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Scaling your community requires overcoming many barriers and learning new ways of working with your community. Rosie explores this in her blog: How we are at the small scale is who we are at the large scale. "In community, we often say to do things that don't scale. To start small. To get the foundations right. To trust that how we are and what we do is what the community becomes, on a larger scale. Our behaviour, our intentions, our alignment, and our goals all influence what the community can become." What we think: There is no right or wrong way to scale your community from its humble beginnings and it can be a lot of hard work but that doesn't mean we should cha…

[HEADING=1]Earlier this year, Invision Community launched a native gamification system called Achievements. We added significant improvements to Achievements in our new release, 4.6.8, out now! [/HEADING] Achievements allows community leaders to reward members with points, badges and ranks for their outstanding contributions. We listened to your feedback and implemented some very exciting changes. In this post, you'll get a crash course on the new updates included in your Admin Control Panel (ACP) upon updating your community to 4.6.8. Once you're familiar with these concepts, you can take action to elevate your community. New! Married group promotions with Ach…

Hello, Moz friends…I’m signing off on the blog after a wonderfully wild, 14-year ride at Moz. It’s time for me to move on and make space for new voices, new leaders. I am so grateful for the way you have cheered — and challenged — me and Moz over the years. Your lively engagement helped us become the company we are today. I’m going to take the winter off to reflect, rest, and cherish my loved ones. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I know it will be a grand adventure. I feel good knowing that I’m leaving Moz, and all of you, in good hands. It’s just the beginning of an exciting new chapter — if you haven’t seen our latest Performance Metrics and Tru…

Long-form content can often be overshadowed by other forms of execution that may be “shinier” or more visually engaging. We see it all the time in blog posts, case studies, conference decks, and on Twitter: the big, flashy content is often what our attention is drawn towards. Of course, with the right expertise and resources, you can do both. But it’s hard for many of us to execute at this level over and over again. The truth is that the value of long-form content shouldn’t be overlooked because it can do so many things for a brand: Drive traffic Build authority and credibility Add value to a website as a whole Generate links and brand awaren…

Image credit: Loren Javier It’s a whale of a question: Does citation management still matter in the grand scheme of local SEO? Our industry has been trying to gauge which way the wind is blowing on this subject for years now, and I’ve been professionally frustrated by a lack of large-scale studies to inform my own take. SEOs live through ongoing cycles of one formerly-favorite tactic or another being proclaimed “dead”, whether that’s link building, guest posting, or search engine optimization, itself. The reality, we come to realize, is much more nuanced than the headlines. I wanted more than my own anecdotal opinion as to how location data distribution and manageme…

MyBB 1.8.29 is now available, and is a security release. 1 security vulnerability addressed: High risk: ACP Settings management RCE (advisory) — reported by Xiangwen (Evan) Yu Check the Release Notes for more information. Get latest MyBB Full & Upgrade Packages → The MyBB Project extends thanks to reporters and researchers following responsible disclosure. Go to mybb.com/security to report possible security concerns or to learn more about security research at MyBB. If you would like to contribute to the Project, Get Involved. Thanks, MyBB Team Continue reading...

MyBB 1.8.28 is now available, and is a security & maintenance release. This version resolves discovered bugs and regressions, and addresses known PHP 8 compatibility problems. This version enables validation of HTML code generated by the MyCode parser — check the Documentation page and previous announcement for more details. 1 security vulnerability addressed: Medium risk: ACP Template Name XSS (advisory) — reported by Andrey Stoykov 28 issues resolved Check the Release Notes for more information. Get latest MyBB Full & Upgrade Packages → The MyBB Project extends thanks to reporters and researchers following responsible disclosure. Go…

[HEADING=1]vBulletin 5.6.5 Changes and Updates[/HEADING] vBulletin 5.6.5 is now available for download. vBulletin Cloud sites will be scheduled for automatic updates in the coming days. [HEADING=1]Front End Changes[/HEADING] [HEADING=2]Answered Topics[/HEADING] Topics can now be marked as "Answered." This is a special status applied to a specific post within the topic. The post that is marked as the Answer will be highlighted and show directly under the starting post in the topic. The ability to mark posts as the Answer in a topic is controlled by permissions. There are three different permissions to control this. Usergroup and Channel Permissions both support…

Testing out a new paid marketing channel is relatively easy. You can assign someone in-house, allocate some test budget, and pretty quickly quantify the return on your investment. Testing out SEO can be quite a bit trickier: Results often take time (more than six months) If results do materialize, they’re often hard to quantify or attribute to any one project It’s more than just a financial investment — you'll usually need product resources as well There are exceptions but most companies can’t say: "let's spend $10K on SEO over the next few months and see if there's potential there". You have to take a leap of faith, and weighing that leap of…

A crucial aspect of improving your SEO performance is reporting. By reporting on what you’ve done, you can analyze the data you’ve collected, and learn from it. In this Daily Fix series, we’ll show you how to create clear, insightful reports that you can easily share with relevant stakeholders. These reports cover all of the key elements of SEO, and can be customized to suit your needs. If you’d like further assistance with creating custom reports, you can book a one-on-one walkthrough with a member of our Onboarding Team. We’ll guide you through how to create a personalized report that looks exactly like you want it to. Book a walkthrough How do I set up …

