Discussion

I'm going to make a bold claim and say that this topic has the most redactions in the history of IPS https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/481831-you-forced-my-bill-from-80-a-year-to-200-a-year-wtf/ This topic has given me faith that forum drama is alive and well, and filled with fiery [REDACTED] 🤣 Also, ironically, the post has earned IPS several 5 star Trustpilot reviews so ... All's well that ends well?

This is something that I struggle with. I may have done an amazing thing with my community. Maybe we hit a new milestone. Maybe we hit a major achievement. Maybe we've been quietly building one of the world's largest dictionaries contextualized for online communities: https://invisioneer.org/index.php?/cmxdictionary/ In my head, I have already acknowledged those milestones as another step in my community journey, so nothing more is needed. It's one of many achievements laying before me. But if it's not communicated out to the membership or to the public, is it worth anything? What does it matter if you hit that milestone if no one else acknowledges, celebrates, …

Hi, I miss the friendly number format app. It seems that is too hard to redo for the entire suite. Would anyone be willing to create a custom widget that would pull this info? https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/481794-friendly-number-format/#findComment-2992016 Thanks

Valentine's Day is coming up this weekend, which is a perfect excuse to host a "Love Your Members" theme, contest, or event. There are plenty of fun celebrations throughout the year, anchored by big seasonal ones such as Valentine's and Christmas. These are "easy" themes. The dates and context behind these holidays are well-known, well-understood, and easily adoptable. But it's also heavily overused and generic. Every forum tries to do a Christmas thing. Every forum tries to do a Valentine's thing. When your credit card company tries to send you a Christmas celebratory introductory rate on a new credit card, you know the holiday has become a bit overdone…

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/481595-support-tickets-v4-to-v5/ Matt proposed a replacement of private forums for support tickets, where users can only see their own topics. This seems to be a very easy and simple replacement, and it uses existing capabilities in the forum.

Everybody talks about community management. But I actually think that the #1 component of success behind your community management - and this is especially targeted at independent sites, hobbyists, and solopreneurs - is self management. What I mean by this is that, before you can run your community and spend time on your community, you need to make sure you manage yourself. Literally, how well do you manage your 'real world' life before you try to manage your 'digital life'? Do you have a stable job that can pay the bills, and have a little extra to pay for your forum hobby? Do you have a strong set of real world friends, social connections, and networking…

How will American teenagers waste time now?? 🤣 On a serious note, there's likely to be a migration of TikTok audience - and an opportunity for community owners to refocus - to other established platforms like Google Shorts, Instagram Reels, or Twitch. And if you're sooking to stay with a Chinese owned app, the apparent replacements are RedNote or Lemon8.

"Pixar uses a different tone and voice for each social network, which is a strategy that you don't see very often." https://futuresocial.beehiiv.com/p/pixar-social-media-strategy My thoughts: Nobody expects a community of one admin to be able to custom craft a different social media strategy per channel. However, Pixar did a per channel breakdown, which I thought was key and could help community managers pinpoint the channel they want. For example, if you're not targeting social trends or Gen Z, then skip TikTok.

Every year about this time, every webmaster and admin forum asks its members to share their New Year Resolutions for the next year. In over 15 years worth of admin forums, we haven't evolved this question. It's the same question, with often the same answers, every year. This year, I want to challenge community managers with a twist: what are your anti-goals and no goals? Anti Goals: the constraints that keep you aligned with your values No Goals: distractions or non-goals to keep you focused on what truly matters For example, say you’re striving to increase community engagement. Your goal might be to grow active participation by 10%, but your…

There's a nuance to this question. I didn't ask what do you plan to do differently for your community, I asked what do you - specifically, as an individual - plan to do differently in 2025? What skills do you want to learn? What efficiencies do you want to implement? What time do you want to allocate more thoughtfully? Running an independent community often means understanding ourselves the most. We are often the biggest reasons for our community's success, its potential failure, its sails to speed faster and its anchors to drag slower. How are we managing ourselves in the new year, before we manage our community?

This is a question about behavioral design. Imagine that you're a member of a popular forum that you enjoy, but it's been a few weeks or months since you last visited. When you come back, you're swamped with both catching up on topics that you previously followed. What do you do? Do you try to read through all of the threads? Do you read through some of the threads? Would you trust an AI summary? Scan through the posts marked as helpful?

https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/480706-storage-settings-multiple-file-storage-locations-will-be-deprecated-in-a-future-release/page/3/#findComment-2985506 If you run a media rich forum (or just want to scale your storage for the future), IPS is *officially* expanding its support to Backblaze in the near future. IPS has always allowed Amazon S3 and has allowed clients to drop in S3 compatible storage in the past, but this is the first time they've publicly talked about their Backblaze can be a significantly cheaper alternative to Amazon S3 since it's part of the Cloudflare alliance. As long as your egress is less than x3 of your storage, you pay no …

For those of you who have an existing community and are ready to upgrade to Invision Community v5 once it becomes available, what are you communicating? Are you walking them through what features are being deprecated (like username sign-ons)? Are you showing them theme changes?

IPS is starting to roll out general upgrade information directly in the ACP Dashboard to prepare admins for the upgrade to v5. It's a good warning about major changes and deprecations, so you're not surprised.