Matt

We've been on a little journey together since we announced the first Invision Community 4.5 feature way back in November 2019. The first feature we announced was a revamped Admin Control Panel interface which created more visual space and brightened it up. Actually, we made it so bright that the first feature request was to add a dark mode (which we did). In the space of three short months, we had spoken about Club improvements, invites and referrals, RSS feed improvements, blog categories, the simple stock photo picker, search insights, security enhancements, user interface updates, new statistic views, and notification improvements. Most will agree that March and April seemed to last months, thanks to a global pandemic. We used these extra days to talk about marking posts as a solution, topic view summary, Zapier integration, forum view updates, post-installation onboarding, private staff notes, page builder widgets, theme designer improvements, a new default theme, language system updates and everything else we missed. We have also revamped the front end user interface to modernise the look and feel but also to introduce new CSS frameworks, variables and other time-saving features our design team have been eager to implement. On the subject of modernisation, we've deprecated some legacy functionality. We've given up trying to make anything look good with IE11 which last saw an update in 2013. We've also deprecated older caching engines like Memcache, APC and Wincache and recommend using Redis instead. The web hosting and domain management features of Commerce are also deprecated as is BBCode. BBCode has its roots in the earliest bulletin-board systems long before rich text editors were common use. It's 2020; we should no longer be asked to type in special codes in square brackets to format text. BBCode is still functional in Invision Community 4.5, but it is likely to be removed in a future version. Now that primary development has finished, we move onto the beta testing stage. This is where you get to try it out and evaluate the new features before scheduling your own upgrades. As always, we do recommend that you only test early betas on staging sites or simple test sites. Many a weekend has been ruined by over-enthusiastic upgrading of live sites; so we don't recommend that. You'll also notice that we're running Invision Community 4.5 on our own site. If you do spot an issue, please let us know in the bug tracker. I've been creating and releasing products for close to twenty years now, and I still get a real buzz out of hitting the release button. It's always a pleasure to see the result of hundreds of hours of coding, dozens of meetings and numerous passionate exchanges among the team. You can access the beta in your client area. We hope you enjoy Invision Community 4.5!

As the deadline slowly comes down, two last feature additions race towards the descending door and slide in underneath with seconds to spare. If you've never seen "Raiders of the Lost Ark", then you probably think this is a weird way to start a blog. As we wrap up development for Invision Community 4.5, we squeezed in two extra features that I want to talk about today. Per Topic Post Approval The first is a way to cool down a heated topic without locking it. Right now you can put an entire forum on post-approval. This means that moderators must review and approve all new posts before they are allowed to be publicly displayed. As of Invision Community 4.5, you can now choose to set a single topic to post-approval regardless of the forum setting. This is a great way to let a topic cool off but still receive new replies to review before adding to the topic. Club Terms and Conditions The ways that clubs are used throughout the many communities that run Invision Community are becoming increasingly varied. A popular request is to allow members to agree to a set of club-specific terms and conditions before they can contribute to the club. Invision Community 4.5 now allows the club owner to set up its own terms and conditions. You can optionally enforce that members agree to them before continuing. That's it for feature announcements. We're excited to be closing development on Invision Community 4.5 and move towards a beta in the coming weeks.