I originally made this case back in January 2018, and it’s hard to believe that’s almost four years ago now. So much has happened since: the evolution of website platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, and Square/Weebly into full-blown digital operations hubs, the start of serious antitrust proceedings against Google and Facebook, and of course, a global pandemic. But if anything, the case for historically search-oriented agencies to add or expand their email marketing offerings has only strengthened. Email remains an under-appreciated and under-addressed channel among digital agencies of all stripes, even as “social media management” seems to have become an almost table…

No matter how good your content is, how accurate your keywords are or how precise your microdata is, inefficient crawling reduces the number of pages Google will read and store from your site. Search engines need to look at and store as many pages that exist on the internet as possible. There are currently an estimated 4.5 billion web pages active today. That's a lot of work for Google. It cannot look and store every page, so it needs to decide what to keep and how long it will spend on your site indexing pages. Right now, Invision Community is not very good at helping Google understand what is important and how to get there quickly. This blog article runs throug…

In part one of this series, we talked about how Google and the web in general were not really ready for the Page Experience Update — Google’s CrUX data covered too few websites, the vast majority of which were not hitting the required thresholds. That was why, I suggested, the update had been so delayed and watered down. In part two, we talked about the metrics themselves — their flimsiness, their arbitrariness, their openness to manipulation. This, too, I suggested, might be holding Google back. However, the proof is in the pudding. Are Core Web Vitals, taken individually or as a whole, correlated with rankings? If so, is that any more true than it was before the P…

[HEADING=1]vBulletin 5.6.5 Changes and Updates[/HEADING] The preview version of vBulletin 5.6.5 Release Candidate is now available for download. Preview versions should not be used on production servers and are released for testing purposes only. [HEADING=1]Front End Changes[/HEADING] [HEADING=2]Answered Topics[/HEADING] Topics can now be marked as "Answered." This is a special status applied to a specific post within the topic. The post that is marked as the Answer will be highlighted and show directly under the starting post in the topic. The ability to mark posts as the Answer in a topic is controlled by permissions. There are three different permissions to…

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to moderating/guiding an online community. Each digital world includes its own series of hurdles to overcome. As a community gains momentum and the registration count climbs higher, community moderators are presented with new challenges. These tasks become inherently more complex as a result, siphoning precious resources and oftentimes paint moderators into a corner. Take back the brush and illustrate a new scene with these supportive tips on how to better engage with your community. These pro-moderation tactics aim to foster a greater sense of togetherness and unity while also acknowledging individual members for…

[HEADING=1]vBulletin 5.6.5 Changes and Updates[/HEADING] The preview version of vBulletin 5.6.5 Beta is now available for download. Preview versions should not be used on production servers and are released for testing purposes only. [HEADING=1]Front End Changes[/HEADING] [HEADING=2]Answered Topics[/HEADING] Topics can now be marked as "Answered." This is a special status applied to a specific post within the topic. The post that is marked as the Answer will be highlighted and show directly under the starting post in the topic. The ability to mark posts as the Answer in a topic is controlled by permissions. There are three different permissions to control this…

When we announced XenForo Cloud a little while back, we were encouraged by the great feedback we received. Having taken onboard all your comments, we have been hard at work refining our offering to make it an even more compelling proposition, and today we are ready to talk about some of the changes we've implemented. Faster Not content with already offering the industry's most capable and responsive infrastructure, we are now using even more powerful hardware with faster clock speeds... Read more Continue reading...

First, let me pull up the best seat in the house for you: the local business owner or marketer who has weathered so much in the past two years. For your work of serving the public, you deserve the comfy chair by the fire, the celebratory cup of hot chocolate, while we chat about preparing to take good care of your customers in the upcoming holiday season. Thank you for how you’ve risen every day to countless challenges, kept communities supplied, and will even make some dreams come true when people give gifts to one another as expressions of love, hope, and generosity of spirit this winter. We can prepare your local business to be both popular and profitable in the …

In the first post in this series, I talked about how relatively few URLs on the web are currently clearing the double-hurdle required for a maximum CWV (Core Web Vitals) ranking boost: Passing the threshold for all three CWV metrics Actually having CrUX data available so Google knows you’ve passed said thresholds For Google’s original rollout timeline in May, we would have had 9% of URLs clearing this bar. By August 2021, this had hit 14%. This alone may have been enough for Google to delay, downplay, and dilute their own update. But there’s another critical issue that I believe may have undermined Google’s ability to introduce Page Experience as a …

Recently, after months of testing, Google pushed a full roll-out of indented results. These are groups of organic results from the same domain, such as this result on a search for “Halloween stores”: Just to make life confusing, indented results are different from expanded sitelinks (in the #1 ranking position), such as these on a search for “Spirit Halloween”: So, why should we care about indented results? To begin with, they seem to be appearing at a surprisingly high rate on page one. Here’s the prevalence since we started tracking them on MozCast (across 10,000 competitive keywords): For the 13 days for which we currently have data, the prevalence…