IP-Gamers

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! 🎉 
 

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.

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!

A short while ago we revealed the new look Admin CP for Invision Community 4.5. The focus was on increasing the workspace, brightening and modernising the look.
However, for some this new look was perhaps a little too bright, especially when setting your OS to use dark mode.
Rather than cause an increase in sales for sunglasses, we went ahead and implemented a dark mode for the Admin CP.
You can set it to work inline with your OS preference, or you can choose to enforce light or dark mode.
I'm sure the next question you're about to ask is "Hey Ehren that looks amazing and now working at 3 am won't wake up the neighbours when I log into the AdminCP but can you do the same for the front-end?"
The short answer to that is "no". The theme system isn't currently designed to support both light and dark colour schemes, however our marketplace has a great selection of dark themes to enhance your community.
I hope that you like this new feature and I just wanted to say thanks for your feedback; we do listen!

For those of you who have been with IPS for some time you may have been aware of a previous announcement regarding the development of two separate products called Nexus and Dynamic. Nexus was to be an ecommerce billing system and Dynamic was to be a content management system.

As we developed these products the Internet market had changed quite a bit so we have made the decision to totally discontinue Nexus and Dynamic production as they were. We know many of you were looking forward to either Nexus or Dynamic as they were first intended and we apologize if this disrupts your plans.

Instead we have decided to create a new product that combines the previous goals of ecommerce and content management along with a host of features including customer management, support, business organization, and a modular structure in which features are only limited by our imagination.

Since everyone at IPS loved the term "Nexus" to describe this system we decided to recycle that name and so IP.Nexus was born. IP.Nexus is a complete business management suite which includes many of the previously stated goals along with so many more. We look forward to releasing this new product line.

It is worth noting that this time around the new product is nearly complete rather than an idea in development. Expect a lot more information including the first public betas in the coming weeks! Watch our announcements forum and this blog for more information.

After literally years of paperwork and waiting on the government's United States Patent and Trademark Office to do its thing we have, at long last, a registered trademark. While our logo and name were always a trademark in the ™ sense they are now a registered trademark in the full on always fun

As most of the world now knows, we have released IP.Board 2.2.0 along with all its components (IP.Gallery, IP.Blog, IP.Downloads). The latest rounds of releases took a bit longer than the previous round as we took extra time in beta testing and being sure all of our proverbial avians were in an ordered queue. We think taking this extra time has paid off.

In one day we did all this:
Released IP.Board 2.2.0 Released IP.Gallery 2.1.0 Released IP.Blog 1.3.0 Released IP.Converge 1.0.0 PB 1 Launched our brand new web site Updated our IP.Nexus-powered client area Released the new IP.Board documentation Managed to keep our sanity during the process We decided this time to release the products "silently" the night before the official release day so those people who frequent our site and forums would get a jump-start. Of course it took all of 30 seconds for everyone to notice it was out. And people wonder why we do not publish release dates :).

So far probably our smoothest release especially considering all that happened in one day. Good work to all the IPS staff involved.

It's our goal to keep this company blog up to date between official announcements so everyone knows what is going on. We will also publish sneak peaks of upcoming software and services. Thank you for your business and interest!

So Charles doesn't feel so lonely here, I've decided to post an entry...

These past two days have been quite the change from what it has been recently. The number of tickets per day has honestly increased tenfold. But that is expected with a new release, right? Almost every ticket is getting a response within the first 24 hours of being opened, which is an amazing feat itself. We have knocked down the tickets over 50% from what they were this morning, but there is a steady flow of them coming in.

This has been one of the smoothest releases since I've worked here - most of the issues we are seeing are either server issues, or other issues that could have been avoided. That brings me to a couple of reminders.
See: Charles' post below.
There is a lot of confusion on the upgrade system. Particularly one setting that allows you to run the queries manually. It seems some users are selecting this, but not running the queries. This causes the board to think it was upgraded, when it actually wasn't. This can cause you to get 'IPS Driver Errors'. If you are comfortable with databases, you can fix this by removing the 2.2 upgrade rows from the ibf_upgrade_history table, and rerunning the upgrade without checking the box to manually run queries. We are working on ways to make this not an issue for future releases.

Be sure to check out our Knowledge Base.
We have been adding patches/information in that as we find issues. We also have a bunch of articles on pre-2.2 issues. So if you have an issue, please see if it is covered in the Knowledge Base. Most articles include patches that you can even apply yourself, so there will be no delay getting it fixed. Well, that is about it for now. To everyone who has submitted a ticket - we haven't forgotten or lost your ticket. We are going through them as fast as we can, and you will get a response as soon as possible. Thank you for patience with this during this busy time.

Off to go answer some more tickets. :)

We had several meetings over the last couple months on improving the upgrade system for IP.Board 2.2 and it certainly has improved. The system is generally safer and warns you if something doesn't go right. Not to mention IP.Board itself will scan your database and report problems in the admin area.

Now that IP.Board 2.2 is released we are finding that although the upgrade routine works there is still some confusion. Particularly the manual upgrade routine.

So... note that if you check the manual upgrade option when running the upgrade system, the upgrade system will tell you what SQL queries to run. It will not run those queries for you as you told it you wanted to do them manually :)

Keith from the tech support team and Brandon from the development team will be getting together tomorrow and work on better explanations of the difference between the manual and automatic upgrade modes. The current plan is to implement the changes to the upgrade as a hot fix to 2.2.0 as the changes will just be instructions (not code changes) so no bugs could be introduced.

We always ask you to report bugs you find in our software but feel free to report things that work but are just a little confusing in our feedback forums. Part of making good software is also making it friendly to manage :)