If your brand sells a product or service, the first thing that comes to mind as a benefit to building your community is support deflection. And it's easy to see why. It's something you can quickly calculate an ROI for. Let's say every 20 hits to a public question with a solved answer from a client or team member equates to one less ticket. If a ticket costs $10 to solve on average, it's straightforward to see the value by calculating deflected tickets. Let's say your busy public support community had 20,000 hits a month; you've just saved $200,000 a month in support costs. Great! But before you finish there, I want you to consider the rewards a brand community can offer. A public support desk isn't a community. It's likely most of your customers join because of an issue with your product. They tap in some keywords on Google and come across your site. They see a bunch of solved questions like theirs, and they either get the fix and bounce out, or post and wait for a reply. With nothing to get them to come back, once they have the answer they'll likely bounce out then and only come back when they hit a new problem. That's not a community. A community is a place where people return multiple times to collaborate, learn and grow together. "[A brand community is] a group of people who share an identity and a mutual concern for one another's welfare - who participate in shared experiences that are shaped by a brand." - Carrie Melissa Jones For that, you need to look beyond the support desk and expand into more use cases, and there are compelling reasons to do this. Shared experiences Allowing your customers to share their experiences with your products can lead to unique brand stories that reinforce bonds between members and creates social solidarity in the community. A few years ago, I remember reading a post on a travel community. A family were flying with Delta and their son who has autism was becoming more and more distressed with the change in routine for that day. A Delta employee saw this and came and spoke with the family, helped settle the boy and ensured they boarded early to avoid the crush of passengers. It's a small moment of kindness that wouldn't make headlines, but it was very memorable for this family; enough so that they posted about it. This post had numerous replies in praise for the airline and no doubt made many of them think of Delta when booking their next flight. "[Social solidarity is] not just passive tolerance but felt concern for what is individual and particular about the other person." - Alex Honneth "The Struggle for Recognition" All those stories, connections and moments build social capital and loyalty for your brand. Feedback Your customers are already talking about your product. Some of it will be good, and some of it won't be good. They are already talking about it on social media, and in numerous communities, they belong to. If you do not have space within your community for your customers to leave feedback, then you're missing out on a massive benefit. You get a chance to address negative feedback before it spills out further into the public domain. Likewise, positive feedback makes for compelling customer success stories. Feedback is a great way to crowdsource innovation and to guide sales and marketing on how your customers are using your products and where the gaps are. Owning your niche Allowing space for conversations relating to your product makes good sense. If you sold a fitness tracker, then it makes good sense to have areas for discussions revolving around wellness areas such as sleep, diet and exercise. Likewise, a mobile phone network will do well having areas related to the various brands of mobile phones. "There is status that comes from community. It is the status of respect in return for contribution for caring for seeing and being in sync with others. Especially others with no ability to repay you." - Seth Godin Creating these spaces encourages return visits beyond direct support for the product. Those return visits are what makes your community a community.

We started talking about Invision Community 4.5 way back in November of last year. Now, less than six months later, it's ready for you to test. While we put the finishing touches to a few features, we have set up a preview site so you can test out the new features, leave your feedback and make a note of any bugs you spot. Head over now to the Invision Community Alpha test site. Please be aware that this test site is running in 'development mode' so it is automatically updated with the latest fixes throughout the day. This means it has to work extra hard on each click as there are no caches, pre-built languages or templates to use, so it will be a lot slower than a production version. So please don't worry about it being a touch slow, and definitely don't try and run Page Speed analysis tools on the alpha site! You can read about the headline features over in our product updates blog. Let us know what you think!

We have announced a lot of new things coming soon with Invision Community 4.5. Most of these are pretty big new features worth a blog on their own. However, we've made a lot of smaller changes that may not deserve their own blog but still have a significant impact. Let's run through some of those. Performance Improvements For every major release, we take some time to run through the code and look at ways to make Invision Community run more efficiently. For Invision Community 4.5, we've made node forms, sitemaps and commonly run SQL queries more efficient, which is excellent news for you and your users who get reduced server load and a snappier community. TikTok Embed Although it confuses me greatly, TikTok has taken the internet by storm. We have added it to the embed list so pasting a TikTok share link automatically shows the video ready to play in the comment. A TikTok Upload Chunking Uploading large files can be tricky. Typically trying to push a large file to a server results in timeouts, memory issues and eventually frustration. We have added chunked uploading when using S3. Put simply; this uploads part of the file at a time to prevent memory issues and the server timing out waiting for the upload to finish. View Members by Rank Very recently, we were asked how you can view all members in the ACP of a specific rank. It turned out you couldn't. This quick change was added into Invision Community 4.5. Showing members with a specific rank in the AdminCP Download Statistics While Invision Community 4.5 has new and improved statistic displays, a common request was to be able to download the raw data. This is now possible. Export stats as a CSV Downloads In Invision Community 4.5, when you require approval of new versions of files submitted to Downloads, the original version will no longer be hidden from view. We've added a new flow for moderators to approve these new versions. Live Meta Tag Editor Invision Community 4.5 seemed like a great time to run through this feature and tweak the functionality to make it more useful. Now it's possible to remove default meta tags, and it's easier to remove custom tags. Closed Tag Autocomplete When using the closed tag system where a user can select from one of your preset tags, we have added a search box to make it easier to find a single tag from a list of potentially hundreds. EU Tax Support in Commerce Tax doesn't have to be taxing! But it generally is. Countries within the EU often have complex tax rates. Commerce now supports multiple tax rates for consumers, businesses and EU VAT-registered businesses. That concludes our mini round-up of all the things we've not talked about yet. Let me know which one you're looking forward to most!

