Matt

What do you see under the Spam Defense tab? The Contact Us verification is a setting under ACP > Settings > Contact Us.

It's a useful metric for those monitoring performance of the community but agree that I never look at it and decide to open a topic or not based on that info.

Everyone at Invision Community is pleased to introduce Community Hive. We are creating a new free-to-use service to help independent communities reach new audiences and re-engage existing members. Community Hive delivers updates from your favourite communities and helps you explore new ones by bringing all the communities you follow into a single feed with optional email updates. The Invision Community September 2023 release will bring Community Hive integration to Invision Community and we're also releasing integrations for XenForo, Squarespace and WordPress. More integrations for popular platforms are planned over the coming months. The "Why" We believe in the power of independent communities. Technology has changed over the two decades we've been building community tools and despite the advances in technology a key problem independent communities still have is re-engaging existing members and finding new audiences. Social media has diminishing returns, and search results continually down-rank user-generated content. Reaching new audiences has never been more challenging. Community Hive solves that by providing a single platform to showcase your content to new and existing audiences. We don't keep your content; the only way to engage is to visit your site, ensuring you retain complete control and ownership. Regular updates via email and push notifications reach your existing members wherever they are. As our attention spans shorten and our online time becomes more cluttered, checking in with each community becomes more of a struggle. Independent and forum based communities fight for attention with social media, and owned platforms like Discord and Slack. Allowing your members to follow your community with Community Hive gives you increased visibility and discoverability and helps level the playing field. The Platform Community Hive has a familiar feed view with two main areas. "Following" shows a feed of communities you already follow to ensure you see more of what you like. This feed learns over time what content you favour and ensures you see more of what you like. The "Discover" tab shows you a feed of content from communities outside of your following list, which is a great way to discover new online communities to join. Following is easy; you don't even need to register on the community to add it to your followed list on Community Hive. Robust account management makes it easy to unfollow communities and set your desired audience classification preferences. Community Hive is mobile-first with push notifications and is ready to be added to your phone's home screen as an app. Integration Community Hive will launch with integration for several platforms such as XenForo, Squarespace and WordPress. Invision Community integration has several tools to nudge your members to add your community to Community Hive with buttons in key follow areas. Following from a community only requests your email address. You can optionally set a password later on Community Hive to enable your feed to be viewed on multiple devices. Clicking "Follow on Community Hive" from an Invision Community when you have an account with that community. Clicking "Follow on Community Hive" from an Invision Community when you do not have an account with that community. Community Hive will be launched in beta alongside Invision Community's September 2023 release, with integrations released for other platforms. You can visit Community Hive now and join in the discussion on the Community Hive forums. We look forward to seeing you there! View full blog entry

I actually agree. I'm not sure everyone would though. But I think a lot of metrics we have scattered around just add clutter and do not add value in determining whether the topic should be read or not.

If it was to change, I'd change it so the red bubble goes the second you click on the icon to see the notifications, but they would stay bold until you read the source item. However, we'd need to make a decision about what to do with pure notifications like "Rank X achieved!" which has no linked item.

Browsers have a great bookmark system.

We’ve gone back and forth on it but I’m leaning towards the suggestion here to mark as read when read.

We did that three years ago in a genuine attempt to increase sales and viability. It helped for a short while but the trend didn’t hold.

I hear you 100% but we are not the arbiters of human habits, we just respond to them. There are loads of old forums still busy but the bulk of those members and that content was generated a decade ago and they are kept alive by an older member base and probably good authority with Google bringing people in for short transactional exchanges. We have a responsibility to you and our other customers to keep driving forward, it is pretty relentless. The worst thing we could do is just continue doing the same things and we lose marketshare and your community stagnates and goes into a slow decline. Communities are more complex than a basic forum and very few have the patience to click loads of links in the hopes of having good content to read. v5 will help with transactional content (I need an answer to this problem) and more social content (Lets discuss Thing) as well as content discovery.

v5 is a significant step forward for UI, discovery, noise versus signal and brand matching. Change is hard but it is kind of inevitable. If nothing changed, then we'd still be using this: And while you could absolutely run a successful community on that product even now, the chances of attracting new members would be low given the expectations modern audiences have for UI and ease of use.

No. Just because a feature request is popular, it doesn't mean that it's right for the product, will enhance the community experience for community members and move the product forward. It is also unfair to have the product guided by a small number of customers that visit the forums and take time to comment on feature requests. The forum does not record the hundreds of conversations we have with other clients over email, regular meetings and so on. We try and account for most things but more often than not what is suggested in feedback is generally minor tinkering around the edges when more bold action is often needed. That is not to say that we do not read every topic and discuss most of them. Quite often a popular request that we hear over and over makes its way into the software but perhaps not in the way that the topic author described. I completely understand this feeling. The last six months or so have been a pretty dark timeline of mostly negative news, especially for self-hosted customers. The introduction of cloud exclusive features, talks of falling profitability for self hosted license sales, a long list of deprecated features people use, v5 dev tools overhaul, the marketplace closing - it's been a lot and we recognise that. Now that the bad stuff is out of the way, we can start talking about v5 and there is a lot of fun stuff to get into. Invision Community 5 is a new chapter for the product and us as a company. A more streamlined and focused operation fit for the next decade of community building.

We don't want to say too much for obvious reasons, but we use a mixture of sources to determine spam accounts and disposable email addresses.

To be clear, we are not closing down third party development, in fact we are developing new tools for v5 to make some areas easier to add functionality to. This announcement is that we are no longer listing items and facilitating sales directly on our site.

Cheers, moved to our issue tracker.

Ryan and the team have done a fantastic job with these new tools and I'm really keen to see how they help in the current spam wave we're all experiencing.

If I was a new developer trying to gain trust, I'd spend some time in the community being helpful and getting to know people. You can quite quickly gain trust this way and then start to offer your services and products.

Most cloud packages can already use external uploads outside of marketplace. We'll remove the limitation for the others.

Yes, we have that functionality already built in and it can still be used assuming the developers have entered the correct URL and have the ability to check for updates. That's correct, you'll go through to the developer's own site. It's likely that you have more than just one modification from a single developer, so it may be less. Some of the developers are talking about forming a new site with a listing, so it may be somewhat centralised if they go ahead.

UI Extensions part 3 of 3 and AMA (sort of!)

It's mostly focused around post-registration content detection.

UI Extensions part 2 of 3:

Definitely. The CSS framework has been rebuilt, and light/dark mode is at the core - it's not an afterthought.

In @Ehren we trust.