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2021 was a big year for Invision Community. 🎉 We launched no-code automation with our Zapier integration, added web push notifications, offline support, stock replies and new reporting metrics. We also improved spam management, SEO crawl efficiency, Clubs, Activity Streams and introduced a native gamification system named Achievements. Not to mention the team grew! 👋 @Matt Finger @Marshall Slemp (and me 🙋🏼‍♂️). We have lots to look forward to in the new year, but before we reveal more let's take a trip down memory lane. 2021 was one of our best-performing years ever! Here are some highlights: Community Activity 2021 We saw an influx of members contributing to our community support forum. 3,832 members submitted new content, followed something, or reacted to something in the community. Points earned: Thanks to the introduction of the Achievements system, members had the opportunity to earn points for contributing to the support community. In total, the community racked up 361,363 points. 📈 Topics created: Members fired off more than 4000 topics, including questions, feature suggestions and community management tips. 😳 New posts: Inside those topics included an array of replies. 31,488 posts to be exact. 😱 Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions given: Members also engaged with the community using our Reputation system (think of it as our "likes" 👍 system). Here are the top 10 members who gave the most Reactions. @sobrenome @Jordan Miller @SeNioR- @Linux-Is-Best @OptimusBain @Matt @Adriano Faria @Davyc @Marc Stridgen @Unienc Top 10 members with the most amount of Reactions received: If a member's topic or reply is well received, it earns Reputation using our Reactions system. Here are the top 10 members who received the most love. ❤️ @Matt @Adriano Faria @Nathan Explosion @CoffeeCake @opentype @Marc Stridgen @Daniel F @Davyc @Jimi Wikman Members who earned the most badges: Participating in the community also earns members special badges. You get a badge and you get a badge! ✅ @CoffeeCake @TAMAN @opentype @PPlanet @SUBRTX @Sonya* @Afrodude Top Marketplace contributors: Shout-out to our crazy talented third-party developers who take time out of their busy schedules to innovate and create downloads for other Invision Community clients to use! Here are the top Marketplace contributes: @Nathan Explosion @Michael.J @Miss_B @IBTheme @Kirill Gromov @ReyDev @Adriano Faria @shahed Most active forum: You have questions and we have answers. Our support system shifted to our help & support forum and it paid off big time! Thanks to everyone who contributed to making Invision Community a better place. Whether you're an active poster in our community support forums, or a customer who lives to learn and absorb, we greatly appreciate you. Cheers to the exciting ventures on the way in 2022! 🎉View the full article

Front-facing support creates visible opportunities for clients to find answers to both frequently asked and uncommon questions. Earlier this year, Invision Community lifted the veil off support, shifting from a private, 1-on-1, email-driven medium to open topics in our community support forum. We found ourselves answering the same questions because we hadn’t fully leaned into community support, which also gives our existing clients opportunities to weigh in with solutions. While we still do convert a chunk of community support questions to a private ticket, most issues are resolved for all to see. This is important to note because it's created an invaluable resource for others who may be searching for similar answers. We have: Improved support staff time management Improved retention Improved support response times for clients Built a resource library and knowledge base Forged stronger connections A few key stats in our support areas: 71% solved (+80%) in 3 months 9 hours is our average time to find a solution (50% faster) in 3 months 14% of topics became a ticket Feel free to mirror what we do for your own community! This is done through four key steps: 1) Identify, 2) Assess, 3) Execute, 4) Follow up 1) Identify: The first step is to identify the client’s problem or concerns. Our team keeps an eye on the support forums and anticipate new topics are incoming. We are equipped with any stored access details, and cloud access details, to login to a client’s community and take a look if needed (with their consent). This can aid us in identifying the issue. 2) Assess: After assessing the issue and gathering information, we put on our critical thinking caps. One of several things may happen: A solution is provided More information may be requested A ticket can be created if needed for more sensitive issues, or items needing more detailed review Sometimes our support team needs to investigate an issue further. That requires us to take things off the community and open a specialized ticket for our tier two support team to take a closer look. 3) Execute Now that we’ve created a path towards finding a solution, we get to work. Each ticket can result in one of three outcomes: It's resolved It needs to be further investigated Or, it’s a bug Bugs Hey, they happen. If an item is determined to be a bug, that bug is also added as a follow up item and the topic is marked as a known issue. When we follow up on a bug item, we go through a few processes. Our developers will work through these bugs to get them resolved, in order of priority/severity. Once done, they are reviewed and added to a new release. Fun fact: Every week, we list out all of the platform updates and fixes in our Community Manager's Lounge! As items are fixed, our support staff will pick up on this through the followup process. The ticket will be changed from “known issue” to “in future release” to show its status. The follow up item status is also changed to show it being in the next release. Upon release of a new version, the above items are gone through to mark them as solved, then we inform the client that the issue is resolved. We also have weekly development meetings to discuss items with developers, as well as weekly support staff meetings to discuss issues with any support processes for that week. 4) Followup Following up with a client after we found a solution helps us stay connected to our community and improves retention. We like to check back in a few days, a week, or even more depending on what the nature of the issue was. The aim is to provide a working solution to the client then ensure that, well… it worked! If an item is escalated, we have an internal follow up system that allows us to keep an eye on your ticket. Shifting the way you handle support, from behind-the-scenes to center stage, has been one of the most profound and rewarding changes to Invision Community. Not only is our support community a wealth of knowledge and saves our clients time, but it also creates trust with our clients because we’re held accountable. How do you handle support in your community? Drop us a line in the comments; we’d love to hear from (and see) you!View the full article