Invision Community introduced drag and drop widgets many years ago. These widgets allowed anyone to add blocks to existing views, and to build up entirely new pages. These widgets were great for quickly adding content to a page, but they weren't incredibly customizable. For Invision Community 4.5, we've added three new Page Builder widgets which allow you a little more control. For an overview of this new feature, please take a look at the video below. As you can see, these new widgets offer a lot of customization without the need to code any CSS or HTML. You can add background colours and images, adjust padding and borders and even add colour overlays right from the widget menu. The new Page Builder widget options Blandness be gone! Now you can let your creativity loose on your pages and all other views that have the drag and drop zones. I'd love to know what you think of this new feature; please let me know below!

Managing a community as a team makes internal communication an essential part of its successful management. There are times where you want to leave notes for other staff on specific topics that you're watching. Perhaps a member is close to breaking the rules, or it might be that you want to keep the topic focused and on point so wish to split off-topic posts into a different area. Whatever the reason, Invision Community 4.5 adds the ability to leave private staff notes on topics. For some time, Invision Community has had the ability for staff to leave public notes. Now, in 4.5, staff can choose between public and private notes. This change was made based on customer feedback, so thank you! We do read and listen to all the feedback you leave. Who is looking forward to Invision Community 4.5? Let us know below!

Invision Community has had different view modes for a good number of years. Forum grid view was added to create some visual interest when listing forums, and we've had expanded and condensed view modes in streams since they were introduced. We've taken both of these views a step further in Invision Community 4.5 Forum Grid View To create even more visual interest, the grid view now allows you to upload, or choose a stock image for the header. This instantly makes for a more dynamic and inviting forum list. The new grid view image headers You can choose an image from the Admin CP when creating or editing a forum. Choose a stock photo, or upload your own Topic List View For the topic list view, we have taken inspiration from our stream view options to introduce a new 'expanded' view mode, which displays a snippet of the first post. The new expanded topic list mode This immediately entices you to engage with the topic because you can read part of the post without having to click inside to see if it interests you. This is controlled via the Admin CP, where you can choose the default view, or turn off the new view completely. Other Changes You may notice a few other subtle changes in these screenshots. The first is that we now included the follower count as a metric on both the forum grid view and the topic expanded view modes. The number of followers is usually a good indicator of how others perceive the value of the content. A higher follower count generally means a more engaging topic or forum. You can also see that we've switched to a short number format to keep the displays clean. Instead of say, "2,483 posts", it will merely say "2.5k posts". Reducing visual clutter is always crucial to maintaining a clean user interface. We hope that you find these new view modes useful and that they make your community even more vibrant!

A topic is more than a collection of posts; it's a living entity that ebbs and flows over time. Evergreen topics can see month-long gaps between posts and longer topics spanning numerous pages can end up hard to navigate through to find useful content. With this in mind, we've added numerous improvements to the topic view to bring context and summaries key areas within the topic. Topic view updates Topic Activity The first thing you likely spotted in the above screenshot is the new sidebar. This acts much like a summary of activity within the topic. It very quickly lets you know how old the topic is and how long it has been since the last reply. This context is essential if you are unwittingly replying to an older topic. Most topics are driven by a handful of key members. The topic activity section shows you who have been most active, which may influence which posters you give greater authority to. Likewise, popular days lets you dig into the 'meat' of the topic which may have evolved quickly over several days. More often than not, a single post attracts more reactions if it is particularly helpful or insightful, and this is shown too. Finally, a mini gallery of all upload images allows you to review media that has been attached to posts. The topic activity summary under the first post This activity bar can be shown either as a sidebar or underneath the first post in a topic. If you enable it for mobile devices, then it will show under the first post automatically. The topic activity summary on mobile As with many new features in Invision Community, you have several controls in the Admin CP to fine-tune this to your communities needs. AdminCP settings Other improvements The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted a few other changes to the topic view. The first is the badge underneath the user's photo. The shield icon notes that this poster is part of the moderation team. Of course, this badge can be hidden for communities that do not like to draw attention to all their moderators. You will also notice that when the topic starter makes a reply to a topic, they get an "author" badge as their reply may carry more authority. When you scroll down a topic, it's not often apparent that there has been a significant time gap between replies. For some topical topics (see what I did there) this may alter the context of the conversation. We have added a little identifier between posts when a period of time has passed between posts. These changes add a little context to the topic to give you more insight into how the replies direct the conversation. The new topic activity summary gives you an at-a-glance overview of key moments and posters to help you navigate longer topics. We hope that you and your members enjoy these new features coming to Invision Community 4.5!

