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Take control of your community messenger inbox.
Topics, replies and reviews are an incredible way to engage with members in a community, but sometimes a conversation needs to be had in private. 
Invision Community's built-in messenger is a powerful system that allows members to privately message another member, or a group of members, directly within your community. 
However, allowing your members unrestricted access to reach out could clog up your community inbox (and mind!). There are times when you may want a little space from receiving new messages. For example, when you are… 
Going on vacation Working on a project that requires your complete attention Needing a moment to catch up Currently, your only option is to disable the entire messaging system. That is effective, but it means you cannot engage with existing messages, send replies or message other members.
We’ve developed a solution! 
Invision Community 4.7.0 allows for more refined control over your messenger by allowing you to disable the inbox. 
The benefit of this is that you can continue existing conversations and start conversations with others while preventing anyone from messaging you (except staff members) either directly or via the Alerts System.


 
The "Disable my messenger" link has been replaced with "Disable my inbox". The warning pop-up makes it clear what this action will do.


 
Of course, administrators can still completely disable the messenger for themselves and other members of the community, which prevents them from accessing the messenger entirely.
The new disable your inbox feature, included in Invision Community 4.7.0, will be available to all in the near future.
Thoughts on the disabling the inbox feature? Let us know what you think in the comments!
 
Related:

As the Invision Community platform continues to evolve, so do the precarious ploys of pesky bots. 
Oftentimes spammers, whether they are bots or actual humans, spam your community with links in an effort to boost their website’s SEO. 
There are already a number of ways in the Invision Community platform to fight against spam, including…
 
Our native Spam Defense built into the platform that scores a newly-registered member Placing new registrations into a moderator queue Adding word filters that, when triggered, put the member in a moderation queue
We also integrate with various CAPTCHAs. You might be unfamiliar with the term, but you’ve definitely participated with one. It’s a digital gatekeeper in the form of an interactive puzzle that asks you to find patterns or similar images in order to evade malicious bots from taking action, whether that’s submitting a spam email, comment or registering an account. 
Our existing CAPTCHA defenses include:
 
Invisible reCAPTCHA where the system intelligently detects if the user is human in the background reCAPTCHA V2 where the user simply clicks an "I'm not a robot" checkbox keyCAPTCHA where the user must complete a jigsaw puzzle
  In our latest update, version 4.7, we’ve included yet another defense to block spam from seeing the light of day: hCaptcha
hCaptcha is one of the world's most widely used independent Captcha services. 
We’re incorporating it in a few places where spammers can prepare their attacks.

Registering:
Prevent spammers from joining your community. If enabled, the hCaptcha will stop spammers in their tracks before even creating an account in your community.



Guest posts:
Community leaders have the option to allow guests to reply to topics. This could potentially open up the floodgates for spammers, but the hCaptcha effectively mitigates this by asking the entity (hopefully an actual person) to problem solve. If the sequence is not successfully completed, the guest post won't be published.



hCaptcha is available in the new 4.7 Beta 1 release.
Give it a shot and let us know what you think in the comments… just be sure to successfully select all the traffic lights if you’re a guest! 😉 
 

There’s a fine line between freedom of speech and censorship. 
Invision Community always aims to empower community leaders with options to encourage an open dialogue within a community, while including barriers for members who choose to ignore the guidelines. 
Invision Community’s latest release, 4.6.11, includes a simple but powerful new feature to help you shape your community’s tone. 
It’s called Block Submission.
Block submission stops a member’s message from being posted if it includes any word(s) added to your Word Filters list with the “Block Submission” option enabled. 
Word Filters, a previously existing feature, allows community owners to prohibit profanity in the community. If a member types a word included on the banned words list, the platform will automatically either...
Replace the word with something else you set Hold the post for moderation Or, with our new Block Submission feature, notify the member they must amend their post.  Located: ACP -> System -> Settings -> Posting -> Word Filters -> Add Word Filter
Here is an example:
I added the word “hate” to the Word Filters list in the Admin Control Panel and selected the Block Submission option. 
 

