Matt
Management
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Everything posted by Matt
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This is fair feedback, thank you. We can do better at how we present the news of new features to make it clear which platform and level it is for. I understand how this can cause friction and I should have been more aware of that.
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I really liked the Pages suggestion honestly. It's just that it's a complex area of code that we have earmarked to refactor at some point, so it's not something we'd consider before then.
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A good number of their community managers and team read these forums and follow our blog. They tell us this a lot. 🙂 As mentioned before, it's not that simple. The architecture we have isn't open and to bring transcoding to all platforms isn't as simple as saying "and now plugin your endpoint here". AWS doesn't have a service where it accepts uploads, puts them in a queue, visually displays processing in progress, processes the queue, transcode it into multiple formats including streaming, move it back into the community's bucket, update the queue system to tell the UI to remove the processing information and start streaming the video. All that is proprietary code we've developed for our cloud platform.
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These are good suggestions but most of them require a good amount of framework refactoring to make them possible. Also none of those topics had any traction from a single other Invision Community owner voicing that they wanted the same thing. Fair point and noted, thanks 🙂
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https://community.sigames.com/forums/ SI Games are a London games publisher for SEGA best known for Football Manager. We're leveraging AWS S3 bucket transcoding using a custom set up developed by an AWS vendor. The costs associated with transcoding video into a streamable format isn't something we can bring to the other plans.
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We are fortunate to work with some of the worlds biggest brands, such as LEGO, Squarespace, SEGA, Mattel, etc. Working closely with the community managers from these brands allows us to really understand the tools needed to manage and moderate at scale. A lot of the features that have been added over the past few years to all platforms have been driven by these conversations in addition to feedback left on our community. As a company that creates a community platform that can be used from the smallest of new communities to managing thousands of posts a day, there will be some features that we announce that will not be of interest to you. It's absolutely fine to skip past these announcements. We are not going to stop talking to all of our customers when announcing new features.
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We do not have any separate forums for our cloud platform customers. All the forums you can see as a client are all that exist.
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The following languages are supported: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. We are not going to build a simple API because as explained above, pushing and pulling data from AWS services is only a tiny part of the architecture.
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While many in this topic are experienced and capable server administrators, a high number of our customers are not. A good amount of support we manage is to do with CDNs, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc where server configurations are incorrect, the service is badly set up or unsupported versions are used. I'm not here to debate the technical ability of our customers, though. There is more to sentiment analysis than just fetching the numbers from an AI service. What we are interested in are trends over time, and for that we have separate architecture running Python, which is the most efficient language when it comes to raw math, aggregating and making sense of the data which is sent back directly into the cloud platforms database; there is actually very little product code for this reason. Even simple things like pulling the data and sending it to AWS for processing isn't done via CRON or a task, we use a custom task runner within our cloud platform to do it. It's more efficient to develop this way. I realise we haven't spoken much about our cloud platform, but there's more to it than just using the AWS SDK in the product code.
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We're using an AWS service to return sentiment based on the content of the posts. We can then do an average to find the sentiment for the topic. Eventually, we'll look at building out guided moderation features based on this, and concepts such as alerting moderators to topics trending negatively, etc. It's an expensive service, so it'll be a feature on our top tier packages. @Matt Finger has been writing python code on our cloud platform to crunch the numbers and aggregate them so we can view trends over time.
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I understand why you feel like this. For 20 years we've been a downloadable source company and everything has been focused around that. However, we have to move with the times. As people demand more interactivity and sophistication from apps, we need to use technologies outside of a standard "LAMP" stack offered by most self hosting companies. A small number of customers have the ability to set up a PHP server, a MySQL server, a Node server, Redis, and configure authentication systems including WAF and CDN, most do not and when you rent out that much hardware, the cost per month won't be far from one of our platform costs. Social media platforms have increased expectation of what a modern web app can do. Leveraging cloud architecture allows us to develop features that can compete on a UI level. Worth noting that "Sentiment" is only there as we test out the system, that's not final UI. 🤣
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Guys. Sentiment down 10%.
