Hump Day: new live community features

[Talisman12]

1 hour ago, Randy Calvert said:

Sorry wrong. Sure you could do that for YOUR own instance but you would need to configure it (and know how) what settings need applied etc. 

You’re making the ASSumption that people know how to use these services, how to configure it, and have yet another service to manually manage and not be able to guess/predict costs for. 

It is not just a simple matter of copy paste an IAM credential. 

So you agree that the self-hosters are likely the more technically minded? In which case it makes perfect sense that like-minded folk would use it.

Your logic is flawed anyway, since IPS already offer S3 backends for self-hosted datastore; so don't imply that people wouldn't know how to configure it, since such configuration is already present.

Besides, even if some people didn't know how to implement these things, it's far better to allow those who do the ability to instead of dumbing everything down, ironically only in the version that caters more to the people who would have the requisite knowledge.

[Randy Calvert]

1 hour ago, Talisman12 said:

So you agree that the self-hosters are likely the more technically minded? In which case it makes perfect sense that like-minded folk would use it.

Not necessarily. Many/most are on shared hosting environments OR on VPS packages where they don’t do this themselves. In addition managing these types of services is very different than managing a LAMP stack, especially when you would have to configure security groups at AWS and firewalls on the LAMP servers. 
 

1 hour ago, Talisman12 said:

Your logic is flawed anyway, since IPS already offer S3 backends for self-hosted datastore; so don't imply that people wouldn't know how to configure it, since such configuration is already present.

Again these are VERY different things. Setting up these services are much more involved and complex than S3. Even as simple as S3 is… people struggle to set it up and integrate it. There are several people who just recently were complaining about not being able to set it up.  IPS is not here to teach people how to setup hosting environments or how to manage them. So it does not make sense for them to try to teach someone how manage this.  
 

1 hour ago, Talisman12 said:

Besides, even if some people didn't know how to implement these things, it's far better to allow those who do the ability to instead of dumbing everything down, ironically only in the version that caters more to the people who would have the requisite knowledge.

The problem is if they release it, they have to support it also. Since they don’t support the hosting setup, that makes this very difficult. 

[Dll]

I think some on here have a weird sense of entitlement, expecting the same features to be developed for them, despite using what is a different product (self-hosted vs hosted), with a different (cheaper) price. 

Edited May 6, 2022 by Dll

[Talisman12]

7 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

Not necessarily. Many/most are on shared hosting environments OR on VPS packages where they don’t do this themselves. In addition managing these types of services is very different than managing a LAMP stack...

You know that's not the point I made - I'm sure some individuals are on a VPS package, however there is a near 0 chance that customers opting for the cloud version as a cohort would be more technically able than self-hosting counterparts. Not denigrating anyone of course, but the technical skills needed to launch a cloud version of IPB are minimal, versus those inherently needed with self-hosting. This is demonstrably what IPS have said they are trying to eliminate with the cloud version in fact; lowering the bar to entry.

7 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

...,especially when you would have to configure security groups at AWS and firewalls on the LAMP servers. 

You don't need to run your stack on a CSP to leverage their services such as the ones in question. Besides which configuring a firewall such as ufw behind an SG is redundant, NGFWs aside.

7 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

Again these are VERY different things. Setting up these services are much more involved and complex than S3. Even as simple as S3 is… people struggle to set it up and integrate it. There are several people who just recently were complaining about not being able to set it up.  IPS is not here to teach people how to setup hosting environments or how to manage them. So it does not make sense for them to try to teach someone how manage this.  

There's really not though, given IPB would just be using the SDK to make calls to the appropriate services. In fact there's less setup than S3/CF because you aren't dealing with things like bucket policies. For example, for Comprehend you'd just use their "detect-sentiment" API call and you get the outputs Matt has likely been watching drop with each of my responses.

What's more, IPS doesn't even have to teach people how to configure things if there was setup involved, since it'd just be a case of making a CFN template available - they're not going to be manually setting this up for each of their cloud version customers. Again, that's worst-case; as you say for self-hosted IPS leave the rest as an exercise for the reader, which is fine -

7 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

The problem is if they release it, they have to support it also. Since they don’t support the hosting setup, that makes this very difficult. 

They don't, not the account-related portions anyway. API calls sure, but then they do that for other integrations no problem. It's not more involved than any of the other integrations (sendgrid, S3, MaxMind, etc) are and really is simpler in most cases.

1 hour ago, Dll said:

I think some on here have a weird sense of entitlement, expecting the same features to be developed for them, despite using what is a different product (self-hosted vs hosted), with a different (cheaper) price. 