 
Now, when a member tries to post the word hate, a message pops up indicating it wasn’t published and why. 


 
The member must modify their comment in order for the post to go live. In this scenario, that would look like taking out the word hate.
Feel free to change the default warning message (the text located in the orange message bar above) to something better suited for your community - it's located in the Languages settings in your ACP. 


 
Why did we create Block Submission?
This feature not only helps automatically moderate content, but more importantly, it sets a precedent to members regarding what is (and isn’t) accepted. 
Gently notifying members that their comment doesn’t align with your community’s guidelines helps maintain the existing culture you’ve worked hard on cultivating, as well as your initiative to keep the language and sentiment positive. 
Interested in trying our block submission feature out? Please upgrade to 4.6.11!
If you don’t have an Invision Community license yet, please reach out to me and I’ll help get you started. 
Thoughts on our latest feature? Sound off in the comments (just make sure it passes our new vibe check 😉). 
 

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! 🎉 
 

Wouldn't it be nice if the Invision Community editor could re-use whole replies, text snippets, and even reply templates?
As we get ready to welcome more customers into our staffed community support area, this feature idea has become a reality to help form personalized replies.
Invision Community has a saved actions feature that allows the community team to perform multiple actions on multiple topics. For example, you might want to add a title prefix, move the topic and add a reply. This works great for 'canned' responses and actions, but it is less useful if you want to edit the reply to personalize it.
Stock replies allow you to set up entire replies, partial replies or even reply templates.

Stock replies via the editor
Once you have these set up in the Admin Panel, they are visible on the editor.

Stock replies are configured in the Admin Panel
You can choose multiple stock replies to build up a message with handy re-usable reply snippets.
stockreplies_video.mp4
Each stock reply has full permission capabilities, meaning you can specify which member groups can use each stock reply. For example, you may wish to create partial replies for your team but encourage members to use a reply template to report bugs, etc.

Using stock actions as a template
We hope you like this feature, which is coming to our 4.6.7 October release.

It’s been a minute since our last blog post, but we have cooked up several epic projects in the interim.
To refresh your memory, we recently launched a new platform update, 4.6. It includes *takes a deep breath* Achievements, Zapier integration, web app and push notifications, anonymous posting, solved content, the ability to show when a team member has replied, a new health dashboard, spam improvements and more.
In the time since, we prepared a few special treats for you. Before we dive into the feature feast, sample our forthcoming website refresh. In the very near future, our entire website will slip into something a little more comfortable. Not only will the look and feel change, but we’re implementing new sections to explain how and why Invision Community is any business’ go-to- solution for community building. More on that to come, but for now take a bite out of this:



Onto the feature updates; hope you’re hungry!
Extended closed Club functionality
Clubs with ‘closed’ permissions have more flexibility than ever. 
Now, the owner of a closed club can opt to have the club’s forums, calendar, pages, gallery and downloads be visible for all to see (despite the club being set to closed). Previously, members could not access any part of a closed club unless they joined.
For example, a closed club leader could create a special landing page that’s viewable by members who have not yet joined the club, but the rest of the club is closed. This might be useful as a means to encourage someone to join, share information that’s pertinent to those in and out of the club or as a sales tool. 
Another example could be keeping the club-associated forums visible for all, but keep the club’s calendar and image gallery exclusive to the club’s members as an incentive to join. 
Gobble up this screengrab below:
 

 
Subscribe to Activity Streams
Never skip a beat! Members of a community can now subscribe to any default or custom activity stream (minus the All Activity Stream) and receive either daily or weekly email notifications with a roundup of content they may have missed. 
This is especially useful for die-hard community members and moderators who frequently consume content. By subscribing to an activity stream, members have important, need-to-know items they’re interested in delivered straight to their inbox. 
 


