Matt

It’s largely down to where the community market is going. There is nothing stopping developers from launching their own site and marketing it. We are not blocking developers from building custom experiences. 5.1 will be our next release.

It’s been a busy start to the year here at Invision Community, and we wanted to share a few updates on what’s coming next. We’re always evolving alongside the needs of modern communities, and we’re really excited about where things are heading in 2026. Invision Community 4 Invision Community 4 has had a great run since launching back in 2015, and it played a big part in getting us to where we are today. With Invision Community 5 now established for well over a year, it’s become the clear path forward for the platform. With that in mind, we’ll be bringing v4 to the end of its lifecycle. After December 31, 2026, v4 will no longer receive updates or support. Until then, we’ll continue providing critical fixes and security updates. If you haven’t upgraded yet, now’s a great time to start planning your move to v5. We’re here if you need help along the way. You can see most of the bigger features here. Providers Directory We’ll also be closing the Providers Directory at the end of the month. The way people connect with third-party developers has changed quite a bit, and the platform itself now covers more out of the box than ever before. Because of that, the directory is no longer something we need to maintain. Profiles will stay visible until the end of May so you have time to grab anything you need. New Website Behind the scenes, we’ve been working on a refreshed website that better reflects what you can actually build and achieve with Invision Community. While v5 has been out for a while now, our current site still feels rooted in an earlier version of the platform. This update brings everything in line with where we are today. It also includes a long-awaited documentation refresh. You can expect to see this go live next week. Community Restructure As the platform has grown, so have the different ways people use it. Cloud customers often have very different needs from those running self-hosted environments, and we want to make sure each group has a space that makes sense for them. We’re updating the community structure to better reflect that. You’ll see clearer separation between different types of discussions, along with a better balance between technical topics and broader community management conversations. The goal is to make it easier to find what you need and have more relevant conversations. New Features Our development team is busy working on a major new release due later this year. I can’t say too much, but it’s already shaping up to be a great update with lots of new features that will give more flexibility in what you build your community around and improvements to essentials such as retention. Invision Community Classic We know many of you are still using Invision Community Classic, and while usage now represents a small percentage of our overall business, that doesn’t mean we’re going to pull the plug. We’ll continue supporting Classic with ongoing updates, including bug fixes and new features. And if you’re ever curious about what’s possible with our cloud platform, it’s there when you’re ready, with more functionality and no worries of hardware, environments and configurations. We’ve got a lot planned for this year, and really we’re looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

Hi Steve, We're working on v5 documentation. It's tied into our website update, which is coming soon(ish). Is there anything specific you need to know?

Thanks! It’s been quite a year.

As we close out another year with Invision Community, I wanted to take this opportunity to review the progress we’ve made and look ahead to next year and beyond. It's certainly been another busy year with over 1,300 improvements, fixes and new features. We listen to your feedback and meet each month with many community management teams. These conversations help us understand what it takes to build and grow a strong community. This year was about listening closely to that feedback and then turning that insight into practical improvements across the platform. We launched major new features, reduced friction, improved insight, added new integrations and API endpoints, improved the mobile experience, and made numerous core platform updates. Let’s take a look at the highlights. A more app-like mobile and modern web experienceThis year, we continued to close the gap between web and native app expectations by making Invision Community feel faster and more natural to use on every device. Improvements included smoother loading states, familiar mobile interactions, and clearer notification prompts, resulting in an experience that feels modern. We continued to remove client-side scripting in favour of native CSS solutions to improve loading and interaction speeds. The mobile experience improvements included: Pull to refresh in iOS Loading animation Installation prompt banner App icon notification count badges Easier to use, enable notification prompts Mobile app-like menus Deeper integrations and extensibilityIn 2025, we expanded how Invision Community integrates with the workflows you rely on every day. New APIs, webhooks, and automation made it easier to move data, trigger workflows, and integrate your community into existing systems. The integration improvements included: New endpoints for Zapier New REST API endpoints New Webhooks Mailchimp integration iFramely integration Driving discovery and engagementContinued growth is essential to the health of your community. In 2025, we continued to invest in helping members find value faster and stay engaged for longer. We also introduced our new feature, Quests, which bridges the gap between in-person events and communities by enabling gamification across both. The complete list of improvements is: Quests Customisable welcome emails Auto follow clubs New email advertising and promotion tools Clearer insight into community healthTo help tell the story of your community and find actionable insights, we created a new suite of community health metrics. For example, tracking 'first response time' provides a clear indication of how quickly new interactions are acknowledged within your community. A 'good' first response time might be within the first few hours of an inquiry, as quick responses often lead to higher engagement and satisfaction. These new metrics cover everything you need to create your reports, with new tools to export multiple charts into CSV files with a few clicks for your own tools to analyze. The new insights include: Author diversity Responsiveness Engagement First response time Daily active users / monthly active users Stronger core platform foundationsThroughout 2025, we continued to improve on the core of the Invision Community platform, focusing on the everyday things that keep communities running smoothly. Updates across content management, permissions, and moderation controls reduced friction and improved consistency across even the largest and most active communities. Auto-splitting large topics Profile photo gallery Auto lock topics Default pages per group Recommended tags Turnstile captcha Page Editor roll back Looking aheadAs we look to the future, our focus remains on strengthening the foundations of the community platform to help yours grow. We will continue to expand AI in thoughtful ways, not to replace humans, but to support moderation and surface relevant content. At the same time, we’re committed to simplifying the platform to sharpen the feature set around what matters most: discovery, engagement, trust, and moderation. The goal, as always, is a platform that is powerful but not complex. To help us shape the journey ahead, we invite you to share your own ideas and hopes for 2026. What features or improvements would you like to see? Your feedback is invaluable as we strive to create a community platform that meets your needs and ambitions. Feel free to join our community to share your 2026 wish list. We're excited about the future, and we're glad to have you with us! View full blog entry

