BomAle

Live Topics in Invision Community 5
Introduced last year, Live Topics are an innovative way to host live chat and question-and-answer sessions, complete with the option for live video integration. Live Topics effortlessly transform these events into permanent forum topics once the event concludes, allowing your members to not only interact in real-time with the rest of your community, but also continue the conversation far beyond the events conclusion.
As part of Invision Community 5, Live Topics will ship with a brand new design, rich-text editors and dynamic reactions. Let’s take a look at all three improvements, starting with the new design.
 

Full-screen, 3 column layout
When viewing a live topic, you’ll be taken to a new, minimal, full-screen, 3 column layout which provides plenty of space to simultaneously view your video, question-and-answer list, and live chat columns all at once. The width of the video can easily be adjusted using a simple drag and drop handle, allowing your members to shift their focus between the video or the question-and-answer list depending on the moment.
Resize.mp4
 
The second column holds a list of dynamic question-and-answer discussions, while the third column boasts a redesigned chat area that more closely resemble an app-like experience.
  Questions-and-chat.mp4  
For smaller devices such as tablets and mobiles, the video is always visible at the top of the page. The question-and-answer list and live chat collapse into their own tabbed area to conserve space.
Mobile.mp4
 
 

Rich-text editors
Text fields in Live Topics have been upgraded to CKEditor, allowing for greater flexibility when it comes to formatting text or posting emoji’s.
 
Richtext.mp4
 
 
Reactions
Reactions have been added to live topics for both the question feed and the live chat. Reactions update dynamically in real-time, offering valuable insights into the content your community deems significant in the moment.
Reactions.mp4
 
A lot of thought has gone into transforming Live Topics into a much more user friendly experience. The refreshed, modern design combined with new real-time features make Live Topics a fantastic solution for hosting real-time community events, and we're looking forward to shipping these updates alongside Invision Community 5 later this year.
 
 

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It's going to be interesting to see how IPS plans to expand its digital monetization
 

I clicked into this very excited, thinking you'd be showing off an AI-generated 'executive summary' of topics. Genuinely curious: why not feed those posts with high impact signals into an LLM to summarize? Not long ago your approach would have been great, but now I think will be in danger of feeling pretty clunky, manual and old fashioned. This seemed like it'd be the perfect opportunity to use a modern tool to solve the problem.

Whether you have hours to browse a community or are short on time, scrolling through a very long topic can be more than a little frustrating when you want to follow the topic's core journey.
Recently, we discussed another feature designed to help support-based communities find helpful answers quickly, but what about social topics that do not have a simple question-and-answer format?
We've all come to a lengthy topic for the first time and found it a little intimidating to find the most relevant content among hundreds of posts, which don't always further the topic. These off-topic posts are important because they help social cohesion and build relationships between members at the time of posting. Still, those visiting later often want the truth of the topic.
Invision Community 5 brings a topic summary feature designed to make the most of your time.

The topic summary is generated by an algorithm that uses many touch points such as average read times, reactions, number of shares, external linking and more to determine how useful a post is via a numeric ranking.
The summary shows an estimated read time of the entire topic and an estimated read time using the summary, which gives your members a good idea of the time they'll save.
A shorter read time will make longer topics more accessible to a greater audience.

Adjusting the summary
We believe that algorithms should be used to support human decisions but not override them. Those with permission can add posts from the summary if they feel they are more relevant. Likewise, posts can be removed if you think they are irrelevant.

Interactions with Helpful Posts
Invision Community supports a broad range of communities, including support-based and social communities. We are improving our toolset to help both.
You can have helpful post-voting enabled as well as topic summaries enabled. When this is the case, the topic summary will show until the helpful post-voting meets a threshold. Once that threshold is met, the helpful post information will replace it.
Of course, not all communities and not every forum will have the support features enabled, meaning the topic summary will be the only way to reduce the topic complexity.
Less is more
Browsing the summary gives you a concise view of the topic's journey with no distractions, a vital strategy for growth. 
By allowing members to focus on the core journey, you reward the time they spend on your community and make it more accessible for those short on time.
We hope you've enjoyed this feature introduction and would love to hear your thoughts!
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Long ago, back in the dark ages, forums used the number of posts a member made and how long ago they joined to demonstrate trust and experience.
Is simply posting a lot and being a member for a long time the best way to know which community members are experts?
And is there a better way?
We think so.
 
 
What makes an expert, and why are they important?
Community experts are the keystones to any thriving community. You probably recognise a handful in your community. They tend to be active regularly, are often the first to try and help others with their questions and help set a positive example within the community.
Wouldn't it be great if newer community members could discover who these super users were a little easier? These members trying to find their feet in a new community could follow trustworthy individuals, absorb the positive tone of the community, and even get help a little quicker.
In the past, forums have shown trust and experience through basic metrics like post count and the years since they joined. However, these metrics only show that the individual has been around a long time and posts a lot. It doesn't show that they are potential role models or helpful and trustworthy.
Community Experts with Invision Community 5
Invision Community 5 identifies these experts through metrics such as the number of solutions they have, the volume of 'helpful' votes on their replies, the speed of answers and more.
Each forum will have its own experts, so if you have a very broad community, someone who is very helpful in a particular area will show as an expert in that area only.
When a member has been picked as an expert, they'll receive an email thanking them, and they can then opt-in to be shown as an expert along with a regular notification or email with any unanswered questions in forums they are experts in.

