JoelR

The biggest news from Matt's post wasn't even the casual mention of tagging, but the timeline. Private alpha is projected to be released some time this week to a small group of clients, which means public alpha and getting to play with Invision 5 is right around the corner.

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/477045-when-can-we-expect-ic-5-to-be-released/?do=findComment&comment=2967912 Okay, I'm convinced at this point that IPS is either a master of hype or they're overflowing with features that they forgot! We've heard about widgets and the page builder. That's huge and exciting. We've heard about the new editor, which was a curveball and unexpected. But still huge and exciting. Any one of these is worth a delay and a focal point of a major point release, but IPS oh-so-happened to casually mention they were doing major development on Tagging. First time we've heard of this, and it's huge and exciting too. I've literally already forgotten what features are shipping with 5. Total theme overhaul, dark mode, community experts and helpful, badge creation, live topics, live posting, and IPS still managed to ship new features for 4.7 too. And this is before IPS has yet to preview any of the new page builder and new editor and new tagging.

This is going to be a spicy, out-there post. 🌶️ Has anyone wondered why we don't ask for topic titles AFTER we write the post? Wouldn't that make more sense? 🤔

I glanced over at H5P. Just curious, does this incorporate elements into another LMS, or is it an LMS by itself?

I really like that targeted approach. Great job. This is the kind of individualization and targeting that I think we can all become better and smarter with - and it's not hard! Using simple permissions, we dynamically change our homepage and menu and widgets

Expertise is the level of knowledge and skill in a particular area. It's usually conveyed by an independent assessment of you skills, such as designations, certifications, or outside commendations. 1. How do you demonstrate or show either your expertise or your community's expertise? 2. How do you show experts within the community? Do you rely on badges or icons, or do you use more dynamic signals like # of solved questions This topic is targeted to the communities of solopreneurs where you're building your own brand or audience, but it's applicable to any community of success.

There are two different kinds of announcements: - Transactional announcements: these are the announcements for routine, maintenance, regular updates. Usually only the superusers and staff will care about this level of announcement, because it's operational and maintained the status quo. - Transformative announcements: these are the announcements where you've hit a major milestone, you're launching a new initiative, or the community / company has accomplished something big. This is something that even casual users might pause and read, because it changes the nature of the community. These two types of transactions are very different from each other in the scope and size. How do we present or prioritize them differently to our community, or do you treat them with the same level of significance?

Tagging @ReyDev @Adriano Faria @DawPi @MissB On the IPS community, check the Providers Directory > Custom App Development https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers-directory/?advanced_search_submitted=1&content_field_231[7]=7&content_field_231[5]=5&content_field_232[0]=0&content_field_232[1]=1&content_field_231[5]=5&content_field_232[0]=0&content_field_232[1]=1

Tagging @DawPi @Jon Erickson, @Makoto @A Zayed or @ReyDev who might have the background and experience for external integrations.

This is only a workaround, but have you thought about consolidating everything into one new topic. Overall though, I agree and like the idea of links directly in the menu addressed to new members. Our sites need to become smarter and customized better to the archetypes of users. New users should probably be presented with starting guides, best of links, asking your first question, etc. Returning users or power users need to be presented with activity streams, latest unanswered posts, etc. All of this can be done with the existing menu, although I'm excited by the vertical menu on v5 to offer more room

This is only from my perspective as another IPS client. IPS is sometimes okay at giving rough estimates of immediate upcoming dates (eg. private beta in April). In ten years, I've never seen IPS give an exact date and time for a release. It would be nice, but they've never committed to publishing hard dates for clients. When you ask for a date, what date are you asking about? The release of a new cycle has many dates: private beta, beta, initial release, and stable. Just because IPS releases 5.0.0 doesn't mean you want to start developing on 5.0.0.

You're still okay. Nothing official is announced yet, just a hint of what's to come. I personally like reading the casual postings by the company, because you can periodically pick up on the thinking and ideology behind some of their development. When IPS posts company news, they tend to focus it on the features: "here's this shiny new thing, yay!" And while features are cool and get all of the applause, just as important are the features' application to real world examples, the context, the ideology, and how IPS intends the feature to be used. For example, on their latest blog (Assign topics to moderators), they talk about things like specialization of duties, accountability, speed to response, quality control. IPS is still posting their official announcements in their News, which is viewable by all.

Updated the OP with a screenshot of the post. It wasn't a formal announcement or anything, just a reply back but IPS alluded to quite a few things!

The most interesting, most fascinating, most informative, and sometimes the most bizarre topics from the IPS client community. In this case, it's all in one post by Matt, who managed to drop some pretty big points in an everyday post: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/477045-when-can-we-expect-ic-5-to-be-released/?do=findComment&comment=2967229 There's the potential for AI tools in the new editor! There's an overhaul of Pages and building pages with blocks! There's the timeline for 5.0 release! These are all huge and weighty things by themselves. While generally a news cycle dies down as we get closer to a release because, well, anything important to be talked about has been talked about, the rumor mill has ratcheted up to a whole new level that some of the biggest swings for 5.0 are yet to be announced. Pages is the most advanced out of the family of IPS applications with the most utility and power for clients (it's a database, template, block, and page builder all-in-one). The Pages app is the foundational application to build an entire website around your forum. I personally believe this aligns with the future of online community technology for independent communities, which need a half-decent website builder as much as a forum. Integrating with Wordpress is messy. One thing that struck me is that Matt emphasized that the Pages update brings a lot more flexibility and power to the Page builder / Block manager. This is great for crafting unique and static pages. But he didn't mention Databases. We'll need to see if IPS offers easier customization or templating of Databases, which are incredibly powerful but have a very high learning curve. No less important is the surprise news about the new Editor, which seems to be a last minute change by IPS. It sounds like the change in editor wasn't planned at all, but since they're making the change, they've decided to postpone the 5.x release and incorporate the new editor. The editor is the single most important interface between the community software and users, and I'm personally most interested in getting teasers and more information about the new editor. By switching to a modern and well-supported editor, IPS has an opportunity in the market right now to convert over clients from other forum software, who are stuck on legacy editors with known issues. In any case, we should expect to see some more concrete details come out in April with the first hosted demo.

