Matt

Ipb has come a long way since you guys founded it 20 years ago. It has become the undisputed leader in the forum software world. Congratulation on 20th anniversary, and I wish you guys many more years of success. 

I was an early adopter back in 2002 when the software was free and in direct competition with phpBB, though I have to say that there was no real competition as Invision Board was streets ahead and a far easier to manage piece of software.  It was the year of Pop Idol and the final was being fought between Will Young and Gareth Gates - Will Young won it and a community sprung up which I joined singing (no pun intended) the praises of Will Young.  It was on phpBB and whether it was the software or the server the site kept going down, much to the frustration of its members, so I offered an alternative using Invision Board.  I can't remember what I called the site, but everyone referred to it as Will's summer house and everyone used to flock to it when the other went down.  It was a fun time and it lit the fire beneath me that keeps me coming back and opening up sites - though none of them garner much interest these days because of DSM (that's dumb social media), but I could care less because I get as much fun out of engineering sites as I do seeing those few who join and use them.
My favourite site is one I dropped a little while ago and I am now feeling the pangs of regret infiltrating my mind to the extent where I may just bring it back and if no one uses it I don't really care, because I will get fun out of breathing life back into it and using it myself lol.
This software has come a long way since those heady days when opening a site saw hundreds of people joining up in a matter of days, the software has evolved greatly whilst the audience capacity has devolved, but there's a trend that often sees things go around in a circle and what once fell from grace becomes fashionable again and I can see this happening with forums when DSM is reigned in and the companies responsible for them are brought to task; that's starting to happen now, so who knows, we may see forum audiences flocking back to us in the near future (he says whilst not holding his breath lol).
Congratulations to the team for their persistence and endurance and bringing us to this momentous milestone 🙂

@Matt it goes even further back for me as I still count the original Ikonboard days!  It was the failed experiment that lead to the one that actually worked!
In terms of memories… there are too many for me to pick just one:
@Charles picking me up from the airport near Appomattox explaining how Virginia was not a state but a commonwealth.  The panicked support tickets to reboot a server and @Lindy saving the day and talking me off the ledge when IPS still sold dedicated servers.  Meeting you and learning about the migration from Perl to PHP.  Working through the upgrade from IPB3 to IPB4 thinking the conversion would NEVER finish… and then when finally turning the board back online and members saying “oh wow!”  

One of our sites from 2007, ah the memories!

It's still going strong today, celebrating over 20 years and still with Invision. Moved to them in 2007, before that was PHPBB.

Now I feel old. Fantastic.
Hello from 2004 as well:

 
99'999 Posts! Around 2004.

And some time later:

 
 
This long-term customer base is proof of the great work you do! Thank you so much!
 

Congratulations @Matt and TeamIPS! Wow, 20 years! That's gone so fast, now I do feel like an old man. I came along for the ride from the small town of Ikonboard and never looked back; there's no other 'message board' I'd use or recommend.

Not so long ago I was googling best Forum scripts, and IP board 3 was on its early versions when I bought it, I had never heard of IP board and I was using phpBB for a gaming clan 😄 
 
 

Great message @Matt, its amazing to see how far things have come, and I'm proud to say I've been along for most of the ride starting in 2003, back when I was part of a gaming clan.  We needed a place to communicate, and the cobbled-together .NET website we had just wasn't cutting it.  Later on, I used it for a local car club which lasted until everyone's lives moved on, and eventually to run a business!  We are coming up on our 10th year in business on March 1st, all the while using a website built exclusively on Nexus/IPCommerce, Downloads, and Pages!
We are very grateful for the love and dedication you put into your products, and look forward to another 20 years!

Congrats IPS! My first order was in 2004...where do the years go?

Boy how I miss these:

Congrats 🥰 Was such a joy to be part of the team for 8 of those years.

Improving PageSpeed needs a layered approach. There are many things you can do with your server configuration (Invision Community Cloud and Enterprise customers need not worry about this, our cloud platform is optimised already). Sending CSS/JS as gzip, ensuring gzip encoding is on, consider using a CDN to speed up delivery of assets, etc.

Software side, we continue to make improvements. We have a plan for re-engineering how javascript and CSS is compiled to make the file sizes smaller.

Just keep in mind that a community platform is much more complex than a simple website, or Wordpress site. A community platform deals with user generated content, which means dealing with external assets such as YouTube embeds, images, GIFs and more.

SEO remains central to our development plans.

Outside of PageSpeed, we continue to improve with JSON-LD, sitemaps and more.

Improving PageSpeed needs a layered approach. There are many things you can do with your server configuration (Invision Community Cloud and Enterprise customers need not worry about this, our cloud platform is optimised already). Sending CSS/JS as gzip, ensuring gzip encoding is on, consider using a CDN to speed up delivery of assets, etc.

