Hump Day: Announcing Invision Community's new swag store!

[Clover13]

Also to add the Block Submissions is a great example of had it been shared ahead of time, you'd have received a bunch of feedback that could have influenced the design.  Post initial release, in the event you receive feedback that drives high value and look to implement it, you are now in a likely higher cost of refactoring of the existing code base versus designing it to accommodate those aspects up front.  Maybe easy to overcome if the code base is hyper abstracted and extensible, but at least historically I've seen a lot of references to "that's not easy to do in the current code", which again could be mitigated by a balanced transparency driven feedback loop with clients.

Edited March 11, 2022 by Clover13

[Dll]

35 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

I definitely understand not wanting to prematurely share an initially targeted feature only to find it's not viable/possible and won't ever be done and having to deal with the fallout from clients (in which case you should be reconsidering if there is enough client interest [$$$+] there).  However, when you share at least roadmap candidates (not definitive/approved) you can establish a feedback loop with active clients to garner value which drives investment and development priority.  Without that, you're reliant on parsing through comments on your forum in unrelated topics or in piecemeal to try and conceptualize what may be valued by your clients (without actually tracking it well, although you could have something behind the scenes that is tracking it in some way already).  Likewise without that, you could wind up investing in and developing something that you envision is high value but turns out not to be highly adopted or accepted.  There's definitely a balance to be had, and it's somewhere in the middle of transparency and secrecy.  Being on either polar end is likely not optimal.

I think the truth of the situation is that the clients on these forums aren't really the clients that Invision are developing their products for.

I suspect it's mostly (perhaps almost solely) the priorities of and feedback from enterprise clients which is driving their development and future planning. 

I'm sure it's part of the reason why there's a reasonable sub section of those on these forums who clearly feel undervalued right now (along with price hikes, changes to support, long lived bugs, and parts of the software suffering from a lack of attention). It's also the reason why some of the communication from Invision can come across as a bit tone deaf and rile people up at times.

I'm not criticising particularly, as far as I'm concerned it's just the way it is. It's just a case of matching expectations to reality in my mind.

Edited March 11, 2022 by Dll

[Clover13]

7 minutes ago, Dll said:

I think the truth of the situation is that the clients on these forums aren't really the clients that Invision are developing their products for.

I suspect it's mostly (perhaps almost solely) the priorities of and feedback from enterprise clients which is driving their development and future planning. 

I'm sure it's part of the reason why there's a reasonable sub section of those on these forums who clearly feel undervalued right now (along with price hikes, changes to support, long lived bugs, and parts of the software suffering from a lack of attention). It's also the reason why some of the communication from Invision can come across as a bit tone deaf and rile people up at times.

I'm not criticising particularly, as far as I'm concerned it's just the way it is. It's just a case of matching expectations to reality in my mind.

Good point.  The Enterprise clients are the highest yielding margin, so it makes sense to prioritize their work for profitability.  The use cases driving features are certainly going to be different, and those conversations could be happening in private with Enterprise clients (who are unlikely to join the community here and start posting with hobby site owners).  I have seen a few pop up here and there but mostly when it's a pretty disastrous scenario for them and they want to voice it openly (having reached their tolerance threshold).

[Chris Anderson]

13 hours ago, Matt said:

@Chris Anderson I completely understand your point, but I can't think of many software apps that give an incredible amount of detail during the build of any new version. There's just too much that can go wrong. We move around projects and delay others all the time.

I always appreciate your thoughtful insights. 

I'm not advocating that you keep us apprised of features like:  "A friendly reminder before posting" that you announced yesterday ahead of time.  This feature is entirely opt-in.  Those sites that want to take advantage of the new feature are free to do so on their schedule.

If an upcoming feature will require a fair amount of social engineering and configuration to use it to its fullest, more of a heads up would be helpful.  A feature that would fit this scenario well would be “Member Achievements”.

The various languages and third-party integrations you utilize are constantly being updated to stay compliant with new standards or to markedly improve their utility.

