Auto Tagging — tags every topic by what it is about
Tagging only works if people do it, and people do not do it. Your tag list gets built with care, gets used properly for a fortnight, and then quietly stops being used at all. Everything posted after that is untagged, so tag pages go stale, filtering misses things, and the vocabulary you designed is doing nothing.
This reads each new topic and applies the tags that actually fit it.
It matches meaning, not words
A topic titled "my card keeps getting declined and I was charged twice" gets tagged billing — a word that appears nowhere in it. Invision's own tag box offers autocomplete over text the author has already typed, which cannot do this. Matching here is done on meaning, so a topic reaches the right tag even when it shares no vocabulary with it at all.
It uses your tags. Only your tags.
Nothing is invented and nothing new appears in your tag list. The app reads the tags you have already defined and chooses between them, so the vocabulary stays exactly as you designed it. Disable a tag and it stops being applied.
It also learns what each tag means in your community, not in general. A tag is understood partly from the topics that already carry it, so build on a woodworking forum and build on a gaming forum end up meaning quite different things — as they should.
It will not touch work someone did by hand
This is the part worth reading carefully. Adding a tag in Invision Community is not actually an operation the platform offers — saving tags replaces every tag on the item. A tagging tool that gets that wrong will silently delete tags your moderators set, and nobody will connect the loss to the app that caused it.

Auto Tagging always writes the complete set: existing tags, the new ones, and the item's prefix. By default it leaves anything already tagged completely alone.
Honest about confidence
Every match carries a score, and there is a threshold below which nothing is applied. The defaults are set to tag less rather than tag wrongly — a wrong tag is worse than a missing one, because someone has to find it and undo it.
There is a Preview screen that scores real topics from your own community and shows you the numbers, so you can pick a threshold from evidence rather than from a guess. It tags nothing while you do it.
Fits around the site rather than into it
Posting never waits. Tagging happens in the background after the topic is saved. Nobody sits watching a spinner while an API is called.
Backfill on demand. Tag the topics you already have, batched so a large community does not arrive as one enormous bill.
Scope it. Restrict it to certain forums, and list any tags it must never apply — solved and staff pick mean something procedural that only a person should decide.
Respects your limits. It will not push an item past your site-wide maximum tags per item.
One key, one bill. If you run Related Topics or AI Assistant, it can borrow their embeddings key instead of asking for another.
No core files are edited. Upgrading Invision Community will not break it.
What it costs to run
Auto Tagging needs an embeddings API key — Voyage AI or OpenAI. This is not a subscription to me; you hold the account and pay the provider directly.
Embeddings are among the cheapest things either provider sells. Your tag list is processed once and then only when it changes, and each new topic is a single small request. For an ordinary community this runs to a trivial amount per month, and there is no charge at all while nothing is being posted.
Requirements
Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted)
Forums
Tags enabled, with at least a few tags defined
An embeddings API key from Voyage AI or OpenAI — or Related Topics / AI Assistant already installed, in which case it can share theirs

