles within the larger community. Think of these small circles as a secure basecamp your members will use to explore more of the community together.
    How you structure your community can heavily influence member behaviour, so let's ensure you are set up for success.
    Forum structure
    Deciding how many forums to have largely depends on the size of your community. Generally, fewer is better; however, adding more when activity increases is recommended. Using the example of a running community, when you have few members, a single topic can be used to keep track of workouts; however, as membership increases, a dedicated forum where members can post and maintain their own workout log topic makes it easier for others to find specific member's logs rather than trawling through a long busy topic.
    If you're in doubt, asking your community is always a great way to draw out real honest feedback and guidance on how to improve.

    Nerd Fitness forums allow each member to maintain their own training log in their busy forum
    Clubs
    Creating a sub-community is a big decision. On the one hand, you syphon off discussion to areas outside the main community, but this can be an advantage if you want members to retain their smaller friendship circles. On the other hand, you may find an appetite for more niched discussion within your topic. For example, while your site may be based around road running, you may have a small group specifically interested in mountain running. Using a club allows them to follow that passion without altering the core purpose of your community.

    Even though our own community is here to serve our clients, we have a health club where members can discuss health and fitness away from the community's primary aim
    Follow
    Using the robust follow and notification tools is an efficient way to let members know when a favoured member posts something new or a loved topic gets a reply. Make sure your members know how to set up notifications and the different ways to receive them, such as via mobile, email, or the community's bell.
    Your members need not miss a friends update again.

    We have a very comprehensive follow system
    Discover
    Activity streams allow members to personalise their first point of discovery. In addition, the flexibility of the streams will enable members to choose which member's content to see and which forum's content to include in a single news feed style stream. 
    Giving your members the ability to customise which content they see when they first visit the community allows them to check in with their favourite areas before exploring the rest of the community.

    NerdFitness use streams to show content for each 'guild'
    Growing a community from a handful of people to tens of thousands takes a lot of planning. Unfortunately, it's easy to focus on just numbers and forget about the people behind them. However, aligning your business goals with your members' goals is critical when growing beyond your early adopters.
    Setting up your community for success using our built-in tools will help your members feel comfortable as you grow.

     
  11. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Community Buzz: November.2021.1   
    🟢 Scaling your community requires overcoming many barriers and learning new ways of working with your community. Rosie explores this in her blog: How we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale.
    "In community, we often say to do things that don't scale. To start small. To get the foundations right. To trust that how we are and what we do is what the community becomes, on a larger scale. Our behaviour, our intentions, our alignment, and our goals all influence what the community can become."
    🧠 What we think: There is no right or wrong way to scale your community from its humble beginnings and it can be a lot of hard work but that doesn't mean we should change our core values and how we approach helping others.
     
     
     🟢 Should you respond to questions before your members? Is a question explored by Richard at Feverbee.
    "If you (the community manager) respond to a question in a community, other members are less likely to respond. This makes it harder for top members to earn points and feel a sense of influence.
    But if you don’t respond to a question in a community, it can linger and look bad. It also means the person asking a question is waiting for a response and becoming increasingly frustrated."
     🧠 What we think: There are certain areas where you need your team to lead. Right here on this forum we want to provide the best service for our customers so our support team are active and quick to reply to all questions. There are other community-led sections that definitely benefit from allowing time for other members to reply to share their knowledge. It's a good feeling helping others.
     
     
     🟢 CMX explores how to move your community online. Much of this is great advice for anyone considering moving platform (to Invision Community, right?). 
    "Christiana recommends viewing community migration as a process that requires patiences, “this is not a race meant to be run fast. We are changing the mindset of the people in our ecosystem”. "
      🧠 What we think: Patience is definitely key when moving platforms. The sooner you start engaging with your own community and explaining the reasons for the move and the benefits it'll bring, the easier it will be.
     
     
     🟢 Michelle can't find the bathroom when at a party which inspires a blog on 5 secrets to community onboarding.
    "Walking into a party without your host can feel confusing, alienating, and frustrating. And for your customers, joining a new community without onboarding is just as bad."
       🧠 What we think: Onboarding is critical to your community's success. New members can often feel lost and unsure where to start. It can be intimidating in real life to enter a room full of people that know each other, and this is true in the online space too.
     
     
    🎧 Podcast: What makes a community a home? Patrick explores this by interviewing members of his own community, which opened 20 years ago and is still going strong.
        🧠 What we think: We love hearing about long established communities that are still thriving and hearing how those early online relationships shaped people's lives.
     
     
  12. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, SEO: Improving crawling efficiency   
    No matter how good your content is, how accurate your keywords are or how precise your microdata is, inefficient crawling reduces the number of pages Google will read and store from your site.
    Search engines need to look at and store as many pages that exist on the internet as possible. There are currently an estimated 4.5 billion web pages active today. That's a lot of work for Google.
    It cannot look and store every page, so it needs to decide what to keep and how long it will spend on your site indexing pages.
    Right now, Invision Community is not very good at helping Google understand what is important and how to get there quickly. This blog article runs through the changes we've made to improve crawling efficiency dramatically, starting with Invision Community 4.6.8, our November release.

