Matt

We're thrilled to announce that Invision Community 4.4 is available to download now. After months of development, over 1650 separate code commits and quite a few mugs of questionable coffee you can now get your hands on the beta release from the client centre. Not our office Invision Community 4.4 brings numerous new features, over 450 bug fixes and a lot of refinement. We've been talking about the highlights since September on our blog. Here's a recap of all that we've added. We'd love to know which is your favourite feature so far! Drop a line below and let us know!

We attach a significant amount of personally identifiable data to our social media profiles daily. I regularly use social media to share photos of my kids and holidays. I post my personal thoughts on products I've used and TV shows I've watched. I'm even tagged in location-based check-ins. It's all there in my news feed for anyone to see. I'm not alone. More and more of us live our lives through the prism of social media. We share things we love, things we loathe and things that make us laugh. With just a few clicks, you can discover a lot of information about a person. More often than not, you can see where they work, where they live and what school they went to. Scrolling through their timeline often reveals their stance on hot topics such as gun control, the current President and other recent headline news items. This information follows you when you join a Facebook Group. Your past Tweets are always available to trawl through. Indeed, there may be some groups that you decide you cannot post in as people would be able to identify you. This is particularly true for stigmatised conditions, such as financial help, illness and mental health. After all, if you were seeking help with a large amount of debt or managing an embarrassing medical condition, you wouldn't feel comfortable knowing that work colleagues, friends and family could read your posts. The benefit of anonymity for stigmatised topics "Forums can all offer some initial anonymity, a community, and information that geographically proximate others may not have. What stigma-related forums uniquely offer is that the anonymity protects those who are not ready to be publicly associated with sensitive topics; the community helps to neutralise the “spoilage” of identity that accompanies stigma." (1) Unlike social media where reams of personal data is willingly added, and which can identify you to other online users, forums allow you to add as much information as you are comfortable with. Support communities for mental health and illness flourish using forums for this reason. An individual may feel devalued in society and unwilling to share their condition over social media. "Nowadays people can both avoid and proactively cope with this devaluation by turning to online forums populated by others who share the same devalued group membership." (1) Forums offer a safe space for these individuals to seek and receive support from others without disclosing large amounts of identifiable data. Allowing a level of anonymity encourages more people to register and over time, they will develop ties with other users. For an individual with a stigmatized condition, a forum may be a real life-line in coping with the condition as face-to-face support is often limited. Adrial Dale, who owns Herpes Opportunity agrees. "In order for us to truly be able to work through the shame that stigma can trigger, it's absolutely vital for us to feel safe to open up and tell all. Through opening up, we not only get to share with an understanding and compassionate community (which normalizes our shared experiences), but we're also able to begin to release what has felt like our own solitary burden to bear. Then a magical thing can happen ... an alchemical process that transforms shame into an opportunity for connection. An opportunity for us to be accepted for who we are *behind* the thick wall of shame. And ultimately, an opportunity to accept ourselves. Especially in these days of the internet not feeling so private (even in places where it absolutely should be), having true privacy and anonymity is paramount for communities like Herpes Opportunity. Anything other than that is grounds for paranoia and holding back from sharing ourselves. (In fact, just the other day someone messaged me asking "Are private messages really private?") Fear can lead to closing ourselves off, which can lead to isolation and paranoia, which can lead to a downward spiral of self-loathing and depression. On the other hand, safety, connection and compassion creates an an okayness with the nitty-grittiness of what it means to be human." The benefit of expressing a new identity "People may strategically express identities when they think they will not be punished, and/or connect them to an audience that is valued." (1) It is arguably true that not so many years ago, tech-related communities were very much male-dominated, with female contributions valued less. Forums allow a way to create a new identity that is either gender-neutral thus allowing the male users to assume a gender, or overtly male to ensure their contributions are evaluated on merit, and not with any gender bias. Christopher Marks who owns Nano-Reef has seen this first hand. "During a discussion with a women’s group in our generally male dominant hobby, a number of women had expressed the benefit of having an anonymous username and profile when asking for help and advice on forums, they receive equal help without the unfortunate gender bias or belittling that can sometimes happen in real life when seeking the same help in person." Invision Community's Jennifer has also experience of this on her own community; RPG Initiative. "RPG Initiative is a community for all roleplayers. We focus on all text-based roleplaying forms that are hosted on the internet. We encourage roleplayers to find each other, discuss roleplay and grow as collaborative writers here at the Initiative in a safe environment." Jennifer relies on, and encourages anonymity. She knows that because her site is predominately female, some female users identify as male to increase the chances of getting others to collaborate with them. "Male players are rare, in fact, I recently ran a poll on my site and of those that responded to it less than 15% of them are male (or identify as such). So this gets them more attention and in turn, more people that want to write with them." Jennifer explains how anonymity is critical to her site's growth. "Anonymity is a difficult thing to accomplish in a small niche like mine, but it's sort of like a small town where everyone knows everyone, and they likely know all of your secrets. So enforcing rules to preserve anonymity is really important to my community and me. This includes prohibiting the "naming of names" or the "site" that the drama is coming from when seeking for advice or help. This doesn't negate that people may know the existing situation or people involved because they are also involved or know some of the people involved, but it helps cut down on the drama and the spread of negativity and false information about people." With a forum community, you can truly be who you want to be. This is not so with social media where others can create bias based on your gender, looks or topical preferences. Together, together "In her early work, Turkle argued that the internet provided myriad positive opportunities for self-transformation, but more recently, she argues that the explosion in social media options has led us to develop superficial, emotionally lazy but instantly available virtual relationships." (1) It's hard to argue against this statement when you consider the content that predominates social media. And often an endless stream of self-focused content. "Indeed, we provide clear evidence that online forums afford users a way of being genuinely “together, together”, as opposed to what Turkle calls “alone together.”(1) The bottom line is that it has been proven that allowing a degree on anonymity increases engagement across all niches, but especially those that are built to support those with stigmatised conditions. These forums have a greater sense of community and depth than those built on social media. When you allow your members to take back control of their privacy, you are empowering them to make decisions about what to share. Given how eroded our privacy is in our modern always-connected world, this is a precious gift. If you are looking to create a new community then consider this before choosing your community platform. References: 1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321500268X 2: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10410236.2017.1339370

Do you want to take our latest release for a test drive? You already are! We've upgraded our own community for wider testing. A big focus has been on page speed, so you will notice that our community is significantly faster that it was on 4.3 If you need a recap of what was added, take a look at our product updates blog which takes you through the highlights. As this is a pre-beta release, expect some funkiness as we scurry around and tidy up our custom theme wrapper and other areas as we spot them. If you you find a bug, we'd love for you to report it with as much detail as you can muster in the bug report area. We'd love to know what you think, let us know below.

