Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

Adriano Faria · September 16, 2021

2 minutes ago, liquidfractal said:

So is that it for the LMS project?

LMS isn’t from IPS, is it? 😀

Edited September 16, 2021 by Adriano Faria

LiquidFractal · September 16, 2021

1 hour ago, Arcade King said:

No support for Zapier for self hosted comes straight to mind.

There was a recent announcement that Zapier will be available for self-hosted customers as well. Just FYI.

10 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

LMS isn’t from IPS, is it? 😀

LOL....I was just asking because you said you were no longer going to support Gallery, and I assumed that LMS would be making some use of Gallery, seeing as (if I remember correctly) it involved Clubs, which in turn could involve Gallery. Not to mention (potentially) Blogs.

Edited September 16, 2021 by liquidfractal

Adriano Faria · September 16, 2021

6 minutes ago, liquidfractal said:

LOL....I was just asking because you said you were no longer going to support Gallery, and I assumed that LMS would be making some use of Gallery, seeing as (if I remember correctly) it involved Clubs, which in turn could involve Gallery.

Actually it supports any app in Clubs. It’s enough to use its ClubContainer trait and it does.

LiquidFractal · September 16, 2021

4 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Actually it supports any app in Clubs. It’s enough to use its ClubContainer trait and it does.

Ahh, cool. Now GET BACK TO WORK ON IT [cracks whip] 😄

Adriano Faria · September 16, 2021

wohali · September 16, 2021

My two cents: Invision is in a tough spot. Price hikes probably should have been gradual over the last 10 years. Moving to annual billing at the same time as the price increase, though, re-started our community's long-running discussion about moving off of IPS entirely.

The value of IPS for us has eroded over the 10 years we've had the product, mostly due to changing members' needs. So many other communities have turned to zero-cost solutions (like a sub-Reddit) or have completely abandoned forums for SNSes like Twitter, Facebook, Discord, etc. Those who still want their own private forum increasingly use open source software like Discourse.

Unfortunately, many of the other IPS features (Blog, Gallery, Pages, "calendaring") still feel half-baked when compared with software like NextCloud, WordPress, GApps, etc. Downloads & Commerce, however, are probably priced right for people who earn their living on this platform.

Since it sounds like the price increase is going to fund more development, I went over the list of new features in the past 2 years that Matt shared earlier in the thread with my community, to see if they felt they have been getting their money's worth. The only features they said they value are "Highlight topics in forum view when staff reply" and "Club improvements", both things we used to get from plugins.

As for @Matt's suggestion to go with their managed offering:

Quote

It might be that our cloud option is a better fit when you take into account hosting costs and the hassle of maintaining PHP and MySQL updates, etc. Our infrastructure leverages many tools to improve performance of your site.

I suspect that this message falls on deaf ears for anyone posting in this thread right now. If you already have the knowledge to run (and extend) a solution like IPS yourself, $50/mo gets you a lot, even from the more expensive hosting providers out there. (Of course, IPS's hosted offering is much cheaper than Discourse's.)

For the changeover to forum-based support, I believe the messaging was worse than the decision -- it took reading this entire thread to come to terms with what was actually happening. We've had both great and poor experiences, both in private tickets and public threads. I think the move can be a good one, if the new forum can be well curated, easily searchable, and the process continues to make sense for things that shouldn't be public.

What to do? For now, we've requested a one-time, 6-month payment period reprieve, as offered in this thread, and are waiting for Sales to confirm. Thank you for making this available. We'll be taking the next few months to decide if we stay or jump ship. It's not a straightforward choice, and we share concerns with many of the others already expressed in this thread. We look forward to seeing what the monthly improvements will be, and are hoping for a road map of potential new features to come. In parallel, we'll be costing out what effort it'll take to move to a different solution.

The Old Man · September 16, 2021

It's not our fault that IPS chose to be competitive and not raise the prices in line with cost of inflation each year. I'm very grateful they didn't, but that's honestly on them. They just can't come along out of the blue and ramp up the costs for whatever reason is behind this and expect people to embrace it.

Whatever it is that's causing the company to dismiss the feedback of their loyal core community customer base and steadfastly refuse all requests for some reasonable compromise, like retaining 6 month renewals.

It's very difficult justifying the cost of IPS 4.6. Since we're paying over and over again for it, we lose all our investment if we our cancel renewals, but I'm not willing to pay a year up front. I couldn't do it anyway. It's been the most problematic buggy release for quite some time.

