Matt

It's getting a bit late here in the UK. We'll get it out Monday.

Ehren, you look different today.

We have intentionally not added a live chat feature, at least not yet. It would be fairly simple to do as we have the same functionality for live topics. However, Live Chat can drain away content from your forum and make what could be useful rich topics for future people (and Google/SEO) to enjoy more vapid and disposable. Our solution was Live Topics which gave you a time limited chat feature that can convert into a normal topic upon completion so that content isn't lost. I think the case for live chat as a constant companion is weak honestly. If you have a really busy forum then you do not need an extra place for people to talk, and if you have a really quiet forum, you won't have enough people in a live chat area at the same time to do anything constructive. Chat boxes used to be a popular add-on but in most cases, it was generally populated with "Hello?" messages from weeks ago. If people want to chat, they're going to do it via a well trodden path in their routine, that could be Discord, WhatsApp or snapchat. They're unlikely to deviate from these routines because of a chat box on a forum they may visit daily or weekly. This is why we built Live Topics. It gives you an event based platform that people will make time for to come together for a short fixed time to discuss a topic live.

This is wonderful Jimi! I'll get this out across our social channels.

I'm going to tag in our CSS maestro @Ehren for assistance.

A merge tags feature wouldn't be a bad idea for when people change their minds.

v4.* you can keep using MyISAM. It's only version 5 that enforces InnoDB.

Invision Community 5 is a fresh start on many things, and we wanted to remove a lot of old features with roots back into the early 2000s. Security through obscurity was pretty much all we had back then, but now there are better tools including firewalls, 2FA and VPN/IP address restriction. I'd always recommend 2FA for all admin accounts. Just hiding the admin folder is a weak way to secure it. It means that if you accidentally paste the link, or it appears as a referrer in access logs or someone figures out the folder name then you've lost that element of security. It's a bit like locking the door and placing the key under the plant pot. I know all these changes can be overwhelming which is why we're making every effort to communicate them to you and give you as much runway as possible to migrate over.

We really require InnoDB for v5 as it's a vast improvement on MyISAM. As we develop new functionality, we want to make use of foreign keys which MyISAM doesn't support.

We do not mention account deletion, just to clarify.

Invision Community 4.7.19 will be released in November and contains many updates along with the report center improvements. While Invision Community 5 moves through the beta process, I wanted to let you know about all the updates coming in Invision Community 4. I've already spoken about the Report Center updates, which bring more professionalism and compliance to that area, and this blog will outline a few other highlights for the forthcoming release. Dormant Account Login Notification Keeping member accounts secure is a top priority for all community teams, and with data breaches containing usernames and passwords regularly shared on the dark web, it makes sense to be vigilant to a potential account takeover. Your members will now receive an email if a successful login occurs six months or more since the last log in to ensure the account is still in the right hands. If the account owner is not responsible for logging in, they can contact the community team to ensure the account is returned to the owner. Prepare for Invision Community 5 We have added a new information dashboard to the AdminCP so you can review the impact of the upgrade and ensure the PHP and MySQL versions are suitable. Of course, our Invision Community Cloud customers need not worry about this as we take care of it for you. You can also see impacting items you may want to know, such as deprecated and removed features that your community currently has enabled. This dashboard is a great starting point for evaluating your upgrade when the time comes. SEO Improvements We regularly review SEO best practices to ensure that your community presents itself in the best way to search engine bots and spiders. This update comes in two parts; the first is a new crawler setting to reduce links on the page for guests and search engine bots. This new feature removes hyperlinks around dates in comment feeds and removes the sharer menu item that shows the sharing box. These links dominate the crawl budget for little value, leaving little time for crawlers to work their way deeper into your content. The second SEO-focused feature is the permalinks to specific comments throughout the community. Currently, the permalinks point to a content handler (do=findComment&comment=123) that locates the correct page number and then issues a 301 redirect to the correct page (topics/1-topic-title/page/2/#comment-123). While 301 redirects are not a problem for search engines, and it's been a long time since a 301 redirect incurred any SEO penalty, the permalink is in a different format to the actual comment URL, which is handled via a fragment. Putting aside search engine optimization for a moment, working to eliminate a lot of redirects positively impacts performance. The new permalink is simply the actual link using a fragment to locate the post in the browser's viewport. This removes the need for a 301 redirect and reduces any search engine confusion over the permalinks canonical URL. Of course, the page number may change if topics are merged or many posts deleted, and we have some client scripting magic to handle that eventuality. It's an exciting time here at Invision Community with a brand new version in development and several new features for our stable product line. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments. View full blog entry

It's probably easier to update your ACP/FTP details in your client centre and we can take a look on your site. Let us know when it's been updated.

Looks great 🙂

If anyone is using V5 for their production site, or a public test site, drop the link below!