Jordan Miller

Happy Hump Day, team! Shout-out to @nodle for being a big fan of these posts. 👏 In today's community management hump day topic, I wanted to chat about one of the most powerful ways you can inspire kindness throughout your community. Kindness is an essential ingredient to a successful community. 😌 I know it's a little cheesy, but it's important. Some times you may experience negative players attempting to derail your day because, well... misery loves company. In my experience, one of the most profound ways to fight toxicity in an online community is by... not fighting at all. Instead, it’s by offering kindness to those who need it the most. That’s done through understanding, outreach and personal displays of vulnerability. Like a drop of ink in a glass of water, a troll's negativity spews throughout the community (and possibly other communities) in such a profound way that it dissuades others from participating. The compounding effect of their flippant responses, snide remarks, sarcasm, arguments and attacks ultimately creates chaos. Fight the ick with understanding, compassion and vulnerability. The act of opening up to an anonymous person in need not only can inspire them to change, but it opens a door towards further self-discovery. Being vulnerable with your members also empowers them and you. Next time you notice a toxic member’s pattern regarding how they post, remember there is more that meets the eye. Hurt people hurt people, so take the opportunity to be kind, practice being vulnerable and watch your community blossom. How do YOU battle toxicity in your Invision communities? Sound off in the comments below. As always, here is a list of changes made to the platform in the last seven days. Nicely done, team! PS - I have an exciting blog post on the way. Stay tuned. 🙃

Just reached out to you via PM 😊

Happy Hump Day, team. Offering opportunities for engagement is one of the cornerstones of the Invision Community platform. I'm curious to know how you incentivize your members to engage? Ways to create engagement: Engagement happens when you can successfully inspire emotion in others. Creating content that invokes a reaction / action (hopefully positive) is one major way to contribute towards engagement. Some communities' purpose is to offer information, educate and sell, but if they can also incorporate avenues for their audience to engage it will help strengthen the brand's presence and foster trust. Invision Community tactics to create engagement: Start a new topic Leave a reply in a content item (like a topic, blog post, news article and calendar event) React to members' content ("like," "love" etc) Create and respond to private messages Reading content items (silent engagement) Reports: It's worth mentioning our platform has a ton of outstanding reporting metrics baked into the ACP to measure engagement. Some of my personal faves include member activity, member visits and posts. This is important to note because you'll see what engagement methods are working, and what areas need improvement. How do you actually go about incentivizing members to create great, engaging content in the first place? Tools to incentivize In my opinion, one of the most powerful ways is to promote members' content across the community so that it's very visible to others. From my experience, this encourages that promoted member to create more similar content and fires up others to follow suit. We have some pretty awesome tools to help you: Announcements Create a finite Announcement from the Moderator Control Panel and link to a member's content item. You can give the community the option to X out of the announcement should they A) not want to proceed or B) they've engaged with the content and no longer need a reminder. An announcement is a pretty overt style of promotion, but it's great way to shine a light on your members' events, a product, a download, club creation and/or topic. Featured list Create a block that showcases your members' Featured content. This style of content curation ensures the community is viewing and engaging with content items (like topics) that you and your moderators feel is particularly noteworthy. Our Picks This is a more visually rich style of curating content than the Featured list of topics mentioned above. Add a beautiful thumbnail & eye-catching caption then promote directly to Twitter. Be sure to enable Our Picks in the ACP, then add it as a block on a prominent page within your community. Achievements Our native gamification system, Achievements, automatically rewards members with points, badges and ranks for their participation. Better yet, you and your team can manually reward members for positively contributing to the community. Write the member a message that others can see and give them props for them for being awesome and creating engaging content. Alerts System Use this sparingly, but if you or a member creates something worth your community's undivided attention, use the Alerts System feature to guide them to that piece of content. Be sure to set an expiration date so that content isn't promoted in perpetuity. Opportunties to incentivize Offer exclusive perks Set up a Group with additional access (that you create) and reward members who positively contribute by upgrading their account. This will encourage others to create and engage in an effort to join an elite, exclusive group. Create community ambassadors Reward your superfans! Similarly to the aforementioned, create an ambassador program for your most-engaged members and publicly recognize them as community VIPs. Grant them special privileges in the hopes they continue to create and promote your community. Send a special newsletter Using the bulk mail took in the ACP, send your ambassadors a content rich email that offers value (like what's in the pipeline, a chance to review a product, roadmap or idea before anyone else). The Whew! If you made it to the end of this information-rich post, congrats to you. 🍪 So, how do you personally go about incentivizing your members to engage? I'd love to hear your thoughts. As always, here's a list of updates and fixes made to the platform in the last seven days: Looking forward to engaging with you in the comments.

Like the idea!

