Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

[Matt]

8 minutes ago, rnorth6920 said:

Thank you for listening to the community, it's a step in the right direction.  Most of us have mentioned that we're okay with the price increase - it's part of life and we're willing to support IPS, because your product supports us.  But we were not okay with the bombardment of changes all at once with no notice. That being said, I was 100% ready to jump ship and not re-up.  Now, I think I can revisit the changes and probably be okay with making my payment in the next week.  

I appreciate that, thank you.

[count1]

A lot has been said in this topic so I will just put my 2 cents in @Matt:

• Do anything in your power to keep talented developers like Adriano, Michael J., Nathan, InvisionHQ, CodingJungle and others happy. They are the reason we use IPS, stock version will never fit everyone's needs. That's why those developers are so useful and important to have. Without them my communities fall apart.
• Should have communicated price change sooner. Allow those who want to renew at least once using old pricing. I know I would have taken advantage of this and renewed immediately. Now for a price three times bigger - not so much.

I also want IPS to succeed but you seem to be causing the opposite all thanks to everything we have been seeing lately. 

P.S. I hope native video uploading and support will not be once again made exclusive to cloud hosting just like Zapier was before all the backlash. Once you start going SaaS route I'm afraid you will loose even more customers.

[Matt]

8 minutes ago, jesuralem said:

BTW, i have to say i have the most respect for what you have been doing for 2 days answering to everybody here.

It's the least I can do, but thank you for saying that.

[InvisionHQ]

Thank you @Matt, this will help many smaller communities to survive.
Thank you for your attention to each topic and for listening.
This is a good sign.

[Zapusto]

Respectfully, no matter which way you spin it, (the lack of) support issue remains.

What I am hearing is that if I need a support ticket, I no longer have the efficient convenience of doing so through my admin. I have to drop what I am doing, come here, log in, make a forum request, and explicitly request an actual ticket. At the same time, I have to explicitly state that input from anyone other than IPB -- the company with whom I have a business relationship -- is unwelcome.

I suspect there will be animosity.

Edited to Add: My apologies, I just remembered the lack of proper support is for self-hosted, not cloud based. Charles told me Cloud Hosted will still have proper ticket support, so I'm good.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Zapusto

[Jordan Miller]

8 minutes ago, Zapusto said:

Respectfully, no matter which way you spin it, (the lack of) support issue remains.

What I am hearing is that if I need a support ticket, I no longer have the efficient convenience of doing so through my admin. I have to drop what I am doing, come here, log in, make a forum request, and explicitly request an actual ticket. At the same time, I have to explicitly state that input from anyone other than IPB -- the company with whom I have a business relationship -- is unwelcome.

I suspect there will be animosity.

Agree to disagree 😇  Our support isn't disappearing, it's shifting from private tickets to the community. We are still very much going to be offering support. 

Curious, why request that people from the community not weigh in? There are lots of brilliant people here. 😁 Yes, you technically have a business relationship with us, but you are also part of this community where we all lean on each other.

[Adriano Faria]

38 minutes ago, Matt said:

2) Price Rises
We have not raised our prices for well over a decade. We've always been reluctant to do it and held off for too long, resulting in a large jump to make up for a lost time.

We can't reduce the prices to their pre-September levels, but we will be much more mindful of price rises in the future.

Yesterday when I requested to remove Blogs and Gallery from my license they were $30 renewal each. Now I see they’re $15 each. 

If it’s right and if it’s possible to do, I would like to return Blogs and Gallery to my license so I keep supporting them.

[Matt]

2 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

Yesterday when I requested to remove Blogs and Gallery from my license they were $30 renewal each. Now I see they’re $15 each. 

If it’s right and if it’s possible to do, I would like to return Blogs and Gallery to my license so I keep supporting them.

Of course, just drop us a message via ticket or via the contact us form and we'll take care of that for you.

[Mark H]

I believe that's due to our change back to the 6-month renewal cycle, so half the old value would be correct.. 