Britney: Hit me baby one more time! IFramely: No.

Yes.

Yep agree. I'll raise it.

To be honest, when that customer pointed out that new members see everything as unread and it made no sense, we all wondered how no one else had pointed that out in 20 years because it makes more sense from a new member's point of view to have everything read and then you can track what you care about instead of every single thing in the community demanding attention right away.

Yes, potentially. But then we've been here before with many services. There's few guarantees in life, but they are an established company and in a worst case scenario, it wouldn't be difficult to replace the embed code in the database with a link to the original content.

Christmas has come early. 5.0.14 Beta 1 is now available! This is our monthly updates and improvements release. You can see the full changelog here. Along with the usual bug fixes and improvements, we've also got the following new functionality: Iframely Integration Iframely is a uniform delivery service for rich media embeds. It has over 1900 different services it is compatible with, and allows many services to be delivered easily as an embed inside a post editor when pasting a link. While Invision Community works well with oEmbed providers, there are some services that do not use this protocol or put it behind a complicated application process, as Meta does for Facebook and Instagram. Now, IFramely removes that complication and allows you to embed Facebook and Instagram content without the need to create a Meta app and get through an approval process. There is a generous free tier, and all you need to do is create an account and paste in the API key hash provided. Assignment Updates ☁️Our assignments feature gets two new useful features: auto-closing after X days, and a daily reminder notification on open assignments. These are two popular requests, and we're pleased to get these into the December release. Let us know how you get on!

Not by search indexes and other useful bots. Indeed, I wrote about that here. Agree, but it still causes issues on a practical level.

We had discussions with several customers affected by issues caused by mega-topics and they all agreed that locking and opening a new topic is absolutely fine. They are all linked up so they can be continued. There are unfortunately real limits on how long a topic can go. I added a lot of optimisations in this area a few years ago to effectively reverse sort the last 50% of the pages so MySQL was not asked to request a very large offset which is very inefficient in the database layer. The middle 40% of any large topic is problematic. One of our enterprise customers has a single topic with 1.2m replies in it. A potential solution would be to remove pagination and just have first / last and next / previous but that degrades the experience and makes navigating long topics tedious. Ultimately we're limited by the available technology. There are probably ways around it by splitting up the data in tables, leveraging intermediate layers between the database and caching but that's a lot of work and months of time to solve a problem that only affects 0.05% of our customers. Self-hosted customers can change the values with a constant, because if you want to take down your own servers, that's your choice but we've kept it at a fixed number that is optimised for our cloud platform to avoid extreme resource allocation on a small number of topics.

We're talking about this. Our current thinking is to add a setting, and to only split older topics when they get new replies, so older topics that don't get any replies are not altered.

This was raised internally, we're discussing it.

