Live Topics — run a proper live event, and keep the topic afterwards

Schedule a session. Attendees see a countdown. A host presses start and the room opens: video on one side, moderated questions in the middle, live chat alongside. When it ends, everything worth keeping becomes an ordinary forum topic.

This is the feature Invision Community sells on its Cloud plans. It has never been available for self-hosted communities, and nobody else builds it.

What Cloud charges for it. Live Topics is not included on the entry plan at all. The next tier up allows two events a month. Ten a month arrives at $259/month, and unlimited only at $619/month. This application has no quota. Run one a week or one a day; it is the same price.

The room

Three columns on a desktop, with a draggable divider. Tabs on a phone.

What hosts and staff can actually do

• Promote a chat message into a Main Question. The good question always arrives in the chat, never in the right box.

• Close replies per question — to everyone, or to everyone but staff, so an answered question stops collecting "+1".

• Mark when a question was answered against the video position. The converted topic then deep-links to that moment.

• Approve questions or chat before they appear, when the session warrants it.

• Mute or remove one person without locking chat for everybody. Cloud has neither; its only controls are global.

• A staff-only channel where staff coordinate, and where reports arrive — during a live event nobody is watching the normal reports queue.

Four things Cloud does not do

• Members can ask to be told when it starts. Cloud reminds the hosts and tells members nothing, so anyone who missed the start has to guess. Here anyone can opt in, and the notification fires when a host actually starts — which is the useful moment, since starting is manual.

• A live attendee count. Visible in the room and on the block, so a session looks alive.

• The chat can be kept. Cloud discards it outright. Keep it as one collapsed post at the end of the topic, or discard it — your call, per event.

• An AI recap. Optional. At conversion, the questions and answers are summarised into the opening post, so somebody arriving a week later gets the point without reading forty posts. Cloud produces no post-event artifact of any kind.

It becomes a real topic

Main Questions and their replies are written into your chosen forum as a normal topic, each question attributed to whoever asked it and timestamped when they asked. Searchable, quotable, moderatable — an ordinary topic in every respect.

Real-time, without requiring anything

This works on its own. Out of the box the room updates on a short timer, which is how every live-chat application on this marketplace works. If you also run my Realtime application, this detects it and upgrades to its WebSocket gateway automatically — no configuration, nothing to connect. A socket that drops falls back to timed refresh rather than going silent.

Bounded on purpose

• A session ends itself when every host has left, after a grace period you set.

• A session ends itself at a maximum length you set. An abandoned room is a standing cost, and neither of these should depend on somebody remembering.

• Nothing is visible to anyone until a host presses start.

What you control

• Who may schedule live topics, and who may moderate any of them

• Per event: hosts, staff groups, who may attend, approval rules, destination forum, whether the chat is kept

• Refresh interval, maximum length, host-absence grace period

• Whether recaps are written at all, and with which provider

Requirements

• Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted), with the Forums application

• Optional: my Realtime application, for WebSocket delivery

• Optional: an Anthropic or OpenAI-compatible key for recaps — or my AI Assistant, whose key this will borrow

• No core files are edited. Upgrading Invision Community will not break it.