Invision Community News

Live Topics in Invision Community 5 Introduced last year, Live Topics are an innovative way to host live chat and question-and-answer sessions, complete with the option for live video integration. Live Topics effortlessly transform these events into permanent forum topics once the event concludes, allowing your members to not only interact in real-time with the rest of your community, but also continue the conversation far beyond the events conclusion. As part of Invision Community 5, Live Topics will ship with a brand new design, rich-text editors and dynamic reactions. Let’s take a look at all three improvements, starting with the new design. Fu…

Just six short weeks ago, Ehren hit record on a video that changed everything for Invision Community. The blog was called "Introducing a fresh new vision for Invision Community 5," and it ripped up the rule book on what forums should look like and revealed a slick new look featuring a new forum home feed view and sidebar navigation. A lot has been discussed, but we're not even close to done! Before we bring you news of more features after Thanksgiving, I wanted to take a mid-season break to recap what we've seen so far. First up was the introduction video, which gave a broad overview of the new UI Invision Community 5 would be sporting. Ehren takes us …

Invision Community offers fantastic ways of customizing the user experience for your members, and today, we’re excited to introduce some new and really simple ways of customizing Invision Community 5 even further using our new icon tools. Icon Picker Lets begin with our brand new icon picker. Containing both Font Awesome icons and emojis, the new picker allows you to easily search and assign icons to specific areas throughout your site. Lets take a look at some examples! icon-picker.mp4 Navigation icons Adding icons to the navigation list has been a highly requested feature, so we're happy to announce that you can now use this new p…

Long ago, back in the dark ages, forums used the number of posts a member made and how long ago they joined to demonstrate trust and experience. Is simply posting a lot and being a member for a long time the best way to know which community members are experts? And is there a better way? We think so. What makes an expert, and why are they important? Community experts are the keystones to any thriving community. You probably recognise a handful in your community. They tend to be active regularly, are often the first to try and help others with their questions and help set a positive example within the community. Wouldn'…

Forum platforms have a wide range of uses, from helping with support to sharing knowledge, ideation and social interaction. Topics can span years, and once the initial explosion of replies has passed, the topic lives on in local search and search engines for future viewers to discover and get value from. However, it's not always easy to get the best content from a very long topic. You may have noticed that when you come to a topic seeking an answer, some replies are less than helpful. How do I fix my Apple Watch? Like this! It's common to find a lot of social content mixed in with useful replies. Jokes, GIFs and off-topic musings are all gre…

Welcome to the third video of our sneak peak series! Today, we're really excited to introduce you to the new Theme Editor! Built entirely from scratch, the new editor provides an instant, live preview of your theme, as soon as you modify a setting. It's a zero-code approach to creating themes, and has been designed to ensure your theme adheres to your color scheme and looks great on every device, with very little effort. Let's take a closer look! Paragraph 1.mp4 To the left of the editor, you’ll see a live preview of your community. You can navigate to any page, as if you were browsing your site normally. At the top left of the editor, yo…

Welcome to the second video of our sneak peak series! Today we'll be taking a closer look at the new Invision Community interface, including dark mode, accessibility improvements, performance improvements and the mobile layout! Before we begin, I should mention that this is a pre-alpha version of Invision Community 5, so some areas of the design may change before the official release. New traditional header design In our previous video, we showcased our new, optional side panel which formats your navigation into a vertical list. For those who prefer a traditional, horizontal header, here it is! A much more compact header compared to version 4, …

Welcome to Invision Community 5! Over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring a bunch of new features and improvements coming to our user interface including our brand new theme editor, a new mobile UI, dark mode and performance improvements thanks to a reduction in both JavaScript and CSS. To kick off this series, let’s take a closer look at the new sidebar layout and new view modes for the forum index and topic pages. Sidebar Layout Traditionally, Invision Community has shipped with a horizontal header and navigation bar at the top of the page, which is still available in version 5. We're introducing a brand new (and optional) sidebar layout, which can be en…

The Marketplace is closing on October 30th 2023. If you haven't already read the announcement, please read it first. As our Marketplace prepares to close its doors, we want to ensure a seamless transition for our customers. To facilitate this process, we're introducing a new 'license key' system to allow you to transfer your purchases to the third-party developer website in a privacy-conscious way. On the 'My Purchases' page, you'll find an improved layout displaying each resource you've purchased from the Marketplace. This includes the original purchase date, the expiry date (if applicable) and the current renewal term (if applicable). Additionally, we've …

Spam has always been an ongoing battle for community owners as spammers find new ways to circumvent existing anti-spam practices. We have seen an uptick in new ways spammers are breaking through existing defense. As such, we here at Invision Community continue to look at new ways for community managers to combat against spam. For our September release, we have added several new tools that can prevent spammers from registering in the first place and help combat them even if they register successfully. Let's take a look at these new tools and settings. Geolocation based registration filtering Oftentimes, spam attacks can originate using bots and ser…