The Invision Community November edition includes numerous improvements, including customizable welcome emails and a new feature to keep your community running smoothly. Auto-splitting large topicsWhile most topics run their course over a small number of pages, some continue to receive daily replies for years, growing to quite a size. Many communities have breakout areas where people enjoy simple forum games or trivial social updates that help bond community members together. However, when forums reach hundreds or thousands of pages, they can struggle a little and may take a little more time to show. We all know how vital page loading speed is to both SEO and user experience, so we have a solution that doesn't disrupt the conversation flow. When a topic nears 100,000 replies, the moderating team will see a message indicating that the topic is approaching the split threshold. Once it exceeds that threshold, the original topic is locked, and a new topic is opened automatically via a background task. Each topic will list all the various parts of the topic in the sidebar and in a block on the topic itself. This allows the conversation to continue, and signposts where the older parts of the conversation are for those who wish to revisit them. The result is a fast-loading topic that preserves all the history. Welcome EmailsThe first point of contact after joining a community is crucial to the onboarding process. Invision Community has always sent a generic "Thanks for registering" email, but it's not particularly useful outside of informing the user that the process has been completed. Now, in our November release, you can easily add content to that email to tailor it to your community. You can add a message that fits the tone of your community, or signpost key areas to help acclimatise members. What else?Of course, every monthly release includes numerous bug fixes and minor improvements. This month, we've focused on the posting editor to address some issues and add some minor quality-of-life improvements. View full blog entry

I will do a blog post but the short version is this: By default, topics will be split when they reach 100,000 replies. The moderators will see a warning indicating this will happen. A task runs to lock and create a new topic, with links back to the previous part. You can adjust the threshold where topics are split, you can do so by using the following constant: define( "LARGE_TOPIC_LOCK", 1000000 );

Your November release is ready for testing! A version that ends in .13 released just before Halloween is some coincidence. Let's hope it's lucky for all! This is our monthly updates and improvements release. You can see the full changelog here. Key changes include: New: Automatically lock large topics and start a new one. New: Ability to customise or disable the "Welcome" email when a member registers. Updated: Editor QoL improvements. Let us know how you get on!

You don't need to add canonical tags to point to the page you're on. You need them to help Google understand faceted pages.

Canonical... to where?

Cancel your evening plans, because 5.0.12 Beta 1 has just been released! (The plans I'm not cancelling) It's almost time for pumpkin carving, heavily sweetened coffees and raking up leaves for months, but first our October release is ready for testing! You can see the full change log for 5.0.12 here. Along with a good number of bug fixes, we've squeezed in a major update on dropdown menus. I know that doesn't sound exciting but it means we can have native feeling menus when using a mobile device via the browser or PWA. It really does make it feel more app-like. It's also a major technical change so please give all menus a good test, both on desktop and on mobile. Ehren and Matt spoke a lot about webcomponents and popovers. 🤷‍♂️ Let us know how you get on!

The Invision Community October release is packed with improvements, updates, and new features, including app-like mobile menus, a curated profile photo gallery, and a popular club request. Mobile app-like menusOur October release features redesigned dropdown menus with an app-like design on mobile devices, improved accessibility, and smoother performance. Dropdown menus have received a significant redesign, resulting in a native, app-like experience on touch devices. Menus transition into view, occupying a larger area of the screen, which is great for accessibility. They can be dismissed by swiping the menu off-screen in a downward direction or by tapping the blank area above the menu. mobile.mp4 These menus have also received accessibility improvements on desktop devices. They can be toggled using the Return/Spacebar keys, tabbed into using the Tab key, and dismissed via the Esc key. A huge win for visitors who are unable to comfortably use a mouse (or prefer to use a keyboard) while browsing your community. keyboard.mp4 The new dropdown system offers performance improvements for all devices and leverages modern HTML and CSS features, including the popover attribute, opening/closing transitions, and anchor positioning. desktop.mp4 Combined, this makes browsing on mobile via browser or PWA feel like a truly native experience. Curated Profile Photo GalleryWe work with many communities that are extremely privacy-focused, including those in the medical space and communities working with young, vulnerable people. In these spaces, external uploads are disabled to reduce the risk of exposing personal information, preventing potential harassment, and helping protect members from being identified outside the community. This means profile photos remain limited to the default letter image, which doesn't allow for much personalisation. Our Invision Community October release introduces a user photo gallery that allows the community team to upload a curated library of images, which members.the community can then select By using only community-approved photos, this ensures that profile images remain safe, consistent, and non-identifying, while giving members a sense of individuality and belonging. Club Auto FollowClubs are individual micro-communities that often have a very focused membership who don't want to miss out on any updates. While our follow and notification system is very robust, most people who join a club want to automatically follow any new items that are posted, such as forum topics. With our October release, you can now set clubs to "auto-follow". When set, any new members who join are automatically added to the follow lists of all content areas, such as forums, ensuring they receive notifications when new topics are posted. This feature is a great way to ensure your club members are always up to date. As always each release contains many other minor fixes and improvements. We hope you enjoy these updates! Some features not available for all plans: Mobile app-like menus are available for all plans. The private photo gallery feature is available for Team, Business and Enterprise plans. The club auto-follow feature is available for all plans. View full blog entry