Invision Community Introducing Community Hive

[CedricV]

Introducing Community Hive​

Everyone at Invision Community is pleased to introduce Community Hive.
We are creating a new free-to-use service to help independent communities reach new audiences and re-engage existing members.
Community Hive delivers updates from your favourite communities and helps you explore new ones by bringing all the communities you follow into a single feed with optional email updates.
The Invision Community September 2023 release will bring Community Hive integration to Invision Community and we're also releasing integrations for XenForo, Squarespace and WordPress. More integrations for popular platforms are planned over the coming months.



The "Why"
We believe in the power of independent communities. Technology has changed over the two decades we've been building community tools and despite the advances in technology a key problem independent communities still have is re-engaging existing members and finding new audiences. Social media has diminishing returns, and search results continually down-rank user-generated content. Reaching new audiences has never been more challenging.
Community Hive solves that by providing a single platform to showcase your content to new and existing audiences. We don't keep your content; the only way to engage is to visit your site, ensuring you retain complete control and ownership.
Regular updates via email and push notifications reach your existing members wherever they are.
As our attention spans shorten and our online time becomes more cluttered, checking in with each community becomes more of a struggle. Independent and forum based communities fight for attention with social media, and owned platforms like Discord and Slack. Allowing your members to follow your community with Community Hive gives you increased visibility and discoverability and helps level the playing field.

The Platform
Community Hive has a familiar feed view with two main areas. "Following" shows a feed of communities you already follow to ensure you see more of what you like. This feed learns over time what content you favour and ensures you see more of what you like.
The "Discover" tab shows you a feed of content from communities outside of your following list, which is a great way to discover new online communities to join. Following is easy; you don't even need to register on the community to add it to your followed list on Community Hive.
Robust account management makes it easy to unfollow communities and set your desired audience classification preferences.
Community Hive is mobile-first with push notifications and is ready to be added to your phone's home screen as an app.

Integration
Community Hive will launch with integration for several platforms such as XenForo, Squarespace and WordPress. Invision Community integration has several tools to nudge your members to add your community to Community Hive with buttons in key follow areas.

Following from a community only requests your email address. You can optionally set a password later on Community Hive to enable your feed to be viewed on multiple devices.

Clicking "Follow on Community Hive" from an Invision Community when you have an account with that community.

Clicking "Follow on Community Hive" from an Invision Community when you do not have an account with that community.
Community Hive will be launched in beta alongside Invision Community's September 2023 release, with integrations released for other platforms.
You can visit Community Hive now and join in the discussion on the Community Hive forums. We look forward to seeing you there!


What is interesting is that they will have an API ready for XenForo next month. And of course the innovation behind it.

 

[nodle]

It makes no sense to me, don't try to become a central hub trying to combine forums, just focus on your own software.

 

[Kirby]

Sounds a bit like the reinvention of TapaTalk to me?

 

[KensonPlays]

Not sure on this, but I'd love an all-in-one aggragator, that also supports RSS, and the ability to "convert site to RSS" - I know rss.app exists, but its extremely limited to convert/manage only TWO feeds on the free account. 10-15 on free would be nice, but they charge for that on that service.

Primarily cause one blog for a game I follow custom coded their blog. They do not provide RSS feeds, syndication, etc, but rss.app was able to pull the info and create its own feed.

 

[Suzanne O]

Sounds a bit like the reinvention of TapaTalk to me?

Same. I wouldn't use it

https://www.tapatalk.com/introduction I'd use tapatalk but not the imposters trying to impersonate them

 

[sbj]

07/2019

XenForo mastered the forum software. Now is time to go beyond with a road map.

All fantastic points. I came to the conclusion years ago that forum developers were never going to meet my expectations. I guess the real question is why. Could it be that my expectations are not shared by other forum owners or could it be they are not shared by the developers. Perhaps they...

www.theadminzone.com

04/2020

Implemented...ish - Making the case for a XF native app

I know XF is forum software, and I understand that forums are fundamentally different than social media. I know that Tapatalk is a viable option for many forum owners. I've tried it but it wasn't the right solution for my site, mainly because it doesn't work with various plugins that website...

xenforo.com

06/2021

Has anyone noticed a decline in forums?

I didn't use the phrases "0 competition" or "tiny niche", nor did I say that League of Legends was a "dying game" (I don't even know what it is). You don't have to though because that is what you are implying. You can always find anecdotal evidence of someone's super niche forum for...

xenforo.com

02/2023

XF 2.3 ?

I find that our visitors keep coming back because of the content, not for features. I'm excited for 2.3 but it won't make a single bit of difference to just about all of our members, regardless of forum--they didn't join us years (or decades) ago because we had the newest, shiniest forum...

xenforo.com

06/2023

Public's perception about forums and what we can learn from IMDb's boards

This is about IMDB's forums where they talk about how they miss it since they closed it years ago. This thread was created hours ago. I fished out for you those messages relevant for us to make a point. As you see, this is how the population sees us, this is their perception: If...

xenforo.com

08/2023
IPS

---

Others are trying at least. What did we get?

 

[Starbucks]

I remember Forum Ragezone, used this a lot back in the age of Habbo Retro Hotels.. even their forum is a little quiet now. Wonder where all these users ended up on... probably Discord?