Gratitude is an essential part of building community. One of the most powerful emotions is gratitude. It helps foster meaningful connections, expands awareness and, well, it just feels good! Invision Community features powerful tools to help you maintain relationships with your clients, customers or members. Approaching them with gratitude in mind will inspire your community to blossom into something even greater. Here are five ways to show your community members you are thankful for them: 1) Achievements Our robust Achievements system is the most obvious method to tap into gratitude. As a community leader or moderator, you can literally show thanks by rewarding your members. Manually award members a Badge and Points for exemplifying leadership, posting special content or for their positive contributions. Move members into an exclusive Rank for consistently being a positive force in the community. Display a block of Badges on the community homepage to make members’ accomplishments visible. 2) Newsletter Send a bulk email from the platform directly into your members’ inbox. A newsletter is a wonderful way to intimately communicate with your die-hards. Blast the email to your entire community, or choose specific user groups. For example, relay this special gratitude email to members who’ve posted 100 times or more. 3) Curate content Highlight your members’ topics or blog posts by curating them for more to see. This not only thanks your community for positively contributing, but also encourages others to follow suit. Use the Our Picks widget or the Feature moderation action to prominently display content items. Though different tactics, both showcase what your members are posting. 4) Reputation Our Reputation system is one of the most efficient and effective ways to show gratitude in an instant. “Reacting” to members’ posts visibly shows thanks and communicates to others that the post is worth stopping and reading. Reacting also increases a member’s perceived value in the community. The higher a member’s Reputation score is, the more they are trusted by others. 5) Topics This might be the most powerful but challenging tip of all: create a topic in the Forums and tell your community you’re grateful for them. It’s one thing to award badges and points, curate content and send a newsletter, but it’s another for you, the community leader, to spend a moment and personally thank your members for supporting you. They are spending their time, one of the most valuable assets, with you. That’s worth celebrating! Speaking of… Invision Community would like to take this moment to thank you. Whether you are a serious hobbyist, a medium-sized company or an enterprise industry giant, we want to thank you for believing in us and using our platform to better your business. If you’re someone who’s interested in joining, we’d love to hear from you! 🙏 Get in touch with us! 🙏View the full article

The holy trinity of successful communities intertwines cause, experiences and value together. Create these and your community will no doubt hold a special place in peoples’ hearts. Before we unpack this special trifecta, let’s define what success means through the lens of community building. While success is subjective, there are a few things we can all agree on: Communities that can consistently deliver value while also connecting people to one another will prosper. Cause Cause is your ‘why.’ Why does your community exist and why should anyone care to join? It sounds obvious, but many businesses have trouble understanding who their audience is or how their community can help them. Can you answer this? My audience is ___________________. An important component of cause is justifying your community’s existence. If you can define why your community helps people, you’ll see success. That may look like: Offering guidance Answering questions Sharing information Selling a product or service A community that stands to elevate a group of peoples’ lives will eventually break the threshold from ordinary to extraordinary. There’s a number of ways to utilize the Invision Community platform to assist with your cause. Create a niche forum for your members to engage with one another using our Forum application. Sell a digital product or physical item using our Commerce application. Create an event with our Calendar application. Share news, information and blogs using our Blogs and Pages applications. How to create a cause: creating and nurturing your community takes a lot of hard work and determination. Having a passion to serve is a must; without it you will burn out. If you have yet to define your community’s purpose, don’t fret – reading this blog post about how to create a successful community is a perfect starting point. However, if you’re a small or big business and ready to take that next step, start by answering the following: My community will help people by ___________________. Experiences Members participating in a shared experience together is what takes your company from just a business to a community. Your community’s cause inspires experiences. A lively community isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it medium. While you’re consistently chucking wood into the community campfire, you’ll need time on your side. That’s a nice way of saying be patient! The compounding effect of shared group experiences is something a company or brand can’t manufacture, however it’s essential for a meaningful history. Oftentimes, a business owner expects their community to flourish in a year or two. It’s possible, but uncommon, because there likely wasn’t enough time to generate an impact across a population. Be in this for the long haul. How to create experiences: tap into people’s emotions. Create content that takes the member on a journey of highs and lows – encourage them to follow suit when creating their own content. My community will make a long-lasting impact because ___________________. Value We’ve all heard the recycled marketing adage, ‘people come for the content, but they stay for the community.’ There’s a reason content is king; it’s a vehicle to drive new audiences to your community while also making your brand more valuable. However, content is only one of several value modalities. This is when value comes full circle with experiences. A brand does this by easily explaining its cause, creating experiences then adding value by justifying its existence through offering guidance, answering questions, sharing information or selling a product/service. How to create value: A community platform alone won’t create value. It requires thoughtful intention, inspired action and follow up. Offer a world class experience by consistently over-delivering: Offer premium, information-style content (like blog posts, YouTube videos, newsletters, social media outreach). Engage with your members in the community (reply to their posts, feature their content, reward them with public recognition using our Achievements system). Touch base outside the community with email outreach, respond to their social media posts, even monthly calls. Creating a community is single-handedly one of the best decisions you can make for your business. My community brings value to the world because ___________________. We’ve helped serious hobbyists, small businesses and enterprise giants give their super fans/customers/clients the ability to create meaningful connections with one another. Ready to bring cause, experiences and value to your company? Get in touch with us!View the full article