[Zapusto]

7 minutes ago, Jordan Miller said:

Agree to disagree 😇  Our support isn't disappearing, it's shifting from private tickets to the community. We are still very much going to be offering support. 

Curious, why request that people from the community not weigh in? There are lots of brilliant people here. 😁 Yes, you technically have a business relationship with us, but you are also part of this community where we all lean on each other.

Oh, I am not discounting the knowledge of the community. I'm all for a peer-to-peer community. But I expect my products and services to be supported by the company I have the relationship with -- and only the company. All the open forum stuff does is add an extra layer, a hurdle, to doing it via my admin and having it dealt with directly and efficiently. I have no interest in searching or hanging out in a community. I have enough to do during the day (though you'd never know it from the number of replies I've made in this thread). But that's the gist of it. And with Cloud Hosted, I apparently get proper support. I'm good.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Zapusto

[RevengeFNF]

31 minutes ago, Matt said:

1) The future of support

Ok Matt, i think i understand what you explained, but i will need to test it first to give feedback. Fortunately, i don't have any issues right now, so i don't have the need to test. 
I still don't feel comfortable enough to share all the issues i might have with my implementation with the public. 

Imagine i create this ticket:

"If someone goes to this link on my site, it will break my webserver until i restart it"

Im basically telling everyone how to ddos my site.

37 minutes ago, Matt said:

2) Price Rises

This is my main issue. I understand Invision have not raised the prices for more than a decade, but the reason behind that it's because your competition did not also raised their prices.

In my point of view, Invision needs to be on the same market level of prices as their competitors. You can argue with me that Invision is much better, but we know in reality that at the end, the diferences are very small.

40 minutes ago, Matt said:

3) Annual Renewals

Good decision 👍

[Jordan Miller]

11 minutes ago, Zapusto said:

Oh, I am not discounting the knowledge of the community. I'm all for a peer-to-peer community. But I expect my products and services to be supported by the company I have the relationship with -- and only the company. All the open forum stuff does is add an extra layer, a hurdle, to doing it via my admin and having it dealt with directly and efficiently. I have no interest in searching or hanging out in a community. I have enough to do during the day (though you'd never know it from the number of replies I've made in this thread). But that's the gist of it. And with Cloud Hosted, I apparently get proper support. I'm good.

Appreciate the response 🙏 One cool thing about asking questions in the forum (generally speaking) is that it's likely going to also help someone in the future. Not to get meta, but it's paying it forward in a way. 🥲 

[Randy Calvert]

7 hours ago, Matt said:

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).

We use the term “drinking our own champagne” at work. Something much easier to swallow (literally)! 🤣

[Ramsesx]

The new support option via forum could even be a better system if the support team is picking up urgent issues as quick as known from the ticket support. Especially when my forum has an outage because of upgrade errors or other issues. A knowledge base of known issues is something I miss hardly. So, take this chance and convince us. Thanks for this open discussion Matt. And please consider the benefits for devs in your next meeting. 

[Zapusto]

Just now, Jordan Miller said:

Appreciate the response 🙏 One cool thing about asking questions in the forum (generally speaking) is that it's likely going to also help someone in the future. Not to get meta, but it's paying it forward in a way. 🥲 

Understood. If someone wants to do that and has time, great.

I have no interest in posting a ticket and hanging around for a response or engaging in a discussion. I have far more important things to do with my day.

Jordan, understand I would only be a "member" here by requirement, not by choice, in order to receive "support". I am not interested in spending time here, engaging in discussions, begging for support in a forum, etc. -- this thread aside.

The extent of my relationship with IPB would ideally be through the software's admin area for support and the client area for billing. I have no interest in being here otherwise. With Cloud Hosted, this is possible. So I'll keep Cloud Hosted until such time that it changes, hopefully it will not.

 

[Chris Anderson]

1 minute ago, Ramsesx said:

please consider the benefits for devs in your next meeting. 