We are currently living through one of the most turbulent times in history. A once-in-a-century pandemic has a grip on all of us. Whatever the outcome, come the end of the year, few of us are going to be the same again. We will have to sacrifice our personal freedoms, and some of us much more. Like you, I'm worried about my family, my friends and neighbours. I'm watching the news, scrolling through social media and consuming articles from scientists, scholars and doctors. The news coming out of Italy is truly heartbreaking. Doctors and nurses have to make life and death decisions daily as they wage war with the virus. Those of us in the UK and the USA are nervously watching the graphs climb in lockstep of Italy from just a few weeks ago. It would be easy to succumb to fear and withdraw completely. But as community leaders, we cannot. Let us take some inspiration from the brave people of Italy who have suffered much with an overstretched health care system and enforced quarantine yet still sing from their apartments in a display of resolve. In a time where we have to remain apart, we must come together. We have to keep showing up and leading. We must focus on what we still have and not what is being taken away. Now more than ever, we are needed to keep the world connected. To bring comfort; to support and to love each other. This year is going to test every one of us. But whatever comes our way, I know that we are stronger together. "Their faithful and zealous comradeship would almost between night and morning clear the path of progress and banish from all our lives the fear which already darkens the sunlight to hundreds of millions of men." Winston Churchill

The news is currently filled with anxiety over coronavirus and workers are being encouraged to work from home where possible to limit or delay its spread. For many people used to commuting daily and working in shared offices, this is a huge upheaval which will take a while to adjust. How do you stay motivated and productive when you're not at your desk and held accountable by your colleagues next to you? Remote working has become popular over the last few years. The internet has transformed how we work, and improvements to connection speeds, authentication systems and cloud architecture make working home a viable alternative for many office workers. Working from home certainly doesn't suffer the same stigma it did years ago when it was synonymous with sleeping in late, daytime TV binges and excessive time in pyjamas. A good number of years ago, I was getting my hair cut. It was about 11 am on a weekday, and we had the usual small talk as she attempted to tame my unruly mop. The question I was waiting for dropped a moment later "so, is this your day off?" My reply was that I work from home so have some flexibility in my day. Usually, this gets a nod, and we move onto the weather. I'd not met this hairdresser before. She processed my reply, stopped snipping and locked eyes with me via the mirror. "Do you really work from home, or is that you don't have a job?" Fears over reduced productivity from remote workers have proved to be unfounded. A large-scale experiment was conducted with 16,000 employees of a Chinese call centre. Workers were randomly assigned to either work from home or at the office for nine months. The home workers enjoyed a 13% performance increase due to fewer breaks and sick days. At Invision Community we not only make a product designed to bring people together online, but a good number of us also work remotely. Our HQ is in Virginia, USA but we have team members in the UK, Europe and Australia. Remote working allows us to hire the best people we can find, and not just those who are within a few miles of our HQ. I spoke with our team to get their tips and strategies for working from home and still getting work done. Rikki, lead UI designer Get out of the house every day It's easy to fall into the trap of being a hermit for days on end. Particularly in the summer, I like to take a walk to get lunch every single day. It gives me a chance to get some fresh air, a little exercise and most importantly get away from my office properly (instead of just being in the next room, which doesn't feel like it's really taking a break). Don't take your work home downstairs with you Another easy trap to fall into is working every waking hour because you're always 'at work'. Set fixed work start/end times and stick to them. Leave your office at the end of the day and consider the work finished. If you do need to hop back to work later because something cropped up, go back to your desk to put yourself in work mode - don't be tempted to start working from the sofa. Olivia, Customer Success Manager Organize your workspace You may not be lucky enough to be able to repurpose a dedicated room in the house, but that doesn't mean you can't find a good spot to work from. Choose a place that is free of clutter and well lit. Organize your work I'm a big fan of to-do lists. Keeping my lists organized helps me stay on track and prevents me from drifting too far from what's important. I like the "To Do versus To Get Done concept." Organize yourself Plan in breaks away from your screen. There's always one more email to write, but setting times to take a break is vital to keeping your energy and focus. Working from home means that you cannot rely on others to remind you! Check-in often with teammates At Invision Community, we use Slack to keep in touch and recreate the 'water cooler' moments where we discuss our favourite TV shows, movies and more. Reframe "my office is always open" to "I'm always available for a call". Remind your colleagues often that they can start a voice call if they need to talk. Stuart, developer and migration specialist Minimize human distractions When you're working from home, it's easy to get distracted, especially by other people! Remind your family and friends that during your work hours you're working. As much as you'd love to spend the day drinking tea (or beverage of your choice) and chatting, you do have a job. Stuart's work area How we do it There's no doubt that we're fortunate to have a team that is self-motivated and responsible. Remote working can allow individuals to drift, and productivity suffers. We use a combination of software platforms and a few simple strategies to keep us all informed, organized and feeling part of a greater team. We use Slack to not only onboard new clients, but also to organize product development, feedback and support. These channels are well used, but without a doubt, our 'general' channel is used the most. This is where we hang out socially and chat during our breaks. It's easy to see this as unproductive or distracting, but I feel that it helps build us as a team and helps forge relationships with each other. We use a private Invision Community as an intranet hub which does the heavy lifting for organizing releases. It also acts as a repository for feedback, new feature ideas and development discussions. We encourage breakout groups to voice call to resolve hot topics and pressing issues. It's amazing what you can get done in a few minutes by voice. We hold a stand up voice meeting weekly where we organize the week, discuss