No entitlement, just disappointed that IPS deem it beyond the capabilities of the self-hosting crowd to implement this at their own discretion, instead of forcing that decision upon them which ironically should be what differentiates their managed hosting (closed ecosystem, less choice) from self-hosting (greater flexibility, more effort needed).

 

Edited May 6, 2022 by Talisman12

[Dll]

36 minutes ago, Talisman12 said:

No entitlement, just disappointed that IPS deem it beyond the capabilities of the self-hosting crowd to implement this at their own discretion, instead of forcing that decision upon them which ironically should be what differentiates their managed hosting (closed ecosystem, less choice) from self-hosting (greater flexibility, more effort needed).

 

But, that's their prerogative. Maybe they don't believe it's a reasonable use of their resources to develop a solution for what it's reasonable to assume would be a small handful of self-hosted clients who may be prepared to both create the correct environment on their side and pay Invision for access to the additional functionality. 

Edited May 6, 2022 by Dll

[Matt]

While many in this topic are experienced and capable server administrators, a high number of our customers are not. A good amount of support we manage is to do with CDNs, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc where server configurations are incorrect, the service is badly set up or unsupported versions are used.

I'm not here to debate the technical ability of our customers, though. There is more to sentiment analysis than just fetching the numbers from an AI service. What we are interested in are trends over time, and for that we have separate architecture running Python, which is the most efficient language when it comes to raw math, aggregating and making sense of the data which is sent back directly into the cloud platforms database; there is actually very little product code for this reason.

Even simple things like pulling the data and sending it to AWS for processing isn't done via CRON or a task, we use a custom task runner within our cloud platform to do it. It's more efficient to develop this way.

I realise we haven't spoken much about our cloud platform, but there's more to it than just using the AWS SDK in the product code.

[jesuralem]

Question: does the sentiment analysis support languages other than english ?

 

As regard to the technical consideration, as I already said you could clearly present API on your servers acting as "proxy" between self hosted sites and AWS services.

You could sell it as paid options to self hosted clients and maximize revenues from theses clients.

This way self hosted client wouldn't need advanced technical skills.

[Matt]

13 minutes ago, jesuralem said:

Question: does the sentiment analysis support languages other than english ?

 

As regard to the technical consideration, as I already said you could clearly present API on your servers acting as "proxy" between self hosted sites and AWS services.

You could sell it as paid options to self hosted clients and maximize revenues from theses clients.

This way self hosted client wouldn't need advanced technical skills.

The following languages are supported: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

We are not going to build a simple API because as explained above, pushing and pulling data from AWS services is only a tiny part of the architecture.

[Sonya*]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

The following languages are supported: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Btw, no need to analyze Russian.

[OptimusBain]

On 5/5/2022 at 4:12 PM, Square Wheels said:

Kinda feels like a poke in the eye to be honest.

I agree 100%. They have already started to put consider self-hosted clients as inferior by releasing features that are only available to cloud clients.

@Jordan Miller I wonder why you are talking about the new features in a global community topic when most of those new features are only for cloud clients. I am sure IPS has cloud-member-only forums. When I read the first post in this topic, I felt disappointed. I am sure many self-hosted clients feel the same way.

Edited May 9, 2022 by OptimusBain

[Matt]

4 hours ago, OptimusBain said:

I agree 100%. They have already started to put consider self-hosted clients as inferior by releasing features that are only available to cloud clients.

@Jordan Miller I wonder why you are talking about the new features in a global community topic when most of those new features are only for cloud clients. I am sure IPS has cloud-member-only forums. When I read the first post in this topic, I felt disappointed. I am sure many self-hosted clients feel the same way.

We do not have any separate forums for our cloud platform customers. All the forums you can see as a client are all that exist.

[Jordan Miller]

On 5/8/2022 at 9:53 PM, OptimusBain said:

I agree 100%. They have already started to put consider self-hosted clients as inferior by releasing features that are only available to cloud clients.

@Jordan Miller I wonder why you are talking about the new features in a global community topic when most of those new features are only for cloud clients. I am sure IPS has cloud-member-only forums. When I read the first post in this topic, I felt disappointed. I am sure many self-hosted clients feel the same way.

Appreciate you tagging me. I think it's because we want to showcase these new features for existing clients on our standard plans (where we host) as well as maybe entice clients who are self-hosted to join our cloud plans. Nothing against self-hosters at all! I personally was on self-hosted for 10+ years before moving to our cloud environment. We just believe the new standard plans have a lot of potential because we can control and maintain the environment whereas on self-hosted we can't, and we want to share that goodness with as many people as we can. 