We would like to take this opportunity to inform you of an important decision we've made with regard to the Invision Community Marketplace. After careful evaluation and consideration, we have decided to discontinue the Invision Community Marketplace, effective October 30, 2023. Over the past several years, we have noticed a decrease in usage of the Marketplace, with a staggering 75% decline in sales. In addition, we have observed a growing trend away from off the shelf customizations towards bespoke tailoring of a community by working more closely with developers. While it has been a platform for many dedicated and talented contributors to share their work, we belie…

There's a lot for your members to love with Invision Community 5, and we recently covered five of the best features. Today, I want to discuss five features your team will love. One of the main concepts for Invision Community 5 was to reduce the complexity of power-user tools like theming and page building. These functions had been built around those with deep technical and coding knowledge, locking out many community teams. We also wanted to build new tools to help busy community teams organise, moderate and identify trusted members. Did we achieve that? Let's look at five new features we think your team will love in Invision Community 5. The new them…

We’ve got some exciting news! All communities hosted on the Invision Community platform will be switching to Cloudflare Enterprise edition for CDN and Firewall services. This transition starts now and will be complete by the end of January 2025. Don’t worry, you won’t experience any downtime during this transition. If you do see any issues, like a secure certificate warning, just clear your cache and try again. If your community keeps getting connection errors for more than 5 minutes, please reach out to our support team. We’re thrilled to offer you these improvements, including enhanced security, faster speeds, and more redundancy. We’ll also be able to better …

We're pleased to say that Invision Community 5.0.0 is now available to all customers.It's been a long journey, but we are now ready to support v5 as our primary release and offer our thanks to all of those who been involved in our beta testing program. What does this mean?We are currently in the soft release phase to help us manage the influx of feedback from those choosing to upgrade. We also have some new documentation to finish, and some website changes to make. If you're unsure what new features v5 brings, you can check out our "What's new in v5" page. Can I still use v4?Absolutely! And we would encourage you to plan your upgrade carefully. Version 5 is not a normal u…

It's been a very eventful week here at Invision Community, with the launch of Invision Community 5 and I wanted to take a minute to give an update on what has happened and what we've learned this week. Fixes and PatchesDespite being a brand-new platform, Invision Community 5 has had a very low number of critical issues, primarily thanks to months of careful testing and preparation before this release. We have made two patches this week that fix the following issues: An issue where some Cloud sites would block .svg and webp images when uploaded. An issue where updating the approval queue during the v4 to v5 upgrade could fail. An issue where the Policy Page would show an e…

Invision Community 5.0.1 is now available via your Admin Control PanelThis release focuses on bugs reported since the release of 5.0.0 and features many editor and UI improvements. You can see the full list of fixes in our release notes section. What's next?This week we'll continue to triage and manage incoming bug reports and we expect to have another maintenance release out next week to ensure that bug fixes are resolved as quickly as possible. If we see anything more pressing, we'll release a patch which can be applied via your Admin Control Panel. As always, thank you for your testing and reports. It really does help us! View the full article

Invision Community 5.0.2 is now available via your Admin Control PanelThis release focuses on bugs reported since the release of 5.0.1 and features many UI improvements. You can see the full list of fixes in our release notes section. This release also resolves several issues with Downloads screenshots and thumbnails. What's next?This week we'll continue to triage and manage incoming bug reports and we expect to have another maintenance release out next week to ensure that bug fixes are resolved as quickly as possible. We then expect 5.0.4 to follow within two to three weeks as we work in some larger fixes that will require more testing. If we see anything more pressing, …

We're pleased to announce that CSAM scanning is now available at no extra cost. What is CSAM scanning?CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material. The media served by your community will be scanned to identify any matches in a central CSAM database. These lists are provided by leading child safety advocacy groups, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). CSAM scanning is now recommended to increase compliance in many areas, and you can rest assured that Invision Community will now block any harmful media from being shown in your community. Moderating large communities can be challenging when your members are able to upload photos, and this s…

Invision Community 5.0.3 is now available via your Admin Control PanelThis release focuses on bugs reported since the release of 5.0.2 and features many UI improvements. You can see the full list of fixes in our release notes section. What's next?We expect 5.0.4 to follow within two to three weeks as we work in some larger fixes that will require more testing. We may release a beta release ahead of the full release to ensure that any bugs from those larger fixes are caught and fixed early. If we see anything more pressing, we'll release a patch which can be applied via your Admin Control Panel. As always, thank you for your testing and reports. It really does help us! Vie…

Invision Community 5.0.4 Beta 1 is now available Please celebrate responsibly. A whole two weeks has passed since our last release. The extra week allowed us to fully review a few larger updates that we've held back and require a beta or two to fully test before we're happy to include in a full release. Things to testThere have been some areas that have received a lot of attention and need extra special testing, these include: Page Editor (now works correctly for right-to-left languages but needs some testing in LTR) Custom badges (lots of work to make them more efficient and store a built version in SVG format) Editor bug fixes (lots of complex fixes, so please test the …