Community administrators have the option to limit how many activity streams a member can subscribe to. 
Because email notifications are inherently intimate, we have also implemented something called stream decay. If the user hasn't visited the site for a predefined amount of time, the activity stream email notifications they previously subscribed to will automatically stop until the member re-engages with the community by visiting. Pretty nifty, right?
 

 

Health Club
Since you’ve made it to the bottom of this blog post, sink your teeth into dessert. Sugar free, of course! 
We recently launched a new Health Club. It’s free to join and available for all Invision Community clients. This is a great opportunity for you to connect with other community leaders in the industry, as well as our own team, through the important modality of physical and mental health. The world is in a weird spot right now; please utilize this club to lean on one another for support, give advice, ask questions and share your health wins and missteps. As cheesy as it sounds, upping your general well-being will make you a better community leader and ultimately elevate your community as a whole. Just some food for thought!
 

The new Club and Activity Stream features will be made available in September.
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Drop us a crumb in the comments - we’d love to hear from you!
Header photo: Unsplash

Invision Community's latest update, 4.6, is officially out! 
To celebrate, we hosted a live event on Zoom.
I, alongside two of the three Invision Community co-founders @Charles and @Matt (shout-out to @Lindy) sat down for a roundtable talk to chat about some of the slickest features 4.6 has to offer.
If you'd like to refresh your memory with exactly what features we implemented in 4.6, check out our detailed blog post (after you're done watching our live event above, of course). 
It includes:
Achievements Spam Improvements Health dashboard Web app and push notifications Anonymous posting Solved content Show when a team member has replied
Did you catch the low-key Smart Community announcement? 🙃

We also wanted to take the time to answer a few questions we received during the live event that we couldn't get to in the moment.
Question: regarding the anonymous posting... is it completely anonymous (like no record is stored of who posted it) or is just a pseudo thing, like it shows "anonymous" but admins/mods can see who posted it?

Answer: The community owner can choose whether moderators can see the true identity of the user. This uses the built in moderator permissions so they can have it so all moderators, just specific moderators or nobody can see this info.
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Question: Is the translation service be hosted by IPS or do we need to use Google or Bing services on our community?
Answer: It will be a turnkey service provided by Invision Community.
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Question: Does Achievements show how many x Points are left to the next level?
Answer: Yup!

 
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Question: When will Smart Community be available?
Unsatisfying Answer: We are excited to share more details on Smart Community soon!
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We appreciate you participating / watching our first-ever live event. We're planning on doing more, so keep an eye out for the next one.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Concerns? Drop us a line in the comments!

Community sharing is community caring.
Take it from me: prominently curating your members’ content will profoundly accelerate growth. It’s also pretty darn fun. 
I’ve run my company, BreatheHeavy, since 2004. While many online businesses shuttered because of social media’s looming presence, mine thrived because of the community. Full disclosure? I had no idea creating a community back in 2004 would become the not-so-secret ingredient to staying alive. Ahh, if only I knew then what I know now.
Hindsight is 20/20 (that number gives me anxiety, am I right?), but I never fully understood or appreciated how immensely game-changing community building is. 
Related: The Importance of Moderation, err... Community Guidance (New Video!)
In the past, I focused my efforts on writing news articles (in Wordpress) while my Invision Community community ran rampant. I felt my presence needed to take center stage. That cast a shadow on my community and thus my members. I unintentionally muted their voices by exclusively promoting mine. 
That was a colossal mistake, but the greatest learning lesson. 
One year ago, I decided to pivot and shift all my energy towards fostering my community; the results were astounding! I saw more than a 100% increase in unique visits compared to the previous year. 