Honestly, I've been with you since Ikonboard and I've never felt so disillusioned.

I'm also so tired of the all the patronising 'Fam' and bizarre hump day rubbish, please grow up already especially if you're being so corporate. It's a shame to see what this forum community has become in the last year.

Afrodude · September 16, 2021

40 minutes ago, The Old Man said:

It's very difficult justifying the cost of IPS 4.6. Since we're paying over and over again for it, we lose all our investment if we our cancel renewals, but I'm not willing to pay a year up front. I couldn't do it anyway. It's been the most problematic buggy release for quite some time

I agree with you completely on all points mentioned above. This is won't stop here all MarketPlace developers will raise their prices in order to cover their renewals, and I have already seen it happening.

Form my end I am going to renew my license in 2023. Rising the renewal price %35 is too much.

Randy Calvert · September 16, 2021

Wow... spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.

Communication

Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way. Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well. In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive". If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to. Bring both the carrot AND the stick.
I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service. I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades. (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.) However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal. Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect. This gives people time to adjust and prepare. At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.

Support

I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket. I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process. One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion. Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.
What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP? One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created. By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on. I foresee the following situation playing out:
- I have a problem and come to the community asking for help. Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.
- If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information. They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.
- This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help.
  - If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter. If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful. Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?
  - If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over. I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help.

Developers

Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful. There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product. So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me.
Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc. My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do.... offer a tiered developer program. The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums. The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc. And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review. You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs. I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers. This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community. It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards. (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?)

I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen. Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward. Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest". Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Randy Calvert

levsha · September 16, 2021

Hello!
Sorry for my translation, I use a translator. 🤗 But I can't help but speak out about the price increase.

I tried to use licensed software and therefore acquired a license, and all these years I paid for support, receiving updates, often not seeing any sense in them both for the community and for myself. My community is not a commercial one, we are a fishing community.
The news with an increase in prices hit us, the amount of $ 250 is not acceptable for us, given the number of support requests for the entire period of using the IPS.
But in the current circumstances, we most likely will not extend support, but perhaps we will start looking for an alternative engine. Or we will work as much as possible on the version that will be the last paid subscription for us.
Thanks to the developers for many years of work, but unfortunately, I will not be able to pay tribute to my habits in the future.

Dll · September 16, 2021

21 hours ago, Matt said:

It's something that has come up in the past. The trouble is making it a fair system.

If you're a developer who is making regular sales, would they deserve a free license at this point over someone who is trying to publish their first app? if you say that any developer can have a free license, how do they develop before they get a free license?

If we say you get free renewals, where is the threshold? A developer who spends 8 hours a day, 5 days a week making apps and looking after customers or someone who gets a basic plug-in published? Where is the line?

It's a system that need a lot of thought should be implement it.

Maybe it's time to get cracking and get something in place then? I mean, what's the alternative here?

You make a big deal of the marketplace in your marketing piece, you take a commission from sales from it and you're reliant on third party developers for its success. So, maybe don't take them for granted and work more in partnership with them?

And, if you want an idea on how to implement a system for discounting or making the renewal free. Base it on volume of sales/downloads. It's maybe not the perfect solution but it's simple, and gives newer devs something to push for, particularly if you offer a sliding scale of discount dependent on those volumes.

I'm sure there are other ways of doing it, but the one thing you really shouldn't be doing is nothing, and overthinking by looking for the ideal answer often leads to stasis. There's already been a drop in the number of devs working on marketplace items, you really ought not to be waiting for that trend to continue or accelerate.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Dll

Matt · September 16, 2021

11 hours ago, RevengeFNF said:

What is the diference between the current support system, with the new community support system and the new Premium support system?

Is the new Premium support system the same thing as the current support system?

10 hours ago, abobader said:

@Matt What the new premium support system? I am really interested in this, thanks.

The priority support option offers one business day turnaround whereas our standard support (be it in tickets until Jan 22 or via the staffed support community is three days). Generally, we do get to tickets within a day, but it's just something that's baked into the service-level agreement.

10 hours ago, CoffeeCake said:

Hold up.

It's still horrifically slow on your infrastructure.

There is a penalty to all of your customers from the latency, shifting, and time to paint. This needs to be a very high priority, and is an item which requires consideration and planning over a stretch of time. When did/will you start that 6-12 month epic?