anything pressing and run through development tasks. This call is developer-focused, but it's held company-wide, so it is inclusive. We try and avoid human information silos where possible. Daniel's workstation Above all, just keep talking It's just as important to share your personality as it is your work. Make sure you check in on quiet colleagues to make sure they're OK. Not everyone is super-chatty, and some prefer to switch off and focus. However, it's easy to feel a real sense of loneliness and isolation if you don't have a partner or family living with you. It's essential to put effort into maintaining relationships online. Working remotely means less interaction with your colleagues, and it's easy for multifaceted personalities to become a flattened disembodied persona online. Without the office 'vibe' and body language cues we often take for granted, it's easy to lose that personal connection. Build depth by asking how your colleagues weekends were. Ask about their hobbies and pets. Work at keeping a connection with the person behind the computer. In our team we have little sub-groups that focus on our hobbies. There's the running/workout club where we share our training plans and give each other virtual high-fives. I've actually found it easier to stick to a running plan knowing that my colleague is running too (and beating my times!). If you only take one thing away from this, maintaining strong relationships with your team is key! If your team isn't keen on video calling, then make sure you voice call regularly. I can't stress how important it is to verbally talk to your colleagues. We start each call off with some light hearted chat and listening to the inflections in other's voices and have them laugh at your silly jokes recharges your soul. Take advantage of technology Apart from using Invision Community as a hub and company-wide information repository, there's a lot of apps you can use to make your work time more productive and avoid the constant distractions partners and children rattling about the house can cause. I work from home and have two young children. School holidays can be challenging when the house comes alive during the day, and there's a constant stream of potential distractions. I use "focus music" with noise-cancelling headphones when I want to knuckle down and write code or blog articles. Right now, my kids are at school, and I'm listening to Metallica at an unreasonable volume through my Homepod speaker. For some reason, loud metal music helps me concentrate. There are only so many power chords you can take, and I've found Brain.fm to be very useful. Brain.fm uses "neural phase-locking" via music to help you focus. I have no idea what that means, but it does help me get into the zone on days where I struggle with productivity. I have the attention span of an anxious squirrel. It can take me a long while to get into the zone and mere seconds to pop back out. When I'm writing code, it's less of a problem. I just put on Brain.fm or some music, and I get lost in time and space as I build complex constructs in my mind before bringing it together in my code editor. However, when I'm writing articles, helping support, hopping between tasks, or doing general administration work, I rely on a Pomodoro timer. The idea is that you work in sprints of 25 minutes, followed by a short break, usually 5 minutes. You repeat this cycle four times and take a longer break. Many apps can track your time in this way, including web-based tools such as the amusingly named Tomato Timer. Using this technique helps me get into the flow by giving me "permission" to take breaks but only once the work block has finished. I might pop out of focus and think about checking up on our community or Facebook and get back to work when I realize I've still got 12 minutes of work left. Where I work. Can you guess my favourite TV show? Work/life balance doesn't exist You'll often hear people talk about their work/life balance. You are better off thinking in terms of work/life integration. Now, I'm not suggesting that you work all day and night. I'm not one of those "sleep when you're dead" people. I like to sleep. I have a partner and two kids I want to enjoy and passions outside of my computer (although my guitars are gathering dust again). The reality is that when your workstation is just a door away from the rest of your life, you're going to work outside of the traditional 9-5 routine despite how rigorous you may want to define a working day. This might be because you took the morning off to watch your kid's school play or you may have booked a haircut during the day as it's much quieter. My advice would be to look for pockets of time that won't impact the rest of your family or free time. I tend to earmark an hour once the kids have gone to bed as potential "work overflow" time. This allows me to integrate my work schedule with my home schedule without it taking over my life. Avoid Coffeeshops Working with your laptop in a coffeeshop is a massive cliché. Every single time I've walked into Starbucks, there have been dozens of people at tables squinting at laptop screens. It's an attractive idea. You get to mingle with fellow humans. You get a change of scenery and a decent cup of coffee. You also get a constant source of distractions, poor quality and insecure Wi-Fi and sideways glances from staff who'd love to free up your table. Also, what do you do with your laptop when you need a restroom break? Do you take it with you? What if someone sits at your table while you're gone? It's just not for me. Jim's work area Exercise and movement I won't lecture you about health and fitness, but I do want to highlight one downside of having no commute and office building to move through: being super-sedentary. If you used to clock up 10,000 steps walking to the train station, walking to your office and then clocking up steps as you moved between meeting rooms and social areas, then expect that number to drop sharply. There are days where my Apple Watch tells me I've done less than 1500 steps during the day. To combat this, I make time during the day to go for a walk or to exercise. I'm fortunate that I have a treadmill in the garage along with some weight lifting equipment. If you don't have any equipment, then a short walk is better than nothing. As a bonus, you'll get some fresh air and vitamin D from the sun. I also have a standing desk so that I can get on my feet during the day and an exercise bike I can use while working with the desk at its highest position. Find ways to incorporate movement into your day for your own mental and physical health. Conclusion Despite the many challenges working remotely can cause and the learning curve of taking your work home, the vast majority prefer to work from home. In a study of 100 remote workers, only six said they'd return to the office if given a chance. If you're new to working remotely, then there will be mistakes. There will be days when you feel that you've achieved very little and probably yearn for some human interaction and be told what to do next. It's all part of the process. Keep lines of communication open, check in on your colleagues and embrace the freedom working remotely gives.

