Our Picks

This is a maintenance release to fix bugs.

View the full article

The support tool has served us well for many years. You can identify, at a glance, potential issues with your community both presently and down the road, right from the comfort of your AdminCP, and you can often resolve those issues with just a few clicks.

But what if we could do better? What if we could make this useful administrative area of the software even more useful?

The next version of Invision Community introduces a new "Health Dashboard" which replaces the previous support tool and helps you get a better overview of potential issues within your community while retaining all of the functionality you've come to know and rely on to resolve issues with your community.

When you launch the new health dashboard, the first thing you will notice is that the previous "Wizard" process is now gone, in favor of a single page giving you access to everything you might want or need.

Central to the page are blocks that identify specific areas of your community, server, and configuration which could be problematic now or in the future. Invision Community will check for available updates, modified source files, server software configuration issues, whether your server is running required and/or recommended versions of important software and more.

Additional checks and recommendations have been added to this page, to help identify other adjustments that could benefit or prevent harm to your community.  Issues are color coded and classified as informational, recommended, or critical and a summary is provided at the top of the page with an easy "check again" button which will do so without taking you away from the screen.

If we become aware of an issue, we can quickly notify communities through a bulletin which will be displayed in the "Known Issues" block on this page. These bulletins can also trigger AdminCP notifications, however they will continue to show on the Health Dashboard so long as they are relevant, even when the AdminCP notification is dismissed.

A graph showing system, error and email error log activity has been added to the page to help you identify spikes in logged issues. Commonly, if an issue begins to surface on your community there will be an increase in these types of error logs, so the graph here is intended to allow you to identify an increase in these logs, allowing you to investigate and react quicker.

The right-hand sidebar surfaces common tools you may need to access.

The first block allows you to see our most recently featured guides, as well as search our documentation. While this functionality was available in the existing support tool, we found that it was rarely used because people more often visited the tool to allow the software to check for common issues, and the ability to search the documentation required a separate work flow through the support wizard. With the block always available (and searches performed "live" via AJAX), we expect users will find the ability to search our documentation from the AdminCP much more useful now.

Next up, the Tools and Diagnostics block gives you access to common tools you may need to use. You can quickly clear your system caches, as well as access phpinfo, the SQL toolbox (for self-hosted clients only), and disable all third party customizations. The process and behavior for disabling customizations is very similar to the existing process within the support tool, with the list of customizations disabled opening in a modal window and the ability to re-enable all customizations, or selectively re-enable individual customizations, still available.

Finally, the ability to submit a support ticket is still available right from this screen. Upon clicking the button to submit a support ticket, you will be presented with a form inside a modal dialog that behaves very similarly to the existing form with one minor but useful addition: if there are any patches not yet installed on the community, you will be alerted to this right on the form before submitting your ticket. Think of this as one last reminder that your issue may already be solved by installing any available patches before reaching out to us for official technical support.

We believe the improved workflow and user experience will help administrators and support technicians alike more quickly identify any issues that need addressing on the community.

Invision Community is growing! We're currently recruiting three new roles, one full-time and two part-time.

It's been a very busy year for all of us at Invision Community and our continued success means that we're looking to expand our team even further with three new roles to fill.

Invision Power Services, Inc. is behind the leading community software platform, Invision Community. Our tailored solutions serve clients of all sizes, from smaller communities to the world’s biggest brands.

We are looking to kick start 2021 with a tight-knit customer-obsessed support team to build a positive support culture for our clients.

All roles are fully remote-working.

Customer Service Superstar
We are in need of a full-time Customer Service Superstar, a new position within the company. You are solution-driven, customer-obsessed and passionate for cultivating a positive support culture for our clients. 
 
The person in this role:

• Answers client questions in a public-facing forum.
• Triages client requests to developers according to our processes.
• Deescalates problem or potential problem communications. 
• Advocate for customers to our development team.
• Is comfortable with technology and willing to learn our platform. 

Why should you apply? 

• You are a Customer Service Star - solution driven when helping clients.
• You are confident in conversing via forum style, public-facing support.
• You can clearly communicate both in writing and verbally. We primarily provide customer service in English.
• You see opportunity to streamline improvements to help our team better serve our clients. 
• Excited about interacting with our clients within our community to build a vibrant support culture.
• You work well with a team remotely. 
• You are personally organized, suited to excel in a remote work environment.

Part-Time Community Support Assistant
We are looking to add two part-time community support assistants to our growing team. You are self-motivated and focused on helping customers with support enquiries.
 
Your role will be in assisting customers via a public-facing support forum.

Ideally, you will have customer support experience, be familiar with our community platform and comfortable with technologies such as FTP, Amazon S3, PHP and MySQL.

Work Location:
Our company is headquartered in Lynchburg, Virginia with staff located around the world. These positions are remote working.

Interested?
Share your resume and characteristics that make you the best fit for this role. Please include your available work hours (timezone). As we are open to both entry-level and experienced applicants, you may choose to include a desired starting salary based on your own evaluation of your relevant skillset and experience.

Apply now!
Please apply for all positions using this form: https://forms.monday.com/forms/c1e2e114c147df71791ef59fef183f63

We look forward to reading your applications!

Wouldn't it be great to know if a staff member had replied to a topic before you clicked to open it?

When you're scanning a list of topics, knowing which have had a reply by a member of the community team can help decide which to read. Currently, you need to open the topic and scan the posts to see if there's a reply from the team.

Happily, in our next release, we've made it clear which have had a reply by a member of a specific group.

You can specify which groups to show as having replied via the Groups form in the Admin CP.

You can select to detect the group based on the member's primary group, secondary group or both.

When viewing a list of topics, you will see a badge showing that a member of that group has replied.

This simple feature will make it easier to highlight when important replies have been made to topics, which is a great addition for forums using the new 'solved' feature.

Let me know below if you'll use this new feature and what you'd like to see in the future.

For a long time, Invision Community has supported a Question and Answer mode within the Forums application which allows a reply to be flagged as the "best answer" to the question posed. With the release of 4.5, we also introduced a way to allow topics to be marked as "solved" which introduces similar functionality without transforming the look and feel or other behavior of the forum itself.

Based on the popularity of this new addition in 4.5, we have made some further improvements to solved topics and answered questions in our next release.

While notifications were available to the poster who answered a question or solved a topic with the release of 4.5, this release also adds notifications for the topic or question starter so that they can be made aware that an answer is available to their question.

Solved topics and answered questions provide for measurable statistics that can help you determine the health and direction of your community, particularly for support communities. To that end, we have introduced two new content statistic blocks that can help you measure how well areas of the community that support answers and solutions are faring.

You can now quickly see the percentage of topics/questions that have been solved (relative to the total number posted in areas that support solutions), as well as the average time it has taken for a solution to be marked on a topic or question (relative to the time the topic or question was initially posted). These statistic blocks support time period filter, time period comparisons, and node filtering to narrow down the statistical data for your specific needs.

User profiles now show the number of solutions the user has posted, and also allows you to view all of those solutions, in a manner very similar to reputation.

These improvements should help reward the most helpful users on your community by giving them more prestige and helping other users find their answers quicker.

Collectively, we hope that these changes make the question and answer and topic solution features in the Forums application more useful for your community members, and the administrators behind the community.