Occam's razor and all would suggest that planning and consideration may not be organizational or leadership strong suits (as opposed to the notion that there exists meticulous planning practices behind the scenes and the screw it we'll do it live approach what could possibly go wrong on the public facing side of things). Investments in human capital with strengths in these areas may be a good idea.

We are actively planning and mapping it out. There's a lot of moving parts and we cannot have a situation where we do not release anything for 6-12 months, or we have two very different branches which need to merge at some point.

9 hours ago, Pleeb said:

I have been a big fan of IPB all growing up, I was an admin on many forums using it in the past, and when I was younger and wanted my own sites (without being able to afford enterprise software), I even opted for InvisionFree. With that being said, when my community moved away from MyBB in 2019, Invision Community was the obvious choice for me; we're entirely ran on donations, but I was willing to save up and pay for the price out of pocket because I was looking forward to an enterprise solution.

I talked up Invision Community on my forums, and while we were a bit bitter over losing BBCode (we're still dealing with posts with formatting issues in my community after all this time), we sucked up and made the migration (which unfortunately didn't go smoothly due to a bug with the MyBB conversion system, but a support ticket pulled through!).

I'm not upset about the price increase, though I think it could have been dealt with better tact (read on), but I'm pretty upset about the loss of opening support tickets. Most of my tickets that I opened were legitimate bugs that had to be escalated to the devs, and some of them involved bugs that could have been security issues (e.g. seeing topics and posts in feeds under specific circumstances that were meant for only staff). One of my biggest talking points to the community, and one of the biggest brags that I've done post IC was "The benefit of enterprise level software is enterprise level support!" I could tell my community when something went wrong "I opened a ticket". I can't do that now, and raising the price while removing that feels less premium. Less enterprise level support.

Regarding Devs.... I'm presently terrified that this is going to lose people like @Adriano Faria. @Matt I hope you're listening, because Andriano Faria is the reason we choose Invision Community. Due to some specific nature of my community, being able to post between multiple accounts was vital, and without their Linked Accounts plugin, we would not have chosen this platform. If it breaks, we won't be able to continue using it, as it was one of two mandatory requirements for a community platform (even Youtube allows me to switch between pre-selected linked accounts from a user interface, many people support this out of the box):

I would pay for this 20 times over if it stayed (just not all at once!)

@Matt, earlier you listed a fair bit of features that were pushed in the last couple years; however, there's so many missing features that should be de-facto (and they are in other free solutions, e.g. MyBB, SMF, etc.) but have either been removed or haven't been included and require a plugin and some of these plugins are holding the software up. People have been asking for night mode since 2019 for the main site (ACP is appreciated but only admins can see that), profile-specific permissions prevent 1-post spambots from joining and putting things in the website field (again, we needed Adriano Faria's plugin), searching reported content is pretty important for larger communities (plugin), bookmarks (plugin...still can't use it in the latest version), post number in thread ( @All Astronauts's Kitchen Sink took up that mantle when Tom Irons' left). You cannot lose any more of these individuals; hire them to implement these things into the main suite if you have too, because it feels like these common sense features are simply not there when they should be.

As for the marketplace, it has burned me a couple times now, specifically with themes. After upgrading my site's main third party, purchased, theme (which I only needed because Invision Community doesn't support dark theme natively), I shortly realized that there was a critical bug in it. The author was prompt in giving me an updated xml with the fix, but since I already had linked the theme to Invision Community, I couldn't just upload the XML, and waiting for the theme to be approved was not immediate; my only choice was to create a brand new theme from that XML, which sucked because the theme in question was heavily customized 😞

The second time is still ongoing, since y'all rejected @Fosters' recent bookmark update (I understand that you're aiming for quality control here, but from what I've heard it can take weeks for the plugin to be in review).

As for as how this all could have been handled, it's unreasonable to never increase the price for existing users, and only introduce it for those coming. However, it is also unreasonable to drop it on us with no prior report. I remember when Flickr changed their pricing structure, and while it got some pushback, they not only provided a warning, but also allowed current customers to prepay another 1-3 years at the current rate before they did. The result? I bought 3 years worth at the old rate, and I think a lot of people did.

I think a better approach to this would be to give existing customers an additional year of the old pricing (or even just 2 more billing cycles), while bringing new ones in, but in this case even the controversial way that Flickr handled their increase I feel was more graceful than Invision Community's.