 

[James]

I remember Forum Ragezone, used this a lot back in the age of Habbo Retro Hotels.

Yep. Me too.

 

[Paul B]

I have tidied up this thread and removed some off topic posts in an attempt to stop yet another thread being derailed.

There are (many) other threads in which complaints can be made about XF features/updates/functionality - this is not the thread for that.

 

[W35K3R]

Not gonna lie, I used TapaTalk in the past, and it was sorta overwhelming at the time even for a newbie such as myself started out with hosting my own forums. I like the simplicity of this new platform, even if it seems like it necessarily reinvents the wheel a bit, which is okay.

Nonetheless, I'm rooting for ya!

 

[TPerry]

They support XenForo for it... but they are having issues because ALL of IPS software requires to be on a recent officially supported version of PHP (think it's 8.1 at a minimum but that may have moved to 8.2). The "forced requirement" of XF to maintain PHP 7.4 backward compatibility is causing issues with the add-on that they provide to install to allow an XF site to participate in this offering since their add-on was not coded to be backwards compatible... and I haven't heard how hard they are going to work on it to get it to be so since running that old of a PHP version is against their "security position" when it comes to what they offer.

 

[Kevin]

their add-on was not coded to be backwards compatible... and I haven't heard how hard they are going to work on it to get it to be

Community Hive

Most issues are being caused by PHP7. We did not realize that Xenforo still supported PHP7 as PHP itself stopped supporting it back in 2021/2022. We do not even have any internal testing environments to test on PHP7 since it's against our security policy to have it. Luckily, a few people have...

xenforo.com

 

[Suzanne O]

Think i will keep on using tapatalk.

 

[James]

Think i will keep on using tapatalk.

I feel like you keep making the same redundant point. This isn't intended to replace or mimic tapatalk.

Feel free to continue using tapatalk.

Would be curious to know how many sites are running tapatalk nowadays. @digitalpoint any stats on this on IO?

 

[MentaL]

I remember Forum Ragezone, used this a lot back in the age of Habbo Retro Hotels.. even their forum is a little quiet now. Wonder where all these users ended up on... probably Discord?

Yep. Me too.

We are still online! over 20 years! still tens of thousands of users daily.

 

[James]

We are still online! over 20 years!

Still got buggy Habbo retros that kids like to try and run on a shared platform?
Gosh. Going back 15 years when I last went on Habbo everyone thought they were awesome because they could run a packet sniffer/mod app that was released by either Sonicmouse, Shenk or Jeax.

Anyway enough of derailing this thread! Your site is definitely a massive nostalgia trip for me.

 

[TPerry]

Would be curious to know how many sites are running tapatalk nowadays.

If you site is much into images... TapACrap used to be a joke. They wanted to host any uploaded (via their app) images on their site. If you decided to "leave" it wasn't not an easy process to get those images an then have them hosted on your own site.
Just for laughs... I visited their support site.... tried to read various topics.

Their only a few versions behind on their nginx...
Honestly... the ONLY thing that TaT has going for it is the multiple sites you can access from their app. If I installed it, users of it would miss a LARGE part of what the site offers.

 

[Starbucks]

We are still online! over 20 years! still tens of thousands of users daily.

That’s amazing!! I just checked it out.

Did you ever had any issues with Sulake? I assume they weren’t that happy about users sharing retro emulators, SWF files and all kinds of content to replicate Habbo!

 

[MentaL]

That’s amazing!! I just checked it out.

Did you ever had any issues with Sulake? I assume they weren’t that happy about users sharing retro emulators, SWF files and all kinds of content to replicate Habbo!

Yes.

 

[Wildcat Media]

They support XenForo for it... but they are having issues because ALL of IPS software requires to be on a recent officially supported version of PHP (think it's 8.1 at a minimum but that may have moved to 8.2). The "forced requirement" of XF to maintain PHP 7.4 backward compatibility is causing issues with the add-on that they provide to install to allow an XF site to participate in this offering since their add-on was not coded to be backwards compatible... and I haven't heard how hard they are going to work on it to get it to be so since running that old of a PHP version is against their "security position" when it comes to what they offer.

I joined, installed the add-on, found no clear instructions how to set it up after looking around the main site, got spammed with email linking to posts from their forum (don't assume because I join, that I want email), poked through said forum and found nothing but issues with XF and being *****y about PHP version ("company policy"), then deleted my account.

FWIW, when I finally found instructions buried in a forum post, it then mentions I would have to use the main email address for my forum. WTAF? So now I have to create another account, using an email address we do not give out publicly? If I need a specific email address for a specific task, I will be the one who decides which one to use (and to prevent abuse, I give it a unique address). To be honest, with other addons, and plugins on other platforms, an API and/or security key (or whatever) is all that is needed to identify a site and connect to it.

I get that they might want to charge for it (resources do cost money), but to rank free communities below paying ones? Nope.

Honestly if I wanted to create a "network" of similar sites, I would go back to the ancient idea of a "web ring," where sites would all link to each other. And the more I thought about it, the quality of potential members we would attract with any sort of public "hive" is not someone we want in the forum anyway.