Famously, all Maria Carey wants for Christmas, is you. This is great news if you're a Maria Carey fan. As the holiday season draws closer and our staff chat channel turns to egg nog, twinkly lights and why is wrapping so hard, we asked the question: What would you like for Christmas? Brandon With so many children, Christmas is more focused on them and the family than myself. My eldest son who started college this year just returned home for the holiday season yesterday which has been awesome. You don't realize how it's like a piece of you is missing until they're back. I guess you could call that a Christmas present for me. Also, my wife and I took a quick 2 day cruise to the Bahamas as a gift to ourselves. My children have not requested very much for Christmas this year either, so my wife and I have decided we're going to plan a trip to Disney/Orlando for some time later in 2019 as a family gift instead of focusing on a bunch of little toys the kids will quickly get bored with. The family time together is the best Christmas gift to me. Awww Mark H In truth, what I’d like for Christmas isn’t something Sanata could provide. At my age I already have most of the “things” I simply want, and the things I really *need* I already have; family and friends. But… I wouldn’t object to Santa dropping off a new gaming computer with a motherboard for an Intel core i9, an RTX 2080 Ti video card, 16 GB of RAM, and one or two NVME SSD’s. Me too Andy I’ve been trying to de-clutter my life for most of the year so hopefully I won’t get much in the way of stocking fillers and things that are fun for a few days and then pushed in a drawer. I’m not a total Scrooge though, honest. I’m really looking forward to spending time with family and friends, Christmas Day walks in the snow and coming home to a toasty warm fire and a few beers… just the simple things really. Marc S I think you get to the point with Christmas where presents become largely unimportant, and its more a time for family to get together and have fun etc. But I guess if I'm going to choose anything particular that I know I would use, I would probably go for a new iMac pro with all the extras. LOL. Seriously though, I'm happy with the break, a few drinks and games. This is what Christmas is all about. Lost a couple of family members over the past 12 month, and unfortunately none of us live forever. Brings home the realisation that there is more to life than material items, as much as we all enjoy them. Where's My Computer? Jennifer I don't really celebrate Christmas traditionally in my house. Like almost everyone in my house has already gotten all of their Christmas gifts. I would probably want just a quiet night with a long hot bath, my favorite bath bomb and a glass of wine. She really does How I became a cliche mom that wants bath stuff for presents. I have no idea. I'd likely love to get Metro Exodus pre-order. I know my BF doesn't pre-order games anymore because of some of the new pre-order issues with games with un-dedicated developers but it's a game I am excited for and hope to have come February when it comes out. Rhett A week in Hawaii, no phone, no computer, feet in the sand and a beer in my hand! Is that too much to ask for Santa? I've been good. Jim I'd say world peace but I think a 2019 Chevy Corvette ZR1 would be easier! Mark Wade A couple good bottles of wine, or I'd also quite like a new iPad Pro. Not relevant but made me laugh Matt Like others here at Invision Community, I've reached the grand old age where material possessions aren't what I long for. I'm happy watching my two children open their gifts on Christmas morning and then share a meal with family. Or maybe a new iPad Pro because if Mark is getting one, I want one too. Yet again Charles and Lindy declined to comment, so in the spirit of Christmas generosity, I've written their answers for them. Charles I would like a butler because it is what I deserve. Lindy I would like a panic room like in that Jodie Foster movie. I don't think for a second I'm going to be attacked in my own home. I just need a place to hide from the kids now and again. I'll kit it out with fresh kombucha, artisanal popcorn and poetry books. I'll be happy for hours. So, that is what we want for Christmas. What about you? Have you been naughty or nice?

I really enjoy writing about the new features the development team have been slaving over for weeks (and sometimes months.) It's a real joy to be able to share the finished product after we've seen it through inception, discussion, planning, assigning to a developer, coding, peer reviewing and final group testing. Although sometimes, the features can be explained in a few screenshots, which makes for a pretty thin blog entry. With that in mind, I've grouped together 6 of the best new micro-features for Invision Community 4.4. Browser notifications We introduced browser notifications in a previous version of Invision Community. Once you've opted in to receive them, you'll get a fancy browser notification when new content is posted while you're off browsing other sites. However, the browser prompt to ask for permission to push notifications isn't subtle, and it attacks you the second you log in for the first time. In Invision Community 4.4, we've made it, so you're only asked to opt-in once you open the notification drop down. No more being attacked by a permission dialog Widget display settings One of the most popular features we've added to the front end in recent times is the drag and drop widgets. We see these used on almost every site we visit. A popular request, though, was to be able to hide them from specific devices. By default, the sidebars appear under the main content when viewed on a smaller device such as a phone. There may be times where you wish to show a block for those on tablets and desktops, but remove it for phones, so it doesn't take up precious retail space. Happily, you can now do this on each block with 4.4. Desktop only? Club Navigation Clubs are relatively new to Invision Community but they incredibly popular as they allow you to run micro-communities within your main community. You're not limited to just forums either; you can add gallery albums and more to each club. We've added the ability to re-arrange the club tabs allowing you to prioritise what you members see first. Rearranging club tabs Announcement URLS Announcements have been a core feature for a long time now. We use them whenever we have a holiday so we can notify our customers about reduced support on those days. We've made it so you can now link to an item, rather than have to provide new copy for each announcement. We may have overdone it a bit Time Frame selector We noticed that in numerous areas around the Admin CP we had time input boxes. These would sometimes be used for seconds, minutes, hours and even days. We've seen customers forced to enter things like 86400 seconds when they want the time frame to last a day. The lack of consistency wasn't great either. In Invision Community 4.4, we've added a new Time Frame selector which is used as standard on all areas we ask for a time frame to be entered. No more taking your socks off to work out how many seconds in a month. Time is no longer relative Group Name Styling For about as long as I can remember (and as I get older, this is not an impressive amount of time), we've allowed group names to be stylized when shown in the online user list. A very popular request is to extend that same group highlighting throughout the suite. Finally, Invision Community 4.4 brings this to the suite. If the group name is visible, that gets the styling, otherwise the name does These features may be micro in nature, but we hope they make a significant improvement to your community. Which are you most looking forward to? Drop a comment below and let us know.

It's easy to think that email is a relic from the past; from simpler times long before social media and the rise of phone apps. And it's reasonable to think that way. Your phone constantly pings at you, and your laptop OS constantly pings at you, so why bother with email? Because it's still a hugely powerful medium to get and retain attention. In 2017, over 269 billion emails were sent and received per day. Of those, 3,360,250,000 are opened, read, and a link clicked. Email is still very much a critical tool in your quest for retention. Invision Community knows this. We have options to notify members of replies by email, weekly or monthly digests by email and members can opt-in for bulk emails sent from your community team. Given how important email is, it was only fair that we invested in some love for our email system for 4.4. Email Statistics Just above, I mention that 269 billion emails are sent, and 3.4 billion are opened, read and clicked. How many emails are sent from your Invision Community daily? (No cheating and checking with SendGrid) You probably have no idea as we didn't record email statistics. As of Invision Community 4.4 we do! Chart showing the number of emails sent daily We now track emails sent, and the number of link clicks inside those emails. Email Advertisements Email notifications are a powerful way to get your members to revisit your community. The member welcomes these emails as it means they have new replies to topics they are interested in reading. While you have your member's attention, you have an opportunity to show them a banner-style advertisement. The new email advertisement form When creating a new email advert, you can choose to limit the advert to specific areas such as topics, blogs, etc. - and even which forums to limit by. Subliminal messages This is a new way to reach your audience with your promotions. Unfollow without logging in Despite spending most of this blog entry shouting the virtues of email, it's inevitable that one or two members may wish to stop receiving notification emails. In previous versions, the unfollow link would have taken you to a login page if you were signed out. For members that haven't been back in a while, this may cause some annoyance if they do not recall their login details. Invision Community 4.4 allows non-logged in members to unfollow the item they received an email about or all followed items without the need to log in. You no longer need to log in to unfollow items Respecting your member's inbox is vital to keep on good terms with them and to keep them engaged in your community. We'd love to know which of these features you're most keen to try in 4.4. Please drop a comment below and let us know!