As others have said, there's still time to make this right; find a way to remedy this to show the community that you're still acting in good faith. Let us open tickets if something is broken, but perhaps still allow "how do I do xyz" to be topics.

And please, I don't want to tell my members that we need to switch to yet another platform after arguing for this software for the past 2 years because you pushed away the developers... find a way to lesson the blow to them, or just hire them outright so they can bring these much-needed features to Invision Community (see above).

P.S. Also please don't make this software become another Discourse-like platform, another reason I love IPB is because it's always had the forums feel; I don't want to lose the bulletin board look.

Hey, I appreciate your thoughtful reply and thanks for sticking with us for so long. I hope you continue to stick with us as we have an exciting future with many new features in the pipeline. We don't want you to switch, we want you to build and grow your community with us.

8 hours ago, Arcade King said:

Several observations as a new customer.

Since moving to IPS there seems to be a lack or foresight on major issue like the one that's being discussed. No support for Zapier for self hosted comes straight to mind. It also feels to me that self hosted customers are being treated second rate which is sad. I've noticed many questions regarding self hosting being skipped over and ignored.

I've got zero issue with a price hike as long as I'm getting value for money. Compared to its competitors IPS is by far the best and I've tried them all (Troll as some might). I'm sorry but trying to blame IPS for your lack of traffic or ability to sustain your site is wrong. Social media is the real enemy to the traditional forum.

Hopefully the IPS team sit down and think hard before making announcements like this in the future. I can understand peoples anger having this dumped on them with little to no warning.

I hear you. Thanks for sticking with us. I genuinely believe that Invision Community has a strong future. We have a great team and a lot of improvements and new functionality in the pipeline.

8 hours ago, liquidfractal said:

I'm certainly not trying to tell you what to do; I don't like price increases either, but taken in context it has been the first price increase for some time now. It's an old story; prices rise across the board while income typically doesn't. But this also tells me that Invision probably won't be increasing their prices for another long(ish?) while. Don't get me wrong - if there's another price increase in a year or three I will be having serious second thoughts, but that's not the impression I'm getting.

You make a very good point re: devs, though. Leaving aside the fact that it's a decision every dev must make on their own: if they shed apps from their own websites, that will also limit the sorts of apps they can develop in the future.

I do, also, take issue with the fact that this really was sprung on everybody without giving them time to adjust their finances - especially during a pandemic, and let's remember: many of us might have our businesses online, but that doesn't make them COVID-proof. And, like many others, I wonder about what the reality on the ground will be re: having a forum for first-response troubleshooting (I know several other sites do it, but how it actually plays out remains to be seen).

I'm not planning to go anywhere anytime soon, and I'm still dedicated to the Invision platform (even if I can no longer afford the second license I was considering). But what worries me is how this price increase will reverberate through the Marketplace and influence the frequency and quality of developer projects. Over time one learns who the reliable developers are, and I for one see some legitimate grievances. And while Invision's software never personally struck me as much of a "hobbyist" platform, that market is there and obviously stands to be worst hit by such a sudden increase.

As for the skyrocketing premium Support price....whoa. It seems like a very radical all-or-standard solution; what about a more tiered selection of Support options?

Thanks for the reply and for sticking with us. I know some of the marketplace devs have been unsettled by this announcement and they know they can always talk to us if they have concerns.

7 hours ago, sudo said:

Sadly I bet cloud customers get email support......

Yes, but the starter plan is $49 a month (or $588 a year). We would still encourage cloud customers to post within the community.

7 hours ago, wohali said:

My two cents: Invision is in a tough spot. Price hikes probably should have been gradual over the last 10 years. Moving to annual billing at the same time as the price increase, though, re-started our community's long-running discussion about moving off of IPS entirely.

The value of IPS for us has eroded over the 10 years we've had the product, mostly due to changing members' needs. So many other communities have turned to zero-cost solutions (like a sub-Reddit) or have completely abandoned forums for SNSes like Twitter, Facebook, Discord, etc. Those who still want their own private forum increasingly use open source software like Discourse.

Unfortunately, many of the other IPS features (Blog, Gallery, Pages, "calendaring") still feel half-baked when compared with software like NextCloud, WordPress, GApps, etc. Downloads & Commerce, however, are probably priced right for people who earn their living on this platform.