[beats23]

On 5/9/2022 at 5:53 AM, OptimusBain said:

When I read the first post in this topic, I felt disappointed. I am sure many self-hosted clients feel the same way.

Yes, I think that is the plan all along. A marketing strategy to disappoint all the self hosting customers and gradually convince them to migrate to cloud. 

I do wonder how many live forums are out there successfully running and using the IPS cloud business plan.

Any links? I would like to see some.

[Randy Calvert]

8 minutes ago, beats23 said:

Yes, I think that is the plan all along. A marketing strategy to disappoint all the self hosting customers and gradually convince them to migrate to cloud. 

I do wonder how many live forums are out there successfully running and using the IPS cloud business plan.

Any links? I would like to see some.

Take a look at some of the brands listed on IPS' homepage...

For example:

[ec2-user@hooboy ~]$ dig discussion.evernote.com

; <<>> DiG 9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-26.P2.amzn2.5.2 <<>> discussion.evernote.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 17018
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;discussion.evernote.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
discussion.evernote.com. 283	IN	CNAME	evernote.ipsdns.com.
evernote.ipsdns.com.	283	IN	CNAME	evernote.invisionmanaged.net.
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.126
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.26
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.29
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.70

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 10.0.0.2#53(10.0.0.2)
;; WHEN: Tue May 24 19:26:11 EDT 2022
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 191

[ec2-user@hooboy ~]$ dig community.creations.mattel.com

; <<>> DiG 9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-26.P2.amzn2.5.2 <<>> community.creations.mattel.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 41972
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;community.creations.mattel.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
community.creations.mattel.com.	300 IN	CNAME	x311865.invisionservice.com.
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.42
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.2
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.9
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.120

;; Query time: 6 msec
;; SERVER: 10.0.0.2#53(10.0.0.2)
;; WHEN: Tue May 24 19:26:45 EDT 2022
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 161

[ec2-user@hooboy ~]$ dig community.jennycraig.com

; <<>> DiG 9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-26.P2.amzn2.5.2 <<>> community.jennycraig.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 31713
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;community.jennycraig.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
community.jennycraig.com. 300	IN	CNAME	jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.20
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.18
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.123
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.15

There are three right there.  🙂 

[beats23]

17 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

Take a look at some of the brands listed on IPS' homepage...

For example:

[ec2-user@hooboy ~]$ dig discussion.evernote.com

; <<>> DiG 9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-26.P2.amzn2.5.2 <<>> discussion.evernote.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 17018
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 6, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;discussion.evernote.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
discussion.evernote.com. 283	IN	CNAME	evernote.ipsdns.com.
evernote.ipsdns.com.	283	IN	CNAME	evernote.invisionmanaged.net.
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.126
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.26
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.29
evernote.invisionmanaged.net. 43 IN	A	52.85.151.70

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 10.0.0.2#53(10.0.0.2)
;; WHEN: Tue May 24 19:26:11 EDT 2022
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 191

[ec2-user@hooboy ~]$ dig community.creations.mattel.com

; <<>> DiG 9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-26.P2.amzn2.5.2 <<>> community.creations.mattel.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 41972
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;community.creations.mattel.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
community.creations.mattel.com.	300 IN	CNAME	x311865.invisionservice.com.
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.42
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.2
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.9
x311865.invisionservice.com. 60	IN	A	99.84.208.120

;; Query time: 6 msec
;; SERVER: 10.0.0.2#53(10.0.0.2)
;; WHEN: Tue May 24 19:26:45 EDT 2022
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 161

[ec2-user@hooboy ~]$ dig community.jennycraig.com

; <<>> DiG 9.11.4-P2-RedHat-9.11.4-26.P2.amzn2.5.2 <<>> community.jennycraig.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 31713
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;community.jennycraig.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
community.jennycraig.com. 300	IN	CNAME	jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.20
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.18
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.123
jennycraig.invisionmanaged.net.	60 IN	A	52.85.151.15

There are three right there.  🙂 

Ha, only three😲. 

Goes to show, not many cloud customers out there on the IPS business plan. 

 

 

[Randy Calvert]

 

14 minutes ago, beats23 said:

Ha, only three😲. 

Goes to show, not many cloud customers out there on the IPS business plan. 

I'm only giving a couple of the "big names" that are showcased on the IPS homepage.  There are many more that have been linked over the years.  

With that being said...  if it did not have sites actually using it, they would not be heavily investing in it.  It makes sense for them to follow the math in terms of where the majority of their users are.  If they don't...  they would not survive as a company.  

