Matt

Long ago, back in the dark ages, forums used the number of posts a member made and how long ago they joined to demonstrate trust and experience. Is simply posting a lot and being a member for a long time the best way to know which community members are experts? And is there a better way? We think so. What makes an expert, and why are they important? Community experts are the keystones to any thriving community. You probably recognise a handful in your community. They tend to be active regularly, are often the first to try and help others with their questions and help set a positive example within the community. Wouldn't it be great if newer community members could discover who these super users were a little easier? These members trying to find their feet in a new community could follow trustworthy individuals, absorb the positive tone of the community, and even get help a little quicker. In the past, forums have shown trust and experience through basic metrics like post count and the years since they joined. However, these metrics only show that the individual has been around a long time and posts a lot. It doesn't show that they are potential role models or helpful and trustworthy. Community Experts with Invision Community 5 Invision Community 5 identifies these experts through metrics such as the number of solutions they have, the volume of 'helpful' votes on their replies, the speed of answers and more. Each forum will have its own experts, so if you have a very broad community, someone who is very helpful in a particular area will show as an expert in that area only. When a member has been picked as an expert, they'll receive an email thanking them, and they can then opt-in to be shown as an expert along with a regular notification or email with any unanswered questions in forums they are experts in. I'm absolutely killing it in the Test Forum Every few months, the experts are recalculated to reflect the organic way communities grow and change. After all, there's little point in showing that a non-active member is an expert. It might even encourage new community experts to keep up the great work and remain active longer. Community experts have a badge shown with their posts, along with the option to follow them. Encouraging new members to follow trusted community members should be a core part of any community strategy. Settings and control Of course, not everyone should be labelled as a community expert, and perhaps, in very rare circumstances, an existing community expert could have a bad day and not represent the community well. Invision Community 5 gives you the ability to set which groups experts can be picked from and offers you the opportunity to block existing experts, ensuring they won't be selected again in the future. Over to you All communities have to be purposeful and provide value. That value may be in close friendships, or it may be in getting answers for problems you have. Either way, locating the most helpful members will help develop trust, provide guidance and increase knowledge within your community. For transactional communities such as support-based communities, experts are vital in providing timely answers and demonstrating credibility and expertise to others. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Please let us know in the comments.

Forum platforms have a wide range of uses, from helping with support to sharing knowledge, ideation and social interaction. Topics can span years, and once the initial explosion of replies has passed, the topic lives on in local search and search engines for future viewers to discover and get value from. However, it's not always easy to get the best content from a very long topic. You may have noticed that when you come to a topic seeking an answer, some replies are less than helpful. How do I fix my Apple Watch? Like this! It's common to find a lot of social content mixed in with useful replies. Jokes, GIFs and off-topic musings are all great while the topic develops organically in real-time. Having fun is critical to feeling a sense of belonging in a community. However, those coming to the topic a little later, say from a link Google has suggested, just want to get the useful content in the fastest way possible. That's where 'helpful' voting comes in. A very helpful reply Invision Community can already mark a single post as the best solution for that topic. Still, not every topic gets a definitive answer, and some community strategies resist quickly marking a post as the best answer to encourage more discussion rather than effectively ending it. Even when you have a definitive answer, there is often value in other highly rated posts offering more context, alternative solutions and more thorough explanations. With Helpful voting, your members are encouraged to flag which posts they find helpful in the topic. When enough votes are added to a single post, they are suggested as a possible answer. You can also tune out the noise and view the most helpful replies only. This is a powerful way to get the very best content from a topic in a short space of time. Want to just view the most helpful replies? No problem. If you eventually choose to mark a post as the definitive answer, the suggested post will be replaced with the answer you choose, but you can still see the posts voted as helpful to gain further context. The helpful voting works independently from reactions, which tend to cluster around social content. Social media conditions us to add a like or funny reaction to content that gets an emotional response. Indeed, a lot of the most highly reacted content is funny content. Social reactions are valuable when building connections between community members but often don't reflect what is the most useful content. The suggested most helpful post threshold is configuration via the Admin Control Panel. Helping your members find the best content within topics helps them do more in your community with less time. Forums continue to evolve, and while social content helps develop the community, content that solves problems and helps others is the rocket fuel you need to keep members and attract new audiences. Helpful voting also feeds into picking Community Experts, a new feature for Invision Community 5, but we'll talk about that in a future blog. A sneak peak at the new Community Expert badge I hope you found this update ✨helpful✨, and if you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comments!

Theming has been a core component of Invision Community since its inception, and this continues with Invision Community 5, but in a very different way. If you haven't already seen Ehren's blog on the new Theme Editor, please do take the time to watch it. The all-new theme editor reduces the complexity of theming by taking complex concepts like HSL CSS variables into a pretty slick UI that almost any Invision Community owner can use to personalise or brand match to any existing properties. Ehren will talk more on the technology behind the theme editor in another developer blog soon, but the short version is that the CSS framework has been completely rewritten from scratch with a new approach to how CSS classes interact with page elements. Of course, if you're reading this, you'll want to know what tools you have for more advanced theming in v5. Custom templates and template hooks Invision Community 5 merges the concepts of custom templates and template hooks into a single feature. In the past, you could edit templates directly and create theme hooks. With Invision Community 5, these features are replaced with the new custom template system. You can create new templates, which you can use in other custom templates via the short tag: {customtemplate='key'}. You can also hook into specific areas with a custom template allowing you to insert code before the opening tag, after the opening tag, before the closing tag or after the closing tag. CleanShot 2023-10-19 at 13.17.16.mp4 For example, if you wanted to add something custom before the reply editor when viewing a topic, you would target that area like so: The result, when viewed on the front end, is as follows: These hookable areas are defined by a special tag that we add to the core templates. We would expect a lot of requests through the beta release and will likely create a request form so we can process them. We will try and accommodate as many areas as possible. While direct template editing is no longer possible in Invision Community v5, the new custom template and hook system allows you to add new functionality, while the new CSS framework makes it easier to target and change elements without the need to edit templates. We also added a suite of new development tools to enable you to target menus, data attributes and other areas where developers commonly had to edit templates before. The good news is that now custom templates are not built on top of our 'master' template engine; they are virtually upgrade-proof and do not require manual merging. Theme Designer Mode Those who create themes for others have some extra tooling to enable them to build truly custom themes. Even though the theme editor has space for custom CSS, there is always a need for CSS that your customers cannot edit, and Invision Community 5 has a special area for that once Theme Designer Mode has been enabled. You also can add any ad-hoc javascript for when you want to hide elements or provide custom interactions. As direct CSS editing and direct template editing are no longer possible with Invision Community 5, there is no need for a 'sync' tool to copy from the filesystem. Conclusion The new front-end theme editor is now the primary way to manage themes. This is where you upload logos and toggle settings. As you can see, theming may look different in Invision Community v5. Still, the new custom templates, theme designer tools and UI extensions provide a lot of functionality that means you can do nearly everything you did in v4, but often in an easier way. I'm sure you'll have many questions, so please add them below, and we'll do our best to answer them for you.