SEO Toolkit — find what's costing you traffic, then fix it
This does not claim Invision Community has no SEO. It has friendly URLs, sitemaps, canonical tags and JSON-LD, and they work. What it has no answer for is "is any of it actually set up correctly on my site, and what is search doing with it?" That is the gap.
The audit
One button. It reads your community and tells you what is wrong, worst first, with a link to each offender.
Site-wide
Friendly URLs turned off · friendly URLs not forced · site offline · no HTTPS · robots.txt blocking everything · sitemap missing from robots · no default share image · Twitter cards off
Content
Duplicate titles · titles too short or too long to survive a search result · thin topics that will never rank
Links
Dead outbound links, and which topic each one is in
Two findings that quietly cost the most. Friendly URLs being off means every page is served at a query string. And with them on but not forced, every page is reachable at two addresses — which search engines read as duplicate content. Invision's own note on that setting says so. Neither shows up anywhere in the AdminCP until something has gone wrong.
Findings are fingerprinted, so re-running updates what is still true rather than piling up duplicates — and anything you have dismissed stays dismissed instead of reappearing every week. Anything you fixed disappears on the next run.
Search Console and GA4, in the AdminCP
Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position. What people actually searched for. Which pages got the clicks. Sessions, users and landing pages from GA4 alongside them.
A service account, not OAuth. Paste one JSON key. No consent screen, no redirect URL to register, no refresh token to keep alive.
The last three days are deliberately excluded. Search Console lags, and including today makes every report look like a traffic collapse.
Answers are cached for the day, because the data only changes daily and the calls are metered.
Redirects that core cannot do
Core follows items that were merged into other items. It has nothing for "we restructured the forums and forty URLs moved" — which is exactly when a site loses its rankings.
301, 302, 307 or 308, with a hit counter so you can see what is still being used
Prefix rules that carry the rest of the path across, so /old/a/b lands on /new/a/b rather than dumping everything on one page
Loops are refused, not stored. A redirect loop is invisible until a crawler walks into one, and then the page is simply gone from the index
The tags core leaves out
Twitter card tags. Invision emits Open Graph tags from eight applications and no twitter: tags whatsoever. These are derived from the Open Graph tags already on the page, so the two can never disagree.
A fallback share image, used only when a page has none of its own.
Per-forum overrides. Core's meta tag feature is a flat list keyed by exact URL, so keeping one forum out of search means knowing every address inside it. Here you pick the forum, tick noindex, and choose whether it applies to sub-forums.
Built to be safe on a live site
The audit never crawls you over HTTP. Everything is answered from the database. A crawler on a large forum is slow and hammers the server it is meant to be helping.
Outbound links are the one exception, and they are fetched slowly, in small batches, on a daily schedule — never in a burst that looks like an attack on the sites you link to.
HEAD first, falling back to GET, because plenty of servers refuse HEAD while serving pages perfectly well. A refusal is not evidence a link is dead.
Requests are pinned to http and https, and private address space is skipped, so a background job cannot be steered somewhere it should not go.
No core files are edited. Upgrading Invision Community will not break it.
Requirements
Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted), with the Forums application
Optional: a Google service account, for Search Console and GA4 reporting

Typesense Search — instant results, typos forgiven
Community search should feel like the search bar on a modern app: results the moment you start typing, and the right answer even when the word is misspelled. Typesense Search brings that to Invision Community, powered by the open-source Typesense engine running on your own server.
Typical searches return in under 50 milliseconds — on a test community, 2ms.
What your members get
Typo tolerance. Search for "instalation" and still find every post about installation. Adjustable from forgiving to exact.
Instant results. Matching content appears as they type, before they press enter.
Filter by content type. Topics, posts, files, gallery images, blog entries — counted and filtered in a sidebar, so a busy result set narrows in one click.
Highlighted matches. Results show the phrase in context with the matched words marked, so members can see at a glance which result they want.
What you get
It indexes everything, automatically. Rather than hooking each application one by one, the app mirrors Invision Community's own search index — so every content type your community has installed is covered, including ones you add later.
Permissions are never guessed. Each document carries Invision Community's own permission tokens, and every search is filtered against the member's real access. Members see exactly what they are allowed to see and nothing more.
Keeps itself in sync. A background task pushes new and updated content every few minutes, removes content that has been deleted, and can rebuild the whole collection on demand.
A status panel that tells the truth. Connection state, Typesense version, documents indexed versus documents available, and time of last sync — all on one screen.
Your community keeps working
This app runs alongside your community's built-in search rather than replacing its internals. Switch on Use for the main search page and members who search are taken to the Typesense results page; switch it off and everything reverts to stock instantly. If the Typesense server is ever unavailable, your community carries on exactly as before.
That also means it is completely upgrade-safe: no core file is modified, so an Invision Community update can't break it and can't silently switch it off.
Requirements
Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted)
A Typesense server reachable from your community — it runs comfortably in a single small Docker container alongside your site, or on Typesense Cloud
An admin API key for that Typesense server
Setup is a few minutes: point the app at your server, save, and press Rebuild collection.
Why Typesense
Invision Community ships with MySQL search and supports Elasticsearch. Typesense sits between them — dramatically faster and more forgiving than MySQL, while being far lighter to run than Elasticsearch. It is open source, it is a single binary, and it will happily run in a few hundred megabytes of memory next to your community.
Version 1.0.0 · Invision Community 5 · self-hosted