If you want a few more...  hit Google.  For example in the paste above, you can see some hostnames contain SOMETHING.invisionservice.com.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:*.invisionservice.com

That returns several thousand results.  That also does not include sites that don't use that specific domain, etc.  So while it's not all inclusive, it's certainly proves there are a heck of a lot more than just 3 sites on CiC. 😉

Edited May 25, 2022 by Randy Calvert

[beats23]

2 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

With that being said...  if it did not have sites actually using it, they would not be heavily investing in it.  It makes sense for them to follow the math in terms of where the majority of their users are.  If they don't...  they would not survive as a company.  

 

Logically it's better not to follow, It's better to lead and be followed. Instead of following the masses, what about getting the masses to follow you. In a business environment it's more lucrative to sell many items at a low price than sell few items at a high price. Have you ever wonder why all of a sudden poor China is now the richest country on the Earth.

I'm just saying IPS bread and butter started from the self hosting folks and still is, and we the self hosting folks should no be made to feel disappointed. That's all

[Randy Calvert]

22 minutes ago, beats23 said:

Logically it's better not to follow, It's better to lead and be followed. Instead of following the masses, what about getting the masses to follow you. In a business environment it's more lucrative to sell many items at a low price than sell few items at a high price. Have you ever wonder why all of a sudden poor China is now the richest country on the Earth.

I agree it's better to lead than follow.  And that's what I think IPS is doing.  Rather than simply trying to stay a software company that makes a web-based application, they're reinventing themselves to be a company that enables communities...  both as a turnkey solution and as a self-hosted service.  

I disagree with your statement that it's better to sell more products at a cheaper price.  Sometimes it's better to focus on quality than quantity.  If you have a premium product, you can get a premium price for it.  Apple is a great example of this...  it makes more from its hardware AND its services than others that just churn out cheap devices.  

If a company simply focuses on being cheap, it becomes an effort to simply cut corners and not necessarily do the "cool" thing or work on other things simply because it's not going to drive new revenue.  

22 minutes ago, beats23 said:

'm just saying IPS bread and butter started from the self hosting folks and still is, and we the self hosting folks should no be made to feel disappointed. That's all

That's a rather presumptuous statement that self-hosted customers should not be made to feel disappointed.  That literally queues a thousand Karen videos about people who felt disappointed for things they should not.  

Instead I would make the argument that companies should try to do right by their customers...  ALL of their customers.  

Sometimes it's not possible to give everyone what they want... especially at the price they want.  (Heck, I want a Tesla Model X Plaid and I want to pay only 60K for it....  since I have a Model 3, they should give it to me cheaper right?!)

But the question becomes then what's right?  

IPS has already said that the self hosted model will continue and that there are no plans to end it.  Customers are not being forced to move to cloud hosted plans.  They've even changed the "upgrade" to cloud button to change the text and make it dismissible.  (Again, I never had a problem with it since end-users never saw it and it's not in the way.)  They listened to those who felt it was a horrible slight and changed it.  In addition there are new features in the works that will apply to all licenses as well.  Just because a few features are only available to cloud instances (because they require advanced features and do not work in all standard LAMP stack environments) does not mean the company is trying to screw over self hosted customers.  

IPS is trying to do right by its customers and listens to feedback.  Just because they can't do everything that every customer asks does not mean they don't care.  And could it mean that a customer gets disappointed as a result?  Absolutely...  and that would be fair for them to feel that way.  But at the same time, IPS can still do right by their customers by listening to that feedback and where it makes sense implementing it.  

Edited May 25, 2022 by Randy Calvert

[Matt]

7 hours ago, beats23 said:

In a business environment it's more lucrative to sell many items at a low price than sell few items at a high price

Here is the biggest barrier to that: there aren't many people to sell to in our market now.

Forums have a significant place in a community strategy and we help many migrate from different platforms to us but rarely do communities start on forums now. They start on social media, free tools such as Discord or Slack, or even the new glut of community / creator platforms that start from $9/month.

The days of selling low and stacking high are long gone. We just continue to evolve with the market, the same as we always have.

7 hours ago, beats23 said:

I'm just saying IPS bread and butter started from the self hosting folks and still is, and we the self hosting folks should no be made to feel disappointed. That's all

We have gone through a cycle of hosted platform updates and new features, this cycle is just about done in terms of development (but not everything has been announced). You will see features coming to all platforms being released soon enough.

[Davyc]

11 minutes ago, Matt said:

Here is the biggest barrier to that: there aren't many people to sell to in our market now.

This is a hard nut to crack and get it right so that everyone benefits. There's two sides to this equation:

1) Not many people to sell to so make the price high to compensate for lack of multiple sales.

Problem:  Price too high and it makes the product unattractive to all buyers other than those with deep pockets, so it can be self-defeating.