It's been said that the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google. While we can't promise to get you to page 1 for a generic search term, we have taken some time for Invision Community 4.4 to do an SEO sweep. Moz.com defines SEO as "a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines." We have the technical skills and were fortunate enough to have Jono Alderson of Yoast lend his time, knowledge and vast experience to improve our SEO. This blog article gets a little technical. It's completely fine to leave at this point with the comfort of knowing that Google will be a little happier on your site with Invision Community 4.4. The majority of the changes are designed to send stronger signals to Google and friends over which content to slurp and which to look at a bit later. Still here? Good. Let us roll up our sleeves and open the hood. Pagination The most visible change is that we've taken pagination out of query strings and placed it in the path. For example, the current pagination system looks a little like: yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/?page=3 Which is fine but it gets a little confusing when you add in a bunch of sort filters like so: yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/?sort=asc&field=topic&page=3 A better approach would be to make a clear signal to both Google and humans that pagination is a separate thing. Invision Community 4.4 does this: yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/page/3/?sort=asc&field=topic Not only is this good for search engines, but it's also good for the humans too as it is more readable and no longer confused with filter parameters. Of course, we ensure that the old style pagination is redirected (via a 301 header) to the new pagination URL automatically so nothing breaks. Canonical Tags These tags are a way of telling search engines that a specific URL is the 'master copy' of a page. This helps prevent duplicate content from being indexed. Without it, you are leaving it up to the search engine to choose which is the master copy of the page. For example: yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/ and yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/?sort=desc&field=time may show the same content but have different URLs. By setting the canonical tag to point to yoursite.com/community/forums/123-forum/ regardless of filters sends a strong signal to the search engines that this is the page you want to be spidered. Invision Community sets these tags in many places, but we audited these in 4.4 and found a few areas where they were missing. For example, viewing a member's profile doesn't always set a canonical tag which may confuse search engines when you click on "View Activity" and get a list of content items. Soft 404s When an application or website wants to tell the visitor that the page they are looking for doesn't exist, it sends a 404 header code along with a page that says something "We could not find that item" or "No rows available". If a search engine spiders a page that looks like a 404 page, but it doesn't have the 404 header code, it logs it as a "soft 404". Given the short amount of time Google has on your site to discover new content, you don't want it to hit many soft 404s. Invision Community 4.4 omits containers (such as forums, blogs, etc.) that have no content (such as a new forum without any topics yet) from the sitemap, and also adds a 'noindex, follow' meta tag into the HTML source. Google will periodically check to see if the status of the page has changed and happily slurp away when content has been added. Other changes Although the changes listed here don't deserve their own section in this article, they are no less important. We have audited the new JSON-LD markup added to Invision Community 4.3 to help search engines better understand the relationship between pages. The "truncate" method that is used to display a snippet of text in areas such as the activity stream now only sends the first 500 characters to the javascript method to reduce page loads and page 'noise'. The profile view in Invision Community contains a mix of information pertinent to the member and content they've authored. We've ensured that the content areas are using a specific URL, with appropriate canonical tags. This will help reduce confusion for search engines. If you made it this far, then well done. It's time to slam the hood closed and mop our collective brows. These changes will certainly help Google and friends spider your site a little more efficiently and have a clearer idea about what pages and data you want to be indexed which can only improve your ranking.

Sun kissed beaches or snowscapes? Bustling cities or quiet villages? The question we posted this month was: If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? In theory we could work from anywhere in the world that has a decent internet connection, but where would we choose to live? Mark Wade It was only a few months ago that I was asking myself this exact question! I've always enjoyed telling people that of the great things about working on the Internet is that I can work anywhere in the world, all I have to do is bring a laptop - and yet, despite saying that, I was still living in the little English town that I was born in. At the end of last year I decided it was time to actually take advantage of that so I moved Sydney, Australia. Sydney has everything you could ever want. First, obviously it's a major city with all the conveniences and excitement of that, and even moreso than a lot of places it always has stuff going on (the first time I was strolling past Darling Harbour on a Saturday evening and had this conversation: "oh wow a fireworks display, what's the occasion?" / "...it's saturday?" - I knew I was in a good place). But for when you want some quiet time, there's some of the world's most gorgeous beaches on one side of the city, and mountain forests on the other. It's perfect. Australian ambassadors in the late 1980s Jim Morrissey So recently (last 2 years) have been doing some traveling during winter months and I've seriously underestimated previously how much living in Florida for the past 20 years has ruined me. This has led me to where I can't live anywhere else but a tropical climate with 100% humidity now. As well, the thought of driving my cars in the snow/salt is even more unappealing than the cold/dryness. In short, I've come to realize, I'm quite happy in Florida. Florida is nice, but it's no Skegness Brandon I would move to Costa Rica. Not because it's exotic, and beautiful, and has tons of fun things to do and see. But because I could have health care without having to pull out a second mortgage. Forget Costa Rica, the UK has Costa Coffee Matt I'm rather fond of the UK but I do love America, so I think I'd split my time three ways. Spend the UK in the summer (that may be about 3 weeks based on an average year), spend the winter somewhere warm, perhaps on the south coast of America with the exception of a few weeks around Christmas where I'd take the kids somewhere filled with snow. Mark H If I could live anywhere I wanted to (and financing was not an obstacle), that would be Hawaii. First because its average temperature doesn’t change much over the year and is nearly tropical year-round, but also because it’s the only State in the U.S. that I have not yet visited. Having lived in Minnesota nearly all my life, as I get older the less I can tolerate Winter each year. Jennifer So I love where I live currently. Arizona (particularly in the valley) is amazing. It's mostly hot but absolutely no snow (albeit sometimes it gets cold enough that there is frost on cars). I think out of the 20 years I've lived here I've only truly seen snow in the valley 1 time and it didn't last long. My secondary location would be Australia. It has a similar climate, some really awesome people and Amanda Palmer visits their regularly so I'd finally be able to see one of her shows. Overall, as long as it doesn't snow you can basically consider it an ideal location for me. That awkward moment when Arizona buys the wrong bridge Andy I’ve always had a strong attraction to Scandinavia and particularly Norway. There’s something quite appealing about the remoteness, nature and freedom to make your own life choices. Unfortunately I’m not at all tolerant of the cold so I don’t think I could live there permanently. Am I allowed to split my time between Norway and Italy? Remoteness? Can I interest you in Wales? Marc S I think if I could live anywhere in the world, I would probably live in Australia. Simply because I hate winter. I don't like the cold, and prefer 30c+ every day if I had the option. In fact if I went back in time, I would certainly have done that knowing what I know now. Having children and family around, it's not something I would likely do at this stage in my life. Where would you like to live? Let us know in the comments below.

It might seem a little odd starting a blog on increasing Invision Community's speed with the word "lazy", but I'll explain why this is a good word for performance shortly. Earlier this year, Google announced that page speed is a ranking factor. Simply put, if your site is slow, it will be ranked lower in Google's search results. It is always a challenge making a large application like Invision Community as efficient as possible per page load. A single Invision Community page can pull in widgets from multiple applications as well as a lot of user-generated content with attachments, movies and images used heavily. This is where being lazy helps. Lazy loading is a method by which attachments, embeds and images are not loaded by default. They are only loaded when the viewer scrolls down enough to make them visible. This allows the page to load a good deal faster now it doesn't have to load megabytes of images before the page is shown as completely rendered. I was going to take a fancy video showing it in action, but it's hard to capture as the system loads the media just before you get to it, so it looks fairly seamless, even with sluggish connections. Not the most dynamic image, but this shows the placeholder retains the size of the image In addition to image attachments, we have also added this lazy loading to maps and Twitter emoji images. Improving non-image attachments Once we had implemented the lazy loading framework, an area we wanted to improve was non-image attachments. We have listened to a lot of the feedback we had on this area, and have now made it very clear when you add an attachment into a post. We've even returned the download count now it's being loaded on demand. Using attachments when posting All the letters When we first implemented the letter avatars in 4.3, we discussed whether to use CSS styling or use an image. We decided to go with an image as it was more stable over lots of different devices, including email. We've revisited this in 4.4, and switched the letter avatars to SVG, which are much faster to render now that the browser doesn't have to load the image files. Other performance improvements We've taken a pass at most areas with an eye for performance, here is a list of the most significant items we've improved. Several converter background tasks have been improved, so they work on less data Duplicate query for fetching clubs was removed in streams Notifications / follower management has been improved Member searches have been sped up (API, ACP live search, member list in ACP, mentions, etc.). Stream performance has been improved UTF8 conversions have been sped up Elasticsearch has been sped up by using pre-compiled queries and parameterisation, as well as the removal of view filtering (and tracking) HTTP/2 support with prefetch/preload has been added Several PHP-level performance improvements have been made Implemented rel=noopener when links open a new window (which improves browser memory management) Several other performance improvements for conversions were implemented that drastically reduce conversion time IP address lookups now fetch IP address details from us en-masse instead of one request per address Cache/data store management has been streamlined and centralised for efficiency Many background tasks and the profile sync functionality have all been improved for performance Brotli compression is now supported automatically if the server supports it Redis encryption can now be disabled if desired, which improves performance Phew, as you can see, we've spent a while tinkering under the hood too. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Let us know below! This blog is part of our series introducing new features for Invision Community 4.4.

