Everything posted by Matt
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PHP is one of the core technologies behind Invision Community. It’s the server-side language our software is built on, so any security issue affecting PHP gets our immediate attention. On October 21, two critical PHP vulnerabilities were disclosed (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619). We acted on them right away. What We’ve Done We have applied temporary safeguards across our entire cloud platform, including the mitigations recommended in PHP’s official security advisories and firewall rules at our network edge. We are also rolling out an infrastructure update to a current, supported PHP version, and will deploy the fully patched release as soon as it’s available. Do I Need to Do Anything? No. These protections are already in place, so your community is safe right now. There’s nothing to update, change, or configure on your end.
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Help people find your community, whether they’re searching Google or asking an AI tool like ChatGPT. This guide explains what Invision Community already handles for you behind the scenes, from structured data to sitemaps and IndexNow, and the few SEO settings worth knowing about. You’ll also learn how to organize your forums and topics so your best answers get found, what makes content more likely to be cited in AI answers, and how to track how you’re doing. -
Control who sees what across your community. This guide explains how member groups and the permission matrix work together, then walks you through the patterns most communities use: public areas that welcome newcomers, members-only spaces, premium areas for subscribers and a private staff room. You’ll also learn how to turn a locked door into a reason to sign up, how staff permissions work, and how to check everything from your members’ point of view. -
Gamification gives members a sense of progress, encourages the habits that make a community work and gives people a reason to come back. This guide explains how achievement rules, points, ranks, badges and leaderboards fit together. It shares a practical strategy for rewarding quality over volume, and it ends with a starter kit of ranks, badges and rules you can set up in about 20 minutes. -
Running a community shouldn’t mean doing everything by hand. The first half of this guide shows you how to automate routine work as you grow, from promoting members and catching spam to keeping members informed with notifications, bulk mail and drip campaigns. The second half shows you how to plug your community into the tools you already use, with built-in integrations, Zapier and our API. -
Clubs let you create focused spaces within your community, public or private, for regions, product lines, industry leaders, course cohorts or any group that would benefit from a home of its own. This guide explains where clubs fit and how to choose the right type. It also covers who should be able to create them, how to set one up so people want to join, and how to hand day-to-day running over to trusted leaders while keeping everything connected. -
If you’re thinking about earning from your community, this guide shows you how to do it without putting off the members who make it worthwhile. You’ll learn how to decide what stays free and what’s premium, set up subscriptions tied to member groups, and sell digital products, courses and event tickets. It also covers letting members sell to each other for a commission, selling sponsorship directly, and getting paid reliably with Stripe or PayPal. -
A busy community rarely happens by accident. This guide covers the five things thriving communities tend to get right early on: starting small, making your purpose obvious, seeding conversations before you launch, giving members a reason to come back, and building a library of answers people can find. You’ll also learn how solved topics and clear titles help your community get found on Google and cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT. -
New to Invision Community? This guide takes you through your first week, from logging in to your Admin CP for the first time to welcoming your first members. You’ll learn how to find your way around, set your colors and logo with the Theme Editor, build a simple forum structure, set up registration and bring in your team. It finishes with a first-week checklist and a look at the features waiting for you on our higher plans. -
Short answer: not really. We pulled all our social promotion tools as it is incredibly difficult to get an app approved to post to Facebook or X. You're better off using a service like Buffer to semi-automate your process.
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It was removed in 5.1 from the first alpha. The release notes have all the details.
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This change is to make it more mobile friendly, and to make it more accessible for screen readers.
