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The engagement trap is a race to community activity for the sake of activity. It's usually measured by simple aggregate numbers like the total number of posts, topics, likes, or members. You don't want members to chat. You want members to learn, to advocate, to innovate, to educate, to support, to problem solve, and to enlighten. Many community managers and webmasters enjoy spouting engagement numbers. It's an easy number to brag about. It's an easy number to find. It's also, unfortunately, a terrible metric to measure. Engagement metrics are exhausting since you're aiming for higher-and-higher goals, which grow into unreasonable levels over time. It's misle…

Invision Community has come a long way over the past five years. We've added many new features and invigorated the front-end user experience to keep it current and in-line with modern interfaces. One area that has remained largely the same is the Admin Control Panel. When we released Invision Community 4.0 back in 2014, the Admin Control Panel was updated but has stayed relatively dormant since. But that's all about to change with the upcoming release of Invision Community 4.5! The Admin Control Panel in 4.5 has received a substantial update, resulting in a modern color scheme and a clean, minimalistic design. We felt that a lighter, more open de…

Without a doubt, clubs is one of the most popular features added to Invision Community in recent times. Invision Community clubs allows you to run sub-communities on your site. We've seen clubs used in many ways, including managing geographically local groups and clan groups for large gaming sites. This popularity drives us to keep incrementally improving the feature set for clubs, and Invision Community 4.5 is no different. One thing that was raised many times was a way for club owners and leaders to create simple pages with general information members need. Happily, in Invision Community 4.5, this feature now exists (and more!) In addition to the …

You'd be forgiven for thinking that RSS feeds belong in some bygone era of the web where Netscape was king and getting online meant listening to your modem scream at your phone line. There's certainly a lot of newer web technologies to share data, but the venerable RSS feed still has a place. Invision Community has supported RSS feed importing and exporting for a very long time now; however, it has been restricted to just Forums and Blogs. Importing an RSS feed is a simple way to populate content on your community. It's even a great way to share content to and from your site without creating blocks or writing custom code. Invision Community 4.5 now centralizes…

Invision Community has supported member referrals via the Commerce app since Commerce was called Nexus all those years ago. Community owners have been able to see at a glance who is spreading the word and members have received the kudos associated with a growing referral count in return. When planning Invision Community 4.5 we saw that this feature had the potential to be so much more… So what have we done to improve it? See Who Was Referred In addition to seeing a count of referrals, it’s now possible for both admins and members to see who they referred. If Commerce is enabled admins can also see how much commission (if any) was earned. The new refer…

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard New year, new you — when it comes to SEO reporting, at least! We're kicking off 2020 with a comprehensive yet gloriously simple recipe from Cyrus Shepard for creating truly effective SEO reports. From tying KPIs to business metrics to delivering bad news effectively, your reports have never looked so good. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Okay, so we have 400 broken pages. Ah, we rank number 7 for best plumbers in Idaho. Oh, hey, Moz fans. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today I'm talking about SEO reports, specifically how to create 10x SEO reports. I've go…

Posted by MiriamEllis Image credit: Migaspinto If you own or market a business location that makes a real-world community more serviceable, diverse, and strong, I’m on your side. I love interesting towns and cities, with a wide array of useful goods and services. Nothing in my career satisfies me more than advising any brand that’s determined to improve life quality in some spot on the map. It does my heart good to see it, but here’s my completely unsentimental take on the challenges you face: The Internet, and Google’s local platforms in particular, are a complete mess. Google is the biggest house on the local block; you can’t ignore it. Yet, the ent…

Posted by FeliciaCrawford What keywords do your top competitors both rank for that you're missing out on? How do you know how much top real estate your URL or page owns in the SERPs? How can you discover answers to your searchers' most common questions and beef up that FAQ page? We can answer all of those questions with some super-simple workflows using Keyword Explorer. In our last post in this series, we covered how to find ranking keywords, uncover new opportunities, check rankings, and more. This time around, we're diving into three more quick and easy workflows you can use to bolster your keyword research and work smarter, not harder. Ready to get started? F…

Posted by BritneyMuller Python is a programming language that can help you uncover incredible SEO insights and save you time by automating time-consuming tasks. But for those who haven't explored this side of search, it can be intimidating. In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller and a true python expert named Pumpkin offer an intro into a helpful tool that's worth your time to learn. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're talking all about introduction to Python, which is why I have a special…

Posted by Jeff_Baker Why is everyone and their grandparents writing about content re-optimization? I can’t speak for the people writing endless streams of blogs on the subject, but in Brafton’s case, it’s been the fastest technique for improving rankings and driving more traffic. As a matter of fact, in this previous Moz post, we showed that rankings can improve in a matter of minutes after re-indexing. But why does it work? It’s probably a combination of factors (our favorite SEO copout!), which may include: Age value: In a previous study we observed a clear relationship between time indexed and keyword/URL performance, absent of links: More co…