This month, I thought I'd ask a trick question. "What is your favourite movie?" I fully expected to be told "but Matt, we work so hard on Invision Community, we don't have time to watch movies." just so I didn't have to complete this month's entry. But no. Apparently, most of our team have MULTIPLE favourites. Hmmm. And here they are. Jennifer Favorite movies are a pain to choose because there are so many great (and greatly terrible) movies out there. So I'm going to choose a few that I just really adore and explain why. So the first one is "Halo: Forward Unto Dawn". I have never played a Halo game in my entire life. I just find the movie intriguing and smooth. It has an amazing pace and of course there are aliens. It's also one of those movies that I can just put on when I don't feel like watching anything else but I want to watch something. The replay value for me is amazing. The Next one is a psychological thriller called "Pandorum" this movie is a thriller about a man that wakes up in a broken space ship that was on its way to another world. The way it's put together is amazing, the story is twisted and it's just an amazing watch. It's something that I can easily say was a quick favorite from the first time I saw it. I can never forget the lovely "Dredd" in this list of my favorite movies. Muricer for the win! It has all the elements of a great Sci-Fi plus Karl Urban and Lena Headey. I win all around on this movie. Plus, it's even better in 3D with the Slo-mo drug. While I can list more I'm going to round off my answer with 2 Series movies. "Tremors" and "Sharknado". What most of you don't know about me is that I'm a sucker for horribly trashy horror movies ("Zombeavers" is another favorite with the same reason as these two series). Scantly clad women, screaming, monsters, corrupt people and lots of blood. There is no better thing to watch. I love a good day of Monster Movies and beer. The trashier the better. When Mark Wade is challenged in a git review Marc I think I will go for 3 different points in time for favourite movies. One from growing up, one which is a classic IMO, and one more recent that I've enjoyed. Growing up, it has to be 'Labyrinth' staring David Bowie. It's the first movie I ever watched at the cinema with my parents, and one I can still watch to this day. I'm very much guilty of singing along to every song, and I'm actually banned from watching it anywhere near my wife as I say every single word in the script a split second before they say it. I think its safe to say I have seen it a few times. A classic for me would be 'Schindlers list'. To me this is one of the best movies ever made, and while I'm sure it will have been greatly adapted for a movie audience, it also shows what many went through during WW2 which are not so common knowledge. A great movie for children to sit there and watch who don't know about it, as it gets them asking questions that all children should ask and learn from. For a more recent movie, I quite enjoyed 'Sully: Micracle on the Hudson'. I generally like movies by Tom Hanks anyway, but I did particularly enjoy this one. Bonus recent movie - Baby Driver I really enjoyed. Great movie, and the star somehow looks familiar I'm sure 'ed' will find a suitable image to illustrate. Disapproving Wade Mark W Airplane. I must have seen it dozens of times, it never gets old, I quote it constantly... I just love it. When Wade is reviewing your branch Andy Zathura - Jumanji in space, no more words are required. When you're late reviewing Wade's branch Brandon This is a fairly challenging question to answer, as someone who watches a lot of movies. I own somewhere around 1500 DVDs/BluRays, though in recent years I've been buying fewer and renting more. A few of my top movies would include (in no particular order)... 1. The Matrix Series - while I've overplayed the series at this point, the story was amazing at the time and it had so many allegories to real life that were fun to think about even when you were done watching. 2. Doom - it was campy and silly overall, but a lot of fun. Karl Urban and The Rock together was a cool mix. 3. The One - I have always been a fan of Jet Li, but when this came out I thought the cinematography was awesome. The way they did the slow-mo movements was neat, and the story was quite unique. Plus, Jason Statham is awesome, and he was a supporting role instead of a lead. When you challenge Wade in a review Jim Morrissey The Beatles’ “Help!” has got to be my favorite movie due to the special place it holds with my family. My sister growing up was a huge Beatles fan and being the younger sibling, it kind of got forced on me but grew to be a fan as well. This movie, in my opinion, was my great due to the music (great album) and very dry comedy that is hilarious. Think I can recite each line of the movie as I’ve seen it too many times. It definitely isn't a movie set out to win any acting awards but if you haven’t seen it and like the Beatles, I would recommend it. When you get a list of 'recommendations' on your branch Daniel As Daniel Son I have to say Karate Kid 🥋 Nah, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is just to sick and amazing and gets never boring! Daniel likes to commit on, then commit off Mark H Like the others, I can’t pick just one movie. For documentaries, that would be “The Longest Day”, the story of the Jun 6, 1944, allied invasion of Normandy, with perspectives from all sides of the conflict. The book by Cornelius Ryan on which it’s based is a very long read, but gripping and factual, and this movie is one of the few that actually did justice to the book from which it was derived. Anyone with a passion for history should both see the movie and read the book. The runner-up in this category would be “Saving Private Ryan”, although it did take liberties with historical fact. In the Sci-Fi category, the original “Blade Runner”. The city in which it is set was once described as “a cross between Hell and Hong Kong on a bad day”, and that’s disturbingly accurate. It’s a warning about the future of humanity if we do not curb our use of the planet’s natural resources, and do not carefully overwatch technology in the hands of corporations driven only by profit and without any societal morals. Two close runner-ups in this category would be the film “Soylent Green”, another cautionary tale that is similar to Blade Runner in its warning about the future of humanity, and “2001: A Space Odyssey”, a speculative tale about our own evolution and our future. For other general fiction it would be “The Silence Of The Lambs”. Few movies have creeped me out like this one did. Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter was truly chilling, Two runner-ups would be the mini-series “Lonesome Dove”, based on the books by Larry McMurtry, a fictional work about the frontier Wild West, but could easily be true, and “The Thorn Birds”, a similar genre set in Australia and based on the book by Colleen McCullough. When you run out of logical facts during a developer's meeting We'd love to hear which movies you love, or that have inspired you in some way. Let us know below!

Dealing with spam can be an annoying problem for community moderators. It's bad enough that our inboxes get clogged up with it daily. Invision Community comes with several tools designed to mitigate spam, and make it hard for spammers to get a foothold in your community. This short video takes you through several key areas: The Invision Community spam defense system CAPTCHAs Question and Answer challenges Group Promotion Flagging a member as a spammer Do you have any tips on dealing with spam or spammers? We'd love to hear them. Let us know in the comments.

Communication has come a long way since those very early humans grunted at each other to determine if they wanted more mammoth for lunch. The course of human history has seen cave paintings, hieroglyphics, the written word, emoji and now GIFs. GIFs have been around since the dawn of the internet. Many websites proudly displayed a 'man at work' animated GIF when they were under construction. Now, GIFs are now mostly used to express complex thoughts and emotions by showing a short animation. Mind Blown Invision Community has allowed GIPHY to be used as an embed for a while now, but we craved something much more straightforward. Behold, the GIF button! Now your members can reply with the majesty of animation. Of course, GIFs won't replace real and meaningful conversation, but they are a fun way to express yourself quickly and encourage more engagement. The GIPHY functionality is enabled via the 'Community Enhancements' page in the Admin CP. GIPHY is enabled from the enhancements page All you need to do is grab a key from GIPHY, and you're all set! Configuration You'll notice a "MPAA style rating" option. This allows you to select a maximum rating for the GIFs as some will have adult themes and language that may not be suitable for your community. For example, you can choose "G" for general audiences, "PG" or "PG-13" to limit what is shown. Yes! Drop your favourite GIF below to show us how you feel about this new feature. This is a blog about our upcoming Invision Community 4.4 release, due later this year.