Every time I checked in with a newly launched running community, it seemed like there were more and more new people posting. As a result, I found it harder to find my friends' latest run write-ups and even harder to reply directly to them. Speaking with other early adopters, they felt the same way, and we all eventually drifted out of the community's orbit. It's natural to want your community to grow; indeed, a lot of community management strategies are based on increasing registrations and scaling upwards. However, your early adopters may feel very different about growth as they watch their close friendship circles dissolve as more members join and begin posting. A small and tightly connected community is very different from a large sprawling community, and often our business goals as community managers can be at odds with our member's goals. Let's take a look at the problem and then the solution. A new community is small and personal. Your early adopters will make friends fast by sharing their experiences and stories. They start to learn about each other and actively look forward to new posts and content. It's easy to keep track of the conversations and people in those early days when memberships are still in their infancy. Before themes and topics drive your community, the primary reason your members return is to strengthen burgeoning bonds. As your thriving community grows, more names appear, generating more posts and content. It can become harder to keep track of those personal conversations and friends. For those early adopters, it becomes overwhelming, and the feel of the community changes. The key to growth is to do it with consideration and understanding by allowing your members to retain smaller friendship circles within the larger community. Think of these small circles as a secure basecamp your members will use to explore more of the community together. How you structure your community can heavily influence member behaviour, so let's ensure you are set up for success. Forum structure Deciding how many forums to have largely depends on the size of your community. Generally, fewer is better; however, adding more when activity increases is recommended. Using the example of a running community, when you have few members, a single topic can be used to keep track of workouts; however, as membership increases, a dedicated forum where members can post and maintain their own workout log topic makes it easier for others to find specific member's logs rather than trawling through a long busy topic. If you're in doubt, asking your community is always a great way to draw out real honest feedback and guidance on how to improve. Nerd Fitness forums allow each member to maintain their own training log in their busy forum Clubs Creating a sub-community is a big decision. On the one hand, you syphon off discussion to areas outside the main community, but this can be an advantage if you want members to retain their smaller friendship circles. On the other hand, you may find an appetite for more niched discussion within your topic. For example, while your site may be based around road running, you may have a small group specifically interested in mountain running. Using a club allows them to follow that passion without altering the core purpose of your community. Even though our own community is here to serve our clients, we have a health club where members can discuss health and fitness away from the community's primary aim Follow Using the robust follow and notification tools is an efficient way to let members know when a favoured member posts something new or a loved topic gets a reply. Make sure your members know how to set up notifications and the different ways to receive them, such as via mobile, email, or the community's bell. Your members need not miss a friends update again. We have a very comprehensive follow system Discover Activity streams allow members to personalise their first point of discovery. In addition, the flexibility of the streams will enable members to choose which member's content to see and which forum's content to include in a single news feed style stream. Giving your members the ability to customise which content they see when they first visit the community allows them to check in with their favourite areas before exploring the rest of the community. NerdFitness use streams to show content for each 'guild' Growing a community from a handful of people to tens of thousands takes a lot of planning. Unfortunately, it's easy to focus on just numbers and forget about the people behind them. However, aligning your business goals with your members' goals is critical when growing beyond your early adopters. Setting up your community for success using our built-in tools will help your members feel comfortable as you grow.View the full article

Earlier this year, Invision Community launched a native gamification system called Achievements. We added significant improvements to Achievements in our new release, 4.6.8, out now! 🎉 Achievements allows community leaders to reward members with points, badges and ranks for their outstanding contributions. We listened to your feedback and implemented some very exciting changes. In this post, you'll get a crash course on the new updates included in your Admin Control Panel (ACP) upon updating your community to 4.6.8. Once you're familiar with these concepts, you can take action to elevate your community. New! Married group promotions with Achievements. New! Added metrics to better understand how Achievements functions within your community. New! Implemented additional rules to further empower your members. New! Updated email notifications to let your members know when they've earned a badge. New! Download member lists based on Achievements criteria. Before we expand on the new features, here's a recap of Achievements to refresh your memory: Related: Want to know more about Achievements? Read our original blog post. Now that you’re up to speed, let’s take a look at the new metrics and rules. Group promotions Group promotions lay out various user journeys. Based on actions a member takes in a community, for example commenting 100 times, having a high reputation score or having joined a community a year ago, the platform will automatically place them in a group (based on the rules you previously set up). This is useful when creating a hierarchy in your community. The more your members are engaged, the more access / privileges they receive. Now, community leaders can automatically place members in specific groups based on what badges they've earned in the community. Couple examples: A moderator manually awards a member the 'Helpful Superstar' badge. In this scenario, that badge can only be earned if a moderator chooses to give it. Once someone earns that badge, they're automatically placed in the 'Helpful Superstars' group. This group may have the ability to create clubs (whereas the other groups can't). A member earns the 'Engaged' badge. 