Give your community a pulse. Trending adds a placeable block that surfaces the topics gaining momentum right now — ranked by recent replies and reactions, with time decay so fresh bursts rise and stale-but-busy threads step aside. It's the "what's hot" list your members expect from modern platforms, running entirely on your own server.
Why you'll want it
Recency-weighted, not just a reply count. A scoring formula blends recent replies, recent reactions, and how long ago the last activity happened — so the list feels alive, not like an all-time leaderboard.
Place it anywhere. Drop the Trending block into any sidebar or block area with the block manager — forum index, a Pages page, wherever your members look.
Tune it to your community. Time window, reply/reaction weights, and a "gravity" time-decay control are all adjustable from the AdminCP. Fast-moving community? Tighten the window. Quiet niche? Widen it.
Privacy-aware. Only lists topics a guest can see, so nothing from private forums leaks into a public block.
Zero maintenance. A lightweight background task refreshes the list on Invision Community's existing task runner. No extra services, no cron to set up.
Upgrade-safe. Reads Invision Community's own forum data and never edits core files, so IPS updates won't break it.
How it works
Every ~20 minutes a background task scores recent topic activity and caches a ranked list. The block renders that list instantly — light on every page load, always current.
Requirements
Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted), with the Forums application
No third-party services; uses the task runner you already have
Version 1.0.0 — Invision Community 5 — self-hosted. Turn raw activity into a living "what's hot" list your members actually click.

Related Topics — suggestions that understand what a topic is about
Invision Community can already show related content. It matches on tags. That means it works exactly as well as your members tag things, which on most communities is somewhere between patchily and not at all — and when everything in a forum carries the same three tags, "related" degrades to "everything".
This matches on meaning. It reads each topic, turns it into a vector, and compares topics by what they are actually about. No tags required, and no tagging discipline to enforce.
A real example from testing. A topic about a workflow-automation app for Invision matched a topic about an automation extension for a completely different forum platform, at 79%. Different forum, different category, no tags in common. Nothing tag-based could ever have found that.
Two ways to show it
Automatically
A "Related discussions" list appears below the posts on every topic. No block placement, no template editing.
As a block
A placeable widget for your sidebar, if you would rather choose where it goes. It only appears on topic pages.
Use either, or both.
It tells you when it has nothing to say
This is the part most "related content" features get wrong. If nothing clears your similarity threshold, nothing is shown at all — no empty box, no heading over a blank list, no five tenuous suggestions padding it out. Silence is the honest answer when nothing is related.
You tune it against your own content, not a guess
There is no threshold that is right for every community, and this application does not pretend otherwise. On a focused forum — where most topics are broadly the same kind of thing — even unrelated pairs score in the sixties. On a varied one the gap is much wider.
So the settings screen shows real matches from your own topics with their real scores, including the ones currently falling below your threshold and greyed out. You pick your number by looking at your own content. That takes about a minute and it is the difference between suggestions people click and suggestions they learn to ignore.
Costs, stated plainly
You need an embeddings API key — Voyage AI or any OpenAI-compatible provider.
One API call per topic, once. Editing a topic only re-embeds if the text actually changed, so fixing a typo costs nothing.
Embedding models are inexpensive. A few thousand topics is small money, but it is not zero and you should know that before you install.
Already running my AI Assistant? One switch and this borrows its provider, key and model, so you manage one key and one bill.
Built to stay out of the way
Nothing blocks posting. Indexing happens on the background queue. An outage at the embeddings provider means new topics wait their turn, never that members cannot post.
Permissions are respected. A topic a member cannot open is never suggested to them.
Changing the model is safe. Different models produce different vector sizes; mismatched entries are skipped rather than compared, so you get fewer results instead of confident nonsense. Rebuild and they come back.
No core files are edited. Upgrading Invision Community will not break it.
What you control
How many suggestions, and the minimum similarity
Whether suggestions can cross between forums, or stay within one
Which forums are indexed at all
Automatic placement on or off
Requirements
Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted), with the Forums application
An embeddings API key from Voyage AI or an OpenAI-compatible provider