    The short version
    This entry will get a little technical. The short version is that we remove a lot of pages from Google's view, including user profiles and filters that create faceted pages and remove a lot of redirect links to reduce the crawl depth and reduce the volume of thin content of little value. Instead, we want Google to focus wholly on topics, posts and other key user-generated content.
    Let's now take a deep dive into what crawl budget is, the current problem, the solution and finally look at a before and after analysis. Note, I use the terms "Google" and "search engines" interchangeably. I know that there are many wonderful search engines available but most understand what Google is and does.
    Crawl depth and budget
    In terms of crawl efficiency, there are two metrics to think about: crawl depth and crawl budget. The crawl budget is the number of links Google (and other search engines) will spider per day. The time spent on your site and the number of links examined depend on multiple factors, including site age, site freshness and more. For example, Google may choose to look at fewer than 100 links per day from your site, whereas Twitter may see hundreds of thousands of links indexed per day.
    Crawl depth is essentially how many links Google has to follow to index the page. The fewer links to get to a page, is better. Generally speaking, Google will reduce indexing links more than 5 to 6 clicks deep.
    The current problem #1: Crawl depth
    A community generates a lot of linked content. Many of these links, such as permalinks to specific posts and redirects to scroll to new posts in a topic, are very useful for logged in members but less so to spiders. These links are easy to spot; just look for "&do=getNewComment" or "&do=getLastComment" in the URL. Indeed, even guests would struggle to use these convenience links given the lack of unread tracking until logged in.  Although they offer no clear advantage to guests and search engines, they are prolific, and following the links results in a redirect which increases the crawl depth for content such as topics.
    The current problem #2: Crawl budget and faceted content
    A single user profile page can have around 150 redirect links to existing content. User profiles are linked from many pages. A single page of a topic will have around 25 links to user profiles. That's potentially 3,750 links Google has to crawl before deciding if any of it should be stored. Even sites with a healthy crawl budget will see a lot of their budget eaten up by links that add nothing new to the search index. These links are also very deep into the site, adding to the overall average crawl depth, which can signal search engines to reduce your crawl budget.
    Filters are a valuable tool to sort lists of data in particular ways. For example, when viewing a list of topics, you can filter by the number of replies or when the topic was created. Unfortunately, these filters are a problem for search engines as they create faceted navigation, which creates duplicate pages.

    The solution
    There is a straightforward solution to solve all of the problems outlined above.  We can ask that Google avoids indexing certain pages. We can help by using a mix of hints and directives to ensure pages without valuable content are ignored and by reducing the number of links to get to the content. We have used "noindex" in the past, but this still eats up the crawl budget as Google has to crawl the page to learn we do not want it stored in the index.
    Fortunately, Google has a hint directive called "nofollow", which you can apply in the <a href> code that wraps a link. This sends a strong hint that this link should not be read at all. However, Google may wish to follow it anyway, which means that we need to use a special file that contains firm instructions for Google on what to follow and index.
    This file is called robots.txt. We can use this file to write rules to ensure search engines don't waste their valuable time looking at links that do not have valuable content; that create faceted navigational issues and links that lead to a redirect.
    Invision Community will now create a dynamic robots.txt file with rules optimised for your community, or you can create custom rules if you prefer.

    The new robots.txt generator in Invision Community
    Analysis: Before and after
    I took a benchmark crawl using a popular SEO site audit tool of my test community with 50 members and around 20,000 posts, most of which were populated from RSS feeds, so they have actual content, including links, etc. There are approximately 5,000 topics visible to guests.
    Once I had implemented the "nofollow" changes, removed a lot of the redirect links for guests and added an optimised robots.txt file, I completed another crawl.
    Let's compare the data from the before and after.
    First up, the raw numbers show a stark difference.

    Before our changes, the audit tool crawled 176,175 links, of which nearly 23% were redirect links. After, just 6,389 links were crawled, with only 0.4% being redirection links. This is a dramatic reduction in both crawl budget and crawl depth. Simply by guiding Google away from thin content like profiles, leaderboards, online lists and redirect links, we can ask it to focus on content such as topics and posts.

    Note: You may notice a large drop in "Blocked by Robots.txt" in the 'after' crawl despite using a robots.txt for the first time. The calculation here also includes sharer images and other external links which are blocked by those sites robots.txt files. I added nofollow to the external links for the 'after' crawl so they were not fetched and then blocked externally.

    As we can see in this before, the crawl depth has a low peak between 5 and 7 levels deep, with a strong peak at 10+.

    After, the peak crawl depth is just 3. This will send a strong signal to Google that your site is optimised and worth crawling more often.
    Let's look at a crawl visualisation before we made these changes. It's easy to see how most content was found via table filters, which led to a redirect (the red dots), dramatically increasing crawl depth and reducing crawl efficiency.

    Compare that with the after, which shows a much more ordered crawl, with all content discoverable as expected without any red dots indicating redirects.

