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After the holidays are behind us I am going to put my attention to getting things done here I've been pushing off. Mainly because I was combining my tech sites. That's done so it's time for Forum Squared to get the things done I should have already done. List of planned items: Upgrade to Invision 5 beta. Currently at beta 9.1 Add the link directory. I removed it after I had a database crash. Revamp the downloads section and add more downloads. Work on the resources section. Get some articles off the drawing board and onto the site. Move my personal blog to here. This is not a priority so it might be a while. That's for starters. …

Forum Squared needs to add another staff member. The role will be to start topics and engage in the threads by our users. You'll also keep things in line and make sure no gets out of hand. This will eventually turn into a paid position once the site grows and starts to make money. It will be paid based on a revenue sharing model. If you are interested send me a PM.

Discourse 3.0.2 Stable Release Discourse strongly recommends that all sites follow the default tests-passed branch of Discourse. The “stable” branch is more focused on lack of change than lack of bugs - all releases, including those on tests-passed and beta are production ready. Security Updates This release includes fixes for these security issues reported by our community and HackerOne. https://github.com/discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-4p63-qw6g-4mv2 2 posts - 2 participants Read full topic

New features in 3.5.0.beta2 Review queue We have begun making a series of improvements to the review queue, where moderators can review and handle flagged content. A popup is displayed after completing a review action, as a success indication and to prevent accidental multi-clicks. If a post is flagged due to matching watched words, the responsible words are listed now so it’s easier to immediately know the reason for the flag. Welcome banner We have added a new welcome banner feature, to welcome members and allow them to search site content. To turn it on, select the Enable welcome banner site setting. Admin interface We continue to make improvements to the a…

Invision Community 5.0.5 Beta 1 Released Mr Milchick approved We're back with a brand new release! This release fixes a few of the bigger issues reported over the past couple of releases. ElasticsearchFor those using Elasticsearch, please note that the new minimum version for Elasticsearch is now 8.0, with the latest version 8.17 recommended. Those using Elastic search in v5.0.4 and earlier (including all of v4) will need to upgrade their Elasticsearch server, and then rebuild the search index. We chose to update to the latest version of Elasticsearch as v7 is no longer supported and there's been some document level changes in how data is stored. We've tested it thoroughl…

From 1st May 2025, Discourse’s minimum supported iOS version will be updated from 15.7 to 16.7. After that, visitors using older versions of iOS will be shown a basic-html version of community content, and won’t be able to login or interact with the site. Devices limited to iOS 15 are the iPhone 6s, iPhone SE (gen 1), iPhone 7, and iPad Mini 4. These were all released more than 9 years ago, and are no longer updated by Apple (see iosref.com). Unfortunately, it will not be possible to use Discourse on those devices going forwards. For more recent devices, iOS should be updated to iOS 16.7 or higher. From today, we’ll be rolling out a warning banner for affected users, w…

If so, what tactics are you using to build backlinks for your forum? If not, why not?

Here's my simple formula for SEO. 1. Choose your topic based on the needs, wants, and pain points of your target audience. You have to "listen" to what they want before you know what they want. 2. Research a suitable keyword. Use a tool like SEM Rush, Uber Suggest, or something like that to make life easier. You want a good search volume but a low competition score. Don't use the same keyword more than once. A longtail keyword is going to be easier to work with. 3. Write the best content you can. Search your keyword on Google and open up the first 10 results. Make sure you include what they include in your own words, but fill in the gaps that they miss. Long-form…

If you use Adsense have you seen your income go up and down? I know it can vary hugely for some sites. Some sites do very well and can count on the revenue to be consistent every month. Some get huge rewards one month and next to nothing the next. What can cause that if traffic stream is constant?

Have you ever successfully utilized Black Hat SEO tactics? If so, what ones and did they work?