Invision Community has had a question and answer mode for a good few years now. This mode transforms a forum into a formalized way to handle your member's questions. Members can upvote answers, and the topic starter and your community management team can mark a reply as the "best answer". This is great when you want to add rigour to specific forums which encourage your members to find solutions. The existing "QA" mode But how about a way to mark a topic as solved without transforming the look and feel of the forum? We get asked this a lot. Happily, it's now a feature just added to Invision Community 4.5! Those with a long memory will recall we had something very similar way back in Invision Community 3. The new "mark as solved" feature This new feature allows the topic starter or your community management team to mark a post as the solution. This highlights the post within the topic as well as adding an icon to the listing views. The green tick notes that the topic has a solution In addition, it also increases the member's solved count, which is displayed under their name in the post and even in a draggable widget that shows members with the most solutions. We have also added a new filter to the existing post and topic feed widgets to allow only items with a solution to be shown, so you can create a "Recently solved" feed. The new widget Finally, a notification is sent to the author of the post that is selected as the best answer, so they're made aware that their helpful content has been spotted. Let your members know their content was useful We hope you enjoy these changes and look forward to allowing your community to find answers quickly, and to reward the members that provide them.

Notifications are a crucial feature in enticing members back to your community to read updates and post their replies. It makes sense that there should be as little friction as possible when setting up notifications. We want to encourage members to enable notifications relevant to them. The current notifications form in Invision Community is functional but overwhelming and confusing for new members. Thankfully, we have simplified it to make it clear what notifications are available and which you have enabled currently. This new settings page also includes support for our new mobile app and links to remove all email notifications. Notification Emails Notification emails are essential to re-engage a member. However, we found that when the email contained all of the post content return visits were not as frequent because the email provided all the information the member needed. In Invision Community 4.5, we've added an option to truncate the content of the email to encourage curious return visits and to reduce the chance that a confused member will attempt to post a reply via the email! What does the rest say?! Download's Notifications To receive notifications of new file updates it was previously necessary to follow files. This meant that you would also be notified of reviews and comments even if they were of no interest to you. From 4.5 we have added a separate button (send me version updates) so you have more control over the notifications you receive. Send me version updates We've plenty of new features yet to announce for Invision Community 4.5, but improvements to common features make our lives a little easier and are just as welcome! Are you looking forward to finally making sense of notification choices? Let us know below!