'Engaged' badges are earned when a member has replied 100 times since joining. Once they've posted 100 replies, the system automatically places them in a new group with other contributing members. Related: Learn more about Group Promotions Metrics Metrics reports are essential for understanding what's working in your community, and what needs improving. Badges Earned: Track what badges were earned during a defined period of time. This is especially useful to track both member engagement as well as identify how often your community moderators are awarding badges manually. Badges earned by member group: How many members in each group earned a badge. Track this when quantifying what groups are most engaged with your community. Understanding which group(s) earn the most badges helps you better tend to groups that might be less engaged. It might be a good idea to show them some extra attention. Badges by member: Search a time-based list of all members with an earned badge total. Easily discover who your VIP members are and reward / thank them for being active contributors. Related: Maximize community growth with our new reporting metrics Rules Set up rules based on various criteria. These rules will automatically take a specific action once the criteria has been met. Member downloads a file: Members may earn a badge for downloading a specific file. This could be useful if your company wanted to share new policies or an announcement; track which members took the time to download the information and publicly recognize them for staying on top of things. Member purchases a package or product: Members may also earn a badge for purchasing either a package or a specific product. For example, you could create a rule for members to earn a coveted product badge for opting to purchase a physical product (like a t-shirt). Only members who've purchased an item from your community would receive this type of recognition. Outreach Jump into your members' inboxes with tailor-made good news. New Email notifications: New notification emails let your members know when they've received a coveted rank. Segment Download a list of members based on a number of Achievements criteria, including points, ranks and badges. In theory, you can upload this list of members elsewhere to target this specific audience (like sending an exclusive email drip campaign in Mail Chimp). Several examples include downloading a list of members who've: Earned 500 or more points Earned a specific badge Reached a specific rank Achievements is a robust feature to engage your VIP members and spark the fuse of inspiration for newcomers. There’s a lot of power at your fingertips. Unsure where to start with implementing Achievements? Check out our original post and determine what behaviors you want to reward within your community. Sometimes just logging in is a good place to start. Reward them for that. 🙂 Ready to take Achievements to the next level? Check out the new Group Promotions and Achievements Metrics now available in 4.6.8. Where are you in your journey with Achievements? Drop us a line in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!View the full article

🟢 Scaling your community requires overcoming many barriers and learning new ways of working with your community. Rosie explores this in her blog: How we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale. "In community, we often say to do things that don't scale. To start small. To get the foundations right. To trust that how we are and what we do is what the community becomes, on a larger scale. Our behaviour, our intentions, our alignment, and our goals all influence what the community can become." 🧠 What we think: There is no right or wrong way to scale your community from its humble beginnings and it can be a lot of hard work but that doesn't mean we should change our core values and how we approach helping others. 🟢 Should you respond to questions before your members? Is a question explored by Richard at Feverbee. "If you (the community manager) respond to a question in a community, other members are less likely to respond. This makes it harder for top members to earn points and feel a sense of influence. But if you don’t respond to a question in a community, it can linger and look bad. It also means the person asking a question is waiting for a response and becoming increasingly frustrated." 🧠 What we think: There are certain areas where you need your team to lead. Right here on this forum we want to provide the best service for our customers so our support team are active and quick to reply to all questions. There are other community-led sections that definitely benefit from allowing time for other members to reply to share their knowledge. It's a good feeling helping others. 🟢 CMX explores how to move your community online. Much of this is great advice for anyone considering moving platform (to Invision Community, right?). "Christiana recommends viewing community migration as a process that requires patiences, “this is not a race meant to be run fast. We are changing the mindset of the people in our ecosystem”. " 🧠 What we think: Patience is definitely key when moving platforms. The sooner you start engaging with your own community and explaining the reasons for the move and the benefits it'll bring, the easier it will be. 🟢 Michelle can't find the bathroom when at a party which inspires a blog on 5 secrets to community onboarding. "Walking into a party without your host can feel confusing, alienating, and frustrating. And for your customers, joining a new community without onboarding is just as bad." 🧠 What we think: Onboarding is critical to your community's success. New members can often feel lost and unsure where to start. It can be intimidating in real life to enter a room full of people that know each other, and this is true in the online space too. 🎧 Podcast: What makes a community a home? Patrick explores this by interviewing members of his own community, which opened 20 years ago and is still going strong. 🧠 What we think: We love hearing about long established communities that are still thriving and hearing how those early online relationships shaped people's lives.View the full article

