Grafidea

Forum moderation management used to be straightforward. It was commonplace to assign a moderator to a single forum. They would be responsible for enforcing the rules, removing spam and generally modelling the behaviour you wanted to see within your community.
As community management has matured and moderators are tasked with roles based on knowledge, help and support, there is a need for more nuance in managing topics within your community.
For example, you may have specialists or teams of specialists who help answer questions about development, sales, or support. Topics that require this help may be posted anywhere within your community.
Indeed, this feature was inspired by a need in our own support community to ensure customers get the right help from the right team member. We have questions on feature sets, purchasing, and support requests, each requiring a different team member. It is not enough to hope that the right person sees the topics; they must be assigned to ensure excellent service.
 
What are the benefits of this feature?
The ability to assign a topic to a single moderator or a team of moderators ensures that each topic gets the best outcome regardless of where it was posted.
Having topics assigned helps moderators deal with issues quickly, as there's clarity over which moderators should handle the topic. It also helps keep your community team accountable by having the ability to monitor their workload and get statistics on the time it takes for your team to reply. These statistics also help the community lead assess quality control.

 
How do you use this feature?
There are two ways to assign a topic to a moderator or team of moderators. You can assign a topic when replying to it or do it from the topic's action menu.
Once assigned, the assignee can review their assigned topics via the Moderator Control Panel and see which are assigned to them via the list of topics. Each moderator will receive a notification informing them they have a new assignment.

Those with permission to assign topics to others will see all the assigned topics and who they are assigned to when reviewing the list of topics.

The Admin CP contains a list of all assigned topics and also allows you to create and manage teams of moderators, such as "Sales Team" or "Developers."

Finally, once the topic has been managed successfully, the moderators can remove themselves from the assignment completing the task.
Assigning a specific topic to a single person or team in a busy online forum is a strategy that can enhance the effectiveness of the forum's management. It promotes efficiency, expertise, consistency, and accountability, which are vital for maintaining a vibrant and respectful online community.
We hope you are looking forward to this feature and look forward to any comments you may have.

The longest awaited iPhone feature is almost here, native iOS notifications, and we couldn't wait to ensure it is enabled for your Invision Community.
Invision Community 4.7.9 is iPhone push notification ready for when Apple release their latest iOS update later this month. This means you'll finally get notifications on your phone, even when you do not have your browser open, to alert you of new content on followed items and more. A feature Android owners have enjoyed for a while.

With notifications, you can have an authentic native app experience with built-in Invision Community features such as the manifest editor.
The manifest editor allows you to edit your theme icons, colours and URL for when your members add your community to their phone's homepage. This manifest file helps mobile devices understand how to display your community site when launched from the home screen.

Your members can add your community to their home screen with the share button. Once it has been added, it looks and feels like a native app downloaded from the App Store.
With Apple finally allowing native notifications and Invision Community's mobile-ready UI coupled with the manifest editor, you can have a real app experience without needing a mobile app.
iPhone PWA.mp4
We intend to bring more functionality and ease of use to mobile devices over the coming releases.
We hope you're looking forward to iOS native push notifications as much as we are!
The features discussed in this announcement are available in both Invision Community and Invision Community Classic.

We love talking about our big new features, such as GraphQL and Live Topics, but we also like to shine a light on some of the smaller updates we've made to existing applications.
In this blog, I'll take you through a few changes to the Download app and an update on our various API integrations.
Downloads
After the success of the Events and Gallery refreshes, we've brought some of those changes over to the Downloads application.
Our Invision Community March '23 release will feature subtle theme updates to bring the Downloads app more in line with other applications. In addition, we have also added a grid mode for files. As in other areas of the platform, you can allow your members to choose their favourite view, which is remembered on subsequent visits.

A long-awaited request by our Marketplace Contributors was to delete their pending version updates. The good news is that our March release now allows this!
API News
Invision Community benefits from several API services, including REST, GraphQL and webhooks.
Our March release brings some improvements to GraphQL, including the ability to query for clubs and members. We have also enhanced the webhook for clubs which now returns information about the club itself.
While we're on the subject of webhooks, we have created a new webhook that is triggered via Downloads when a new pending version is approved.
I hope you find these updates useful. I'll be posting some more in our developer's blog on GraphQL, including some simple javascript examples to show you how easy it is to query for data and insert it into the templates without needing to edit templates.
 

This week, we're excited to preview some of the UI changes which will be included with Invision Community 4.7.8.
These changes result in improved performance for Google Fonts and better contrast for accessibility, while also fixing a few bugs along the way. When combined, these small improvements result in a much more polished UI, so lets dive in and take a look at some examples below!
Google Fonts
Google Fonts are now imported using the latest version of their API, which includes support for font-display:swap. This CSS property prevents FOUT, or the Flash Of Unstyled Text, where fonts would temporarily be invisible if the Google Font hadn't finished downloading. With this update, a fallback font will be displayed until the Google Font has been downloaded, so your text will be immediately visible even on your initial page load.
With this update, we have also imported font-weight:600 for improved rendering of semi-bold fonts.
Cleaner UI for Forum Grid
This update includes a cleaner UI for forum grids, resulting in improved contrast particularly for the forum icon and forum name.

Cleaner UI for "Expanded view" topic lists
In addition to new forum grids, the expanded view UI has also seen improvements in this update, where items are now separated by a simple border instead of being separated into their own boxes.

Improved button alignment on mobiles
When possible, buttons will now only occupy a single line on mobiles which results in a cleaner layout and less scrolling. Win win!
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Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs now use a darker color and thicker font-weight for improved contrast, and no longer truncate when long titles are included.
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Social Icons
The background color of certain social icons has been updated to match their current brand colours.
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Widget designs
All widgets have received a slight UI overhaul, resulting in improved readability due to heavier font-weights on titles. Alignment issues have also been addressed in certain widgets for mobiles:
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Improved alignment in posts
Post controls (the bar containing the quote link and reactions) are now vertically aligned to the bottom of posts, regardless of the post length. Small change, but a big difference!
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And much more!
In addition to these changes, we've included a bunch of fixes including broken stats on record lists, wide tooltips, sticky announcements not staying stuck to the screen, incorrect image ratios for Recent Achievement badges and stretched thumbnails in widgets.
We think these improvements have really helped to clean up certain areas of our UI and we look forward to them going live on all sites with 4.7.8!