Overview

Description

Nobody scrolls past a board that moves

Topboard puts a live activity board at the top of your community: the newest posts, discussions heating up right now, your most active members, and sponsored slots you can sell to help fund it all.

It refreshes itself while people read, and turns some of the most valuable screen space on your site into something members watch and sponsors can pay for.

Demo: https://demo.invisionite.com/

The problem

A forum index is a list of containers. The actual life of your community, the reply posted forty seconds ago, the topic that suddenly took off, the member on a posting streak, is buried one click deeper.

Visitors land on your busiest page and see furniture.

Monetizing that page is its own headache. Banner ads look like ads, so people learn to ignore them or block them outright. Selling placements manually means invoices, start dates in spreadsheets, expiry dates to remember, and renewal reminders someone eventually forgets to send.

Topboard fixes both halves: it surfaces the activity and runs the sponsorship pipeline for you.

Three looks, one widget

Every widget instance gets its own style:

• Native Feed: clean stacked rows that feel like part of the rest of your community.

• Classic Table: the column-based statistics board forum veterans remember, with topic, forum, replies, views, activity, and last poster. On phones it restacks into tidy rows instead of forcing a sideways scroll.

• Spotlight: card-based headline slots with full-image sponsor cards and text overlaid on the artwork.

Eight tabs, plus two of your own

New posts, New topics, Featured, Latest files, Trending, Most replies, Most viewed, and Most reacted.

Choose the tabs you want for each widget, set the number of items, and limit them to selected forums if needed.

You can also add up to two custom tabs with your own label and forum selection. An Introductions tab for greeters, a Marketplace tab for traders, or whatever fits your community.

Trending and Most reacted rank content within a time window you control, so they reward what is happening now instead of what happened in 2019.

Alive without a reload

A countdown sits in the tab bar and Topboard refreshes itself on schedule while keeping the reader on the tab they were viewing. Impatient members get a manual refresh button too.

Members who do not care about the board can collapse it into a slim strip. The Top Members panel folds away separately, letting the activity area use the full width.

Both choices are remembered per device.

A collapsed board also stops refreshing and stops counting impressions. No wasted requests and no phantom ad views.

Headline slots

Above the tabs sit your promoted rows: pinned topics you want seen and sponsored placements you have sold, each with its own label chip.

A slot can point to an internal topic or work as a completely standalone external ad with its own title, description, link, and image.

Images appear as neat thumbnails in Native Feed and Classic Table, and become full-image cards in Spotlight.

Sponsored slots can also be hidden from selected member groups, which gives you an easy premium perk: upgrade and the ads disappear.

Monetize the app without any effort

With Commerce installed, Topboard becomes self-service advertising.

You create the packages: price, duration, slot type, label, and an optional Most popular highlight.

Members buy through the campaign storefront, pay using your normal Commerce checkout, and then submit the topic or advertisement they want to promote through a guided form.

Nothing goes live automatically. Every submission goes through staff approval first.

Once approved, Topboard handles the schedule. Campaigns start, run, expire, and become available for renewal without you tracking dates manually.

Numbers a sponsor can trust

Impressions are counted from the reader's browser, deduplicated per visitor with a cooldown, and only counted while the board is actually visible on screen.

Clicks pass through a tracked redirect.

Every slot gets daily impression and click data alongside its lifetime totals.

Sponsors see their own report card at /campaigns, with stat tiles, click-through rate, a 14-day chart, and a renewal button that extends an active campaign or relaunches an expired one through normal checkout.

You get the same picture across the entire site in the ACP Performance dashboard: totals, a 30-day chart, and every campaign with its own sparkline.

Top members included

A ranked member panel, based on posts or reputation, sits beside the activity tabs like the classic statistics boxes many communities used for years.

A standalone Top Members widget is included for sidebars too.

In short

Topboard is a live, tabbed activity board with three display styles, eight activity sources, custom forum tabs, a Top Members panel, and promoted headline slots.

Behind it sits impression and click tracking, self-service Commerce campaigns with staff approval, sponsor-facing performance charts and renewals, and an ACP dashboard that shows you the whole picture.

The front of your community, finally earning its keep.