Clover13

How do you go about using the built in Leaderboard?

I use both often. Mobile is the wave if you want to grow a community, which is why it's so important to be a mobile first "site". Hoping IC5 makes strides towards this. Fewer and fewer people are using desktops as time moves forward.

I've found it difficult to pull people off social media. They seem perfectly content on Facebook in FB groups or on IG or TT or Twitter/X. They'll like the content I post on those platforms and follow my page/account, but it's not enough to draw them to join the site and forums and start posting there. I have also run paid ads on those platforms to experiment on acquisition and see better analytics around the ad visibility and actions. There are a very small percentage that will click the link to visit a website and a much smaller percentage of those who click that actually join. Could just be the niches I'm in, but the same people enjoy posting on the social media platforms. Guessing they are simply comfortable there and have no interest in learning/posting on another platform.

In my opinion and use cases, there are two main focus points: 1. Ease of use and fluid integration One of the biggest gaps I still see and experience on my sites is the lack of solid video integration couple with simplifying the user experience in sharing their videos. Other social media platforms handle this incredibly well by making it VERY easy to upload and share images and videos with a simple interface. People today are profoundly focused on images and video and will favor whatever is easy for them to use and give them the desired sharing result. Unfortunately IPS lacks robust video handling and presentation, and that has certain been an impact for my communities. Even if one user can upload a video file via the editor, there is no guarantee another user's browser will display it correctly due to file types, encodings, and browser compatibilities. As a result, users simply don't share video they otherwise would OR it gets displayed as a download link and no one wants to download it to then have to find it and open it with some other player. 2. Incentives to drive user content/interactions Apps like what @Adriano Faria offers with Raffles/Giveaways is a nice addition to my sites to give back to members and helps incentivize visiting the site and sharing content. Gaps for my sites right now are an extensive Contests framework, whether it is custom scored contests or photo driven contests. Either way, having a rich contest app/framework I believe is a huge benefit to creating interest in a user base and incentivizing them to post high value content.

I'm also experimenting with trying to create and grow a new community which is heavily established on social media platforms. The question is, what can you offer that they don't (primarily better socialization, content organization/structure, etc). But users want ease of use at their fingertips, and the multi-step process of "creating" things on IPS is a barrier. But I think the biggest barrier is the speed at which a post/reply and enriching content can be added (i.e. pictures and video). The shear lack of a fluid video experience (let's face it, there are issues with the various proprietary formats and browser compatibilities) is a huge inhibitor in this age of the online social sharing. Something better is needed to create and maintain the interest in respect to video on IPS. As a side note, also experimenting with Facebook ads, I am convinced there is a mix of bots wasting my spend and Facebook intentionally thwarting ad placements to user bases that will actually visit and join your site (i.e. it's against their own business interests so why would they drive their own users to a site that has them spending less time on Facebook). However, I have no idea how to reach those users without top tier content and a lot of time, when it's those same users who are creating that top tier content in volume (more than I can in the same period of time).

I posted years ago on the IPS site about the importance of video, namely as shorts were becoming extremely popular. Now it's ALL about video and there's a huge gap with IPS when it comes to video. Dealing with video is hard and expensive (storage, processing, proper encoding, browser compliance, etc), and it's why I've always suggested integration with platforms that already do video well (YouTube, Vimeo, etc). The key integration aspect is allowing members to post video on IPS assets (Forums, Pages, etc) while externalizing the video storage and then embedding that video within the IPS asset. IMHO, that one (perhaps complex) enhancement to IPS is invaluable. Even as a third party app, I would pay a good amount to have that level of integration and I'd imagine many site owners would crowdsource finances to have it as a shared app.

Thank you @DawPi for taking the time to review and correct the issues with the Auto Welcome Members app! 👍

He would rarely answer on the IPS forum in recent times. He just didn't seem interested in doing the dev anymore or determining why some of his mods didn't behave as they should. I was using his Welcome New Members plugin but could never get it to work right, tried to pass along the info to troubleshoot it with him but could never get his interest in it. It was free, so is what it is, but I'd imagine other devs never developed something similar because he already had. As a result, I just watch for notifications of new members and manually add a welcome.

I could never get Auto Welcome to work properly. Also All Astronauts hasn't responded to anyone asking questions about getting verified on his site to get access to their paid apps/plugins. No idea what's going on with him, but he could be done with dev work as well or at least his customers could be done with him. Given his lack of response and support, I personally won't use his products anymore. He hasn't even been on here since October. He's been on IPS but hasn't answered my PMs. He's been on his site but hasn't answered any of his customers.

That's a good why, but not a who 🙂 When I indicated self hosted, I meant with an external provider/company and not using CIC. I assume you took self hosted literally, as you are the host running your own machines OR you are running an unmanaged VPS (that you self manage)

For those who are self hosted, who do you currently use and why?

It would be pretty devastating for self hosted to lose Pages as a cloud only feature. With that said, I do really like Pages, I think the only thing I'd like to see more of is pre-built or custom templates. @opentype has some really nice ones, but his are the only ones I can even think of coming across.

Well, ancient and issues leads me to be concerned about security first and compatibility/functionality second. If you're in a bad spot, it might be worthwhile to give up some functionality to gain security and stability in v4. If you can minimize the customization, then your path to v5 simplified. If you can't and absolutely require the customization, then you may just have to eat the tech debt to convert twice. No idea what state your site is in or what the risks vs revenue. On the bright side, v4 will be around for awhile, so you could stay on it for some time.

This is very individual. Some people are very private and/or don't want a spotlight on them, while others bask in and welcome it. For a business (who is a member of a community), I'd imagine as public as possible is the desired approach.

Assuming by large and complex you aren't talking just data, but functionality and a bunch of custom functionality at that. Also assuming you are on some other software as you are referring to creating/styling in v4 (i.e. you don't have any of that in a self hosted v4 that is moving to cloud). Given the major version change and significant framework and codebase changes, and assuming your current site/software/server is suitable for the foreseeable future, if I were in your shoes I would wait for v5 and start fresh once it's well understood. There aren't clear paths from v4 to v5 yet and for some things there may not be a path (there's always a path, it just might not be using Invision Community exclusively/directly). It would be costly to convert complex facets of your site to v4 only to find it doesn't work in v5 and you'll have to eat that tech debt and do it over. Just my .02! 🙂

I'm willing to upgrade fairly quickly if the functionality my communities need is there. I do rely on a bunch of third party apps, so we'll have to see how the v5 framework looks and how easily (or at all) the devs can build similar functionality. It's really unclear where the line in the sand is (at least to me) right now. There are a bunch of greats devs in the community and I hope they're able to continue to build and extend desired functionality for Invision Community.