Community Experts — free

Invision Community has a Community Experts feature. Members you name as experts get a badge on their posts in the forums they actually know about, and get an email when a question in one of those forums goes unanswered.

It is Cloud only. On a self-hosted community it is switched off, and there is no setting anywhere that turns it on.

This does not imitate that feature. It completes it.

Almost all of Community Experts is already sitting in your installation, doing nothing:

What is missing is the switch. Every one of those pieces is behind a check for the Cloud platform, so none of them can ever run. This application supplies what is missing and uses core's own badge, core's own email, core's own unsubscribe handling and core's own table.

The practical result: what your members see is the real feature, not a lookalike. And because the assignments live in core's own table, a community that later moves to Invision Community Cloud finds its experts already in place.

Named per forum, which is the whole point

Somebody who knows billing inside out is not an authority on off-topic. Experts are named per forum and the badge only appears where they actually are one — a badge that follows a member everywhere is worth considerably less than one that does not.

Naming experts automatically, if you want to

Off by default. When enabled, anyone who clears both of these tests in a forum is given the badge there:

• Accepted answers in that forum. Replies of theirs that somebody marked as the answer. This is the strongest evidence available, because the person with the problem said so.

• Posts in that forum. A second test, so one lucky answer is not enough on its own.

Both are counted inside the forum, deliberately. Promoting on a site-wide reputation score or post count measures how much somebody posts, not what they know — on a community whose busiest forum is off-topic, that names the most prolific chatterer an authority on billing.

The admin screen lists everyone who currently meets the tests whether or not automatic naming is switched on, so you can see exactly who the rule would pick before trusting it with the decision. Nobody is ever removed automatically: taking a badge away stays a decision a person makes.

Emails that produce answers

Once an hour, experts are emailed about questions in their forums that nobody has answered. It skips anything they started, anything they have already replied to, and anything they have already been told about — an expert is never sent the same question twice. One email lists several questions rather than sending several emails.

Members can turn it off from their own notification settings, or from the link in the email itself. Both routes work because both are core's.

Also

• An audit trail of who was named or removed, when, and by whom — with automatic changes marked as such and the reason recorded.

• Members can opt out of being shown as an expert without losing their assignments.

• Administrators can block a member from ever showing as an expert.

• Restrict by group, so the badge can only reach the people you intend.

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

Honest about the limits

• Forums only. Experts are named against forums, because that is what core's own data does.

• Automatic naming needs "solved" enabled in a forum. Without accepted answers there is no evidence to promote on, so nobody is ever named automatically in a forum that does not use it. Naming people by hand works everywhere.

• The emails need a working task scheduler. Without one, nothing is sent.

• Three language strings belong to core's namespace. They have to, because they are the strings for core's own email, which does not ship with them. If you ever migrate to Invision Community Cloud, uninstall this application first — see the setup guide.

Requirements

• Invision Community 5.0 or newer (self-hosted)

• The Forums application

• A running task scheduler, for the emails and for automatic naming

Free. No key, no account, no external service.