Agreed 👌 Love where this is headed 🙂

Happy Hump Day, team! Sort of. 😔 One of Invision Community's founding fathers, @Rikki, is amicably moving on from Invision Community to pursue another exciting opportunity. This is his last week with us. He has a few parting words to share with you: Rikki has been an instrumental player in Invision Community's success; we're bummed to see him go, but at the same time excited for him to spread his wings. Please leave some well wishes for Rikki in the comments! --- Speaking of the team, @Matt Finger wrote a new dev blog post touching on the PHP8 Compatibility Scanner, our Pre-Upgrade Resource Checker and a full change log for our upcoming September release: --- And last but not least, 4.7.2 Beta 1 is officially out. Check out the release notes here. See you in the replies. 🙏

Looks awesome!

Appreciate that! And thanks for the input as well.

Happy Hump Day. Identifying what members are frequently searching for is an important job for community managers. Built directly into the statistics panel of your ACP is a section that includes the most-searched-for keywords. Understanding what people search for helps you: Improve upon those items Create more content around the term(s) Provide further clarity for people who search for the word or phrase in the future Because of the importance of search, we made some major improvements! You may have noticed Invision Community introduced an update to our Search Bar user interface. @AlexJ certainly did 😜. Previously, the search bar was smaller in size and included different options that could be confusing at first glance. We've simplified the search experience. Should the user want to drill in further, they have that option on the search results page: Go ahead and give our new search UI a test drive. Feel free to share your findings / thoughts in the comments. 😃 🔍 --- As always, here's a list of updates and fixes made to the platform in the last seven days. 4.7.1 Beta 2 is out now. Release notes here. See you in the comments.

Hey Invision, this is @Jordan Miller. I'm posting as breatheheavy since I have an idea for a feature I'd like to implement in my community and figured it'd be fun to reach out to the community. I recently implemented @onlyME's Chatbox+ application and the Chatbox Voice Notes plugin alongside it. My community loves the feature and have asked me if I could also make it available for them to use as a reply. Ideally, the original topic starter can include a voice note as well. Concept: Members can hit the record button and leave a voice note as a reply. The member will still need to include some text to coincide with the voice note (so the replies are not just a string of voice notes, there must still be at least some text or an image or an embed to go with the voice note recording). Once posted, other members can hear the voice note. Members can also quote the voice note and respond with one of their own. Why? Because it will add more depth to the member and add some cool new functionality to how online communities function. Do you think this is possible? And if so, is anyone interested in helping me bring this idea to reality (onlyME mentioned they are not available at the moment to help)? This is a paid job. Please feel free to comment or PM me if interested. Thank you!

Nice! I'd recommend putting your ad code in the Advertisements section in your ACP. De-select your subscribers group from those ads and voila! When they become a subscriber, and are automatically moved into the subscriber group, they won't see ads. 💸

Glad to hear that advice worked! I actually ran into something similar a few years back and recall now that disabling automatic ads in Google did the trick. It's been a few days since you last left a comment. Have you sorted everything out? 😊

We are trying to discourage editing the core css files. Let's see if we can find another route. Can you expand on what specifically you want to achieve and maybe we can find a solution together. 😃

Hey @Adlago, sorry you're feeling frustrated. What are you hoping to accomplish that you can't with the latest update? Maybe we can find some solutions together.

Appreciate you weighing in!

Happy Hump Day, team. I'm curious to know if you're utilizing the subscriptions feature in your community. 🤔 Or, at the very least, have you thought about it? Subscriptions feel exclusive and elevates the brand imo. I personally use a subscription component in my community. It offers members additional access, as well as an ad free experience, but it's not something I've leaned into as much as I'd like to. However, I love the potential of it and want to chat with you about it. It might be a good time to strategize using subscriptions as businesses figure out how to navigate through the topsy-turvy markets and unpredictability nature of the global economy. There are a ton of benefits to having a subscription element in your community. Here's some marketing jargon explaining the benefits: VIPs: Subscribing members can unlock restricted areas of the community and receive added benefits. 🤩 Reward: Highlight your subscribing members with exclusive badges, outlined replies and vibrant signatures. 🏆 Recurring revenue: Subscriptions provide stable and predictable income, an essential ingredient for business growth. 💰 Builds loyalty: Your fans and customers want to support you. Give them the opportunity to by consistently showing up for them and building that trust. hold 🙌 Boosts brand image: Offering another facet to your company illustrates you understand the importance of community exclusivity. 😎 Provides direct access: Paying subscribers cut to the front of the line. 🤵‍♂️🤵‍♀️ Offer incentives: Give paying subscribers additional perks like exclusive access, additional privileges, an exclusive newsletter, merch and more. 🎈 TL;DR: As always, here is a list of updates from our devs in the last seven days. Nicely done! Let me know what you think about subscriptions in the comments! PS - while I've got you, please read and comment on our new blog post about our simple theme editor!