It's not often that we get to blow our own trumpets. That's not just because we don't own trumpets, but also because we like to keep our heads down and focused on producing fantastic software [Ironic trumpet blowing - Editor]. Many of our team also run their own Invision Communities. So this month, we asked: What is your favourite Invision Community feature? Here's what we said. Brandon My favorite feature would be Pages 'databases' feature. You can quickly and easily create databases of content, and then you can adjust the templates to make those databases display in a more relevant manner for the type of content you are working with, all without having to modify any code. On my wife's real estate website, I have used Pages to create databases for hosting leads, property listings, closings, and realtor contacts. Being a developer I've further enhanced some of those areas with plugins, but even right out of the box the system is powerful enough to do quite a lot with just a little bit of configuring and templating. Trying to remember the block names when creating Pages templates Jennifer So, I love Invision Community. I've loved it for ages and it's hard to pick just one favorite feature. I'm going to say that Clubs and Pages are probably my top two favorite things in the whole wide world on Invision Community. For clubs, it allows your members to create special interest groups/forums/galleries/etc without having to do all of that yourself. It makes pulling together people of similar interests really easy and it makes it to where you don't have to manage "as much" of the responsibility for having a billion forums or groups. I also find it's a great way to get people excited and talking about things that they love which spreads positivity and happiness, which I love as an administrator. For Pages! There is so much! From Databases that you can super customize to blocks! There is so little I can't do with Pages!! I've made a super custom link directory (https://rpginitiative.com/directory/), a directory of searchable people (https://rpginitiative.com/pb-directory/) and one of my favorites a copy and paste code directory (https://rpginitiative.com/codex/). They all are unique in look and feel and all have different purposes but they fill them so well. I of course have a basic Guides listing (https://rpginitiative.com/guides/) but I don't think it's nearly as cool. Pages gives me a sense of empowerment on my community. It gives me the ability to create content that is special to my site and doesn't have to be cookie cutter in any way. Honestly, the whole suite always makes me happy because I get the community I want out of it and to me that is always the best and most special thing about Invision Community. [This is the best answer - Editor] Mark H Given my forum’s niche, amateur pyrotechnics [Must be nicer to Mark - Editor], my favorite feature would be the Gallery. You can describe a pyrotechnic shell, effect, build process, etc, with as many pages of text as you wish, but photographs or videos are truly worth 1000 words. While our Gallery isn’t the largest one around, it does contains a large number of items that our members have contributed to showcase their work, some of which are quite impressive. Mark's last day at Invision Community Matt I've given this a lot of thought [Makes a change - Editor]. There are several contenders, Pages (because I wrote it), Social Promotion (because I wrote that too), Commerce (I did not write this) and Gallery. All deserve to be picked on their own merits. I decided to go with the profile completion system. It's not a massive feature, and it's not the most exciting feature but it does its one job very well. It helps reduce overwhelm when registering. It's critical to make the transition from guest to member as frictionless as possible, and having a dozen custom profile fields to complete is a good way to put people off. The profile completion system allows you defer data collection after registering, which reduces the barrier. Mark W The auto-upgrader. When I first started at Invision Community one of my responsibilities was doing upgrades - often from 2.x to 3.x at the time - hours and hours of uploading files by FTP (sometimes painfully slowly) and clicking the upgrader, over and over again. I'm glad those days are behind us! I think it was quite a good technical achievement too. The system knows what version you're coming from, what apps you have installed and only downloads the files you need. It knows if it needs to ask you for FTP access or if it can just write the files. Recently we made it so it knows if your themes are going to be compatible with the new version and warns you before you upgrade if they might not be. Perhaps most significantly for me though is the backend behind it. Releasing an update used to be a bit of a nightmare (we had to build zip files ourselves!) - now I just tag the release in our git repo and everything magically figures itself out [Only if following instructions to the letter - Editor]. It still delights me every time I do it. Mark (not) doing upgrades now Marc S For me it has to be the block manager. The block manager makes it was so easy to set up the basic structure of your site. And it's hard to believe we used to disable hooks to remove an item, or even comment them out in some cases. Adding something like a list of new posts was something you would need a 3rd party plugin to achieve, and adding a simple bit of text is something you would have likely done in your theme. This brought a large amount of flexibility for users that wouldn't have previous had the capability to make some of these changes, and generally just made life easier for others. Daniel Pages App because of blocks and databases. I have all kind of custom databases which I use daily to organise my work (Linklists, Knowledge Bases, Documentation) It saves one a lot of time and makes coding own apps quite unnecessary in most cases. Ryan Okay, I think I've finally decided that Reactions is my favorite feature. It's really cool to see how clients implement the feature on their own sites with different reaction types. Also, I wrote the backend and it was probably one of my favorite things I've done in the software. Indeed Stuart I like OAuth and RestAPI, I wanted us to do those since 4.0 and they work really well. [That's it? Can I make up the rest of the answer? - Editor] Those are our favourite features - but what are yours? We'd love to hear, let us know below!

Once again, we hand over the reigns of our blog to client and friend to Invision Community Joel for another client view of our community suite. Today @Joel R tackles Activity Streams, and how to make them "your awesome". Activity Streams is one of the best new features of Invision Community 4 with more flexibility and options than ever before. It can be an amazing and easy way to dive into interesting and new content, constantly feed new content to your users, and uncover different parts of your community. Your community contains amazing content. Activity Streams empower your users to discover the awesome in your community! While earlier versions of the software contained New Content streams, they were pre-defined and shipped by default. Now, everyone from users to community managers to admins can create their own unique Activity Streams, customized for the needs of the community or your own browsing interests. These new options in Invision Community 4 give incredible power to both you and your users to discover new ways of looking at your content. You can reference Invision’s Guide on Activity Streams. Let’s take a look at all the different ways to strategically use Activity Streams. 1. Home Stream Make the Activity Stream your homepage! It’s a beautiful, automated, chronological stream of recent content that constantly replenishes as new content is posted. Rather than a blocky homepage that is literally stacked with blocks in a chunky mix-and-match, you can offer a blended homepage that unifies all of your content into one continuous stream. It’s easy to browse, and you can still decorate the page with blocks in the sidebar and hot zones. To make the Activity Stream your homepage, go to the ACP > Applications. Set System as the default app by clicking on the ☆ star. Then open up System, and make Content Discovery the default module by clicking on the ☆ star. Bedlington.co.uk uses “All Activity” as its homepage. Look who just moved into town! 2. Default Stream The default Activity Stream is always one the most significant links in your entire Invision community. After the homepage, the default Activity Stream is usually the most popular page to which returning users will consistently use. On some Enterprise boards, the default Activity Stream drives up to 20% of the initial clicks from repeat members. It’s no wonder why. The default Activity Stream is the portal to the rest of the website and easily shows recent content. But how many of us have customized or self-critiqued it? Review your default stream and filter for the primary content you want to display. Make your best stream the default stream. 3. Content Streams By default, Invision Community ships with a handful of global streams. While those are appropriate for a new community, they aggregate all content in the community. This can be problematic if your community emphasizes one content type over another since all content is mixed together and content types with high volume can overwhelm less popular types. For example, a recent upload of IP.Gallery images can flood the Activity Stream with new images, pushing discussion and blog posts too far down. One thing you can do is to create new Activity Streams per content type or exclude certain content types. Make separate streams for Forum Topics, Gallery Albums, Blogs, and more depending upon your community. This will delineate content and makes it easier to navigate exactly what you want. And even within content types, you can filter down to specific boards or categories. You can create special streams specifically for Introduction or New Member boards; Gallery images and albums, so they don’t clutter up your primary stream; or Club discussions open to all members. 4. User Streams One of the most creative ways to use Activity Streams is to show content from specific users. This can be strategically used to create streams for specific users or accounts: staff members, special contributors, or leadership accounts. You can also stealth stalk your most favorite IPS staff members! Create an Activity Stream of all recent activity, then each user can customize the stream to follow the people most important to them. Each user can track the members most important to them and survey a quick overview of those members’ most recent activity. Follow the most interesting users in your community. 5. Mobile Streams There are a couple of options that can help your stream be optimized for mobile. By default, the Activity Stream can be packed with information. You can include every detail of when a member registers, changes their profile photo, reacts to an item, and more. You can also show the Expanded view, which includes up to three lines of text. If your website receives a lot of mobile traffic, you should toggle on Condensed view. This streamlines the Activity Stream and packs more content items onto the viewport. In a typical smartphone, you may only see 2 – 3 items in Expanded View, but see 5 – 6 items in Condensed view. That allows users to see twice as much content, even on a smaller device. Pack more into less with Condensed view 6. RSS Streams For community managers who run an IPS community in support of an enterprise or organization, you can activate an RSS feed per stream. This allows you to push the content to your other digital properties. Turn a feedback and testimonial board into a showcase of product reviews; turn Q&A boards into a live stream of ongoing customer support; turn a New Customer introduction board into profiles of actual customers; and tap into the best parts of your community-generated content to fit into other parts of your support channels, brand marketing, and sales outreach. Leverage your passionate community elsewhere with Activity Streams, and its built-in feature of RSS feeds. Like most advanced features, learning to ‘surf the Activity Stream can be tough. The streams are usually tucked away into the menu or an icon. And many users are unaware that it exists! What your users will say when you introduce Activity Streams. That’s okay, just put on a life vest and hold on for dear life. Activity Streams are such an incredibly powerful and flexible tool, which is why I personally love it. You can slice-and-dice your community in any number of ways, and you gain an instant overview of the parts of the website that are most important, most engaging, and most interesting to yourself. Spend some time sharing a quick tutorial with your community. Show them where to view streams. Show them how to customize it. And let them discover the awesome in your community!

