💬 Platform Discussion Introducing Community Hive

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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!

 

[Cedric]

This is really cool. Looking forward seeing more communities up there.

 

[Empire]

Seen this and the link was broken from the index of IPS site at the time.

 

[Jay™]

Another great idea from IPS.

 

[CharlesW]

We hope you like it. We think it will be a great tool for communities!

 

[Cedric]

It’s very innovative. Hopefully it will gain a lot of traction. Also worth mentioning that I love how you open this to various other forum and website scripts and that this is not only exclusive to Invision Community.

I’m especially looking forward to see Admin Junkies listed in the Hive. 😀

XenForo should take note. Their “showcase” hasn’t been updated in years. Not that it’s a competition to the Hive, but that only shows where their priorities are.

 

[CharlesW]

We will be publishing the APIs so other platforms can integrate as well.

 

[Jay™]

I am moving one of my sites back to IPS, I like what I see there in the last few months.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I love this concept! I'm hoping that Simple Machines and Woltlab will be added at a later date as well. I really do like the new features IPS has been rolling out!

 

[Empire]

Since it's still beta we will see improvements over time but it's an open book that you guys can invite other software boards to the dealership ;P IPS gets to run test before consider added other forums software right

 

[Matt M]

I love this concept! I'm hoping that Simple Machines and Woltlab will be added at a later date as well. I really do like the new features IPS has been rolling out!

We want to encourage as many platforms as possible to join. We'll be publishing documentation soon for developers.

 

[Cedric]

Well, we’ve installed their XenForo add on. Will be interesting to see how it goes.

 

[V0RT3X]

Well, we’ve installed their XenForo add on. Will be interesting to see how it goes.

Don't you have a follow button?

 

[Cedric]

Don't you have a follow button?

Doesn’t appear in the widgets.

@CharlesW is it supposed to be enabled?

 

[V0RT3X]

There should be a follow page too, on my site it's domain.com/hive/follow/

 

[Empire]

Doesn’t appear in the widgets.

@CharlesW is it supposed to be enabled?

It's beta yet guys, I mean those that have not updated their site to Beta 1 IPS software don't have it going yet

GOing to be inserting to see if we going to see any growth

 

[CharlesW]

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 volunteered to let us re-work the plugin to work on PHP7 on their servers. We should have an update for you soon!

 

[Empire]

at Xenforo still supported PHP7

Damn, should get them to upgrade to PHP 8 then

Everyone start singing the petition

 

[CharlesW]

I would honestly be scared to run PHP 7 since PHP itself doesn't even do security updates anymore for it. We are contractually obligated to our clients to not use things that are known risks.

I know people talk all the time about how out of date Xenforo is but I have never had to personally experience it before.

 

[Cedric]

Well, like I said before. Seeing more than 40% still runs on 7.4, they don’t want to force anyone going to 8 or above. Even some add on’s don’t work on 8.