At various points in time, you may have to rewrite portions of the suite to extend the product's lifespan. Some things might remain unchanged, and some things might require a complete reset such as subscription renewals.  (Just using this for illustrative purposes).

That could be “consequential” for sites with little to no cash reserves to tide them over until all the subscription renewals could be reenabled for all the effected members get around to restarting their subscription.

I am advocating that you keep your customer base apprised of such occurrences with as much head's up time as you can.

If for example you must fundamentally rearchitect themes, we will be forced to use your provided default theme until such time as the theme creators revamp their offerings.

If the changes are too radical and time consuming many if not all the existing providers might exit the marketplace. 

It could take time to recruit replacements and a variety of compliant themes get released due to a high learning curve.

Some sites could readily adapt to the default theme, and some might not as their members are extremely attached to the look and feel of the site and various community value adds that are integrated into the theme.

You may have a multitude of different projects on your radar. I’m in no way advocating you to keep us apprised of all of them just, the “consequential” ones we will have to address in the next rolling six to twelve months. 

[sound]

On 3/10/2022 at 1:27 PM, Matt said:

We chose to not use commerce because we wanted to use a service that can take orders, issue invoices, take payments AND fulfil the orders without any of us having to do a thing.

If we did use commerce, then our developers would have needed a few months to write new features and APIs, and Jordan will, ironically, be a full time t-shirt executive as he'd be picking, packing and posting.

 

Storefront

Sell merchandise and other physical items to your clients or fans.

Orders

Track all paid, pending or cancelled orders in one place.

 

https://invisioncommunity.com/features/commerce/

 

 

[Sonya*]

@sound, it is about fulfillment. With IPS Commerce you manage the products, take orders and process payments. However, IPS Commerce does not include picking the items from the stock, wrapping and packing them, bringing to post and so on. That's why they use Shopify, who does all the things above.

Connecting IPS Commerce to fulfillment services would be a cool idea, but there is nothing out of the box right now. 

[sound]

1 hour ago, Sonya* said:

@sound, it is about fulfillment. With IPS Commerce you manage the products, take orders and process payments. However, IPS Commerce does not include picking the items from the stock, wrapping and packing them, bringing to post and so on. That's why they use Shopify, who does all the things above.

Connecting IPS Commerce to fulfillment services would be a cool idea, but there is nothing out of the box right now. 

Thanks for that 👍

Understand the reasoning now, think I have misjudged the demand for such products

Though it has and still does raise my own concerns about the long time future of using commerce

ah well...

[jaeitee]

On 3/11/2022 at 12:27 AM, Matt said:

We chose to not use commerce because we wanted to use a service that can take orders, issue invoices, take payments AND fulfil the orders without any of us having to do a thing.

If we did use commerce, then our developers would have needed a few months to write new features and APIs, and Jordan will, ironically, be a full time t-shirt executive as he'd be picking, packing and posting.

Imagine you choose to build that in to Commerce so that others could have a part of Invision "that can take orders, issue invoices, take payments AND fulfil the orders without any of us having to do a thing." 🙂 

There's probably a significant number of communities out there that would like to be able to push those orders off to something life cafe press or similar via the backend.

 

On 3/10/2022 at 6:53 AM, Jordan Miller said:

We launched an Invision Community swag store!

We'll periodically add new items here, including exclusive designs. For now, we started with items repping our logo. 😎  Our team had first dibs and, not going to lie, we're all looking pretty darn spiffy.

It looks like someone exclusively leaked the 'Invision 2001 Intranet Staff Uniform Page' on to Shopify 😛 

I look forward to some new designs, maybe a mug that has the invision logo and all the different ways people pronounce mekham, meeechham, mackham, meykam 😉 

[Matt]

On 3/12/2022 at 1:57 PM, jaeitee said:

Imagine you choose to build that in to Commerce so that others could have a part of Invision "that can take orders, issue invoices, take payments AND fulfil the orders without any of us having to do a thing." 🙂 

There's probably a significant number of communities out there that would like to be able to push those orders off to something life cafe press or similar via the backend.