This month, we ask the team the age-old question: If you won a million dollars (or denomination of your choice), how would you spend it? The question was almost guaranteed to bring a raft of hilarious replies that showcase our amazing humour and wit. Once again, we fall short and instead worry about taxation and retirement. You can't give it away these days. Marc S I couldn't decide on whether to answer this with what I would 'like' to do with it, or what I would actually do with it, so figured I would answer both. [So you just upgraded to $2,000,000? geez - Editor] If it was just what I would like to do with it, then I would probably follow the F1 season around the globe for a few years until I got bored. I'm very much into the sport, and with the locations, it would make for some great destinations to visit in between the races. What I would actually do is pay off my mortgage, buy another 3 reasonably priced houses to rent out to others, and live off the investment. Given I would then have a constant income without doing much, I would then try my hand at starting a business. Not entirely sure what that business would be to be honest [How to understand people with strong accents? - Editor], but I'm not the kind of person who would be able to just retire, without it driving me to insanity. I know nothing of F1, so hopefully this is OK Jennifer Pay off all of my debts. Buy a house. Put away some in a nice savings account both for me and my kiddos. Buy a serious amount of shoes, and get a few cosmetic tweaks. Who doesn't love shoes? Brandon If I had a million dollars, I'd pay off debts, stash some money away for savings and to have a healthy cushion [You give your soft furnishings a health check? - Editor], and I'd probably use a good chunk of it for travel. There are a lot of places I'd like to see in the world still and travelling is expensive. I’d like to visit some of the top touristy spots in South America, like Rio, Galapagos islands, Peru, Machu Picchu, etc. I’d like to see Australia, Japan, China, Alaska, the northern lights in the Arctic, and I would like to make it back to Europe at some point, particularly to see more of Italy and visit Greece. It's where we first met. Daniel I’ll go with my sailing boat dream which is still is a thing for my retirement, but if I would get tomorrow $1,000,000 I would do it right now too. [How? You're not getting the money until tomorrow - Editor] Get a Katamaran and sail sail sail... depending on time and budget and people.. mediterran sea, caribbean sea, then around South America, US west costs , Hawaii, Philippines , India. Around Africa .. back to Mediterran Sea. Stuart If I had $1,000,000 tomorrow, I'd probably be fairly sensible [Boring- Editor] by paying off the mortgage and spending some cash on finishing renovating the house. Then I'd buy either a Mustang GT or a Tesla Model 3 Performance (I know, one is an eco-machine and one is a gas guzzler!). The remainder I'd split between savings and stock market investment. Mark H A million dollars….. well, the government takes about 1/3 of that first off, so after taxes you get ~ $650,000. With that I’d pay off the house and credit card, buy a reliable vehicle, then the rest goes in the bank. Would not have enough to retire, even at my age. [It wouldn't last 2 years? - Editor] But it would eventually make retirement easier. The fun answer. Jim I would pay off my mortgage, buy a 2019 Corvette ZR1 (plus pay off following speeding tickets) and probably go to Australia. Then save the rest for a rainy day or you know, retirement. Mark W I live in Sydney, so probably buy a small apartment and carry on as normal. [How small is your current apartment? - Editor] Good day. Matt I'm not a huge fan of travelling, but I'd like to see a little bit more of the USA. I've been to Los Angeles, Nevada, Las Vegas, New York and Virginia but I'd like to see more of the middle bit too. Definitely Miami and New Orleans. [Dude, you need to check a map to see which states are in the middle - Editor] I love my work too much to think about retiring but I'd put some away for when I do. I might give some to my family if they ask nicely and are reading this (hopefully they are not). Yes I can. Andy (Andy did not contribute this month, so this reply is 100% fictional) I'd be too depressed with the massive income drop to think about how to eek out such a pittance. Lindy (Lindy never contributes, despite being threatened with a fabricated answer) I'd probably invest in a gas-tech company, buy more cars I'll only drive 3 days a year and spend the rest in Vegas. Charles (Charles also never contributes, so this is also fabricated) Please do not say funny things about me. Charles also has edit permissions to this blog. So there you have it, that's how we'd choose to spend a cool $1,000,000. We'd love to hear how you'd spend your imaginary windfall.

