Abies

Good idea! 🙂
In my case, I would use it but only for chosen forums [not globally].
For forums like news, feedback, contacting the mods I find it useful. But for Chit-Chat-like forum it would be unnecessary. Thanksfully we can set in CSS where to display the badge and where to hide it. 🙂

Hey again, Joel. Jordan here.
First off, I want to say that I genuinely appreciate your passion for community building. We spoke about a year and a half ago via Skype because you genuinely care about the subject and offered me a lot of valuable insight. It really doubled down the importance of online communities. I've always appreciated that convo we had and want to publicly give you props for that. Thank you. 🙏
You bring up a lot of great points! That's exactly why (I believe) Invision decided to include me in an official capacity, because first and foremost we want the community to be heard and taken seriously. I've been a frequent visitor of the Invision Community; I have a lot of experience regarding the customer side of things and wanting XYZ change. I understand the feeling of wanting my ideas/concerns/feedback heard and hopefully implemented.
That is one of our goals with my role is to listen, assess and take decisive action.
I do feel confident I can be an advocate for you and other Invision clients, as well as be a sounding board for the official team. Picture me as an Invision Bridge that connects this community to the team. I believe this takes trust, which I must earn, and I look forward to that.
You make a lot of great points. The community does not need a professional meme poster. We need someone who has the power to deliver and communicate on meaningful actions to drive our communities forward.
I do believe I can serve you and the rest of the community in that regard.
However, I know actions speak louder than words, so I'm looking forward to the future and the upcoming opportunities to show that. 😊
And just cause I love me a good cat meme.
 


If you need anything, @Joel R, please feel free to reach out to me via PM. I'm here for you and the rest of the community.

Haha you know it! 

Hi Joel!

I struggled with a single title to encapsulate Jordan's role within Invision Community.

In terms of Jordan's presence on this forum, then Community Advocate is a fair fit, but even that doesn't cover everything.

Our community is more than just this forum of course. There are (neglected) social channels, email communications with customers, face to face conversations with enterprise customers and so on.

To break down the excellent points in your post:

How will he triage, prioritize, and escalate client feedback to the IPS team, all of whom can and do visit the forums themselves?
This is really the core reason we're now hiring more non-development roles and roles that don't directly tie into pure technical support. We're growing as a company and part of this growth means that we have to put focus on other areas. Our development team do and will continue to interact with the forums but they have less time to collate and manage feedback, complaints and so on. Having a single person to collect all that information, break it down and then feed it to the team to be planned into future releases makes sense.

What are the parameters for clients to help highlight and channel our feedback in an effective manner?
Sometimes feedback is quite formal "I want this feature". Sometimes it's a complaint "I can't seem to get this to work" and sometimes it's just in conversations.

We do very well in collecting feedback from enterprise clients. We get a lot via email. We also get a lot with regular calls but we've become less adept at collecting feedback from this forum.
Jordan will be a familiar face that people can speak to. Clients don't need to do anything special to get his attention. He'll go through feedback and make sure that everyone gets a reply and everyone gets heard.
And finally, as a community advocate, what does he actually advocate?
As part of our growth, it's very easy when planning development to overlook some suggestions. I want Jordan to be a champion for our customers and represent them in our team meetings.
Invision has attempted multiple community engagement tactics over the years.
Yes indeed. We always look for ways to improve. We can create effective strategy but without the required person-power, it stalls quickly. Making new hires in these areas will help us move forwards.
To be blunt and on behalf of all of your retail clients, we don't need a Community Advocate to post memes.
I will defend Jordan's right to bear memes and emoji. If you are judging him based on his output so far, that is unfair. He's settling into his role after a fairly intense week of onboarding within our team.

We need a Community Advocate with the power to deliver and communicate on meaningful actions to drive our communities forward.
Couldn't agree more. Jordan is an experienced community owner who has achieved excellent growth over multiple platforms (including his own Invision Community, Twitter, Instagram, etc). Jordan is an excellent communicator with a very open and friendly personality. I want him to have freedom to learn more about our customers and make more meaningful connections to get richer feedback that we can use when planning future releases.
 

Thanks, @Abies 🙏 Super cool of you to say that. 😢 

The nicest comment doesn't exi...... 😢

Fantastic news! 😉 I've noticed many valuable feedback and ideas by Jordan! And of course his outstanding community skills. Congratz Jordan! 🙂

Congrats! You can Breathe Easy now 😉

1. I agree with @Abies to make this board-specific.  
2. Will you turn this on in your own community? Asking for a friend.  And every IPS client who has ever posted in the feedback forum.  
3. Parity of apps - will we see this badge on other apps? 

1) Good feedback.

2) Probably, yeah.

3) It's core functionality; right now it works with Forums and Pages.

Good idea! 🙂
In my case, I would use it but only for chosen forums [not globally].
For forums like news, feedback, contacting the mods I find it useful. But for Chit-Chat-like forum it would be unnecessary. Thanksfully we can set in CSS where to display the badge and where to hide it. 🙂

Good idea! 🙂
In my case, I would use it but only for chosen forums [not globally].
For forums like news, feedback, contacting the mods I find it useful. But for Chit-Chat-like forum it would be unnecessary. Thanksfully we can set in CSS where to display the badge and where to hide it. 🙂

Good idea! 🙂
In my case, I would use it but only for chosen forums [not globally].
For forums like news, feedback, contacting the mods I find it useful. But for Chit-Chat-like forum it would be unnecessary. Thanksfully we can set in CSS where to display the badge and where to hide it. 🙂

Don't worry, Invision Community is in very capable hands. While I co-founded the company 20 years ago, we've come a long way since then. Along the way, we've hired some extremely smart developers who do the bulk of coding now. I still work on features and help direct the product, but I spend less time in a code editor these days, and that's a great thing. 

I enjoy writing, and if one person gets a little value or inspiration from a blog article, then it's been worthwhile. 
Really soon. A soft release helps us narrow down critical issues before we roll it out to all customers.

We are trying to break away from large monolithic releases spaced 12-18 months apart which leaves long periods of time devoid of any significant new functionality.

In terms of demand for this feature, it's been requested a lot for our enterprise communities for quite some time.

I like the spacing. Its cleaner and it may solve my forum's issues with google saying that elements are too close together, spacing issues. 

Agreed - we avoid making large changes to the frontend on the whole (save for new features, which necessitate updates by their nature). The downside of that of course is running the risk of appearing outdated, or not being able to employ newer techniques/technologies. It's a balance between competing concerns as always. 4.3 and 4.4 didn't have any substantial changes, so we feel 4.5 is the right time for a moderate refresh, saving a much bigger update for a future (major) version.

I outlined the justification for moving links out of that top area in the entry - it allows us to display comment states much more effectively and simplifies the comment area.
No ad slots have disappeared, and our last substantial design improvement was ~3 years ago - it's well overdue.

This all looks amazing and so much neater, but there is one thing that really bugs me a lot - it's probably the designer in me - is the inconsistency of the side bar top alignment; see below:

The gap between the top of the sidebar and the topic header.
Yet here it is aligned perfectly:

I presume there is a reason for this, or is it an oversight?
I don't mean to be picky as you've done a fantastic job on the update, but this one little niggle is a bug for me lol

Good spot - that happens because on the invisible widget container above the main content. We’ll figure out a solution 🤞

@Maxxius Try this, works for me:
#ipsLayout_sidebar .cWidgetContainer { position: sticky; top: 0; }