🟢 Scaling your community requires overcoming many barriers and learning new ways of working with your community. Rosie explores this in her blog: How we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale. "In community, we often say to do things that don't scale. To start small. To get the foundations right. To trust that how we are and what we do is what the community becomes, on a larger scale. Our behaviour, our intentions, our alignment, and our goals all influence what the community can become." 🧠 What we think: There is no right or wrong way to scale your community from its humble beginnings and it can be a lot of hard work but that doesn't mean we should change our core values and how we approach helping others. 🟢 Should you respond to questions before your members? Is a question explored by Richard at Feverbee. "If you (the community manager) respond to a question in a community, other members are less likely to respond. This makes it harder for top members to earn points and feel a sense of influence. But if you don’t respond to a question in a community, it can linger and look bad. It also means the person asking a question is waiting for a response and becoming increasingly frustrated." 🧠 What we think: There are certain areas where you need your team to lead. Right here on this forum we want to provide the best service for our customers so our support team are active and quick to reply to all questions. There are other community-led sections that definitely benefit from allowing time for other members to reply to share their knowledge. It's a good feeling helping others. 🟢 CMX explores how to move your community online. Much of this is great advice for anyone considering moving platform (to Invision Community, right?). "Christiana recommends viewing community migration as a process that requires patiences, “this is not a race meant to be run fast. We are changing the mindset of the people in our ecosystem”. " 🧠 What we think: Patience is definitely key when moving platforms. The sooner you start engaging with your own community and explaining the reasons for the move and the benefits it'll bring, the easier it will be. 🟢 Michelle can't find the bathroom when at a party which inspires a blog on 5 secrets to community onboarding. "Walking into a party without your host can feel confusing, alienating, and frustrating. And for your customers, joining a new community without onboarding is just as bad." 🧠 What we think: Onboarding is critical to your community's success. New members can often feel lost and unsure where to start. It can be intimidating in real life to enter a room full of people that know each other, and this is true in the online space too. 🎧 Podcast: What makes a community a home? Patrick explores this by interviewing members of his own community, which opened 20 years ago and is still going strong. 🧠 What we think: We love hearing about long established communities that are still thriving and hearing how those early online relationships shaped people's lives.View the full article

Gathering information, then understanding what to do with it, is essential for sustainability. Reporting tools available in the Invision Community platform can help you better understand the inner workings of your community and decide whether your current setup is leading you towards or away from your bottom line. We recognize that knowledge is power, so we expanded our extensive list of reporting metrics. Invision Community’s latest release, 4.6.8, includes additional reporting tools in the Admin Control Panel (ACP) to empower community leaders. Now, community leaders can not only check registration count, topic creation, device usage and other engagement metrics, but may also view reports on follower statistics, top referrers, member preferences and more. In this post, we'll highlight a couple of our favorite metrics included in 4.6.8. New! Metrics to better understand moderator actions: # of warnings given: track how many warnings moderators issued during a defined time period. # of suspended users: track how many members moderators suspended during a defined time period. # of reports submitted over a defined period of time. Moderator actions include any action a moderator takes in the community, for example hiding/closing/deleting a topic. Understanding how your moderators handle sticky situations builds trust and clarity. However, a moderator’s value shouldn’t depend on the amount of warnings / suspensions given. Ideally, a well functioning community with a clear set of guidelines creates a culture where toxic members (and their posts) are less common. Don’t punish a moderator for taking less restrictive action; reward them because they didn’t have to! Why you should care: because metrics are imperative for goal setting. For example, “we want to reduce the number of warnings given by 50% at the end of the year.” In this scenario, the overarching goal is to foster a better user experience, resulting in less problematic posts (and thus less opportunity for moderators to issue warnings). If X then Y: If moderators issued 50% less warnings, then their time is freed up to spend on other important tasks. Related: 5 quick tips to up your community moderation game New! Metrics to understand whether your spam defense tactics are working: Unlikely to be a spammer Possibly a spammer Likely to be a spammer Known spammer No one likes a spammer. Unlike the junk you receive in your physical or email inbox, Invision Community includes powerful tools to combat spam. Our new spam defense metrics let you know if the systems you put in place are working, or if there's room for improvement. We integrated an intelligent spam defense system directly into the platform, as well as a few additional steps to avoid spam, including an invisible reCAPTCHA and question and answer challenge. Why you should care: because spam hogs resources and clutters a community. The higher the "unlikely to be a spammer" stats are in comparison to "possibly a spammer," "likely to be a spammer" and "known spammer," the better. With the new metrics, you'll know without a shadow of a doubt how frequently spammers are flagged and blocked. If X then Y: If there are 75% less spammers per month, then your community's health has increased. Related: 3 major improvements we made to spam management But wait... there's more! Here are additional metrics included in 4.6.8: Members with the most followers Members following the most people Number of content items deleted RSVPs to calendar events Questions with the most up/down votes over time Member preferences Most-used theme Most-used language Information is one of the most valuable resources for any community leader because it prompts inspired action. The additional reporting metrics included in 4.6.8 will be made available to you in the first half of November. Thoughts on our new reporting tools? Drop us a line in the comments.View the full article

