Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

[LiquidFractal]

Some random observations:

1. This thread is a perfect case study of the necessity of forums (you could never have this conversation on social media like Facebook)
2. I don't know if there's a third-party plugin for this, but how about a "thread bookmark" function?  I just spent a fair bit of time re-reading posts only to later come across my own, which means I had already read much of that material yesterday. 😄 What if one could bookmark a specific response (I'm a fan of drag-and-drop, but keep it simple I guess) so that with lengthy debates/discussions like this one could jump straight to where one left off reading previously?
3. I'm neither a developer nor an Invision employee, but I see this thread as a massive opportunity for a meeting of the minds re: productive change.  Crisis as opportunity kinda thing.

 

[Charles]

1. Yes, you need both.
2. Browsers have bookmarks. Much like cookie-consent banners, things like this are best left to your browser.
3. Every topic is that 🙂

 

[LiquidFractal]

2 minutes ago, Charles said:

Browsers have bookmarks. Much like cookie-consent banners, things like this are best left to your browser.

Yes, but there are people like me who have little use for browse bookmarks and prefer to keep things contained in the sties they visit. 😄 Instead of having to go into my browser's (sub)folders and delete/recreate bookmarks, I had envisioned something like being able to read a long thread, click a comment and "bookmark/re-bookmark" it so that I could progress through the debate/discussion.

A further, non-related observation: if you talk to yourself while drunk you can still call it "social drinking" 🙂

[Charles]

In that case, I am my own best friend.

[sound]

19 hours ago, liquidfractal said:

Yes, but there are people like me who have little use for browse bookmarks and prefer to keep things contained in the sties they visit. 😄 Instead of having to go into my browser's (sub)folders and delete/recreate bookmarks, I had envisioned something like being able to read a long thread, click a comment and "bookmark/re-bookmark" it so that I could progress through the debate/discussion.

A further, non-related observation: if you talk to yourself while drunk you can still call it "social drinking" 🙂

Once used the old 'like' feature for a site makeshift bookmark feature.

I'd say could be done now with 'reactions'  quite easy.

A 'right now instant' way would be to just 'react' to the comment and then view profile later to revisit

Or perhaps invision or an app dev could take it further by adding  a simple 'bookmark' reaction and a separate 'bookmark' display on profile all contained in the existing feature

 

Edited September 18, 2021 by sound

[Hexsplosions]

@Matt @Lindy @Charles @Jordan Miller

I would like to acknowledge and thank you for the compromise re 6-month renewal. It's fair to say that I was vocal and extremely critical (and negative) in my reactions to this situation. I'm glad there has been an acknowledgement of the failings and a compromise to ease the impact on smaller communities like mine.

While the price increase still respresents a challenge for my site, being on the smaller hobbyist side of the spectrum, the reintroduction of the 6-monthly renewals does at least give us some breathing room to try to accommodate the new prices by reducing the short-term burden on us.

I'd like to add my tuppence worth now that things have calmed down.

I'd ask, as others have done, that any changes to pricing or service offerings be communicated in a timely fashion in the future to give us time to deal with said changes.

I would also suggest that a consultation process with a core user group would be beneficial, for any proposed changes to services. If this was broadly representative of your customer base, and used to test and vet ideas in advance of implementation, issues such as the ones debated in this thread could be identified and solved in advance. We're here and we're vocal, and I personally would be only too happy to form a part of that. I've been an advocate of your team and services for so long, and it was truly upsetting to suddenly find that trust shattered. I believe the community being more engaged would have alleviated much of this situation.

Finally, I don't expect IPS to hold its prices, even for a short period, which I've said numerous times in this thread. I'd absolutely support smaller incremental price increases inline with inflation to help maintain development of the product and services. These smaller increases would be far easier to plan for and to absorb.

P.S. I apologise for any typos, the spellchecker in Firefox does not seem to recognise this as an editor. 🤔

P.P.S. I am not switching to Chrome. 🤮

[Bulletbrain]

I have been a customer since 2006 and the "Don’t worry, it’s not bad news" email newsletter was a real shock.  Whilst everyone fully understands that price increases are required over time, I am really disappointed with the huge 50% price hike that has been announced.

This makes it twice as expensive as other well regarded commercial forum systems.  So I will definitely be removing Pages and quite possibly my whole account due to this.

It appears that many of us smaller communities are being pushed out - it feels like they are trying to shift their customer base as more communities are moving to free products like discourse, discord, etc.

I still have a few months left on my account, so I will be looking at possible alternatives, but in the mean time how do you remove applications like Pages from your account?  I thought you could do this yourself, but I can not see any way to do this in the client area.

[WP V0RT3X]

15 minutes ago, Bulletbrain said:

free products like discourse, discord, etc.

Discord isn't as free as you think, for the cool stuff you have to pay too 

[Bulletbrain]

Just now, Darth Vortex said:

Discord isn't as free as you think, for the cool stuff you have to pay too 

I've used it a lot for other communities and everything required for most people is totally free.

[Ramsesx]

On 9/17/2021 at 10:27 PM, liquidfractal said:

I don't know if there's a third-party plugin for this, but how about a "thread bookmark" function?

But not yet compatible with 4.6

[LiquidFractal]

2 hours ago, Darth Vortex said:

Discord isn't as free as you think, for the cool stuff you have to pay too 

I also took a brief look at Discourse, and they make self-hosting a mission and a half for a great many people (not supporting self-hosting on CPanel/DirectAdmin/Plesk?  Really?).