Today, we're handing over our blog to long time client and friend to Invision Community, Joel R. @Joel R is often found hanging out in our community offering his insight and wisdom when he's not harassing the team in Slack. Over to Joel. Invision Community releases a variety of blockbuster features in every major update, which usually hits once a year. You may think those updates are not enough (it’s never enough!), but I wanted to spend some time talking about how to survey and incorporate those features into your community systematically. This blog post is not about any specific feature, but more a general and philosophical approach in integrating the newest features. My goal is to help you get the most out of every new IPS update! You may think that many of the features in the updates are easy to assess. You either want them or don’t. But it’s not that easy. I was inspired by some recent personal experiences when I found myself revisiting features from 4.2 and earlier. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I still had so much to experience and learn from those features, all of which I had previously reviewed when they were initially released. Invision Community comes packed with rich features, and no community manager is expected to be a master at everything. But a systematic approach is your best chance at making sure you get the most out of every feature. To give a personal example, I jumped into Social Media Promotion when it first came out in 4.2. The new Social Media Promotion offers several powerful tools for social media cross-posting, and I immediately wanted to learn how I could use it to cross-post content to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. It’s an easy drop-in replacement for services like Hootsuite or Windscribe and allows community managers to drip interesting content to their social media pages for constant advertising and social engagement. Well, it turns out my Facebook and Twitter reach is nil because I have no followers (wish I was more Internet famous!), so I soon lost interest and dropped Social Media Promotion as a tool. A couple of months ago, I was assessing my homepage versus other popular websites when I came across a startling realization: I could make a gorgeously visual homepage on par with Instagram using Our Picks – a feature of Social Media Promotion. I would intentionally ignore the social media component, but use the other component of Our Picks for a beautiful new homepage. The context of using Our Picks for a homepage opened my eyes to a whole new way to evaluate Social Media Promotion, and what was once a feature on the back burner is now – literally - the front page of my Invision community. I love it! To help you incorporate new Invision features, I’ve brainstormed 5 strategies on how to make the most out of Invision feature updates. Each strategy comes with a mini-lesson for an action plan. 1. Learn the knowledge, not the feature. This is my personal motto when Invision Community releases a new feature. I’m more concerned about the knowledge and broader usage of the feature than implementing the feature itself: What’s the potential scope of the feature? In what context could the feature be used? How did Invision Community intend for the future to be used, and what are other ways it can be used? I’ve never worried about the technical configuration of the feature. You enable or disable some settings, and that’s it. But what’s more important is how the functionality can best be integrated and in what context. You never know when you might come back to the feature for the next great idea, and you can only do that if you possess the knowledge and application behind the feature. Lesson: Try every feature at least once, even if you don’t need it. 2. When at first you don’t succeed, take a nap. Some things take a while to think about. Don’t try to cram through all new Invision Community features. There’s too many to digest in one pass. Assess the features you’re most interested in one by one, play with each feature until you’re satisfied, test them, find out how they work, and when you get frustrated, take a nap. Eat some ice cream. Go jogging. And revisit in a month. The bigger the feature, the longer you should think about it. The biggest “aha” moments didn’t come to me right away. When you try to rush through a feature, you can get rushed results. Take your time to bounce ideas around your head and try to think through the context of how to best utilize the feature. Lesson: For features that you like, set a calendar to revisit after a month. Then take a nap. 3. You’re running the marathon, not a sprint. Successful community managers have evolved with the changing needs of our audiences. While our mission remains the same, the backdrop of user expectations and digital trends has dramatically changed. When you implement a feature, you should be evaluating it for both sustainability and longevity. Is this a sustainable mechanism to keep up with? Is this something that I want to continue for the foreseeable future? It’s nice to play with new features; every major update is like a Christmas unwrapping of new features. But you need to prudently pick-and-choose which feature is most appropriate and how it can give you an impact for the long-term. Sometimes it’s better to do a few things very well than many things not well at all. Lesson: Ask yourself if you see yourself using the feature 3 years later? 4. Make it uniquely yours Invision Community ships with default features ready to use out of the box, but those features are just that: default. We like to dress up our theme with custom colors, designs, and logos. You should apply the same flair for customization with your features. Some features are ready to be customized: reactions, ranks, and group promotion. Others, however, might take more thinking. Here are some examples to spark your creativity: • Social Sign-in Streamline – are you using the default message, or did you customize it with a unique and clever introduction? • Fluid Forum – did you activate fluid forum and hope it went well? Or did you use it as an opportunity to re-analyze your entire forum structure for the modern web? • Leaderboard – did you leave it as a Leaderboard, or could it be Genius board for a technology company, or Joyboard for a nonprofit, or Loyaltyboard for a consumer brand? Lesson: Make the feature uniquely yours. 5. Talk through your scenario Every battle-tested community manager knows that the only thing constant is change – whether it’s our forum software, ACP settings, user expectations, and broader digital trends. It’s important to find a trusted circle of friends and users who can help you steer and implement features. It may sound great in your head, but other users may look at it very differently. On my site, I have a trusted group of users called “Champions.” In my pre-planning stage, I float my ideas by them as early in the process as possible. They’ve provided valuable feedback of user expectations with differing perspectives. I’ve nixed certain features based on their veto, and I’ve tweaked continuously based upon their continuous input. Talk through your scenario with your trusted friends, and not just with the voices in your own head! Community management is such a uniquely rewarding and challenging role because every community demands and needs a different set of features. Invision makes it easy with regular releases of exciting features, but you also need to make the most out of those features on your own. Don’t just turn on the next feature: turn on excitement, joy, and community. If you notice, I didn’t include a lesson yet in my last strategy when you’re ready to talk about your scenario. And that’s because it’s the ultimate lesson: Write the next guest post in the Invision Community Blog and share your own success story in how you adopted a new Invision feature. We’d love to hear about it. Thanks Joel! We love this angle on how to best evaluate the myriad of opportunities the Invision Community software allows. What is your biggest take-away from Joel's advice?

In between complaining about the temperature of the United Kingdom, a hot topic in staff chat was what jobs we've done in the past, and which jobs we'd be terrible at. Mark said that Matt would be terrible at being a software engineer. Once all the laughter and clearing desks and leaving the building immediately had finished, we settled on these answers. Jennifer I'd be a terrible runway model. For most of my life I've had the height and the general look of a decent runway model (even like people staring at me) however I am terrible at it. This was not Photoshopped I get really nervous in front of large crowds of people, wobbly knees and everything. My mum does costume design and has used me as her model a few times and that whole "stand at the end of the runway for a few seconds and pose thing"... Nope. Stood there, turned around and walked back. Marc I think the job I would be terrible at would be 'Handy Man'. Picked this rather than just saying a joiner/carpenter, plumber etc, as it encompasses more areas of complete ineptitude. My DIY skills are legendary, but for all the wrong reasons. Whilst I'm actually attempting to learn how to do things myself more lately, I have had a history of doing things incorrectly. I am that guy who has 8 pieces left after putting together flatpack furniture, creates swimming pools whilst fixing a tap, and don't even ask me to put a hole in a wall as I can do so with dramatic effect. [Should have shared the picture of your workbench - Editor] I think the one which springs to mind, which most would find simple, would be putting up a shelf. I put up a DVD shelf above my head which was a fair weight. This lasted 1 week before falling off the wall on to my head which was underneath it. [That explains a lot - Editor] Not a problem, because with my 'expert' DIY skills I put it back on the wall with 8 inch screws and to ensure it didnt come down again I covered the wall facing side with extremely strong glue. 3 years later when my wife wanted this taking down to decorate, I took it down along with half of the wall behind it. This was the point where the decorator was called to fix my mistakes. Brandon I couldn't be President (or any major political position for that matter). I'm a very middle-of-the-road people pleaser type of person usually, and I could never handle having to make important decisions that affect everyone [like in git? - Editor], especially with half of everyone agreeing with me and half of everyone thinking it was the worst idea ever. As much as people like to criticize those in power and feel like they have all the answers, I know it's just not that easy and I would never want to be in their position. A nightmare vision of the future Jim Morrissey Cold call telephone sales/telemarketing. I often say I couldn't sell water to someone stuck in the desert. OK, maybe not *that* bad but definitely cannot get on the phone and convince someone product XYZ is the one for them. I'm also not that big of a talker in person and don't have that personality to just grab people on the phone and persuade them to purchase something they may not otherwise want. Half my personality, half ethics which would make me horrible Mark H A job at which I would be no good, is a politician. I’d be jailed within a week for strangling other politicians who open their mouth and spew the usual double-speak we’ve come to expect (and loathe) from them. [This is actually a toned down version of the original - Editor] Mark W I was struggling to come up with anything (because obviously I'd be great at anything, right?) but as the token vegan around here I guess I have to say butcher. The last time I ate meat was about 10 years ago and even walking past a butcher's makes me feel ill. Mark is Ultra Spiritual FAQ: Lots of things have protein; I kind of miss chocolate but not much else; Yes, I would eat you if we were on a desert island. [Well, that got dark at the end - Editor] Andy I would be an awful chef. I wouldn’t even be able to heat up pre-prepared meals in a pub [Do you not have a kitchen at home? - Editor]. Apparently I make a good sous-chef in the home but I require strict instruction. In other words I get the job of chopping onions at dinner time. Like Gordon Ramsey, except nice Ryan The job I would most suck at, I actually did. Back in 2008, I was a factory worker for a paving company, where I packaged pavement crack sealant at approximately 160 degrees Fahrenheit, in addition to various other types of sealant (for driveways, parking lots, etc.). It was a lot of heavy lifting, and because the material was so hot, I had to wear heavy long sleeve shirts in a factory that hit approximately 120 degrees each day. I lasted about four months. Oozing Confidence Matt Anything on a production line. I have a very short attention span and having to do repetitive tasks would finish me off. Back in the 90s [1890s? - Editor] I used to work in a print and design studio. One of the tasks was producing 15,000 copies of a 8 sheet magazine. It'd run through the collator, through the stitching head, under the folding arm and slide out to a tray. For about two days straight a month we'd be running this machine. Counting copies as they came out, freeing jams and filling up the paper. It was really tedious work. Those are the jobs we'd think we would be terrible at. How about you? What would be your nightmare job?