Not just the current developers but how you can better foster the next cadre of programmers who might one day be great candidates to join your firm one day. 

Provide a crippled version of the suite to develop on and allow for one or two people to test the apps being developed but not be able to be used to run an actual site off of. 

[Yamamura]

57 minutes ago, Jordan Miller said:

One cool thing about asking questions in the forum (generally speaking) is that it's likely going to also help someone in the future.

I see that the debate about a new kind of support is due to differing understandings of this meaning. I agree that "asking questions" is best done on the forum, rather than contacting support in person. BUT I and many others here are talking about a different type of support requests. I contact support when problems arise on the forum (mainly after an update) or I see some bugs, I attach screenshots and screen recordings (which I post to my YouTube account), I provide developers with access to my forum so that they can go in, check and confirm problems. I don’t want to write about this on a public forum, I don’t need a "community support" for these problems (because these problems can ONLY be solved by developers), and maybe I don’t want to show a link to my forum or YouTube account. So yes, I want to be able to address such issues directly to support.

[SoftwareFactory]

The new website design looks just amazing! Good job! I'm fine with most changes.

If I was not a developer, I would hate the fact that I need to pay $100 more yearly. But I probably wouldn't need all the apps as well in such case, and it wouldn't be that painful. Though I wish there was a cheaper cloud option, maybe with fewer apps. I think that many customers don't need all of them. I also have some concerns about the future of Marketplace, but I will be making a topic about this later on. I would say it's already too much of things to read this week, for both you and us...

 

This is probably not the best topic to share this, but I love how the software evolved over the years. I also have many memories related to your software and the entire community around it. I was 11 years old when I and my friend were setting up Minecraft-related forums - that was my first experience with Invision (some crazy things happened afterwards, but it was funny and I learned a lot).

There is no way I will ever forget this. Never. People I met on communities using your software had an incredibly significant impact on my life. And now as a developer, I am committed to helping people manage all of their amazing and meaningful communities, with apps like Brilliant Discord Integration.

And you know what? I love doing this. Why? Because at the end of the day, the most important thing in life is the value you bring to other people's lives.

Edited September 16, 2021 by SoftwareFactory

[Matt]

36 minutes ago, SoftwareFactory said:

The new website design looks just amazing! Good job! I'm fine with most changes.

If I was not a developer, I would hate the fact that I need to pay $100 more yearly. But I probably wouldn't need all the apps as well in such case, and it wouldn't be that painful. Though I wish there was a cheaper cloud option, maybe with fewer apps. I think that many customers don't need all of them. I also have some concerns about the future of Marketplace, but I will be making a topic about this later on. I would say it's already too much of things to read this week, for both you and us...

 

This is probably not the best topic to share this, but I love how the software evolved over the years. I also have many memories related to your software and the entire community around it. I was 11 years old when I and my friend were setting up Minecraft-related forums - that was my first experience with Invision (some crazy things happened afterwards, but it was funny and I learned a lot).

There is no way I will ever forget this. Never. People I met on communities using your software had an incredibly significant impact on my life. And now as a developer, I am committed to helping people manage all of their amazing and meaningful communities, with apps like Brilliant Discord Integration.

And you know what? I love doing this. Why? Because at the end of the day, the most important thing in life is the value you bring to other people's lives.

Thank you for reminding me of the power and wonder of community. This made my day. 

[Dean_]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

3) Annual Renewals
We want to simplify billing and reduce the number of invoices we need to send, and you need to pay. An annual invoice seemed logical to achieve this.

However, you have made it clear that moving to annual renewals affects your budgeting, and we have listened to that.

We have reverted this decision and have restored 6-month renewals in your client area. This is not a temporary one-off offer; it's a permanent change.

Again, I want to thank you all for being so vocal and passionate about Invision Community. We want to keep offering you the very best community platform to help your communities succeed.