No matter how good your content is, how accurate your keywords are or how precise your microdata is, inefficient crawling reduces the number of pages Google will read and store from your site. Search engines need to look at and store as many pages that exist on the internet as possible. There are currently an estimated 4.5 billion web pages active today. That's a lot of work for Google. It cannot look and store every page, so it needs to decide what to keep and how long it will spend on your site indexing pages. Right now, Invision Community is not very good at helping Google understand what is important and how to get there quickly. This blog article runs through the changes we've made to improve crawling efficiency dramatically, starting with Invision Community 4.6.8, our November release. The short version This entry will get a little technical. The short version is that we remove a lot of pages from Google's view, including user profiles and filters that create faceted pages and remove a lot of redirect links to reduce the crawl depth and reduce the volume of thin content of little value. Instead, we want Google to focus wholly on topics, posts and other key user-generated content. Let's now take a deep dive into what crawl budget is, the current problem, the solution and finally look at a before and after analysis. Note, I use the terms "Google" and "search engines" interchangeably. I know that there are many wonderful search engines available but most understand what Google is and does. Crawl depth and budget In terms of crawl efficiency, there are two metrics to think about: crawl depth and crawl budget. The crawl budget is the number of links Google (and other search engines) will spider per day. The time spent on your site and the number of links examined depend on multiple factors, including site age, site freshness and more. For example, Google may choose to look at fewer than 100 links per day from your site, whereas Twitter may see hundreds of thousands of links indexed per day. Crawl depth is essentially how many links Google has to follow to index the page. The fewer links to get to a page, is better. Generally speaking, Google will reduce indexing links more than 5 to 6 clicks deep. The current problem #1: Crawl depth A community generates a lot of linked content. Many of these links, such as permalinks to specific posts and redirects to scroll to new posts in a topic, are very useful for logged in members but less so to spiders. These links are easy to spot; just look for "&do=getNewComment" or "&do=getLastComment" in the URL. Indeed, even guests would struggle to use these convenience links given the lack of unread tracking until logged in. Although they offer no clear advantage to guests and search engines, they are prolific, and following the links results in a redirect which increases the crawl depth for content such as topics. The current problem #2: Crawl budget and faceted content A single user profile page can have around 150 redirect links to existing content. User profiles are linked from many pages. A single page of a topic will have around 25 links to user profiles. That's potentially 3,750 links Google has to crawl before deciding if any of it should be stored. Even sites with a healthy crawl budget will see a lot of their budget eaten up by links that add nothing new to the search index. These links are also very deep into the site, adding to the overall average crawl depth, which can signal search engines to reduce your crawl budget. Filters are a valuable tool to sort lists of data in particular ways. For example, when viewing a list of topics, you can filter by the number of replies or when the topic was created. Unfortunately, these filters are a problem for search engines as they create faceted navigation, which creates duplicate pages. The solution There is a straightforward solution to solve all of the problems outlined above. We can ask that Google avoids indexing certain pages. We can help by using a mix of hints and directives to ensure pages without valuable content are ignored and by reducing the number of links to get to the content. We have used "noindex" in the past, but this still eats up the crawl budget as Google has to crawl the page to learn we do not want it stored in the index. Fortunately, Google has a hint directive called "nofollow", which you can apply in the <a href> code that wraps a link. This sends a strong hint that this link should not be read at all. However, Google may wish to follow it anyway, which means that we need to use a special file that contains firm instructions for Google on what to follow and index. This file is called robots.txt. We can use this file to write rules to ensure search engines don't waste their valuable time looking at links that do not have valuable content; that create faceted navigational issues and links that lead to a redirect. Invision Community will now create a dynamic robots.txt file with rules optimised for your community, or you can create custom rules if you prefer. The new robots.txt generator in Invision Community Analysis: Before and after I took a benchmark crawl using a popular SEO site audit tool of my test community with 50 members and around 20,000 posts, most of which were populated from RSS feeds, so they have actual content, including links, etc. There are approximately 5,000 topics visible to guests. Once I had implemented the "nofollow" changes, removed a lot of the redirect links for guests and added an optimised robots.txt file, I completed another crawl. Let's compare the data from the before and after. First up, the raw numbers show a stark difference. Before our changes, the audit tool crawled 176,175 links, of which nearly 23% were redirect links. After, just 6,389 links were crawled, with only 0.4% being redirection links. This is a dramatic reduction in both crawl budget and crawl depth. Simply by guiding Google away from thin content like profiles, leaderboards, online lists and redirect links, we can ask it to focus on content such as topics and posts. Note: You may notice a large drop in "Blocked by Robots.txt" in the 'after' crawl despite using a robots.txt for the first time. The calculation here also includes sharer images and other external links which are blocked by those sites robots.txt files. I added nofollow to the external links for the 'after' crawl so they were not fetched and then blocked externally. As we can see in this before, the crawl depth has a low peak between 5 and 7 levels deep, with a strong peak at 10+. After, the peak crawl depth is just 3. This will send a strong signal to Google that your site is optimised and worth crawling more often. Let's look at a crawl visualisation before we made these changes. It's easy to see how most content was found via table filters, which led to a redirect (the red dots), dramatically increasing crawl depth and reducing crawl efficiency. Compare that with the after, which shows a much more ordered crawl, with all content discoverable as expected without any red dots indicating redirects. Conclusion SEO is a multi-faceted discipline. In the past, we have focused on ensuring we send the correct headers, use the correct microdata such as JSON-LD and optimise meta tags. These are all vital parts of ensuring your site is optimised for crawling. However, as we can see in this blog that without focusing on the crawl budget and crawl efficiency, even the most accurately presented content is wasted if it is not discovered and added into the search index. These simple changes will offer considerable advantages to how Google and other search engines spider your site. The features and changes outlined in this blog will be available in our November release, which will be Invision Community 4.6.8.View the full article