Since it sounds like the price increase is going to fund more development, I went over the list of new features in the past 2 years that Matt shared earlier in the thread with my community, to see if they felt they have been getting their money's worth. The only features they said they value are "Highlight topics in forum view when staff reply" and "Club improvements", both things we used to get from plugins.

As for @Matt's suggestion to go with their managed offering:

I suspect that this message falls on deaf ears for anyone posting in this thread right now. If you already have the knowledge to run (and extend) a solution like IPS yourself, $50/mo gets you a lot, even from the more expensive hosting providers out there. (Of course, IPS's hosted offering is much cheaper than Discourse's.)

For the changeover to forum-based support, I believe the messaging was worse than the decision -- it took reading this entire thread to come to terms with what was actually happening. We've had both great and poor experiences, both in private tickets and public threads. I think the move can be a good one, if the new forum can be well curated, easily searchable, and the process continues to make sense for things that shouldn't be public.

What to do? For now, we've requested a one-time, 6-month payment period reprieve, as offered in this thread, and are waiting for Sales to confirm. Thank you for making this available. We'll be taking the next few months to decide if we stay or jump ship. It's not a straightforward choice, and we share concerns with many of the others already expressed in this thread. We look forward to seeing what the monthly improvements will be, and are hoping for a road map of potential new features to come. In parallel, we'll be costing out what effort it'll take to move to a different solution.

Appreciate the reply, thanks! We are seeing a steady number of self-hosting customers move over to cloud, which has been a trend over the past year or so as rising hardware costs mean higher hosting costs which reduces the savings gap by running your own hardware / VPS / large hosting account. Stick with us, we've got a lot more to come. 🙂

5 hours ago, The Old Man said:

It's not our fault that IPS chose to be competitive and not raise the prices in line with cost of inflation each year. I'm very grateful they didn't, but that's honestly on them. They just can't come along out of the blue and ramp up the costs for whatever reason is behind this and expect people to embrace it.

Whatever it is that's causing the company to dismiss the feedback of their loyal core community customer base and steadfastly refuse all requests for some reasonable compromise, like retaining 6 month renewals.

It's very difficult justifying the cost of IPS 4.6. Since we're paying over and over again for it, we lose all our investment if we our cancel renewals, but I'm not willing to pay a year up front. I couldn't do it anyway. It's been the most problematic buggy release for quite some time.

Honestly, I've been with you since Ikonboard and I've never felt so disillusioned.

I'm also so tired of the all the patronising 'Fam' and bizarre hump day rubbish, please grow up already especially if you're being so corporate. It's a shame to see what this forum community has become in the last year.

I understand that you don't like some of our messaging, but a lot of our customers do. Many have reached out privately and said they feel the community has been more fun since Jordan was hired. We can't please everyone though. 🙂

4 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

Wow... spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.

Communication

Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way. Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well. In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive". If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to. Bring both the carrot AND the stick.

I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service. I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades. (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.) However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal. Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect. This gives people time to adjust and prepare. At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.

Support

I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket. I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process. One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion. Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.

What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP? One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created. By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on. I foresee the following situation playing out:
I have a problem and come to the community asking for help. Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.

If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information. They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.

This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help.
If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter. If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful. Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?

If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over. I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help.

Developers

Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful. There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product. So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me.

Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc. My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do.... offer a tiered developer program. The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums. The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc. And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review. You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs. I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers. This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community. It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards. (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?)

I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen. Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward. Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest". Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Hey Randy! Nice to hear from you. Really appreciate your thoughtful and detailed reply. Some great thoughts on the developer program. We have a few things to iron out with our staffed community support but it's already feeding back into the core software as we add functionality to make Invision Community 'eat its own dog food' (gross lol). Statistic improvements, a new stock replies feature and more are coming.

Dll · September 16, 2021

11 minutes ago, Matt said:

Yes, but the starter plan is $49 a month (or $588 a year). We would still encourage cloud customers to post within the community.

7 hours ago, wohali said:

Wow. I didn't know that. I thought the switch to community support was all about offering better support and a 'live knowledge base'. So, if it's a better way to go, why limit it to self-hosted customers? Those poor cic customers will be missing out, surely?

Edited September 16, 2021 by Dll

RevengeFNF · September 16, 2021

6 hours ago, Afrodude said:

Form my end I am going to renew my license in 2023. Rising the renewal price %35 is too much.

Like i told yesterday, i have a small community without any kind of monitization. The site survives only with donations from the users.

So, i needed to told them the prices increased, because that will required more donations.