    Conclusion
    SEO is a multi-faceted discipline. In the past, we have focused on ensuring we send the correct headers, use the correct microdata such as JSON-LD and optimise meta tags. These are all vital parts of ensuring your site is optimised for crawling. However, as we can see in this blog that without focusing on the crawl budget and crawl efficiency, even the most accurately presented content is wasted if it is not discovered and added into the search index.
    These simple changes will offer considerable advantages to how Google and other search engines spider your site.
    The features and changes outlined in this blog will be available in our November release, which will be Invision Community 4.6.8.
  13. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Editor Stock Replies   
    Wouldn't it be nice if the Invision Community editor could re-use whole replies, text snippets, and even reply templates?
    As we get ready to welcome more customers into our staffed community support area, this feature idea has become a reality to help form personalized replies.
    Invision Community has a saved actions feature that allows the community team to perform multiple actions on multiple topics. For example, you might want to add a title prefix, move the topic and add a reply. This works great for 'canned' responses and actions, but it is less useful if you want to edit the reply to personalize it.
    Stock replies allow you to set up entire replies, partial replies or even reply templates.

    Stock replies via the editor
    Once you have these set up in the Admin Panel, they are visible on the editor.

    Stock replies are configured in the Admin Panel
    You can choose multiple stock replies to build up a message with handy re-usable reply snippets.
    stockreplies_video.mp4
    Each stock reply has full permission capabilities, meaning you can specify which member groups can use each stock reply. For example, you may wish to create partial replies for your team but encourage members to use a reply template to report bugs, etc.

    Using stock actions as a template
    We hope you like this feature, which is coming to our 4.6.7 October release.
  14. Like
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, Announcing new updates to Clubs and Activity Streams (plus a sneak peek at our website refresh)!   
    It’s been a minute since our last blog post, but we have cooked up several epic projects in the interim.
    To refresh your memory, we recently launched a new platform update, 4.6. It includes *takes a deep breath* Achievements, Zapier integration, web app and push notifications, anonymous posting, solved content, the ability to show when a team member has replied, a new health dashboard, spam improvements and more.
    In the time since, we prepared a few special treats for you. Before we dive into the feature feast, sample our forthcoming website refresh. In the very near future, our entire website will slip into something a little more comfortable. Not only will the look and feel change, but we’re implementing new sections to explain how and why Invision Community is any business’ go-to- solution for community building. More on that to come, but for now take a bite out of this:



    Onto the feature updates; hope you’re hungry!
    Extended closed Club functionality
    Clubs with ‘closed’ permissions have more flexibility than ever. 
    Now, the owner of a closed club can opt to have the club’s forums, calendar, pages, gallery and downloads be visible for all to see (despite the club being set to closed). Previously, members could not access any part of a closed club unless they joined.
    For example, a closed club leader could create a special landing page that’s viewable by members who have not yet joined the club, but the rest of the club is closed. This might be useful as a means to encourage someone to join, share information that’s pertinent to those in and out of the club or as a sales tool. 
    Another example could be keeping the club-associated forums visible for all, but keep the club’s calendar and image gallery exclusive to the club’s members as an incentive to join. 
    Gobble up this screengrab below:
     

     
    Subscribe to Activity Streams
    Never skip a beat! Members of a community can now subscribe to any default or custom activity stream (minus the All Activity Stream) and receive either daily or weekly email notifications with a roundup of content they may have missed. 
    This is especially useful for die-hard community members and moderators who frequently consume content. By subscribing to an activity stream, members have important, need-to-know items they’re interested in delivered straight to their inbox. 
     


    Community administrators have the option to limit how many activity streams a member can subscribe to. 
    Because email notifications are inherently intimate, we have also implemented something called stream decay. If the user hasn't visited the site for a predefined amount of time, the activity stream email notifications they previously subscribed to will automatically stop until the member re-engages with the community by visiting. Pretty nifty, right?
     

     

    Health Club
    Since you’ve made it to the bottom of this blog post, sink your teeth into dessert. Sugar free, of course! 
    We recently launched a new Health Club. It’s free to join and available for all Invision Community clients. This is a great opportunity for you to connect with other community leaders in the industry, as well as our own team, through the important modality of physical and mental health. The world is in a weird spot right now; please utilize this club to lean on one another for support, give advice, ask questions and share your health wins and missteps. As cheesy as it sounds, upping your general well-being will make you a better community leader and ultimately elevate your community as a whole. Just some food for thought!
     

    The new Club and Activity Stream features will be made available in September.
    Questions? Comments? Feedback? Drop us a crumb in the comments - we’d love to hear from you!
    Header photo: Unsplash
  15. Agree
    BomAle reacted to Jordan Miller for a blog entry, Battling toxicity in communities with kindness and vulnerability   
    Promote kindness and foster interpersonal relationships through the power of vulnerability to outshine toxicity in your online community. 
    Before my time as a Community Advocate with Invision Community, I focused all my attention on my own online community, BreatheHeavy. Pop music and Britney Spears news are the bread and butter of BreatheHeavy. As you can imagine, fans of pop stars are energized, vocal and unapologetic. There’s real potential for conversations to slip into negativity.
    16 years ago when I launched BreatheHeavy, I hadn’t realized I took the first steps towards becoming a community leader. It never occurred to me such a role existed. My mission evolved from forum administrator to community leader, and during that process, I discovered a love of community building. Along the way, I’ve learnt invaluable lessons about toxic community culture (shade a pop star then let me know how that goes for you). 
    What is online community building?
    It’s the act of cultivating culture and creating connections on the Internet. It’s an essential aspect most businesses don’t focus on enough because it’s hard to quantify its value A.K.A. the bottom line.
    I spent the majority of my career writing news articles. My resources went into content creation on my company’s blog section while my community members, completely segregated from my news posts, ran rampant. I recall thinking, “negative comments are better than no comments!” 
    That thought eventually led to the demise of my community. The trolls had infiltrated and won. 