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If you run a busy community, you'll know how important Achievements and tagging are to encourage member activity and to keep a large amount of content organised. We've had a lot of feedback on two areas. First, some members quickly worked out that they could boost their points by repeating the same action over and over, like liking post after post. Second, the tagging system we rebuilt in Invision Community 5.0 keeps your tag list focused and tidy, but it needed more flexibility. Some tags should be reserved for staff, and members have no way to suggest one that's missing. Invision Community 5.1 gives you more control over both, with point limits and staff boost for Achievements, and restricted tags and tag suggestions. Keep points fair with limitsAchievements have rewarded members with points, badges and ranks for years, and for most communities they work great. However, every so often a member discovers that reactions earn points, and suddenly every post in the topic has a like from them. Their rank climbs, and the members who've spent months answering questions slip down the leaderboard. In Invision Community 5.1, you can cap how many points a member earns from any achievement rule within a set number of days. For example, you might allow a maximum of 50 points a day for giving reactions. This will make the Achievements system fairer and more accurately show who offers the community the most value. Give staff reactions more weightA like from a moderator or someone on your team may mean more than most. It tells the author that someone who knows the community well thinks their post is worth reading. Staff boost lets you recognise that. When a staff member reacts to a member's content, you can award extra points on top of the usual amount. Control who can use each tagSince Invision Community 5.0, your team decides which tags are created, which keeps the list clean. However, once a tag exists, any member can apply it, and a tag like "Official" or "Announcement" only means something if the right people are using it. You can now choose which member groups can apply a specific tag. Want "Official" or "Staff pick" to stay with your team? Restrict it to those groups. Everyone can still see restricted tags and browse content by them. The tag picker only shows members the tags they're allowed to use. Let members suggest new tagsYour members often spot what's missing before you do. The trouble is that open tagging lets them instantly add duplicates, misspellings and similar phrasing, and closed tagging leaves them with no way to fix it at all. With a new group permission, members can suggest a tag straight from the tag field when the one they need doesn't exist yet. Suggestions arrive in the AdminCP with a notification. Approve one and the tag is created and applied to the content in a single step. In addition, if your community has built up a long list of tags, the tag field now switches to autocomplete once you pass 100, which loads faster and saves members scrolling to find the one they want. A few ways to use itProtect official labels. Restrict tags like "Announcement", "Official" or "Staff pick" to your team, so members can filter by them with confidence. Curb reaction farming. Cap points for giving reactions at a sensible daily amount, so ranks reflect real participation. Reward great answers. Use staff boost so a reaction from a moderator gives the author a noticeable lift. Grow your taxonomy with your members. Let trusted groups suggest tags, then review them weekly and approve the ones that stick. Put together, these changes help your points and tags keep their meaning as your community grows, so the members doing the real work get the credit, and your content stays easy to find. These features are coming to all package levels, and we're looking forward to seeing how you put them to work in your own community. -
If you run a busy community, you'll know how important Achievements and tagging are to encourage member activity and to keep a large amount of content organised. We've had a lot of feedback on two areas. First, some members quickly worked out that they could boost their points by repeating the same action over and over, like liking post after post. Second, the tagging system we rebuilt in Invision Community 5.0 keeps your tag list focused and tidy, but it needed more flexibility. Some tags should be reserved for staff, and members have no way to suggest one that's missing. Invision Community 5.1 gives you more control over both, with point limits and staff boost for Achievements, and restricted tags and tag suggestions. Keep points fair with limitsAchievements have rewarded members with points, badges and ranks for years, and for most communities they work great. However, every so often a member discovers that reactions earn points, and suddenly every post in the topic has a like from them. Their rank climbs, and the members who've spent months answering questions slip down the leaderboard. In Invision Community 5.1, you can cap how many points a member earns from any achievement rule within a set number of days. For example, you might allow a maximum of 50 points a day for giving reactions. This will make the Achievements system fairer and more accurately show who offers the community the most value. Give staff reactions more weightA like from a moderator or someone on your team may mean more than most. It tells the author that someone who knows the community well thinks their post is worth reading. Staff boost lets you recognise that. When a staff member reacts to a member's content, you can award extra points on top of the usual amount. Control who can use each tagSince Invision Community 5.0, your team decides which tags are created, which keeps the list clean. However, once a tag exists, any member can apply it, and a tag like "Official" or "Announcement" only means something if the right people are using it. You can now choose which member groups can apply a specific tag. Want "Official" or "Staff pick" to stay with your team? Restrict it to those groups. Everyone can still see restricted tags and browse content by them. The tag picker only shows members the tags they're allowed to use. Let members suggest new tagsYour members often spot what's missing before you do. The trouble is that open tagging lets them instantly add duplicates, misspellings and similar phrasing, and closed tagging leaves them with no way to fix it at all. With a new group permission, members can suggest a tag straight from the tag field when the one they need doesn't exist yet. Suggestions arrive in the AdminCP with a notification. Approve one and the tag is created and applied to the content in a single step. In addition, if your community has built up a long list of tags, the tag field now switches to autocomplete once you pass 100, which loads faster and saves members scrolling to find the one they want. A few ways to use itProtect official labels. Restrict tags like "Announcement", "Official" or "Staff pick" to your team, so members can filter by them with confidence. Curb reaction farming. Cap points for giving reactions at a sensible daily amount, so ranks reflect real participation. Reward great answers. Use staff boost so a reaction from a moderator gives the author a noticeable lift. Grow your taxonomy with your members. Let trusted groups suggest tags, then review them weekly and approve the ones that stick. Put together, these changes help your points and tags keep their meaning as your community grows, so the members doing the real work get the credit, and your content stays easy to find. These features are coming to all package levels, and we're looking forward to seeing how you put them to work in your own community. View full blog entry