MyBB 1.8.16 is now available, and is a security & maintenance release. This update includes compatibility fixes for database engines and recent PHP versions as well as performance and global security improvements. Note that the theme’s CSS files may need to be updated. If you use the login_attempt_check() function, note that its signature has changed. 6 security vulnerabilities addressed: High risk: Image & URL MyCode Persistent XSS — reported by Punisher_HF Medium risk: Multipage Reflected XSS — reported by Dimaz Arno of Ethic Ninja Low risk: ACP logs XSS — reported by Cillian Collins Low risk: Arbitrary file deletion via ACP’s Settings — reported …

MyBB 1.8.17 is now available, and is a maintenance release. This update fixes several issues introduced by MyBB 1.8.16 such as not being able to log into forums. 11 issues resolved Check Release Notes for a list of changes to language files, templates and unresolved issues. Get latest MyBB Full & Upgrade Packages → 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 1.8.18 is now available, and is a security & maintenance release. Changes include added support for Mixer videos and multi-file attachments, modified Word Filter behavior, fixes to the mailing queue and improved compatibility with SQLite and MySQL 8. Theme CSS changes may be required and administrators may need to review Word Filters. 2 security vulnerabilities addressed: High risk: Image MyCode “alt” attribute persistent XSS — reported by Punisher_HF Medium risk: RSS Atom 1.0 item title persistent XSS — reported by 0xB9 30 issues resolved Check Release Notes for a list of changes to language files, templates and unresolved issues. Get lat…

Keeping MyBB boards secure is a team effort. Security issues discovered and reported by external researchers and our core developers are analysed, fixed and included in final packages. The process doesn’t end there however: it is essential that administrators are notified to update their forums as soon as possible in order to prevent the addressed vulnerabilities from being exploited in an attack on their boards and users. Our recently published summaries, recommendations and links to reviewed guides in the SECURITY.md file contain many resources forum administrators can use to secure their boards against both opportunist and experienced digital criminals. First an…

MyBB 1.8.19 is now available, and is a security & maintenance release. This update includes improved compatibility with PostgreSQL and resolves regressions from previous versions. Administrators may need to update CSS code in global.css for customized themes. 4 security vulnerabilities addressed: High risk: Email field SQL Injection — reported by StefanT Medium risk: Video MyCode Persistent XSS in Visual Editor — reported by Numan OZDEMIR of InfinitumIT Low risk: Insufficient permission check in User CP’s attachment management — reported by StefanT Low risk: Insufficient email address verification — reported by StefanT 8 issues resolved Check Re…

Greetings everyone, We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.2.3 "Bertie's long summer". This version is a maintenance release of the 3.2.x branch which fixes various issues reported in previous versions. The fixed issues include, among others, problems when submitting posts with more than one attachment, migrations failing when updating from versions prior to phpBB 3.2.2 and PHP warnings being displayed when editing signatures in the ACP. Notable changes are the dropped support for HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) and more prominent links to privacy policy and the terms of use. The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs …

Greetings everyone, We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.2.4 "Bertie's ‘stache". This version is a maintenance and security release of the 3.2.x branch which fixes one security issue and various issues reported in previous versions. The security issue was discovered with a new exploitation technique called Phar deserialization. An attacker with control over a founder admin account could escalate to remote code execution by abusing PHP’s default unserialization of metadata in Phar files. More information about this technique can be found here. In order to fix this issue we’ve removed the ability to define absolute paths in the Admin Control Panel. This …

Greetings everyone, We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.2.5 "Bertie's Secret Santa". This version is a maintenance release of the 3.2.x branch which fixes various issues reported in previous versions. The fixed issues include, among others, a BBCode parsing regression in the generate_text_for_display() function, a missing variable cast on the ACP extensions page, as well as a fix to how the assets version gets appended to JavaScript files included via INCLUDEJS. The full list of changes is available in the changelog file within the docs folder contained in the release package. You can find the key highlights of this release on the wiki at https://wi…

Greetings everyone, We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.2.6 "You Know Nothing, Bertie Snow". This version is a maintenance and security release of the 3.2.x branch which fixes two security issues, introduces further hardening, and resolves various issues reported in previous versions. Previous versions of phpBB allowed users to run searches that might result in long execution times and load on larger boards when using the fulltext native search engine. To combat this, we have now introduced further restrictions on search queries. We’d like to thank Snover for his report and responsible disclosure. The issue has been assigned CVE-2019-9826. In addition…

Greetings everyone, We are pleased to announce the release of phpBB 3.2.7 "Bertie’s Force Field". This version is a maintenance release of the 3.2.x branch which resolves issues reported in previous versions. The fixed issues include, among others, issues with form token validation during login, the inability to change topic types after posting, an issue with viewing private message folders, and potentially incorrectly shortened URL links when using the Issues fixed in 3.2.7 The packages can be downloaded from our downloads page. The development team thanks everyone who contributed code to this release: JoshyPHP, Matt Friedman, mrgoldy, EA117 If you have an…