Invision Community 5.0.4 Beta 1 is now available Please celebrate responsibly. A whole two weeks has passed since our last release. The extra week allowed us to fully review a few larger updates that we've held back and require a beta or two to fully test before we're happy to include in a full release. Things to testThere have been some areas that have received a lot of attention and need extra special testing, these include: Page Editor (now works correctly for right-to-left languages but needs some testing in LTR) Custom badges (lots of work to make them more efficient and store a built version in SVG format) Editor bug fixes (lots of complex fixes, so please test the …

We have been working on a new rich text editor mode for our composer so that it’s easier to write on Discourse. We’re now ready to start testing this mode out on Meta to get more feedback from our community on this feature! This topic will serve as both a guide to testing the new composer and a hub for tracking feedback. Thanks in advance for all your help! Getting to know the new composer The new composer is a rich text editor that simplifies the writing experience, particularly for non-technical users who are not comfortable with Markdown. This editor still supports Markdown, but formatting is rendered immediately for a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) exper…

Starting today, we will be removing the Discourse Akismet plugin and will instead enable Discourse AI - Spam detection by default for hosted customers on Starter and Standard plans. Why are we making this change? Over the past few weeks, we’ve found our AI spam detector to deliver a superior performance over Akismet. We’ve had over 126 sites extensively using it and within Meta, we’ve personally seen over 96% success rate in detecting spam. On top of the performance, the setup would now be a default experience with customization and flexible options, should you need it. What do I need to do? If you are on our Starter or Standard hosting, nothing at all! The change wo…

Introducing Advanced Sentiment Analysis: Powerful New Insights for Your Discourse Community We’re excited to announce a significant enhancement to Discourse AI with our new Sentiment Analysis Report feature. Building on last year’s Sentiment overview, this powerful tool gives administrators deeper insights into community sentiment across your forum. Where to Find It Navigate to your admin dashboard and look under the Reports section in the sidebar. You’ll find the new Sentiment analysis option alongside the existing Sentiment overview report. Flexible Analysis Options This comprehensive report empowers you to: Filter by specific parent categories Group results by c…

For licensing reasons, we had to change the emoji sets. The following existing sets have been migrated automatically to a new set: apple → twemoji facebook_messenger → unicode google → noto google_classic → noto win10 → fluentui emoji_one → twemoji twitter → twemoji On top of fluent ui, noto, twemoji, and unicode, we also added the openmoji set. Admins can change the set at /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=Emoji%20set If there’s an existing open-source set you would like to see available in Discourse, please let us know. We understand that changing emojis can be a very visible change, but we didn’t have any other way around it. We prefer to lay a goo…

At Discourse, we are committed to fostering safe and healthy online communities. To support this, we’re introducing an important update that allows forum administrators to access and manage group chats within their communities. This update ensures that community leaders can effectively manage group chat memberships, enforce guidelines, and respond to safety concerns when needed. It also helps communities align with evolving online safety legislation, providing admins with the necessary tools to maintain a secure and welcoming space for all members. We believe this change will empower admins to uphold community standards while continuing to provide a space for meaningful…

Invision Community 5.0.3 is now available via your Admin Control PanelThis release focuses on bugs reported since the release of 5.0.2 and features many UI improvements. You can see the full list of fixes in our release notes section. What's next?We expect 5.0.4 to follow within two to three weeks as we work in some larger fixes that will require more testing. We may release a beta release ahead of the full release to ensure that any bugs from those larger fixes are caught and fixed early. If we see anything more pressing, we'll release a patch which can be applied via your Admin Control Panel. As always, thank you for your testing and reports. It really does help us!

Discourse 3.4.1 Stable Release Discourse strongly recommends that all sites follow the default tests-passed branch of Discourse. The “stable” branch is more focused on lack of change than lack of bugs - all releases, including those on tests-passed and beta are production ready. Bug Fixes Improve group name validation (31315) Wikipedia onebox images and sections (31384) Language parser matches with dashes or underscores (31381) Ensure revoke_ungranted_titles! works with user_ids (31371) Adds further support for ‘prioritize_full_name_in_ux’ setting (31346) Make permalink search work even when there’re 100+ permalinks (31354) Don’t show   in date to button (31352…

New features in 3.5.0.beta1 Easy switching between light and dark mode If you’re using a theme that has both dark and light modes, you now have the option of displaying a selector to your users for them to choose which mode they prefer. The selector can appear in the footer or the header, and allows users to select dark, light or auto, which will select the appropriate mode based on their system settings. This core feature replaces the now-deprecated theme component that provided this selector. Read the announcement here. More useful information when flagging content To help site admins remain compliant with evolving legislation, the flag modal now includes text pr…

Well, there are multiple methods to get traffic to your site, however, getting people to actually visit your site is very difficult. Well, you might have done SEO, marketed on social media or sent newsletters and think that you will get traffic. But despite your hard work traffic is not guaranteed. Your SEO effort will get you traffic only when your website ranks high on Search Engine Result Page for high traffic keywords. You might run ads for traffic but there is a price to pay.