You've done the right thing. And, I'm glad you've listened to your customers. Even us small fish, who may not bring in the big bucks, but we are here. And, after all, we are here choosing your products over anyone else. So thank you. I may not always be able to pay at the 6 months renewal, and I may have to wait 2-4 months before I can pay, but you can be sure I pay when I have the funds.

As a side question Matt, with all this talk about support. A lot of us were surprised to find that you moved from your own support ticketing system within commerce and changed to ZenDesk, only then to change again to emails (or whatever you may use internally). Was (or is) Commerce just not up to the job, even if you as a business cannot use it? Is there going to be any development on it as I'm sure it's in need of a massive upgrade by now. As it's still used by a lot of us, it would be nice to see Commerce get a massive overhaul.

[Clover13]

@Matt@Jordan Miller

Can you walk us through a support scenario where a customer without priority support has a downed site as a result of an IPS upgrade or some other unexpected IPS behavior with corresponding error message (i.e. it isn't immediately correlated to a server resource issue or configuration change)?

Old process (PRIORITY SUPPORT):

1. Customer opens ticket with IPS and mark as highest priority (site down)
2. Within 24 hours, IPS evaluates via ticket information and updates ticket with resolution as to what they fixed or what was identified outside the scope of their support that needs to be fixed
3. Customer verifies issue is resolved and if not, returns to #2 and may wait up to 24 hours (usually less) for an additional followup review?  If verified, customer addresses/closes the ticket.

As I had priority support before, I had generally heard in a few hours from IPS when it came to critical issues and even high issues.  In general support, are you saying this could be up to 3 days of waiting while your site was down?

New process (NO PRIORITY SUPPORT):

1. Customer posts in a community forum indicating their site if offline, posts corresponding error messages and related server information, and de-identifies anything specific to their business/site if they wise to remain private OR simply requests a ticket be opened to review the issue privately?
2. Within 3 days, IPS evaluates the issue via the topic information or private ticket and updates ticket with resolution as to what they fixed or what was identified outside the scope of their support that needs to be fixed
3. Customer verifies issue is resolved and if not, returns to #2 and may wait up to 3 days for an additional followup review?  If verified, customer addresses/closes the ticket.

 

I think the crucial aspect of support is availability and SLAs around resolving major issues that either result in the site being down or have a significant impact on its functionality.  I'm not sure what IPS' position is on this that drives the increase from $200 (I believe it was $100 per 6 months) to $1250, but it feels like the sites that are hobby oriented and have small/no revenue are priced out of the priority support and may have to sit waiting for days on end for their site to get back into an acceptable operational mode.  This shouldn't happen often, but I feel there should be an exception for these critical outage type support issues that mandates a faster response time even for smaller sites.  Or as I noted in previous reply, maybe some kind of scaling in pricing that make priority support more affordable.  IMHO, "Enterprise" (corporate) level pricing shouldn't be the same as "Small business" or "Hobby" level pricing.  However, across the board we have one single pricing model (particularly impactful at the elevated support pricing).  This just doesn't fit your customer base well:  Easy for mid/high revenue customers (corporate, bigger businesses, high traffic sites, etc) to afford, difficult for low revenue customers to afford, and impossible for no revenue customers to afford.  There simply has to be a better pricing calibration model to apply here that quite honestly gets you MORE from your Enterprise level customers and less as it tiers down to the no revenue customers.

ADDENDUM:  IMHO the goal of IPS should be enabling and expanding their customer base (all of it).  This seems like an obvious, but the current pricing increase deviates from that objective.  The more of IPS that is out there, the more visibility it achieves, the more interest it gains, the more developer incentive and recruitment there is, the more enhancements and growth are experienced.  Everyone wins in that case, and the path there is finding a comfortable pricing model that offers affordability based on the type of site and its inherent revenue, as well as rewarding IPS for the product suite they are creating.  There is a balance, but I don't think this is it as it's now impacted a subset of your customer base that you really should care if you lose.  And honestly, where it was at before wasn't it either because IPS was getting the short end of the stick not having raised prices in 10 years.