I'm absolutely killing it in the Test Forum
Every few months, the experts are recalculated to reflect the organic way communities grow and change. After all, there's little point in showing that a non-active member is an expert. It might even encourage new community experts to keep up the great work and remain active longer.

Community experts have a badge shown with their posts, along with the option to follow them. Encouraging new members to follow trusted community members should be a core part of any community strategy.
Settings and control
Of course, not everyone should be labelled as a community expert, and perhaps, in very rare circumstances, an existing community expert could have a bad day and not represent the community well.
Invision Community 5 gives you the ability to set which groups experts can be picked from and offers you the opportunity to block existing experts, ensuring they won't be selected again in the future.

Over to you
All communities have to be purposeful and provide value. That value may be in close friendships, or it may be in getting answers for problems you have. Either way, locating the most helpful members will help develop trust, provide guidance and increase knowledge within your community.
For transactional communities such as support-based communities, experts are vital in providing timely answers and demonstrating credibility and expertise to others.
As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Please let us know in the comments.
 

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Ehren is a superstar, he's barely scratched the surface on what he's been working on for the past six months. I'm really excited by these new views and the sidebar mode gives a very desktop app like experience, whereas the new mobile view is truly fit for purpose and not just a squished desktop view.

Stripe or PayPal have the most expensive fees for payments. I'm paying to 5% in a lot cases.
Today we have many newest and cheapest alternatives like Revolut, Skrill, Payoneer, Clover, Dharma, Binance.
We need more flexibily and alternatives to charge our payments in IPS.

Hello!
Using Stripe we can implement Apple & Google Pay support but it currently does not support automatic renewals to subscriptions. I think having this option is a great addition and would generate extra revenue for any community selling subscriptions.
Hoping this gets implemented.
Thank you!

Nice job, looks great! Any thought to additional future categories? Powersports (maybe that is under Cars) as an example and maybe Outdoors (for hunting, fishing, etc).

Happy to discuss that on Community Hive 🙂 
https://talk.communityhive.com/topic/11-multi-language-support/

It would be perfect if we could pay with marketplace credit automatic, something like a button in Account Credit page and bum… it’s paid. I would jump right away!

We no longer sell Invision Community Classic with individual applications. This is in preparation for v5 where there will no longer be a separation for the "applications" like there is now. It will just be all bundled together and more tightly integrated.
Old pricing for full Invision Community Classic was $850 upfront and $300 per year.
New pricing is $499 upfront and $199 per year.
You can reach out to sales if you have questions about pricing or options.

js mixins will be available?

My only concern is who's going to feed all the monkeys now?

Keep an eye out for the UIExtension news coming soon for form fields. 

I'd like to say more but we really want to present the entire package so it all makes sense.

I also want to say that while I often talk about the new stuff we do, it's the product of a very hard working team. We have had input from multiple stakeholders, including those who use the v4 dev tools daily, when designing the new development tools.

We continue to offer major upgrades to active license holders. We do not require a purchase of a new license.

Better.

Amongst other things as it does now, yes. There are actually rumours that we will be plugging directly into Matts mind for some of the more advanced features, but I feel those rumours may be greatly exaggerated.
We will provide more information on how development will work within the v4 framework in due course, but there will be changes to how this works 

- Improved rich embedding to support embedding of short links provided by the TikTok app (vm.tiktok.com links).

Support topic for app
 

Hi @Kirill another little advice.
If one has a forum configured as PWA and has devised a bar with tabs to browse the forum, the messenger bar takes up the whole string...

It would be nice to have a setting where you can choose whether to have this messenger tab in the footer, or in the right/left side of the page so it's not annoying, That follows the scrolling of the page, but is not disruptive.
example:

 
 

Support Topic for the app Live Messenger
    
Live Messenger for Invision Community. This app is not an alternative to the standard IPS Messenger, but a handy add-on. Live Messenger was created to relieve communication with other users. Loading and sending new messages is happens without reloading the pages. The main advantage of this application is that you can quickly write or read a personal message on any community page.
Features
Quick Buttons: create pm, open messenger and show/hide Live Messenger window. Quick access to recent private messages. Quick access to the private conversation. Messages in a minimal design, without distracting design elements. Select the groups that can use Live Messenger. PM read/unread icon. Quick message sending.

@Askancy thanks, It will be fixed in next version.
I will add compatibility with 4.7

Daniel is on fire today.

Another branch reviewed 😄 

@beats23There has already been extensive conversations around this issue between various customers and IPS staff.