1 hour ago, Ramsesx said:

But not yet compatible with 4.6

Thanks....interesting!

[TDBF]

On 9/15/2021 at 4:20 PM, Matt said:

I'm sorry to see you go. Good luck with the conversion and thanks for your business. 🙂 

I just thought I would give you an update on our situation.

After speaking with our forum and staff members, they made it clear they didn't want to move to another forum software and some even offered to pay our fees (which was amazing tbh).

After the news about restoring the 6 monthly payments, this makes it easier for us payment wise and we will be sticking around for a little while longer. As for the support, I may have been a bit hasty at first!

So thank you for listening to us regarding the yearly payments, that does help. 🙂

[WP V0RT3X]

2 hours ago, Bulletbrain said:

I've used it a lot for other communities and everything required for most people is totally free.

Maybe for most people, but that doesn't change the fact that if you want to have more than the limited basic features you have to pay.

PS: I'm a gamer and use it every day, so I know what I'm talking about too.

[Matt]

9 hours ago, TDBF said:

I just thought I would give you an update on our situation.

After speaking with our forum and staff members, they made it clear they didn't want to move to another forum software and some even offered to pay our fees (which was amazing tbh).

After the news about restoring the 6 monthly payments, this makes it easier for us payment wise and we will be sticking around for a little while longer. As for the support, I may have been a bit hasty at first!

So thank you for listening to us regarding the yearly payments, that does help. 🙂

You have an amazing community, and thank you for sticking with us. 🙂 

[Dexter_X]

On 9/19/2021 at 1:02 AM, liquidfractal said:

I also took a brief look at Discourse, and they make self-hosting a mission and a half for a great many people (not supporting self-hosting on CPanel/DirectAdmin/Plesk?  Really?).

Discourse is in Java, you'll need a hosting company with this ability. It is not about your user interface to manage your hosted options, its about what their servers are set up to do (or not).

[abobader]

14 hours ago, Dexter_X said:

Discourse is in Java

It done by "Ruby on Rails"

[beats23]

Is there any plans to update the gallery app any time soon in IPS?

[rfcontreras]

Hi

Would be great if we can cache html like we can do for anonymous visitors. I don't know the inner working of the forum code, but maybe it's a good option to let us cache everything and once a post or article or product (I don't use commerce) is updated then invalidate it. 

I'm using cloudflare for speed and security. Right now I'm caching all my databases html and this part of the suite is very fast, but the forums not. I can cache forums html but the minimum invalidation for my plan in CloudFlare is 30 minutes. 

I've implemented a CloudFlare rule to cache all the css and js, but there's a cache busting variable so we have a lot of cached copies of the SAME CSS and JS. 

Could you please clarify if there's a reason to disable caching for html or invalidate ONLY with changes ?

also why can't the Pages databases CATEGORIES can't be cached, once we put the db's we never change them.

My stack is Ubuntu 20, with Nginx, Mariadb, Opcache, Redis for the forum, pagespeed_nginx for js and css and Cloudflare on top. 

Thanks in advance

Ricardo

 

Edited September 22, 2021 by rfcontreras
added comment

[Yamamura]

[AtariAge]

On 9/15/2021 at 6:01 AM, Matt said:

*Raises hand* I search.

I am also someone who attempts to search before starting a new topic, but unfortunately the search here is not very good.  It would be immensely helpful if you defaulted to AND'ing search terms, but even then I often have to use google's "site:invisioncommunity.com" feature to find relevant topics here.

[christopher-w]

On 9/19/2021 at 12:02 AM, LiquidFractal said:

I also took a brief look at Discourse, and they make self-hosting a mission and a half for a great many people

On DigitalOcean we roll out new instances in less than 15 minutes. And they are free, apart from hosting costs.

[Pleeb]

On 9/18/2021 at 9:04 PM, Ramsesx said:

But not yet compatible with 4.6

I bought this plugin and mentioned it in my last post on this very thread, when pointing out how Invision Community needs to better listen to requested common-sense features along with my grievances of the marketplace.  Fosters' update has been rejected once already, and it takes weeks for a plugin to come out of review.

Edited October 2, 2021 by Pleeb

[beats23]

Yes I too find a plugin taking weeks to be reviewed is not good for business.

A plugin should take no longer than 1 day to be reviewed. these plugin and apps has basic codes that is simple to be accessed.

[Dll]

I think you're maybe being a little unfair to Invision here. It seems like most plugins get reviewed much more quickly than that, and without knowing when those 'late' ones were uploaded and whether they have been rejected or not makes it impossible to judge. 

The bookmarks example is a prime one - the author has said they would upload a new version after their previous one was rejected, but since they haven't confirmed when they did (if they have), or responded in the support thread for a few weeks since, it's maybe unreasonable to pass judgement on the situation and place blame on Invision. 

Edited October 2, 2021 by Dll

[Square Wheels]

Regarding Marketplace, is it possible to post the date a new version was uploaded while it's awaiting review?

It is frustrating that we pay renewal fees on these apps and weeks of time are taken away waiting for approval.  Also, the only reason we purchase them is we find them to be an enhancement to our sites, those enhancements (like Bookmarks) are now missing.