    Credit: Unsplash
     
    A mob of toxic commentators had free reign, thus scaring away quality members. Freedom of speech is imperative, but it also has limitations (screaming “fire!” in a crowded theater is not applicable to free speech).
    To better understand how we can combat negativity in our communities, let’s first define what makes a community toxic?
    When a member or group of members devalue the community. 
    Their negativity permeates throughout the community in such a profound way that it repels others from contributing, engaging and worst of all: not returning. 
    As much as I hate to admit it, toxic members are powerful. They can influence your community, albeit in the opposite direction of what community owners want. Their role deteriorates the community they call home. The compounding effect of flippant responses, snide remarks, indifference, arguments and attacks ultimately creates chaos. 
    The sad thing is... they’re usually unaware their behavior is adversely affecting the community. If they’re oblivious, there’s no opportunity to turn things around. 
    In an effort to better understand their motivation (and avoid smashing the ban hammer), I personally reach out to these members in a private message. Call me a sap, but I’m a firm believer that people can change if you communicate with them. 
    This is a great opportunity to send them a private message.
     



    People just want to be heard.
    When someone exhibits toxic behavior... ask yourself why, and more importantly... can you help them? 
    Typically, a troll’s demeanor stems from what’s transpired in their real life, and it manifests onto your community (lucky you!). Know there’s a motive behind the negativity; a harsh reality they may not want to face.
    You’re not necessarily required to reach out, and a suspension is a lot easier, but taking this upon yourself as a community leader to uncover what’s really going on is an unrequited and selfless act that’ll set your community apart.
    In other words: it’s a very kind thing to do. 


    Credit: Unsplash
    Kindness in communities
    The most profound way to fight toxicity in an online community is by not fighting at all. It’s by offering kindness to those who need it the most. That’s done through outreach and personal displays of vulnerability. 
     


     

    Members on the other end want to know they’re talking with another person. A person who also encounters struggles in life, but found ways to not only overcome those hurdles, but lean into them as they forge mental fortitude - an important component for successful community leaders. 
    Your past challenges can inspire change in peoples’ futures.
    A powerful way to do this is through being vulnerable.
    Dr. Brené Brown, who’s extensively researched what it means to be vulnerable, said it best: “The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.”
    It’s easy to expect others (in our case toxic members) to share with you some real life hurdles they’ve encountered. It’s much more difficult for us (the community leader) to shine a light back on ourselves and share that vulnerability back. However, it’s the secret ingredient to creating a perfectly baked community cake.
    The act of opening up to an anonymous person in need not only can inspire them to change, but it opens a door towards further self-discovery. 
    Being vulnerable with your members empowers them and you.
    So the next time you notice a toxic member’s pattern regarding how they post, take a pause. Remember there’s more behind the curtain, that hurt people hurt people, then take the opportunity to be kind, practice being vulnerable and watch your community garden blossom. 
    How do YOU battle toxicity in your Invision communities? Sound off in the comments below.
    Hero Image Credit: Unsplash 
  16. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Welcome to the team, Jordan!   
    I'm thrilled to introduce the newest member of team Invision Community.
    You may recognise Jordan from his photo as he's been an active member of our community as BreatheHeavy. Jordan has been running his site BreatheHeavy.com using Invision Community for nearly a decade.
    Jordan's official title is "Community Advocate" which means that he will be working very closely with our community to guide and curate feedback, assist with support questions, to help educate and inform and to bring you news of the latest developments being cooked up by our development team.
    Jordan says:
    Your feedback, ideas and questions matter.
    I've spent the last decade discovering what it means to be a community leader in my own Invision Powered community, BreatheHeavy. Community building is an ongoing journey that's taught me invaluable lessons, namely the importance of absorbing feedback from the community then taking decisive action. I'm excited and honored to share that insight with the Invision Community. My new role is designed to shed light on what Invision Community members (that's you!) want and share it with the team.
    I'm looking forward to getting to know you! 
    We're very excited to start a new chapter within Invision Community to improve communication, engage more Invision Community owners and make the most of the excellent feedback we receive.
    You'll be seeing more of Jordan on the forums in the coming days.
  17. Like
    BomAle reacted to bfarber for a blog entry, Health Dashboard   
    The support tool has served us well for many years. You can identify, at a glance, potential issues with your community both presently and down the road, right from the comfort of your AdminCP, and you can often resolve those issues with just a few clicks.
    But what if we could do better? What if we could make this useful administrative area of the software even more useful?
    The next version of Invision Community introduces a new "Health Dashboard" which replaces the previous support tool and helps you get a better overview of potential issues within your community while retaining all of the functionality you've come to know and rely on to resolve issues with your community.