Edited September 16, 2021 by Clover13

[Tripp★]

2 hours ago, Matt said:

I want to thank you all for your feedback. I appreciate everyone who took the time to leave their thoughts and concerns. I've read every single one and replied to almost all of them.

Firstly, I want to say that I understand that the messaging that went out ahead of this update fell short of what you deserve, and I want to apologise for that.

After spending two days reading every single post, almost all concerns fall into these three areas:

1) The future of support
I've seen many people use the phrase 'no more support', which isn't true. I know the change from ticket support to staffed community support is a significant change, but I genuinely believe that it will benefit customers. I believe that we can create a living knowledge base of solved issues just like many brands do. For example, when I have a problem with my iPhone, I google it and invariably end up with a link to a topic within their support forums with a solved answer. I don't need to raise a ticket with them and wait for a reply.

There are many "what about" concerns mixed in, and I ask you to try the new staffed community support areas and give us your feedback once you've used it regularly. We will work with you based on that feedback and make improvements where it is needed.

We have custom functionality that shows our team links to your client accounts, including license keys, etc., so we know who you are and have all your information right next to the topic. You will never need to divulge personal information, or even your site URL if you do not want to.

If your support issue is complex or needs developer intervention, with a click of a button, our technicians can convert this into a ticket for you and we will continue to resolve the issue with you in that ticket.

You will be in safe hands.

2) Price Rises
We have not raised our prices for well over a decade. We've always been reluctant to do it and held off for too long, resulting in a large jump to make up for a lost time.

We can't reduce the prices to their pre-September levels, but we will be much more mindful of price rises in the future.

3) Annual Renewals
We want to simplify billing and reduce the number of invoices we need to send, and you need to pay. An annual invoice seemed logical to achieve this.

However, you have made it clear that moving to annual renewals affects your budgeting, and we have listened to that.

We have reverted this decision and have restored 6-month renewals in your client area. This is not a temporary one-off offer; it's a permanent change.

Again, I want to thank you all for being so vocal and passionate about Invision Community. We want to keep offering you the very best community platform to help your communities succeed.

Thank you.

I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that this is what I wanted. Action and an apology. 

By in large I don't mind this price increase, it was a shock, admittedly, but most of that comes down to the fact that it came out of the blue when I discovered it and had no prior warning of it. But to say that you haven't had a price increase in a decade? Was it really that long ago when the Branding Removal went up to $500? I thought it was not that long ago.

Either way; thank you for this. Putting it back to 6 month renewals is better for me, and hopefully a lot of other people too. My next question about support is what do we do with NSFW sites?

I'm sure you don't want porn site links appearing on your forums; which is why I am very careful about linking my forums where the public can see it, going to the extent where I alter screenshots and do inspect element to change things prior to taking the screenshots so that people can't draw connections and such, when pasting screenshots publicly. 

Finally my last question is, are we to expect regular price increases "In line with the rate of inflation" or something annually from now on like mobile phone contracts?

[ReyDev]

@Matt
In my opinion, you should work more on your site's search engine and improve your search capabilities and priorities. In this case, finding solutions to problems is done much faster. A professional search engine!

[Kjell Iver Johansen]

I notice that "Help and support" topics are open to guests and I find that a bit strange. On our own sites some of us have "About this community" forums, where people ask about problems with our sites, and then (now) we check the Help and support forum, or ask a question about it. It gets kind of awkward to discuss stuff like that open here then. I'm not a softwareguru whatsoever (even if som of my users might think I am) - and my own stupidity is displayed in public when it is 100% open for google and guests.

This topic here are not open for guests, and I see no good reason for having the Help forum open for guests either..

So - would it not be better to have all this support and help hidden from guests?

[Sonya*]

1 hour ago, Clover13 said:

Can you walk us through a support scenario where a customer without priority support has a downed site as a result of an IPS upgrade or some other unexpected IPS behavior with corresponding error message

I do not have a scenario, but there have been a thread recently with urgent help needed