Deep Dive into IPS: Quickly find the most helpful answers

[JoelR]

Invision Community 5: Quickly find the most helpful answers

IPS has been building up to this feature from its very first teaser, and we now finally get the first in-depth look at Helpful. Helpful builds upon the prior feature Mark as Solution, and provides a more robust multi-point method for communities to indicate quality responses.  

Before I do a deeper dive into the video, I think this feature is incredibly important because it speaks to strategy and purpose behind community:

• This is one feature along a road of many that are geared more and more towards support communities.  IPS has been incorporating signals of authority, helpfulness, and expertise for several years now with features such as post notes, staff highlights, Q&A, and more.    
•  If your community is explorative (social conversations for the sake of conversations), you should rethink your longterm strategy.  There are better, easier, and free platforms (Reddit, Facebook, Discord, etc) that host explorative conversations infinitely better than your small independent community.  Independent communities can potentially survive when shifting their strategy to progressive (members work towards a specific goal).
• IPS balances both explorative engagement and progressive engagement in communities. In the video, Matt talks about humor, GIFs, and memes as part of the organic development of the topic: that was the explorative engagement where reactions should be used. On the other hand, for users who want the most insightful and informative content, they can switch to the Helpful reactions and Solution.  
• One of the reasons mentioned for why that some communities resist marking an answer as a best answer to encourage more discussion. That seems ... highly manipulative. And clever.  Forums invented the never-ending game of counting up.  I suppose it's not a stretch to see that forums can also circumvent our own features for best answers for never-ending discussion.  

Some Easter eggs of details they didn't announce ...

Community Experts are encouraged to be followed 

 

Menu can use emoticons for icons

 

Reference: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/475929-invision-community-5-quickly-find-the-most-helpful-answers/