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to moderating/guiding an online community. Each digital world includes its own series of hurdles to overcome. As a community gains momentum and the registration count climbs higher, community moderators are presented with new challenges. These tasks become inherently more complex as a result, siphoning precious resources and oftentimes paint moderators into a corner. Take back the brush and illustrate a new scene with these supportive tips on how to better engage with your community. These pro-moderation tactics aim to foster a greater sense of togetherness and unity while also acknowledging individual members for their contributions. Clear and concise community guidelines. These are the building blocks for a solid foundation. Community guidance is less about different means of restriction and more about the ability to express one’s thoughts and feelings in a healthy way. All communities will inevitably run into toxic trolls, but instead of exerting energy on the negative, give praise and accolades to the positive. As we mentioned in a previous blog post about community guidance, show your community in the guidelines how you want them to post by contributing that way yourself. That sets a precedent. From there, you'll notice other community members participating in a way that is similar to you (TL;DR lead by example). Curate member content. Curating member content is the secret sauce to accelerated growth when it comes to community building. Featuring your members' posts publicly demonstrates your desire to embrace participating members. It’s one thing to comment on members’ topics, it’s another to feature and promote them for all to see. It gives added depth to your community by amplifying differing opinions, builds trust and encourages others to partake. It’ll take extra effort on your end to manually curate content (be selective regarding what topics you want to represent your community); establishing multiple authorities in your community builds momentum. Remember, people come for the content, but stay for the community. Give them both! Moderate on the offense. Moderating has a bad rap. Generally speaking, most view it as a prohibitive tool. A member posts profanity? Moderate! A topic goes live in the wrong section? Moderate! A spam bot infiltrates the latest blog entry? Moderate, moderate, moderate! That aspect of community building will always exist, but setting up automations will save you time and money. More importantly, it creates an elevated user experience because your attention is spent engaging with your members. We have some powerful tools at your disposal to help, including a designated ‘automatic moderation’ section in your Admin Control Panel. Here, community leaders can set up rules that will trigger automatic content moderation. For example, you could create a rule that automatically hides content when it receives three or more user-submitted reports. If your members collectively agree another member’s post is problematic, and three or more of them report it, the post is hidden from public view until a moderator has a chance to review it. Moderation doesn’t have to be a dirty word. And if it does, we have an automatic moderation tool for that, too. Publicly recognizing members. Members who refuse to follow your community guidelines likely won’t fall in line with a public reprimand. Either privately message them your concerns or issue a warning only the moderation team can see. Instead, focus your attention on recognizing and rewarding contributing members. There’s a number of ways you can energize morale, including responding to members’ positive posts, manually or automatically awarding badges with our Achievements system, highlighting engaged members in a sidebar block, showcasing Leaderboard champs or even interviewing your MVPs. The idea is to approach community guidance with open arms – not a closed fist. Team work makes the dream work. There’s a reason it’s cliché. Organizing then empowering a moderation team is essential. Once on the same page in terms of expectations and processes, a community leader is then faced with the daunting task of relinquishing control as their team gears up to congratulate and moderate. Your moderation team is only one moving part of a well-oiled machine. There are times, especially in the early days of a community where, as the community leader, you’re doing most of the heavy lifting. However, there will come a time when the community supports you in return and shares the weight. It’s important to recognize those instances and publicly acknowledge them! The world has enough doom and gloom; be an inspiration to your community and in return they’ll inspire you. Do you have a community management tip to share? Drop it into the comments. We’d love to hear from you! Header photo: UnsplashView the full article

Wouldn't it be nice if the Invision Community editor could re-use whole replies, text snippets, and even reply templates? As we get ready to welcome more customers into our staffed community support area, this feature idea has become a reality to help form personalized replies. Invision Community has a saved actions feature that allows the community team to perform multiple actions on multiple topics. For example, you might want to add a title prefix, move the topic and add a reply. This works great for 'canned' responses and actions, but it is less useful if you want to edit the reply to personalize it. Stock replies allow you to set up entire replies, partial replies or even reply templates. Stock replies via the editor Once you have these set up in the Admin Panel, they are visible on the editor. Stock replies are configured in the Admin Panel You can choose multiple stock replies to build up a message with handy re-usable reply snippets. stockreplies_video.mp4 Each stock reply has full permission capabilities, meaning you can specify which member groups can use each stock reply. For example, you may wish to create partial replies for your team but encourage members to use a reply template to report bugs, etc. Using stock actions as a template We hope you like this feature, which is coming to our 4.6.7 October release.View the full article

