We are happy to announce the new Invision Community 4.3 is available!
Some highlights in Invision Community 4.3 include...
Improved Search
We now support Elasticsearch for scalable and accurate searching that MySQL alone cannot provided. There are also enhancements to the overall search interfaces based on your feedback.
Emoji
Express yourself with native emoji support in all editors. You can also keep your custom emoticons as you have now.
Member Management
The AdminCP interface to manage your members is all new allowing you easier control and management of your membership.
Automatic Community Moderation
You as the administrator set up rules to define how many unique member reports a piece of content needs to receive before it's automatically hidden from view and moderators notified.
Clubs
The new Clubs feature has been a huge hit with Invision Community users and we are expanding it to include invite-only options, notifications, exposure on the main community pages, paid memberships, and more.
Custom Email Footers
Your community generates a lot of email and you can now include dynamic content in the footer to help drive engagement and content discovery.
New Gallery Interface
We have reworked our Gallery system with a simplified upload process and more streamlined image viewing.
The full list follows. Enjoy!
Content Discovery
We now support Elasticsearch which is a search utility that allows for much faster and more reliable searching.
The REST API now supports search functions.
Both MySQL and Elasticsearch have new settings for the admin to use to set search-defaults and default content weighting to better customize search logic to your community.
Visitors can now search for Content Pages and Commerce Products.
When entering a search term, members now see a more clear interface so they know what areas they are searching in and the method of search.
Member Engagement
Commerce can now send a customizable account welcome email after checkout.
You can whitelist emails in the spam service to stop false-positives.
REST API has many enhancements to mange members.
Ability to join any OAuth service for login management.
Invision Community can now be an OAuth endpoint.
Wordpress OAuth login method built in.
Support for Google's Invisible ReCaptcha.
Groups can be excluded from Leaderboard (such as admins or bot groups).
All emails generated by Invision Community can now contain admin-defined extra promotional text in the footer such as Our Picks, and Social Links.
Admins can now define the order of Complete Your Profile to better control user experience.
Clubs
Option to make a Club visible but invite-only
Admins can set an option so any Club a member is part of will also show in the parent application. So if you are in a Club that has a Gallery tab then those image will show both in the Club and in the main Gallery section of the community.
Club members can now follow an entire Club rather than just each content section.
There is a new option on the Club directory page for a list view which is useful for communities with many Clubs.
If you have Commerce you can now enable paid memberships to Clubs.
Admins can set limits on number of Clubs per group.
If a group has delete permission in their Club, they can now delete empty containers as well.
Members can ignore invitations.
Moderation and Administration
Unrestricted moderator or administrator permission sets in the AdminCP are visually flagged. This prevents administrator confusion when they cannot do something as they will be able to quickly see if their account has restrictions.
You can choose to be notified with a new Club is created.
Moderators can now reply to any content item with a hidden reply.
Download screenshot/watermarks can now be rebuilt if you change settings.
Support for Facebook Pixel to easily track visitors.
Moderators can now delete Gallery albums.
Automatic moderation tools with rules to define when content should auto-hide based on user reports.
Totally new member management view in AdminCP.
More areas are mass-selectable like comments and AdminCP functions for easier management.
New Features
Commerce now has full Stripe support including fraud tools, Apple Pay, and other Stripe features.
Commerce packages can now have various custom email events configured (expiring soon, purchased, expired).
Full Emojii support in the editor.
Complete overhaul of the Gallery upload and image views.
Announcements system overhaul. Now global on all pages (not via widget) and new modes including dismissible announcements and top-header floating bar option.
Many new reports on traffic and engagement in the AdminCP.
Blog has new view modes to offer options for a traditional site blog or a community multi-member blog platform.
The content-starter can now leave one reply to Reviews on their item.
Commerce now makes it much easier to do basic account-subscriptions when there is no product attached.
Useful Improvements
Forums has a new widget where you can filter by tags.
If tags are not required, the tag input box now indicates this so the member knows they do not have to put in tags.
Member cover photos can now be clicked to see the full image.
