Cannabis Connect

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!

Spam is as much a part of life on the internet as emoji overuse, serial GIF abuse and regretful tweeting.
But I'm not here to talk about how I conduct myself online; I wanted to talk about three spam improvements coming to Invision Community 4.6.
As you may be aware, Invision Community has its own Spam Defense functionality, which uses a mixture of crowdsourced data, publicly available data and our own special sauce to help reduce the number of spam accounts that get through the registration system. Invision Community also has several other tools to mitigate spam post-registration.
These tools have served us well, but as spammers evolve, so must our systems. Here's what's coming to our next release.
Spam Defense Scoring
I can't divulge too much on our Spam Defense system lest we give spammers targeting Invision Community information that can assist them. Still, we have made several changes to our Spam Defense system.  These include rebalancing the score thresholds, checking against known TOR networks and proxies and using other data in the public domain to inform our scoring decisions.
Spam Defense Blocking
The current implementation of our Spam Defense only allows options to either prevent registration entirely or put the registration in an approval queue. However, the days when Spam Bots stood out from normal registrations are long gone, and it's hard to know if an account in an approval queue is legitimate or not.
In 4.6, we've added a new Spam Defense option that you can choose to allow the registration but put the new members into the posting approval queue, meaning their posts will need moderator approval before being published.

This reduces the decision burden and makes it easier to take a chance on a low score from the Spam Defense system and review their posts before they are made public.
Word Filters
We have added a new option to the Word Filters to allow content containing specific words or phrases to be held for moderator approval where the author has less than a set threshold of posts.
For example, you may notice an increase in spam targeting "CBD Oil" and add it to the word filter list to hold the content for moderator approval. This works great and captures a good number of spam posts; however, your regular members get frustrated when they want to talk about CDB Oil in their posts.
This new option allows you to set a trust level for allowing these words to be used without capturing them for approval.

We hope these three changes to our spam controls will reduce the level of spam you get in your community!
I'd love to know what's the weirdest spam (that is safe for work!) you've seen in your community.