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Courses have been part of Invision Community since 2023, giving communities a way to run structured learning with sequential modules and lessons, quizzes, required courses for specific groups, and paid courses through Commerce. In Invision Community 5.1, Courses get many new features and improvements that turn it into a proper learning space. Courses can now be organised into categories and run entirely from the front end; each course can have its own discussion forum and files; members can leave reviews and ratings; and anyone who finishes earns a badge and a printable certificate. If you run staff onboarding, paid training, product education or a volunteer programme, this is the release where Courses really come into its own. Organise Courses into categoriesCourses now live in categories, each with its own name, description, cover photo and permissions. You can keep staff-only onboarding separate from public training, or put free introductory courses in one place and paid advanced tracks in another, without piling everything onto a single page. The Courses home page lists your categories first, and members with permission can add a course straight from there. Build and run Courses from the front endCreating, editing and publishing courses, along with managing modules and lessons, all happens on the community itself now. Instructors don't need AdminCP access to build and maintain a course, while admins keep control of settings, categories and enrolment tools in the ACP. You can assign instructors to each course, the same way you assign organisers to an event. Instructors manage the content and enrolments, and everyone enrolled appears on a Members tab. Keep course materials with the courseEach course can now have its own files library. Instructors upload worksheets, slides, templates or whatever else the lessons need, and enrolled members can download them. If someone withdraws from the course, they lose access to the files too. Everything stays in one place, rather than sending learners off to a separate Downloads category and hoping they find the right thing. A discussion forum for every courseEach course can have its own dedicated forum, open to enrolled members and instructors. It's a full forum with topics, replies and all the usual tools, so questions and conversation stay right next to the lessons instead of getting lost in your main forums. This makes a big difference for courses that run over weeks or months, where a group of learners is working through the material together. If you switch on files or discussions for a category that already has courses in it, you'll be asked whether to add them to existing courses or only to new ones. Reviews and star ratingsMembers can now rate and review courses. The average rating shows on course listings and in the course header, and a reviews tab lets people sort by newest or most helpful. For someone deciding whether to enrol, social proof is useful. For instructors, it's honest feedback from people who've actually taken the course. You decide whether reviews are allowed in each category, whether they need approval before going live, and which groups can leave them. A Course page that feels aliveThe course overview can now show a recent activity sidebar with the latest reviews and discussion. It appears only when there’s something to show, so a brand-new course won't look empty. New learners can see that people are engaged, and returning learners can catch up on what they've missed. Celebrate completion with badgesInstructors can upload a badge image on the course form, and anyone who completes the course automatically receives it. Badges appear on the member's profile. Certificates members can printOnce a member has completed at least one course, a Courses tab appears on their profile. It shows the badges they've earned, a list of completed courses, and a certificate of completion for each one, including the course name, badge, number of modules, lessons and quizzes, and the completion date. Members can print any certificate, complete with your community name, their name, the course title and the completion date. A finished course becomes something people can point to, which demonstrates trust and ability. Learning where your members already arePut together, these updates take Courses from a place to work through lessons to a complete learning experience, from browsing a category to printing a certificate. Your members learn alongside the people they already know, and your instructors run everything without needing administrative access. Courses is available from Creator Plus -
Courses have been part of Invision Community since 2023, giving communities a way to run structured learning with sequential modules and lessons, quizzes, required courses for specific groups, and paid courses through Commerce. In Invision Community 5.1, Courses get many new features and improvements that turn it into a proper learning space. Courses can now be organised into categories and run entirely from the front end; each course can have its own discussion forum and files; members can leave reviews and ratings; and anyone who finishes earns a badge and a printable certificate. If you run staff onboarding, paid training, product education or a volunteer programme, this is the release where Courses really come into its own. Organise Courses into categoriesCourses now live in categories, each with its own name, description, cover photo and permissions. You can keep staff-only onboarding separate from public training, or put free introductory courses in one place and paid advanced tracks in another, without piling everything onto a single page. The Courses home page lists your categories first, and members with permission can add a course straight from there. Build and run