 

It looks like someone exclusively leaked the 'Invision 2001 Intranet Staff Uniform Page' on to Shopify 😛 

I look forward to some new designs, maybe a mug that has the invision logo and all the different ways people pronounce mekham, meeechham, mackham, meykam 😉 

Honestly, we want to focus on our strengths and put effort into creating a powerful forum and discussion engine. There are a large number of people that do great cart and fulfilment software.

BTW: It's "mee-cham".

[Nathan Explosion]

I am considerably, considerably, more metal than yow!

[Matt]

Ok, you can join the band. Want in?

If it helps, I was in a Metallica cover band in school.

[Dean_]

On 3/10/2022 at 2:03 PM, Matt said:

🚨Breaking: Andy and Jim join the band.

Sum41 returns? 😲

[sound]

22 hours ago, Matt said:

Honestly, we want to focus on our strengths and put effort into creating a powerful forum and discussion engine. There are a large number of people that do great cart and fulfilment software.

BTW: It's "mee-cham".

Matt @Matt

Am reading that as you saying invision has now reached a top level with the apps such as commerce/nexus, and similar for gallery, blog etc etc

eg

Do not expect any new major features/improvements on these apps in future just maintenance releases

that right?

 

 

Edited March 15, 2022 by sound

[Matt]

2 hours ago, sound said:

Matt @Matt

Am reading that as you saying invision has now reached a top level with the apps such as commerce/nexus, and similar for gallery, blog etc etc

eg

Do not expect any new major features/improvements on these apps in future just maintenance releases

that right?

 

 

That is not right. We have plans for all our current apps.

My comment was directed at the idea that we should add in extra functionality to integrate with print on demand services.

[Morrigan]

Hot pink is missing. So disappointing.

[Morrigan]

I see lulz on my post but no retribution. Women deserve to be represented too. Just saying.

[Matt]

On 3/11/2022 at 5:01 PM, Clover13 said:

Also to add the Block Submissions is a great example of had it been shared ahead of time, you'd have received a bunch of feedback that could have influenced the design.  Post initial release, in the event you receive feedback that drives high value and look to implement it, you are now in a likely higher cost of refactoring of the existing code base versus designing it to accommodate those aspects up front.  Maybe easy to overcome if the code base is hyper abstracted and extensible, but at least historically I've seen a lot of references to "that's not easy to do in the current code", which again could be mitigated by a balanced transparency driven feedback loop with clients.

We tend to iterate through releases. We like to get a solid feature out there and see how it fares in the real world. If we take on too much feedback, we’d not ship for months. 

[Clover13]

5 hours ago, Matt said:

We tend to iterate through releases. We like to get a solid feature out there and see how it fares in the real world. If we take on too much feedback, we’d not ship for months. 

I get it, but getting client feedback early in the planning process promotes optimal feature targeting directly tied to established client value.  Otherwise you're operating in the silo of your company's opinion only, which IMO could cause you to fall short on meeting some requirements your clients actually have/need/want.  Iterations are on compounding enhancements with minimizing tech debt incurred, however if you pattern a solution that couples you to your vision (without consideration of the clients'), shifting to meet additional/different requirements may prove difficult (or simply costly that could have otherwise been avoided).  Just my .02, been through it in a different industry a number of times.

[Dll]

Almost a full house in web dev jargon there. Good work.

[Jordan Miller]

On 4/16/2022 at 8:07 PM, Morrigan said:

I see lulz on my post but no retribution. Women deserve to be represented too. Just saying.

Hey @Morrigan 😊 Totally feel you! 

Most of the items in the shop are unisex. 😇 
 

[Morrigan]

It works for people that like those colors. I don't wear the colors provided there unless there is a witty and hilarious joke on it or has a horror character on it (like my wonderful Crystal Lake Running team tank top) and even then I tend toward the more feminine colors. I don't mind repping IPS its just not the color palette of my choice to put on myself.

I was just joking around so the comment was all in good fun.

 

@Jordan Miller

[Feneroin]

You ship to France?

 

Edit: YES

Edited April 30, 2022 by Feneroin