    When you launch the new health dashboard, the first thing you will notice is that the previous "Wizard" process is now gone, in favor of a single page giving you access to everything you might want or need.
    Central to the page are blocks that identify specific areas of your community, server, and configuration which could be problematic now or in the future. Invision Community will check for available updates, modified source files, server software configuration issues, whether your server is running required and/or recommended versions of important software and more.
    Additional checks and recommendations have been added to this page, to help identify other adjustments that could benefit or prevent harm to your community.  Issues are color coded and classified as informational, recommended, or critical and a summary is provided at the top of the page with an easy "check again" button which will do so without taking you away from the screen.
    If we become aware of an issue, we can quickly notify communities through a bulletin which will be displayed in the "Known Issues" block on this page. These bulletins can also trigger AdminCP notifications, however they will continue to show on the Health Dashboard so long as they are relevant, even when the AdminCP notification is dismissed.
    A graph showing system, error and email error log activity has been added to the page to help you identify spikes in logged issues. Commonly, if an issue begins to surface on your community there will be an increase in these types of error logs, so the graph here is intended to allow you to identify an increase in these logs, allowing you to investigate and react quicker.
    The right-hand sidebar surfaces common tools you may need to access.

    The first block allows you to see our most recently featured guides, as well as search our documentation. While this functionality was available in the existing support tool, we found that it was rarely used because people more often visited the tool to allow the software to check for common issues, and the ability to search the documentation required a separate work flow through the support wizard. With the block always available (and searches performed "live" via AJAX), we expect users will find the ability to search our documentation from the AdminCP much more useful now.
    Next up, the Tools and Diagnostics block gives you access to common tools you may need to use. You can quickly clear your system caches, as well as access phpinfo, the SQL toolbox (for self-hosted clients only), and disable all third party customizations. The process and behavior for disabling customizations is very similar to the existing process within the support tool, with the list of customizations disabled opening in a modal window and the ability to re-enable all customizations, or selectively re-enable individual customizations, still available.

    Disabling customizations is still simple
    Finally, the ability to submit a support ticket is still available right from this screen. Upon clicking the button to submit a support ticket, you will be presented with a form inside a modal dialog that behaves very similarly to the existing form with one minor but useful addition: if there are any patches not yet installed on the community, you will be alerted to this right on the form before submitting your ticket. Think of this as one last reminder that your issue may already be solved by installing any available patches before reaching out to us for official technical support.

    Submitting a support ticket is still just a few clicks away
    We believe the improved workflow and user experience will help administrators and support technicians alike more quickly identify any issues that need addressing on the community.
  18. Like
    BomAle reacted to Andy Millne for a blog entry, 4.5: Sign in with Apple   
    Since the feature was announced at last year’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) we have received lots of requests to implement Sign in with Apple in Invision Community. We’re pleased to announce that as of 4.5 this is now available.
    You will need a paid Apple developer account to use it but once enabled users will be able to sign in using their Apple ID and all the convenience that brings. Touch ID and Face ID is supported natively where available and works across all your devices.

    Choose to share or hide your email address
    Isn’t it just another login button?
    Sign in with Apple is built on similar technologies as other login buttons such as those already available in Invision Community from Facebook, Google and Microsoft. The difference is Apple’s unique focus on privacy. On certain community types users can be reluctant to sign up when they fear they need to disclose lots of personal details. Every community is different so allowing your users to share as little or as much info as they like could be important to your success. Apple have stated that no user tracking will take place in contrast to other services where this forms a part of their business model.
    When signing in with their Apple ID the user can choose whether or not to share their real email address with your community. If the user chooses to hide their email address then your community will receive a relay email address that will forward to their real address. The email address used is unique to your community so the user can retain control.
    Can users link their existing Invision Community accounts?
    Yes! If a user signs in using the Apple button and shares their real email address, then providing they already have an account on your community they will be prompted to link their account in the same way as other social login buttons. They can also link an existing account from their account settings. If linking from account settings then the email addresses used do not need to match.
    Sign in with Apple is already enabled here on our community and is available in the 4.5 beta available to download now.
  19. Like
    BomAle reacted to Stuart Silvester for a blog entry, 4.5: One More Thing...   
    Almost ten years ago we launched the Marketplace; a place to connect Invision Community owners with talented developers creating new functionality.
    Over the decade, the Marketplace has grown to hold thousands of applications, large and small. For many Invision Community owners, the Marketplace has become an essential resource.
    Our aim was always to have the Marketplace available inside your Admin Control Panel to make it even easier to purchase and install extra functionality.

    I'm pleased to say that as of Invision Community 4.5, this is now a reality. You can browse the Marketplace and install new add-ons without leaving the Admin Control Panel.

    Obtaining Resources
    Paid resources can be purchased directly from the Marketplace and are available to install immediately after the payment is complete. You no longer need to download and install the files yourself.
    You may also notice some additional information with the resource listing, we'll be introducing a new 'tab' to marketplace resources to allow the authors to provide more useful information such as answers to frequently asked questions, or configuration instructions etc.