It's 2 am, and my bleary red eyes are fighting sleep. My thumbs are still glued to the Playstation controller as I try and persuade my on-screen avatar to complete the level. If I manage it, I've won another trophy. Many of us have been there. Investing a considerable amount of time into a game just to get to the next level, win a trophy or better yet, complete the entire game. I still remember the thrill of finishing Metal Gear Solid. I had become a recluse and lost track of time. Each time I thought about putting the gamepad down, there was just one more tiny thing to achieve. For decades, game designers have been using gamification to keep players plugged in and wanting more. A well-designed game hooks you completely, and you can't help but keep playing. In more recent times, social media has switched onto gamification. Each like and share you receive triggers a little dopamine kick in your brain. It's a pleasurable sensation which keeps you coming back for more. How many times have you opened Twitter back up moments after closing it? What does this mean for communities? Applying game mechanics to your community can have a powerful effect on member retention and engagement on your site. There are three main areas we can use gamification for: onboarding, driving engagement and encouraging positive behavior. Let's look at these areas in more detail. Onboarding When a new member joins your community, you want them to complete as much of their profile as possible. Ideally, this would mean that they upload a photo and complete any custom profile fields you have created. The more information a user provides, the more chance there is that they will come back and that others will start to engage with them. A relatively anonymous member will not be taken seriously by your veteran members. Traditionally, new members are presented with either a massive registration form or they are never prompted to complete their profile after sign up. Presenting a sizeable complex registration form is a sure way to reduce your guest to member conversion rates. A persons attention is a rare resource so do not waste the one opportunity you have for a new sign up! Invision Community has a profile completion feature which displays a progress bar at the top of each page. Members are encouraged to complete their profile This is a great way to add gamification to the onboarding process. You get the best of both worlds. A short compact registration form and a very persuasive reason to upload a photo and complete any profile fields. Very few can resist the temptation to leave their profile 90% complete! Gamification can help you convert a new lurker into a contributing member by leveraging the member groups and promotion feature. Set up your default Member group with specific restrictions that would be attractive to your community. This may be custom signatures, or it could be custom member titles. Perhaps limit the number of images that can be seen per day in Gallery. The key is to limit access in a way that doesn't agitate or annoy your new members but encourages them to level up. Create a new group "Full Members" and remove those restrictions. Create a promotion rule that after five posts, they get to level up. This will encourage lurkers to join in the discussion, so they reach the next level. You will want to be careful with this feature. You don't want to encourage noise and vapid posting just to reach the next level. 5-10 posts are enough to get them engaged. Meet Player One The number one thing you need to have a thriving community is constant user engagement. It is the lifeblood of any discussion focused site. Game mechanics will help drive user engagement using Invision Community's features strategically. But first, we must understand the types of players that will frequent your site. The High-Status Seeker We've all come across this type of forum member. These members tend to wear their content counts with pride. They cite how long they've been members for. They are the elite member's others look up to. The High-Status Seeker will want to be in the top three of your leaderboard every single day. In many ways, the High-Status Seeker is the ideal member. They want to move up the levels as fast as possible and show their experience and dominance to others. They will have an eye on becoming a moderator and getting access to exclusive private forums. The Social Butterfly This type of forum member isn't as interested as status as others. They are content to be active and participate in many different conversations. They typically like open-ended games like MMORPG where the reward is just playing the game. The Social Butterfly can be reluctant to engage with gamification elements in your community, but in many ways, they do not need to as they are likely to become long-standing members anyway. Engagement and Loyalty Now we have met the players, let's look at some of the features Invision Community has built in to create a game-like environment to drive up engagement and retention. Content Count The humble content count has been around since the dawn of the forum age. In simple terms, it displays the number of posts and comments the member has added to the community since they joined. When content is deleted, the post count is typically untouched. High-Status seekers love their content count and protect it with their life! Getting to 10,000 posts is a real achievement and sets them apart from newer or less engaged members. Reputation Allowing others to like your posts is a powerful way to not only get more engagement but also encourages quality content to be posted. Content with actual value, humor or flair tends to receive more likes than average. This gives the author a good morale boost which they will want to replicate. In many ways, this is the critical driver for the Social Butterfly. Acknowledgment for their efforts is what keeps them happy and content. Leaderboard While the Social Butterfly may be content with receiving likes on their content, the High-Status Seeker will want to top the leaderboard for as many days as they can confirming their status. The leaderboard is generated each night and adds up each person's reputation given for that day. The winner is crowned for all to see. The leaderboard The winner also gets a trophy on their profile for 'winning the day.' High-Status Seekers love this feature and do all they can to ensure they are in the top three. Our Picks Invision Community introduced the social promotion feature to 4.2. We use it to promote our blogs and good content we see members posting on our forum. To have your content picked for promotion is a huge thrill, and will undoubtedly put a smile on the face of the author. Both High-Status Seekers and Social Butterflies will love seeing their content promoted on social media and on the site itself. It is also a great way to keep your social media feeds topped up with quality content. Our Picks We are seeing a good number of communities using Our Picks as their home page to give their site more of an Instagram feel. Level up with member groups Who doesn't love being invited into a VIP area to sit in the good seats with the red ropes making it clear that not everyone is invited (yet!) This is a key strategy to engage High-Status Seekers. With member groups, you can create exclusive VIP areas that normal members can see, but cannot view topics or post into. In practice, it is as simple as creating a new member group called "VIP Members." This member group has access to specific forums. Group promotions A member group promotion rule can then be used to level up members who reach specific goals, such as 5,000 posts. This feature can be used to stretch members to achieve a large goal, or you can use it for a series of mini-goals. Either forum access or increased feature access can be leveraged to encourage goal completion. Become part of the team "Welcome to the team!" is a message that most members would love to receive. Being handed access to the private team forums where strategic discussions are held, topics are discussed and where the cool kids hang out is probably the ultimate goal for the High-Status Seeker. Wearing the moderator's badge is a tangible benefit and validation for all their work in the community. Inviting great members to become moderators is not only a massive boost for the member, but it is an excellent way to offload some of the workload for day to day moderation tasks such as flagging spammers, checking reported content and dealing with minor squabbles in topics. Final Thoughts Gamification is definitely a strategy that you should use to build the base of your community, but it should not be the only strategy you deploy. Extrinsic motivation in the form of reputation points, member titles and badges are effective, but at some point, those rewards run dry. I would encourage a mix of short-term rewards such as winning the day and mini-goals to level up through member groups along with longer-term goals such to stretch members. Long-term goals can be access to the "5k" club when the member hits 5,000 pieces of content. However, you will need mini goals to keep them moving forwards, or you risk the ultimate goal being too distant to want to reach. Once your members are hooked on your gamification, social bonds will grow, and members will want to come back just to engage with their friends. When you reach that point, you know you have an excellent robust community that will stand the test of time.

Work smarter, not harder is a motto we hear a lot of in our modern age. This is of course great advice. Invision Community's Admin CP is packed full of tools and settings to help you configure your community to your needs. In this short video I show you how you can work smarter in the Admin CP. Dashboard Blocks I show you how create a dashboard perfect for your needs. The dashboard is perfect to show a snapshot of what is happening with your community. Search Bar The search bar is the most powerful tool in the Admin CP. From finding members, settings and Commerce tickets, it's something I reach for every day. Re-order the Menu Prioritise the menu to put often used sections of the Admin CP within easy reach. Copy Settings With a few clicks, you can copy a single setting from a forum across multiple. This saves a lot of time moving between the forum list and forum settings. This of course works across the suite including downloads, blogs and more. Copy Nodes Got a forum or blog category set up perfectly and want to add one more like it? Just hit the copy button and save the hassle of filling in the form again. These are our tips for using the Admin CP as effectively as possible. Do you have any tips? Let us know below!