Hi @Live Games Sorry to hear that you're having problems. I would encourage you to reach out to: https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers-directory/driven-2-llc-r61/ You can let him know that I referred you. In the meantime, you should disable all of your applications and plugins, check your server log, and check your ACP logs.

I was being facetious with asking users to make SEO-optimized topic titles. As @GrantHorizons pointed out, it's hard to even get users to make a relevant and succinct topic title. But it shouldn't be! We've had 20 years of forums, but zero innovation in helping users refine and improve their interaction around what is arguably one of the more important elements. Two trains of thought: 1. We give up on topic titles entirely. Really. Remove them. Social media allows uses to directly post their comments, you don't need a title at all. 2. We think about ways to nudge or force users to post better topic titles either before or after.

I'm less and less convinced that we should spend time trying to convert one archetype to another (eg. To push and notify and send newsletters to coerce a lurker into a superuser) and more convinced we should attempt to provide distinct user journeys to accelerate the users who can or want to contribute. To put it another way, do we try to push and force a user to become someone they're naturally not? Or do we meet users where they're most comfortable at? This second approach requires more thought and more individualization.

When new users come to your community, they're attracted by different things and seeking different value propositions. I wanted to propose 3 archetypes for New Users: Seeker: These new users are the most mercenary. They seek their information in the fastest, most efficient manner. Once they obtain their information, their knowledge gap is fulfilled, and they have no more use for your community. Their values center around self-fulfillment, efficiency, and accuracy or speed of knowledge. This is usually the 90% of a public-facing community. Citizen: These new users are the quiet lurkers. They may initially seek knowledge, but are curious - and soon become attracted to - the sense of community, freedom, or knowledge that the community sparks in them. Their values center around exploration, a sense of belonging, and curiosity. Oftentimes, these Citizens become superusers overtime but are the slow and quiet ones. This is usually the 9%. Creator: These are the ones that come in with a bang, and immediately start contributing and sharing their subject expertise. They usually have confidence in their abilities or skills, go out of their way to share, and may feel a strong sense towards either service to others or power. These are the superusers that can be shaped and molded into your biggest contributors. This is usually the 1%. What do you think about these archetypes? Have you seen these archetypes in your community? How do we thoughtfully approach and build pathways of success for each of these?

What a great way to repurpose evergreen content! Instead of a new or custom application, have you thought about unarchiving part or all of the topics? That would allow you to simply mix in those topics, or create a feed widget of topics, etc. I wonder if you could also tap into the Leaderboard to highlight content from specific sections. You can use Saved Actions to automate routine moves.

That's the core of Community Everywhere: the recognition that we should stop trying to force users coming to us (on the platform that we "own and control"), and instead, go to where the users are already located.

I can't be the only one who has this thought regarding the behavioral experience of a user on a forum. Has anyone ever wondered why we ask users to give a succinct forecast, projection, and summary of what they're going to post about before they post? Into a one-line phrase? Oh, and that is search engine optimized? That's hard. That's very hard. That requires a user to not only know what they plan on writing about, but to summarize and distill a future thought into a short one-line. What we're really asking from our users when writing a new topic: To forecast the entirety of what they want to write about To potentially know where the conversation might go in a leading manner, before it even goes there To summarize and then condense the conversation To come up with a compelling and catchy one-line phrase And we're asking for all of this in a few seconds. Before they actually get to write about what they want to write about. It introduces friction. And it requires our brains to work really hard at a time when it doesn't want to work hard. Forums have always weighted new topics much more than posts. (By a very unscientific assessment of paid forum posters, 1 new topic is "worth" the equivalent of 4 posts.) Most online users can't even write clear and insightful posts. Why are we asking them to write clear and concise topic titles, which are even harder? And why are we asking them to write topic titles before they even make their post?

This should be very doable as a custom request. Good luck!

Some key takeaways: March 2024 core update is bigger than before, and multiple systems will be updated and released. "More complex than usual" Helpful content now part of core updates. Please make sure to refer to Google's guide to Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content Producing content at scale to boost search rankings - either with automation, people, or a combination -s against its guidelines The trick of buying expired domains and repurposing them them is now considered spam Parasite SEO is spam too: third-party sites host low-quality content provided by others to piggyback on the ranking power (eg. an education website publishing payday loan reviews) On Reddit: Link: https://searchengineland.com/google-released-massive-search-quality-improvements-with-march-2024-core-update-and-multiple-spam-updates-438144

One thing I see among a certain subset of hobbyist forum admins is that they give up, and then they want to restart their forum, and then they give up again. I get the feeling none of them really planned out their forum, it was a decision in the moment. They didn't put together a budget to sustain their forum, they didn't put together an action plan behind their strategy, and they didn't map out a multi-year plan to grow their forum.