 
The most powerful change I made was shining a light on the content my members created.
My website went from being a news site to a community. 
I constructed a new homepage that featured topics created by myself AND my members. This not only manifested a dynamic, constantly varied homepage, but also incentivized members to post thought-provoking and engaging topics in the hopes their content gets featured. 
In my community, topics that are featured on the homepage are considerably more viewed and commented on than topics that aren’t. I suspect you’d find similar results.
Here’s how I set up my new homepage:
I utilized Invision Community’s custom blocks feature. It’s available with the Pages application.
I created a new block plugin, selected “topic feed” from the list, then set the permissions in the Feed Configuration tab to only show “featured” topics from members. I also used @opentype's SuperTopics plugin to give a more-polished look. Might sound a bit complex, but it’s rather intuitive. 
Community leaders can “feature” members’ content by selecting their topic and in the moderation panel, tap “Feature.” 
 


Our Picks
“Featuring” content isn’t the only powerful tool Invision Community has baked into its software to highlight your members’ content. We’ve also carefully crafted a promotion option to manually select content that’s included on the “Our Picks” page and corresponding block. This is another powerful method to curate community content. 
We created a guide on how to set up promotion/our picks.


 
With great power comes great responsibility
The ability to “feature” content is a privilege only moderators in your community should have access to – at least in the beginning. Avoid giving any member the ability to freely feature their own content onto the homepage - instead, focus on manually curating the content. Be selective and choose what topics you want to represent your community. 
By creating a standard, your homepage won’t feature any and all content. Instead, it’ll display items you believe will pack the greatest punch. 
Featuring your members' content visibly shows your desire to embrace your community. It’s one thing to comment on members’ topics, it’s another to feature and promote them for all to see. That’s the secret sauce of curation. 
Do you agree? Disagree? Have any suggestions? Curate content in your own community? How many questions can I ask in a row? Drop us a line in the comments below! 

If you've been around Invision Community for a while, you'll know our frontend default theme hasn't significantly evolved since the early days of 4.0. Indeed, the last significant refresh came with 4.2.
With the upcoming release of 4.5, we wanted to revisit the default theme and give it a facelift for 2020, as well as make incremental improvements to the underlying codebase as a stepping stone to a bigger re-engineering in a future version.
In this entry, I want to talk a little about some of the design decisions that went into building the new theme.
Goals
Redesigning for the sake of it is never a good idea, so we first laid out what we wanted to achieve:
A brighter UI with more saturation & contrast and simpler overall color scheme Improved typography Better, more consistent, spacing around and between elements, especially on mobile Better logical grouping of sections of each page Reducing underutilized links/buttons on the page and finding alternative ways of making them available Improving how post states are displayed Modernizing and enhancing the underlying code that powers the default theme Let's talk a little about each of these.
 
Brighter UI
The most obvious change will be that our default colors are brighter and more saturated than before. Before making any changes, we first created a color scale for both neutrals and the brand color (blue, of course). This gave us a flexible but consistent palette of colors to choose from, with appropriate contrast built in. Neutrals have a touch of blue too to avoid seeming washed out.
We've simplified the style, in particular reducing reliance on background colors to differentiate sections within cards (a card essentially being an ipsBox, for those who are familiar with our framework). Instead, we use spacing, borders and appropriate typography to achieve visual separation.

Brighter default colors
 

Simplifying the UI by removing block backgrounds
 
Improving typography
We've felt our typography has been somewhat muddled for some time - with a mixture of sizes, weights and colors used depending on the particular context.
The first step to improving it was to create a typography scale that we could refer to and implement, to ensure we remained consistent throughout the product.

Our typography scale
(The keen-eyed amongst you may also notice we've switched our default font to Inter. Inter is a fantastic open source font that is ideal for text on the web, and was recently added to the Google Web Fonts project making it super simple for us to incorporate it into our default theme.)
We've been much more deliberate about applying type styles, especially for titles, ensuring that they are always visually distinct from surrounding text. We've done this through both color and weight. As a result, pages should instinctively feel more organized and logical than before.