    The video below takes you through the purchase and installation of a Marketplace application.
    marketplace-install.mp4
    Installing an Application
    Updates
    Some of the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed in the first screenshot that there are more 'bubbles' showing in the menu on the left. These are supported for Applications, Plugins, Themes and Languages.
    In Invision Community 4.5 every resource available via the AdminCP is automatically versioned, you will see update notifications for everything you have installed (previously, you would only see update notices if the resource author supports them).
    Installing an update is as simple as clicking on the update notice, then clicking 'update' on the Marketplace listing.

    Installing Updates
    Downloads Changes
    Our Marketplace is built on our Downloads application, during development of this feature we needed to add new functionality. We have included as many of these improvements as possible in our software for the benefit of our customers, some of these are:
    Custom Fields can now be set to only show to members that have purchased a file. Files can now be set to accept a single file upload instead of multiple. New file versions can now be moderated without hiding the current version from view. Downloads REST API Performance Improvements New /download endpoint that counts the download Added more data to the /downloads/file/{id} response Ability to sort file results by last updated date We hope you're as excited about this feature as we are.
  20. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, Beyond the support desk   
    If your brand sells a product or service, the first thing that comes to mind as a benefit to building your community is support deflection.
    And it's easy to see why. It's something you can quickly calculate an ROI for. Let's say every 20 hits to a public question with a solved answer from a client or team member equates to one less ticket. If a ticket costs $10 to solve on average, it's straightforward to see the value by calculating deflected tickets. Let's say your busy public support community had 20,000 hits a month; you've just saved $200,000 a month in support costs.
    Great! But before you finish there, I want you to consider the rewards a brand community can offer.
    A public support desk isn't a community. It's likely most of your customers join because of an issue with your product. They tap in some keywords on Google and come across your site. They see a bunch of solved questions like theirs, and they either get the fix and bounce out, or post and wait for a reply. With nothing to get them to come back, once they have the answer they'll likely bounce out then and only come back when they hit a new problem.
    That's not a community. A community is a place where people return multiple times to collaborate, learn and grow together.
    "[A brand community is] a group of people who share an identity and a mutual concern for one another's welfare - who participate in shared experiences that are shaped by a brand." - Carrie Melissa Jones
    For that, you need to look beyond the support desk and expand into more use cases, and there are compelling reasons to do this.
    Shared experiences
    Allowing your customers to share their experiences with your products can lead to unique brand stories that reinforce bonds between members and creates social solidarity in the community.
    A few years ago, I remember reading a post on a travel community. A family were flying with Delta and their son who has autism was becoming more and more distressed with the change in routine for that day. A Delta employee saw this and came and spoke with the family, helped settle the boy and ensured they boarded early to avoid the crush of passengers.
    It's a small moment of kindness that wouldn't make headlines, but it was very memorable for this family; enough so that they posted about it. This post had numerous replies in praise for the airline and no doubt made many of them think of Delta when booking their next flight.
    "[Social solidarity is] not just passive tolerance but felt concern for what is individual and particular about the other person." - Alex Honneth "The Struggle for Recognition"
    All those stories, connections and moments build social capital and loyalty for your brand.
    Feedback
    Your customers are already talking about your product. Some of it will be good, and some of it won't be good. They are already talking about it on social media, and in numerous communities, they belong to.
    If you do not have space within your community for your customers to leave feedback, then you're missing out on a massive benefit. You get a chance to address negative feedback before it spills out further into the public domain. Likewise, positive feedback makes for compelling customer success stories.
    Feedback is a great way to crowdsource innovation and to guide sales and marketing on how your customers are using your products and where the gaps are.
    Owning your niche
    Allowing space for conversations relating to your product makes good sense. If you sold a fitness tracker, then it makes good sense to have areas for discussions revolving around wellness areas such as sleep, diet and exercise. 
    Likewise, a mobile phone network will do well having areas related to the various brands of mobile phones.
    "There is status that comes from community. It is the status of respect in return for contribution for caring for seeing and being in sync with others. Especially others with no ability to repay you." - Seth Godin 
    Creating these spaces encourages return visits beyond direct support for the product.
    Those return visits are what makes your community a community.
  21. Like
    BomAle reacted to Ryan Ashbrook for a blog entry, 4.5: Language System Updates   
    Ever since Invision Community 4.0, there has been a huge focus on making communities multi-lingual by providing translation features inside the AdminCP.
    We have received a lot of feedback on our multi-lingual and translation tools over the past year, and we're happy to announce these new features coming to Invision Community 4.5.

    Pages Phrase Tools
    If you have the Pages application, you can also use these phrases in HTML pages and HTML Blocks without needing to visit the translation tools area. Simply use the tag editor in the sidebar when editing a page or block's contents.



    The new phrases sidebar options
    You can quickly create new multi-lingual phrases by clicking the + icon.

    The new add phrase dialog
    Additionally, WYSIWYG Blocks have now been made translatable, so you can now create WYSIWYG blocks that will display their content in specific languages.
    Translation Tools
    Language pack creators can now set a version update URL which is checked to notify admins within the AdminCP that an update available, just like the theme system. This is a great way to notify customers when fixes are available.

    Finally, you can now quickly add a new phrase from the Translation Tools page without the need to use the developer tools.