It’s been a minute since our last blog post, but we have cooked up several epic projects in the interim. To refresh your memory, we recently launched a new platform update, 4.6. It includes *takes a deep breath* Achievements, Zapier integration, web app and push notifications, anonymous posting, solved content, the ability to show when a team member has replied, a new health dashboard, spam improvements and more. In the time since, we prepared a few special treats for you. Before we dive into the feature feast, sample our forthcoming website refresh. In the very near future, our entire website will slip into something a little more comfortable. Not only will the look and feel change, but we’re implementing new sections to explain how and why Invision Community is any business’ go-to- solution for community building. More on that to come, but for now take a bite out of this: Onto the feature updates; hope you’re hungry! Extended closed Club functionality Clubs with ‘closed’ permissions have more flexibility than ever. Now, the owner of a closed club can opt to have the club’s forums, calendar, pages, gallery and downloads be visible for all to see (despite the club being set to closed). Previously, members could not access any part of a closed club unless they joined. For example, a closed club leader could create a special landing page that’s viewable by members who have not yet joined the club, but the rest of the club is closed. This might be useful as a means to encourage someone to join, share information that’s pertinent to those in and out of the club or as a sales tool. Another example could be keeping the club-associated forums visible for all, but keep the club’s calendar and image gallery exclusive to the club’s members as an incentive to join. Gobble up this screengrab below: Subscribe to Activity Streams Never skip a beat! Members of a community can now subscribe to any default or custom activity stream (minus the All Activity Stream) and receive either daily or weekly email notifications with a roundup of content they may have missed. This is especially useful for die-hard community members and moderators who frequently consume content. By subscribing to an activity stream, members have important, need-to-know items they’re interested in delivered straight to their inbox. Community administrators have the option to limit how many activity streams a member can subscribe to. Because email notifications are inherently intimate, we have also implemented something called stream decay. If the user hasn't visited the site for a predefined amount of time, the activity stream email notifications they previously subscribed to will automatically stop until the member re-engages with the community by visiting. Pretty nifty, right? Health Club Since you’ve made it to the bottom of this blog post, sink your teeth into dessert. Sugar free, of course! We recently launched a new Health Club. It’s free to join and available for all Invision Community clients. This is a great opportunity for you to connect with other community leaders in the industry, as well as our own team, through the important modality of physical and mental health. The world is in a weird spot right now; please utilize this club to lean on one another for support, give advice, ask questions and share your health wins and missteps. As cheesy as it sounds, upping your general well-being will make you a better community leader and ultimately elevate your community as a whole. Just some food for thought! The new Club and Activity Stream features will be made available in September. Questions? Comments? Feedback? Drop us a crumb in the comments - we’d love to hear from you! Header photo: UnsplashView the full article

Invision Community's latest update, 4.6, is officially out! To celebrate, we hosted a live event on Zoom. I, alongside two of the three Invision Community co-founders @Charles and @Matt (shout-out to @Lindy) sat down for a roundtable talk to chat about some of the slickest features 4.6 has to offer. If you'd like to refresh your memory with exactly what features we implemented in 4.6, check out our detailed blog post (after you're done watching our live event above, of course). It includes: Achievements Spam Improvements Health dashboard Web app and push notifications Anonymous posting Solved content Show when a team member has replied Did you catch the low-key Smart Community announcement? 🙃 We also wanted to take the time to answer a few questions we received during the live event that we couldn't get to in the moment. Question: regarding the anonymous posting... is it completely anonymous (like no record is stored of who posted it) or is just a pseudo thing, like it shows "anonymous" but admins/mods can see who posted it? Answer: The community owner can choose whether moderators can see the true identity of the user. This uses the built in moderator permissions so they can have it so all moderators, just specific moderators or nobody can see this info. --- Question: Is the translation service be hosted by IPS or do we need to use Google or Bing services on our community? Answer: It will be a turnkey service provided by Invision Community. --- Question: Does Achievements show how many x Points are left to the next level? Answer: Yup! --- Question: When will Smart Community be available? Unsatisfying Answer: We are excited to share more details on Smart Community soon! --- We appreciate you participating / watching our first-ever live event. We're planning on doing more, so keep an eye out for the next one. Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Concerns? Drop us a line in the comments!View the full article

Nearly two decades ago, Invision Community President, @Charles , set out to make a leading online community platform. Around that time, Charles also met his now-husband of 18-years and hasn't looked back since. Until now. Behind the code, product updates and newsletters are a group of people who share a passion for community building. Considering how volatile and toxic the Internet can be, we want to become more visible, transparent and vulnerable. To help you familiarize yourself with the masterminds behind Invision Community, starting with Charles, we're kicking off a new series that'll highlight our team. I interviewed Charles for the first installment. In it, he commented on the state of the Internet: "I do think some times, for or better or for worse, people forget there are real people on the other end," he said. Mr. Warner also touched on Invision Community's evolution over the years. "People don't like change. No one likes change," Charles said, adding "sometimes you say, 'we really need to change something' either in the software, or how you do things, and people push back. It might be we change a feature or maybe internally we change the way we do something. Sometimes you have to move forward. Sometimes it's irritating at first. 'Why did you change that?!' And also you have to recognize that sometimes you're wrong. Sometimes you might change something [and think], 'no, it's not better...' I really find that that's a big thing – to constantly be looking at all those other options and try stuff out. It doesn't harm [anything] to try things." And in the spirit of Pride Month, Charles opened up about being part of the LGBTQ community and also President of a successful company. He hopes it'll inspire others. The full interview is available to watch up top. After watching, please drop us a line in the comments and let us know your thoughts! 🌈View the full article