Any item with a poll now has a symbol on the list view.
Twitch.tv embed support.
You can now update/overwrite media in the Pages Media Manager.
Mapbox as an additional map provider to Google Maps.
Technical Changes
Direct support for Sparkpost has been removed. Anyone currently using Sparkpost will automatically have their settings converted to the Sparkpost SMTP mode so your email will still work.
Your cache engines (like Redis) will be checked on upgrade and in the support tool to ensure they are reachable.
Third-party applications will now be visually labeled to distinguish them from Invision Community official applications.
The queued tasks list in the AdminCP is now collapsed by default as queued tasks are not something people need to pay much attention to during normal operations.
When upgrading from version 3 series you must convert your database to UTF8 and the system saves your original data in tables prefixed with orig. The AdminCP now alerts you these are still present and allows you to remove them to reclaim storage space.
On new installs there are now reasonable defaults for upload limits to keep people from eating up storage space.
Categories in all apps (forums, gallery albums, databases, etc.) no longer allow HTML in their titles. This has been a concern both in terms of security and usability so we were forced to restrict it.
Large improvements to the Redis cache engine including use for sessions.
The login with HTTPS option has been removed and those who were using it will be given instructions to convert their entire community to HTTPS.
Images loaded through the proxy system now honor image limits for normal uploads.
We now consider BBCode deprecated. We are not removing support but will not fix any future issues that may come up.
There's a lot to talk about here so we are going to lock this entry to comments so things do not get confusing. Feel free to comment on upcoming feature-specific entries or start a topic in our Feedback forum.
One huge benefit of running your own Invision Community is the moderation tools.
Out of the box, Invision Community allows you to turn members into moderators. Better still, you can define what these moderators have permission to do.
Part of this moderation suite is the report system. The report system allows your members to flag posts that need a moderator's attention.
There comes a time when your community is so successful that it can be a little tough to keep up with all the content and reports.
Community Moderation
This new feature leverages your member reports to automatically remove objectionable content from public view.
You as the admin will define thresholds for the content. For example, you may say that to hide content, a post needs 5 reports.
This reduces the workload for your moderators and enables you to crowd source moderation.
Let's take a look at this feature in a little more detail.
Reporting Content
When a member reports a piece of content, they now have the option to set a type, such as "Spam" or "Offensive". These options can count towards the threshold. Once the threshold has been passed the item is hidden.
The threshold can be set up by creating rules in the Admin CP.
Admin Set Up
At its heart of the system are the rules. You can create custom rules in the Admin CP to determine the thresholds.
For example, you may decide that:
A member with less than 10 posts only needs 5 reports to hide the content.
But you may want to give more experienced members a higher threshold as there is more trust.
You simply add a new rule:
A member who joined over a year ago with over 500 posts needs 10 reports to hide content.
You can do that easily with the rules system as it will scan them all and pick the one most suitable for this member.
It's as simple as that.
Notifications
Once an item has received enough reports to match the threshold, it is automatically hidden from view.
A notification is sent to all moderators who opt in for notifications. This notification shows inline in the notifications center.
It can also optionally be sent via email for those who want to know without checking the site.
Restoring the content
Of course, a moderator may decide that the content is fine and un-hide it. Once a piece of content has been un-hidden, automatic moderation will not hide it again.
Report Types
Depending on your community, the default types may not be suitable or relevant. You may also want to set up other report types.
You can do this via the Admin CP.
Preventing Abuse
Your first thought may be that a single member can report a single item multiple times to force content to be hidden.
The system will only count a unique member as one point towards the threshold. This means a single member can report an item 5 times, but they are only counted once towards the threshold.
You can also set a time limit between reporting the same item. This will prevent a member reporting a single item multiple times in succession.
Of course, the member can delete their report if it was in error.
Report Center
The Report Center is the hub for all reported content. Invision Community 4.3 adds a filter to view a specific report type. The reports themselves also show the type of report.
We hope that this new feature will be a huge help and time saver for you and your moderators.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, please let us know what you think and if you have any questions.