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Good work everyone: Sentiment: [63.5000] Positive | [14.2500] Negative | [7.8750] Neutral
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I adore and love this reply Andy! You are just the best! I love free puppies!! We can literally code a "vibe check" feature now! "Sorry, your post does not pass the vibe check" *opens PHPStorm*
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Now it's just 44% positive. Well done for killing the vibe, guys. Sentiment: [44.0000] Positive | [21.8000] Negative | [11.2000] Neutral
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Sentiment analysis puts this topic and it’s replies as 99% positive. Sentiment: [99.5000] Positive | [0.0000] Negative | [0.5000] Neutral
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Welcome to our April developer's update! This month has seen the developers work on a variety of features coming to our cloud platform, some of which we've been testing here, which include real-time updates on what members are viewing and when they are typing replies and an image scanner which not only identifies what is in the image, it also tags it for search results. Furthermore it can also hold images for moderation if they contain nudity, etc. We've got more to come and will announce them as they are finished. The cloud platform features leverage multiple technologies such as node, JWT security, and AWS specific functionality, enabling us to build pretty impressive new features quickly. As we expect more sophistication and algorithmic crunching from our web apps, we're starting to break out of the PHP and MySQL limitations to deliver forward-thinking features. Of course, we have plenty of new features coming to all platforms, including the self-hosting version; I can talk about a few changes we've made but let's start with some housekeeping. There will not be a full release for May, although we will be releasing several betas throughout the month. We are taking this time to finalise a few bigger changes to our codebase. For those running their own servers, we are updating the minimum PHP requirement to 7.4 and the recommended version to 8.0. If you're not sure which version you currently use, now is a good time to check! We are working on PHP 8.1 compatibility still and are aiming to have that finished for June's release. The list of fixes already in the June release is as follows: Core - Fixed an issue that may prevent attaching audio files to content. - Fixed a minor typo in the forms.css template. - Fixed upload area not showing on minimised editors for guest users. - Fixed an issue where post counts were incremented even when a new item was held for approval via the profanity filters. - Fixed an issue where filters and sort options do not persist between deleting members in the Admin CP. - Fixed an issue where sitemap may show entries from offline applications. - Fixed an issue where support account may show as the latest registered member. - The Editor Preview Button was removed from ACP Editors. - Removed the deprecated FX Country code from the Geolocation class. - Removed the ability to rebuild existing attachment thumbnails due to an incompatibility with content attributes required for lazy-loading. Gallery - Fixed an issue with the followed Gallery Images page. - Fixed an issue with rebuilding thumbnails on legacy communities where the original image may no longer exist. Pages - Added the missing `__indefart_cms_page` language string. - Fixed an issue where sorting by a numerical field could duplicate the option with an incorrect label. - Fixed issue with 'image upload' block carousels not working in the sidebar - Fixed an issue where custom Yes/No fields, when used as a database filter, were ignored when further sorting. Converters - Fixed an issue rebuilding some profile photo images. Commerce - Improved performance when updating a large number of existing purchases. - Removed deprecated Amex Express checkout options. - Fixed a niche issue where a renewal invoice (for manual payment) would not be generated if a PayPal Subscription was cancelled on an active purchase. Calendar - Fixed an issue where the day view wouldn't show today's events when it's being used as the default calendar view. A few items still being finished before being sent for peer review include tweaks to search logging. Andy added the ability to specify which groups to log anonymous search sessions. We got some feedback that bot searches were polluting the results, making it hard to discern search trends from members over time. As we anonymise the search data, we can't pick out specific member groups once it's been written. Andy also moved the search logs to their own page to reduce confusion over what the data represents. Andy has also been working on some activity stream improvements to bring a "Solved/Unsolved" filter option to allow you and your members to find unsolved (or indeed solved) topics quickly. This will require a search index rebuild after upgrading. You may also find a few new hook points added, which are in the following locations: \IPS\Helpers\Form\Upload::populateTempData() This is called from within processUploads and allows you to modify the data before it is saved into core_files_temp. \IPS\applications\forums\modules\front\forums\topic::finishManage() This is called during manage() and allows you to modify the $topic before it is returned to \IPS\Content\Controller. If you have to overload manage() in your apps, you may find this a better hook point. \IPS\Content\Search\Index\indexData now allows $content modification before it is stored via an extension in /applications/{app}/extensions/core/SearchIndex That's it for this month! -
We tend to iterate through releases. We like to get a solid feature out there and see how it fares in the real world. If we take on too much feedback, we’d not ship for months.