    The new "Add Phrase" option

    These little changes should make a huge difference in your workflow, and make it easier than ever to create fully multi-lingual pages throughout your site.
  22. Thanks
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, What are the benefits of a support community?   
    When your customers buy or use your products, they will have many questions. They may have issues using the product, or they may have requests for future versions based on their needs.
    Managing and responding to those questions and requests quickly increases conversion, satisfaction and the likelihood or purchasing again.
    The statistics back this up.

    There is no doubt that unless you have a support community for your brand,  you are not delivering the best experience for your customers and risk losing them to competitors that do.
    Building a support community around your product or service will positively drive your business across all departments from product development through sales and into customer support.
    Let's break it down and look at the key benefits for each department.
    Customer Service
    Encouraging your customers to visit your support community is the simplest way to reduce the cost of supporting your product or service. Creating a self-help culture allows other more experienced customers to offer assistance and troubleshoot any problems they have.
    73% of customers fall in love with a brand because of friendly customer service representatives.**
    Quite often, new customers encounter the same issues that would flood customer support if they were all channelled to your support desk. For example, consider a company that produces an internet-enabled smart device. Less technically savvy customers will likely contact support to troubleshoot initial connectivity issues which can quickly be resolved by peers in the support community.
    These questions and answers form a crowdsourced knowledge base that will allow customers to help themselves without any intervention from your team. Furthermore, these questions will feature in external search results, driving more traffic to your site.

    Sales
    The primary purpose of your community may have initially been to help support your customers, but it quickly becomes a valuable resource to help drive sales.
    Your support community will be a relaxed place where customers talk to each other honestly and openly. They will be less inhibited than they would if they were talking to your sales agents.
    Customers might be discussing a need for more functionality that you have in another product or service. Your sales team can move these conversations from the community to your CRM to curate new sales leads.
    72% of customers will tell 6 people or more if they have a satisfying experience. - Esteban Kolsky
    Customers that have had positive interactions with their peers and members of your support team will become advocates for your brand. They will help sell your product over social media and among their friend circles. Given than 90% of customers are influenced by a positive review when buying a product*, having brand advocates is critical to your growth.

    Marketing
    There are several costly routes to learning about your customers and their wants and needs. You can conduct external surveys, or pay for research groups to look at your products and offer feedback.
    56% of customers don't mind sharing their personal information in exchange for better service.**
    The most effective method is to look at your community.
    Your customers will be posting their thoughts daily. They'll tell you exactly how they use your products, offering you valuable insight into the problems they are solving with your product. This information should be used as the basis of new marketing campaigns.

    Project Development
    Your support community is a direct line to your customers. You no longer need to use external tools and services to determine which features you should add next. You'll be told directly!
    55% of customers are willing to spend more money with a company that guarantees them a satisfying experience.**
    You'll find that some feature requests bubble up regularly. These are the ones you will want to move to your product roadmap.
    Invision Community allows you to segment your community into private areas for beta testing. Your developers can interact with this group to work directly with your customers to shape new functionality.
    Harnessing analytical data will inform development decisions. Invision Community can track keywords in user-generated content. If you have released a new feature, you can track how often it is mentioned in conversations to monitor its uptake.
    52% of customers believe that companies need to take action on their feedback.*

    Setting up your Invision Community
    Now we've looked at the compelling reasons you should create a support community around your products, let's take a look at how to set up your Invision Community.
    Support Desk
    Invision Community has a fully-featured built in support desk functionality. Commerce has all the features you need, including multiple support desk categories, reply by email, pre-written reply templates and private notes.

     
    However, if you already use another support desk such as Zendesk then our API tools mean that Invision Community can integrate with your existing support flow seamlessly.
    Keyword Tracking
    Invision Community allows you to track how often specific words or phrases. This is useful to monitor which of your products are trending or monitoring uptake on new features.
    To set this up, visit the Statistics section of the Admin CP.
    Question and Answers
    To formalize a support or ideation area within your support community, Invision Community offers a Question and Answer forum type.
    Question and Answer forum types allow your members to post questions and enable other members to upvote the questions and replies. Your support team can also flag specific responses as the "best answer" which turns historical questions into a crowdsourced knowledge base.
    Showcasing Great Content
    Invision Community has several tools to highlight great customer-created content. You can pin topics, and feature specific replies within those topics.
    You can also convert posts into new articles within a formal knowledge base or blog to further help your customers find the right answers to their questions.
    Extensibility
    Invision Community has OAuth and a REST API out of the box. This means it's trivial to extend Invision Community to work within your existing flows. Integrate Invision Community to your SalesForce CRM and Zendesk support systems seamlessly.
    Create a federated search to integrate your external knowledge base with client-generated knowledge.
    The options are limitless, and we can take care of any custom integrations for you.
    If you have any questions, please let me know below, or contact us to see how we can help you harness the power of community for your business.
    * https://www.customerthermometer.com/customer-service/customer-service-and-satisfaction-statistics-for-2019/
    ** https://www.qminder.com/customer-service-statistics/
  23. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, 4.5: Marking as solved   
    Invision Community has had a question and answer mode for a good few years now.
    This mode transforms a forum into a formalized way to handle your member's questions. Members can upvote answers, and the topic starter and your community management team can mark a reply as the "best answer".
    This is great when you want to add rigour to specific forums which encourage your members to find solutions.