Courses from the front endCreating, editing and publishing courses, along with managing modules and lessons, all happens on the community itself now. Instructors don't need AdminCP access to build and maintain a course, while admins keep control of settings, categories and enrolment tools in the ACP. You can assign instructors to each course, the same way you assign organisers to an event. Instructors manage the content and enrolments, and everyone enrolled appears on a Members tab. Keep course materials with the courseEach course can now have its own files library. Instructors upload worksheets, slides, templates or whatever else the lessons need, and enrolled members can download them. If someone withdraws from the course, they lose access to the files too. Everything stays in one place, rather than sending learners off to a separate Downloads category and hoping they find the right thing. A discussion forum for every courseEach course can have its own dedicated forum, open to enrolled members and instructors. It's a full forum with topics, replies and all the usual tools, so questions and conversation stay right next to the lessons instead of getting lost in your main forums. This makes a big difference for courses that run over weeks or months, where a group of learners is working through the material together. If you switch on files or discussions for a category that already has courses in it, you'll be asked whether to add them to existing courses or only to new ones. Reviews and star ratingsMembers can now rate and review courses. The average rating shows on course listings and in the course header, and a reviews tab lets people sort by newest or most helpful. For someone deciding whether to enrol, social proof is useful. For instructors, it's honest feedback from people who've actually taken the course. You decide whether reviews are allowed in each category, whether they need approval before going live, and which groups can leave them. A Course page that feels aliveThe course overview can now show a recent activity sidebar with the latest reviews and discussion. It appears only when there’s something to show, so a brand-new course won't look empty. New learners can see that people are engaged, and returning learners can catch up on what they've missed. Celebrate completion with badgesInstructors can upload a badge image on the course form, and anyone who completes the course automatically receives it. Badges appear on the member's profile. Certificates members can printOnce a member has completed at least one course, a Courses tab appears on their profile. It shows the badges they've earned, a list of completed courses, and a certificate of completion for each one, including the course name, badge, number of modules, lessons and quizzes, and the completion date. Members can print any certificate, complete with your community name, their name, the course title and the completion date. A finished course becomes something people can point to, which demonstrates trust and ability. Learning where your members already arePut together, these updates take Courses from a place to work through lessons to a complete learning experience, from browsing a category to printing a certificate. Your members learn alongside the people they already know, and your instructors run everything without needing administrative access. Courses is available from Creator Plus View full blog entry
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Yes, although I focused on Pages/forum, it works across all apps.
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I use future publishing a lot here for our news blogs, and it doesn't create the topic until it's published. My latest blog was originally created last night, and published around 1:15pm today. The topic was only created once it was posted.
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1) Guests are not covered by this, so you'd likely want to gate your premium content to members and beyond, and then use this tool to tease content to members. 2) Not at this time, we've toyed with the idea of microtransactions for a while, but nothing on our roadmap at this point. This is for members, guests are harder to track effectively, so it only works for logged in members. The idea here is to convert members into paying members, rather than guests into registered members.
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If your community has content worth paying for, such as in-depth articles, expert answers or a knowledge base you've spent years building, you've probably wondered how much of it to give away. The trouble is that there's no easy middle ground. Make it all free and members have little reason to upgrade. Hide it behind a subscription, and they never get to see what they'd be paying for. News publishers have used a simple answer for years. They let readers open a set number of articles before asking them to subscribe, and it's now a model most people recognise instantly. Limited Content Views in Invision Community 5.1 brings that same idea to your community. It lets you give members a set allowance of topics and Pages articles, shows them how much they have left while they read, and invites them to subscribe when they're ready for more. How it worksLimited Content Views lets you set how many items a member group can open over a period of time. For example, free members might get 10 topics every 7 days, while subscribers get unlimited access. When the allowance runs out, members see your upgrade message instead of the content. Topics and Pages each have their own allowance, so you can leave the forums wide open and meter only your articles, or the other way around. You can narrow it down further to specific forums or Pages databases. Keep general discussion free and meter only your expert forum or your premium articles database. What your members seeNobody likes hitting a wall without warning. While reading limited content, members see a banner showing how many views they have left, what their allowance is and when it resets. A progress meter fills as they go, with an optional upgrade button right there while they're reading the content. You can place the banner in the header or as a sticky footer. Once the allowance is used up, opening something new shows your custom message in place of the content. We've also made sure it feels fair. Anything a member has already opened stays readable, so going back to a topic doesn't use another view. Likewise, viewing all pages of a topic only counts as a single view. Nobody gets locked out halfway through a piece of content they started yesterday. The allowance resets after the period you choose, and members can see exactly when that will happen. Pair it with subscriptionsLimited Content Views works best alongside Invision Community's