Jordan Miller

Invision Community’s forthcoming release includes an exciting new feature available for all. Announcing the Alert System! 🚨™ The Alert System is a new tool for community managers to communicate with their members. There are times when a community manager needs to bring information to the attention of either a single user, or a group of users; when existing systems such as PMs or warning points are not suitable. So, we developed a happy medium to empower you. The new alert system offers multiple ways to engage with single users or multiple member groups with a message that must be acknowledged and dismissed before further engagement with the community. Here are a few examples of when a community leader can use the Alert System for individual members: Moderator actions A moderator moves a topic and wants to inform the topic starter that the topic has been moved and why. Get ahead of warnings A member left a comment that doesn’t justify a warning point, nor should it warrant a private message. You want to kindly remind them of the community guidelines. Community leaders may wish to send information to an entire member group. This may to warn them of new limits, or to notify support changes, etc. Here are a few examples of when a community leader can use the Alert System for groups: Updates to community guidelines After reviewing and updating your community guidelines or terms of service, you can send an alert to all affected member groups outlining the changes, so they are aware. As the message needs to be dismissed before any further interaction with the community, you can be sure it has been read before any more posts are made. This example shows an alert with send anonymously switched on. Welcome message To strengthen your onboarding flow, you may like to send all new members a welcome message to introduce yourself and your team, along with some helpful information to help get them settled in. This example shows an alert with the option to reply, with send anonymously turned off. Heads up Remind a group of a permanent account-related change, like their subscription will be decreasing/increasing. New forums added After consultation with your community, you want to add some new discussion areas for your VIP Members. You can now send an alert targeted to members in that group to let them know where the new forums are and what their purpose is. Let's chat You notice that a great community member is having a bad day. Instead of reaching for punitive tools, you can send them an alert that they have to reply to before being allowed to continue engaging in the community. These are just a few examples; of course, the alerts functionality has a lot of flexibility built in. Alerts are managed from the Moderator's Control Panel. Let us take a look at the different areas that can be configured. Dates Each alert has a start date, and this date can be in the future. This is especially useful if you have an event coming up you want to showcase. You can optionally set an expiration date to only serve the alert for members that visit between the start and end date. You can also leave it running indefinitely for uses such as the welcome message. Send to This section allows you to choose to send to a single user or to a single or multiple groups. If you are sending to groups, you can further fine-tune the deliverability by choosing to send to everyone currently registered and to new members when they register, or you can target just new members (to be precise, this will target members who register after the alert date), this option is ideal for the welcome message alert. Send as yourself or anonymously You can choose to send the alert anonymously or from yourself. There are times when you want a personal touch and times when you need more of a system style alert, perhaps when notifying of guideline updates. Or, if the message is general, or you want to protect members of your team, send the alert anonymously. Replies If you choose to send the alert personally, then you can allow the member to reply, force the member to respond to dismiss the alert or remove the ability to reply. For a welcome message, you'd likely want to allow replies which then will create a new personal message between you and the member. We have built the system to be very flexible to cover a wide range of uses where you want to directly engage with a member or group of members and be confident that they have seen the alert before any further engagement in the community. Alerts can be used to strengthen onboarding, notify sections of your community about exciting new features and changes or even create an open dialogue after a punitive measure such as having a posting time-out. This feature is coming to Invision Community 4.7, across all platforms. Thoughts on our new Alert System?! Drop us a line in the comments and let us know what you think.

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! 😉