    The existing "QA" mode
    But how about a way to mark a topic as solved without transforming the look and feel of the forum?
    We get asked this a lot.
    Happily, it's now a feature just added to Invision Community 4.5! Those with a long memory will recall we had something very similar way back in Invision Community 3.

    The new "mark as solved" feature
    This new feature allows the topic starter or your community management team to mark a post as the solution. This highlights the post within the topic as well as adding an icon to the listing views. 

    The green tick notes that the topic has a solution
    In addition, it also increases the member's solved count, which is displayed under their name in the post and even in a draggable widget that shows members with the most solutions. We have also added a new filter to the existing post and topic feed widgets to allow only items with a solution to be shown, so you can create a "Recently solved" feed.

    The new widget
    Finally, a notification is sent to the author of the post that is selected as the best answer, so they're made aware that their helpful content has been spotted.

    Let your members know their content was useful
    We hope you enjoy these changes and look forward to allowing your community to find answers quickly, and to reward the members that provide them.
  24. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, 4.5: Everything else   
    We have announced a lot of new things coming soon with Invision Community 4.5. Most of these are pretty big new features worth a blog on their own.
    However, we've made a lot of smaller changes that may not deserve their own blog but still have a significant impact.
    Let's run through some of those.
    Performance Improvements
    For every major release, we take some time to run through the code and look at ways to make Invision Community run more efficiently.
    For Invision Community 4.5, we've made node forms, sitemaps and commonly run SQL queries more efficient, which is excellent news for you and your users who get reduced server load and a snappier community.
    TikTok Embed
    Although it confuses me greatly, TikTok has taken the internet by storm. We have added it to the embed list so pasting a TikTok share link automatically shows the video ready to play in the comment.

    A TikTok
    Upload Chunking
    Uploading large files can be tricky. Typically trying to push a large file to a server results in timeouts, memory issues and eventually frustration. We have added chunked uploading when using S3. Put simply; this uploads part of the file at a time to prevent memory issues and the server timing out waiting for the upload to finish.
    View Members by Rank
    Very recently, we were asked how you can view all members in the ACP of a specific rank. It turned out you couldn't. This quick change was added into Invision Community 4.5.

    Showing members with a specific rank in the AdminCP
    Download Statistics
    While Invision Community 4.5 has new and improved statistic displays, a common request was to be able to download the raw data. This is now possible.

    Export stats as a CSV
    Downloads
    In Invision Community 4.5, when you require approval of new versions of files submitted to Downloads, the original version will no longer be hidden from view. We've added a new flow for moderators to approve these new versions.
    Live Meta Tag Editor
    Invision Community 4.5 seemed like a great time to run through this feature and tweak the functionality to make it more useful. Now it's possible to remove default meta tags, and it's easier to remove custom tags.
    Closed Tag Autocomplete
    When using the closed tag system where a user can select from one of your preset tags, we have added a search box to make it easier to find a single tag from a list of potentially hundreds.
    EU Tax Support in Commerce
    Tax doesn't have to be taxing! But it generally is. Countries within the EU often have complex tax rates. Commerce now supports multiple tax rates for consumers, businesses and EU VAT-registered businesses.
    That concludes our mini round-up of all the things we've not talked about yet. Let me know which one you're looking forward to most!
  25. Like
    BomAle reacted to Matt for a blog entry, 4.5: Club Improvements Roundup   
    Almost every single day, we receive feedback on our popular clubs feature. Some of the requests are big in scope, and some a little smaller.
    Following on from our previous blog entry for Club Pages, we’re pleased to announce a collection of smaller, but no less useful improvements.
    Improved Map Display

    The Clubs location map better shows where local clubs are
    A small but useful change to the clubs map means the view is now centered and zoomed around available clubs. Previously the map would show a world view even if all of the clubs were located in a concentrated geographical area.
    Member Tab
    A commitment to privacy always influences our development decisions, and this is true in clubs as well as other areas. It is now possible to set who can view the club member list on a per club basis. Clubs can be set to show the member list to everyone, only to club members or only to club leaders and moderators.

    You can now decide who can see your club
    Club Widgets
    A common request for clubs is that widgets should be able to display content from within clubs. With 4.5, this is now possible and allows you to better bring attention to your club content from anywhere in your community.

    Content widgets can now show club specific content
    Some people wanted to control where widgets would show more finely. This wasn’t previously possible, but now it is. When adding widgets to a page, you can now set whether you want it to appear everywhere, everywhere except clubs, or only in clubs.
    Join Requests
    Club leaders can invite members who they believe will enjoy their content to join. Likewise, members can request to join a club that is not open for all to join instantly.
    For a site with a lot of clubs, this could mean that you are invited to many clubs or find that your pending request goes unnoticed.

    Your member can quickly manage their pending invites
    Members can now cancel pending requests themselves quickly and easily from the Club homepage.
    Clubs are becoming an increasingly popular part of Invision Community and really helps foster a sense of involvement.
    We are always interested and surprised by the variety of ways this feature is being used. Let us know how you’re using clubs in the comments and keep the great suggestions coming!
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