Basically after too much discussion, we reached 2 solutions.

Move to a different bulletin software that is cheaper or even free
Continue with IPS, but only get 1 year of updates and then 2 years without updates and so on. Basically paying the license once every 3 years

Im inclined for this last one.

Now the wierd part. I have 1 active license and 1 inactive license. Till now i could just go to the inactive license and just pay the price to renew it and it was good.
Now if i go there, it won't let me renew it, and it will ask for support. I don't know why, but i have a feeling that we won't be able to pay only the renew price for an inactive license, but we will need to pay more, like the price of a new license or something like that.

Well, if that happens, it's the end of IPS for me.

Edited September 16, 2021 by RevengeFNF

Matt · September 16, 2021

2 minutes ago, Dll said:

Wow. I didn't know that. I thought the switch to community support was all about offering better support and a 'live knowledge base'. So, if it's a better way to go, why limit it to self-hosted customers? Those poor cic customers will be missing out, surely?

They will be encouraged to use the staffed support community first. Ticket volume from cloud customers is much lower than self-hosted because they don't have the various server-level problems. Outside of "how do I", most self-hosting tickets end up with a developer to diagnose what is often a config / server issue.

Dll · September 16, 2021

4 minutes ago, Matt said:

They will be encouraged to use the staffed support community first. Ticket volume from cloud customers is much lower than self-hosted because they don't have the various server-level problems. Outside of "how do I", most self-hosting tickets end up with a developer to diagnose what is often a config / server issue.

Edit: Was talking rubbish.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Dll
Meh

Matt · September 16, 2021

Just now, Dll said:

Hmm, not the best advert for your cloud offering then!

I don't understand, perhaps you misread my reply.

Dll · September 16, 2021

2 minutes ago, Matt said:

I don't understand, perhaps you misread my reply.

Apologies, I did misread your reply, so my reply makes no sense.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Dll

Matt · September 16, 2021

No worries, there's a lot going on. 😄

Nathan Explosion · September 16, 2021

14 minutes ago, RevengeFNF said:

Now if i go there, it won't let me renew it, and it will ask for support. I don't know why,

That's a simple one - an invoice is generated a few weeks before your renewal is due. It has an expiry date on it, and if you don't renew then the invoice expires. Contact them, as indicated, and they will generate a new invoice for you.

RevengeFNF · September 16, 2021

27 minutes ago, Matt said:

Yes, but the starter plan is $49 a month (or $588 a year). We would still encourage cloud customers to post within the community.

Matt, but if im not mistaken, the reason for the community support was not because of money, but to create "a living knowledge base to search for answers before even needing to ask."

In this case, it would be better for the cloud customers to also post their problems in the Community Support instead of going directly to a ticket.

RevengeFNF · September 16, 2021

26 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said:

That's a simple one - an invoice is generated a few weeks before your renewal is due. It has an expiry date on it, and if you don't renew then the invoice expires. Contact them, as indicated, and they will generate a new invoice for you.

But it was not like that and IPS Staff can confirm it.

I have two licenses for the same URL. A mistake i made a long time ago.

Last time i renewed my license, i made a mistake and i did renew the one that was inactive, without the need to contact the staff. The invoice was expired for many years, i just clicked renew and bam, it renew.

Edited September 16, 2021 by RevengeFNF

jesuralem · September 16, 2021

51 minutes ago, Matt said:

Outside of "how do I", most self-hosting tickets end up with a developer to diagnose what is often a config / server issue.

Given the fact that you provide no valuable info on how to configure the server, you should expect that.

Maybe i missed it but i never saw a list of basic Mysql/apache/php key config items for IPS. Providing basic key settings value for typical community sizes would help a lot. Theses settings depend on the code so nobody can guess the best settings for IPS.

By the way, most of the time the hoster says it is a code issue and you say it is a server issue. And this is often right for both as optimization on both sides would probably solve the problem.

Summit360 · September 16, 2021

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic. WOW!

12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉 who/what is a standard? Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.

Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites.

I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them.

I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.

Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.

I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release. I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community.

not bad news... just wow.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Summit360

simonle · September 16, 2021

I haven't had the time yet to properly calculate what the new price increase means for my communities and weigh the different pros and cons of both the new changes and existing features and so on. But it isn't looking good. I'll probably start looking for alternatives which is sad because IPS is a splendid community software. But it's getting harder and harder to justify its cost.

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