Subscriptions feature. Subscriptions let you sell paid plans that move members into a group with elevated access, and that group can have a higher allowance or no limit at all. Point the upgrade button straight at your subscription plans, and members can go from reading to subscribed in a couple of clicks. You can also use the message members see when they run out of views to pitch your paid options directly. Explain what each plan includes, what it costs and why it's worth it, at the exact moment they want to keep reading. If a member belongs to more than one group, they get the more generous limit. So as soon as someone subscribes and joins your paid group, the cap lifts straight away. Setting it upLimits live in your member group settings, next to familiar options like posting and attachment limits. For each content type, set the number of views and days, or leave it unlimited. The upgrade button can link to your subscription plans, or anywhere else you like, such as your own landing page. A few ways to use itA premium article library. Free members read 5 Pages articles a week, and subscribers read as many as they like. Expert forums. General discussion stays open to everyone, while a specialist forum where your most experienced members answer questions is metered for free members and unlimited for subscribers. A taste of everything. Give free members a small allowance across both forums and articles so they can explore, then show them your subscription plans when they're ready for more. Limited Content Views gives members a real feel for what your community offers before you ask them to pay, and it makes the value of subscribing visible while they're reading. We're excited to see how you use it to build your memberships. This feature is available on all Invision Community plans and packages -
If your community has content worth paying for, such as in-depth articles, expert answers or a knowledge base you've spent years building, you've probably wondered how much of it to give away. The trouble is that there's no easy middle ground. Make it all free and members have little reason to upgrade. Hide it behind a subscription, and they never get to see what they'd be paying for. News publishers have used a simple answer for years. They let readers open a set number of articles before asking them to subscribe, and it's now a model most people recognise instantly. Limited Content Views in Invision Community 5.1 brings that same idea to your community. It lets you give members a set allowance of topics and Pages articles, shows them how much they have left while they read, and invites them to subscribe when they're ready for more. How it worksLimited Content Views lets you set how many items a member group can open over a period of time. For example, free members might get 10 topics every 7 days, while subscribers get unlimited access. When the allowance runs out, members see your upgrade message instead of the content. Topics and Pages each have their own allowance, so you can leave the forums wide open and meter only your articles, or the other way around. You can narrow it down further to specific forums or Pages databases. Keep general discussion free and meter only your expert forum or your premium articles database. What your members seeNobody likes hitting a wall without warning. While reading limited content, members see a banner showing how many views they have left, what their allowance is and when it resets. A progress meter fills as they go, with an optional upgrade button right there while they're reading the content. You can place the banner in the header or as a sticky footer. Once the allowance is used up, opening something new shows your custom message in place of the content. We've also made sure it feels fair. Anything a member has already opened stays readable, so going back to a topic doesn't use another view. Likewise, viewing all pages of a topic only counts as a single view. Nobody gets locked out halfway through a piece of content they started yesterday. The allowance resets after the period you choose, and members can see exactly when that will happen. Pair it with subscriptionsLimited Content Views works best alongside Invision Community's Subscriptions feature. Subscriptions let you sell paid plans that move members into a group with elevated access, and that group can have a higher allowance or no limit at all. Point the upgrade button straight at your subscription plans, and members can go from reading to subscribed in a couple of clicks. You can also use the message members see when they run out of views to pitch your paid options directly. Explain what each plan includes, what it costs and why it's worth it, at the exact moment they want to keep reading. If a member belongs to more than one group, they get the more generous limit. So as soon as someone subscribes and joins your paid group, the cap lifts straight away. Setting it upLimits live in your member group settings, next to familiar options like posting and attachment limits. For each content type, set the number of views and days, or leave it unlimited. The upgrade button can link to your subscription plans, or anywhere else you like, such as your own landing page. A few ways to use itA premium article library. Free members read 5 Pages articles a week, and subscribers read as many as they like. Expert forums. General discussion stays open to everyone, while a specialist forum where your most experienced members answer questions is metered for free members and unlimited for subscribers. A taste of everything. Give free members a small allowance across both forums and articles so they can explore, then show them your subscription plans when they're ready for more. Limited Content Views gives members a real feel for what your community offers before you ask them to pay, and it makes the value of subscribing visible while they're reading. We're excited to see how you use it to build your memberships. This feature is available on all Invision Community plans and packages View full blog entry
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Opensearch is currently available for Enterprise customers. We may being it to Cloud plans, but it would be a purchasble extra given the uplift in costs we would face. We have some customers on Creator Plus would would require a sizeable Opensearch footprint.
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Hi Nicolas, Can you submit a ticket from your client area please? We can make sure it gets to the right department. Thanks!
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Best to start a topic in the support area, it's a complex question to answer here. 😄
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Alpha testing has been underway for a while, and we're not far from beta now.