Software side, we continue to make improvements. We have a plan for re-engineering how javascript and CSS is compiled to make the file sizes smaller.

Just keep in mind that a community platform is much more complex than a simple website, or Wordpress site. A community platform deals with user generated content, which means dealing with external assets such as YouTube embeds, images, GIFs and more.

SEO remains central to our development plans.

Outside of PageSpeed, we continue to improve with JSON-LD, sitemaps and more.

I love it when the comments are better than the blog itself. 
 
Outstanding contribution! Thanks Chris. 

I love it when the comments are better than the blog itself. 
 
Outstanding contribution! Thanks Chris. 

I love it when the comments are better than the blog itself. 
 
Outstanding contribution! Thanks Chris. 

I love it when the comments are better than the blog itself. 
 
Outstanding contribution! Thanks Chris. 

I love it when the comments are better than the blog itself. 
 
Outstanding contribution! Thanks Chris. 

Although there are lots of settings and features built into the suite to programmatically encourage "connectivity", it takes a great deal of finesse to keep both the early adopters and those that join later "truly" connected.
If a site admin "wings it", then...

It will likely lead to a "very" bumpy ride for one-and-all.
It takes thought and experimentation to hit upon how to create an overall environment that encourages members to connect with each other at the various stages of a site's development and long-term existence.
Eliciting feedback from early adopters is important but there is no guarantee that the first cohort's personality and interests will mirror that of future members. As such, it's wise not to build-out a site utilizing their input exclusively.   One should continuously elicit input from folks that have been around for varying periods of time. When you get a handle of the needs of your overall membership new and old you will have a better sense of how to guide the community towards ever more connectivity around areas that matter to the group as a whole.
As people's interests change (and you factor in short-lived trends) a site needs to constantly figure out how to address those changing interests and possibly differences in how members engage with each other. This is especially important if a site caters to a demographic that encompasses multiple generations and geographic regions.
Adopting a top-down approach to community engagement is unlikely to work much past a site's launch. A site admin should refrain from thinking this is "my site" and instead of think of it as "our site". What should "we" do to make this site far more engaging for all of us in comparison with our competitors?  Does "our" content "engage" and "inform", and does it feel like a place to hang out and make "real" connections with others.
Instead of admins setting the tone for a site by ensuring members adhere to a complex set of community standards one might consider changing their roles to be facilitators. They could be utilized to facilitate great dialog and introduce various members to each other they think might benefit from getting to know each other and elicit great conversations.
Getting to know other members in meaningful ways may require revealing a little more about oneself than just one's screen name. Profiles with just the right kind of fields filled out can go a long way towards helping ferret out fellow members with similar interests. This is a feature that often isn't utilized to its fullest extent as the value proposition isn't properly communicated to one-and-all from my observations of this site as well as others.
I've had 12,719 profile views here but as very few other people have filled out their profiles, I've followed suite and left mine almost blank.  People appear to want to know more about other fellow members here, but IPS has chosen not to promote the use of profiles.
Being in regular contact with your entire community (not just your early adopters and power users) is important. This will better allow you to find common ground amongst your entire membership. You might have to make a special effort to draw some folks out but it's worth it in the long term.  Many new members are a bit shy at first but in time may become quite active when they reach a certain comfort level. Who knows, some of these folks might be some of your best contributors in the years to come.
Society seems to instill a strong sense of independence in the populace.  Although that has many positives there are negative aspects as well.  One being that we are often reticent of asking for help from others.
Collectively we can accomplish so much more than what we can do individually, so don't be afraid to ask for assistance from your membership to help create a "community". You might be surprised by how many folks will offer to lend a hand if it is being used in a truly useful fashion and a task can be completed in a short span of time.
@Matt made some great points above, I would recommend folks check out more of his blog postings along with Joel R and Jordan Miller.
 
 

If your community is in the root (test.com/) then it doesn't prompt for a download and it's not a physical file, it's served on request.

If your community is in a directory (test.com/forums) then you are prompted to download so that it can be uploaded to the site root, and it will be a physical file.

If you go to your ACP > Site Promotion > Search Engine Optimisation you should see a tab called "Crawl Management" you can create the robots.txt file there.

Hopefully this is because the crawl efficiency improvements allowing Google to focus on the new content and not be distracted by changes to profiles, etc.

The best place for support is https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/forum/497-help-support/, thanks!

The best place for support is https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/forum/497-help-support/, thanks!

Hopefully this is because the crawl efficiency improvements allowing Google to focus on the new content and not be distracted by changes to profiles, etc.

Hopefully this is because the crawl efficiency improvements allowing Google to focus on the new content and not be distracted by changes to profiles, etc.