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Improving SEO with your community is a hot topic with community managers. Many minor tweaks can move the needle in the right direction, but the most significant changes come with increasing crawl efficiency. I recently wrote about changes we made to Invision Community to improve crawl efficiency. By removing thin content pages and being laser-focused on what you want to be crawled, you present a more efficient site ready for crawling. Crawl depth is another metric that impacts crawl efficiency. The more 'clicks' Google and other search engines have to make to get to your content; the less efficient your site is for crawling. With a community, this can present problems because using forums and child forums segments content and places it an extra click or two away from the home page. Segmenting is ideal when your community has defined content boundaries, but it can mean Google has to work harder to find your content. We introduced a "fluid view" in a past release, which streams all of your community's topics into a single filterable view. This streamed view works well when you have a small number of forums, but it is less valuable when you have a more significant number. Wouldn't it be perfect if you could have a fluid view per forum or category so you can stream the forum's topics with any child forum's topics in a single view? With our latest release, you can do just that! In this example, I have a forum called "Ideation", and there are two child forums. The new feature enabled on a per-forum basis in the AdminCP allows the topics from all three forums to be streamed in a single view. As with the global fluid view mode, your members can toggle the filters to refine which forums you want the stream to include. Showing the topics from multiple forums in a single unified stream is not only helpful for search engines as it reduces the crawl depth, but it also reduces helps your members find valuable content faster. Update (July 14, 2022): You asked and we listened! Thanks to valuable client feedback, we made an update to our fluid view feature included in our latest release, 4.6. To better the user experience, we improved the fluid-mode per forum filters to remove a page reload! We also reversed the filter checkbox status to make it clear which filters are being viewed. The Fluid View updates are available now. We'd love to hear your thoughts below! -
This is our April maintenance release. Key Changes include: Added a per-forum option to show the forum and any sub-forums as one unified "fluid mode" view.
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I'm always interested in what you'd add if you had control of the roadmap. Let's try not to move this into a debate over how feedback is managed. I'm reading every comment, and there's already a good number of items that I've thought about adding so just reading these suggestions helps validate those ideas and allows me a useful insight into what you'd like based on running your communities. I also read the last topic and took away notes. Development can be slow, we have our pipeline mostly filled until summer so it while it may appear that not much is going on, be assured that lots of things are. We are continuing with the monthly releases. Every month we deliver a new update with dozens of bug fixes and feature tweaks/additions. I like this cadence as it makes each release smaller and more manageable.
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If you had a magic wand to create a new feature or functionality within Invision Community, what would it be? I'm especially interested in your thoughts for features or improvements to the discussion engine (aka forums), workflows around that such as moderation, reporting content and members, issuing warnings, etc. Here's a list of updates and fixes from our developers made in the last 7 days:
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That is not right. We have plans for all our current apps. My comment was directed at the idea that we should add in extra functionality to integrate with print on demand services.
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Ok, you can join the band. Want in? If it helps, I was in a Metallica cover band in school.
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Honestly, we want to focus on our strengths and put effort into creating a powerful forum and discussion engine. There are a large number of people that do great cart and fulfilment software. BTW: It's "mee-cham".