An example of improved typography, from the Downloads app
 
Improved spacing (especially on mobile)
We identified that spacing (padding and margins) needed some improvement. A lot of spacing values were arbitrary and inconsistent, leading to poor visual harmony across any given page.
Most troubling of all, on mobile sizes we simply halved desktop padding values. While this was a reasonable approach in the days of phones with small screens, it has felt decidedly dated for some time. Phone screens are now typically larger and able to accommodate roomier UIs without appearing comical.
In 4.5, we have done away with that approach, and the impact was immediate. Mobile sizes now get a much more pleasant interface, with elements having room to breathe. In addition, we've also made most cards full-width to provide additional breathing space for content.

Posts can finally breathe on mobile
 
There are numerous other tweaks across the product too: default spacing has been increased a little, data tables (e.g. topic listing) get extra vertical spacing, and spacing between elements has become more consistent.
 
Improved grouping of related elements
Prior to 4.5, most content areas existed inside cards. However, one notable exception to this was page headers and as a result, they could feel particularly disorganized, especially for users who had many controls in this part of the page (such as staff).
To solve this problem, we've developed a new, standardized design for content item page headers, giving them their own cards and consistent button placement.

Topic view header
 
Some areas don't necessarily fit into the same design pattern above. In those areas, we've tweaked styling to suit the context, while still adhering to our overall aesthetic.

Calendar header

Messenger conversation header
 
Reducing underutilized links/buttons
Finally, another area we identified as needing improvement is the abundance of tools, made up of links and buttons, across pages. Many of these are only used occasionally and so would be better moved out of the main view to simplify the page.
Two particular areas we focused on were share links and postbits (both forum posts and comments in other apps).
Research shows social share links are used by a vanishingly small percentage of users, so even though they were at the bottom of the page, it was unnecessary to make them so prominent (given their eye-catching colors). To solve this, we've added a share link to the page header, with the social network links themselves in a popup menu. The result is ideal: sharing functionality is unobtrusive but obvious.

Share links in content items
Comment areas have also suffered from 'button creep' over the years. A typical comment will contain a report link, a share link, a quote link and multiquote button, reactions, plus IP address, checkbox, edit and options links for certain users. That is a lot of visual noise around the important part: the content.
We've therefore simplified comment boxes as much as is reasonable. Reporting and sharing comments/posts is now available in the post options menu, as are any tools for the author/staff. Quoting and reacting are two primary interactions for users, so they of course retain their position in the control bar.

Simpler postbits, even for staff
 
Improving post states
Posts/comments in Invision Community can have many states - sometimes more than one. Posts can be hidden/unapproved, popular, recommended, solved (new in 4.5!) or highlighted because of the author's group. It's always been a challenge to indicate these statuses well.
In previous versions, we added a border but the most prominent indicator was a flag in the top-right corner of the post. This had three problems:
Due to the lack of space (thanks to report/share links), showing more than one flag was difficult. Showing any flags on mobile was messy because of the space constraints. The meaning of the flags was not obvious, especially to new users. Group-highlighted posts had no flag, just a border, which made them even more difficult to understand. With the top-right corner of posts now tidied up and free from fluff, we were able to much more effectively use this space to indicate post statuses.
In 4.5, posts and comments will show badges when they have a particular status, as well as a more attractive semi-transparent border. For group-highlighted posts, we show the group name instead (the colors of this highlight are still controllable via theme settings).

A post with two states: group highlighted and popular
This works much better on mobile too, where the status badges get the prominence they deserve:

Mobile post statuses
 
Modernizing the underlying code
I wrote about the technical improvements behind the theme in a previous entry. If you're a theme designer or edit the theme for your own community, go and check it out now!
 
Wrapping up
As well as these large-scale concepts, you'll notice many other smaller enhancements as you start using the new theme.
I've shown some snippets of pages in the screenshots above, but I've included some full-page views below so you can see the overall aesthetic and how these pieces fit together.
Modernizing and refreshing our default theme has been needed for some time, but we view this as just a stepping stone to future work that will be reserved for a major version bump, and we're excited to figure out where we go next.
 
Screenshots
  
Desktop forum views (click to expand)
 
    
Mobile forum views (click to expand)
 
 
Activity streams & messenger (click to expand)