2) Not many people to sell to so make the product cheaper and more attractive to many different buyers.

Problem: If there are not enough interested parties then no matter how cheap the product is, it still won't sell, so the issue still remains self-defeating.

There are many inherent issues with both of these scenarios, not least of which is (as Matt pointed out) Social Media is the biggest draw away from forums than any other medium out there.

I feel for those who have been with Invision since the beginning and stayed loyal and who now feel as though they are being priced out, but what is the solution?  In these scenarios you're damned if you do and damned if you don't; it's one of those horrible Catch-22 situations that can often be seen to be out of anyone's control.  I also feel for the people who both own and work for Invision as this is their livelihood and they are seeing it slowly being eaten away and it is becoming increasingly difficult to entice people into the arena.

That's my business head speaking.

Now on the emotive side I really do feel as though the smaller guys and gals are being priced out from using Invision, but Invision are not buying and selling emotion and no amount of feeling towards sentiment will pay bills.  As I started this reply with 'this is a hard nut to crack' it really is and I don't envy those having to make cold decisions to ensure survival.

If I did have a suggestion to make, it would be to bring back an affordable and flexible cloud solution.  I believe, and I may be totally wrong as their are no crystal balls available to see the future, this would be beneficial to all parties.

Closing words - too cheap and you lose money, too expensive and you lose clients. A hard nut.

[Matt]

We've lived through a lot in the past 20 years, so we're well versed in moving with the times and I want to make it clear that we're in a very strong position as a company due to us diversifying years ago.

In terms of self-hosting, it is just a shrinking market as shown by this graph showing self-hosted income only.

As you can see, it's roughly a quarter of what is was back in 2015 and also where we are now is not a surprise to us.

If we halved the cost of self-hosting licenses we would definitely see a bounce in sales for a short time as existing customers picked up second licenses to experiment with other community ideas and we may even pull in a few customers currently using a competitor but not completely happy with that platform but it will be a short lived bounce and not a sustainable increase over time. After a few months, it'll likely return to where we are now but with a significantly increased support burden on half the income.

2 hours ago, Davyc said:

f I did have a suggestion to make, it would be to bring back an affordable and flexible cloud solution.  I believe, and I may be totally wrong as their are no crystal balls available to see the future, this would be beneficial to all parties.

This is something we're discussing for existing license holders. 

 

 

[kotaco]

11 hours ago, beats23 said:

Yes, I think that is the plan all along. A marketing strategy to disappoint all the self hosting customers and gradually convince them to migrate to cloud. 

I do wonder how many live forums are out there successfully running and using the IPS cloud business plan.

Any links? I would like to see some.

You know they already had a meeting where they decided on this prior to announcing 😛

In all seriousness, from a business management standpoint there is a risk in alienating loyal customers for any brand. They wouldn't be the first to make that mistake. However that assumes they rely on us small customers running downloaded instances on our own servers; if they see their push to SaaS and cloud as worth alienating those like us, it obviously means that's where they see their profit and as a result their future. 

If that is indeed the case, I wouldn't expect any discontent from us to make any significant change or deviation from the path we are headed down as the large players that can afford their cloud services have a very different set of values than we do as niche and small community admins. 

Darn capitalism.

There's always the option of an Open Source fork 😉
 

Edited May 25, 2022 by kotaco

[beats23]

3 hours ago, Matt said:

Here is the biggest barrier to that: there aren't many people to sell to in our market now.

Forums have a significant place in a community strategy and we help many migrate from different platforms to us but rarely do communities start on forums now. They start on social media, free tools such as Discord or Slack, or even the new glut of community / creator platforms that start from $9/month.

The days of selling low and stacking high are long gone. We just continue to evolve with the market, the same as we always have.

We have gone through a cycle of hosted platform updates and new features, this cycle is just about done in terms of development (but not everything has been announced). You will see features coming to all platforms being released soon enough.

 

It's always great when management chimes in.
A Lil bit about my history which led me to be using IPS. As a teen, while living in Jamaica, I was one of the lucky few to have a PC and the internet. I won my first PC from a Coca Cola promotional raffle. Back then, the cost of a PC could buy you a house. I got introduced to the web when Microsoft was running Windows 95, me having access and the internet was the most incredible thing and still is. Having the opportunity to connect with others worldwide and share what I knew and learned from others was great. For the past 25 years, while being on the web, 95% of the forums that hold much helpful information and forums where I took my time to post information all disappeared. Some got wealthy and moved on, while some withered away. The time had changed, and I saw that internet hosting price was now affordable, so I thought, you know what, I want to run my own forum and information hub. The idea was to have a website based on all the different things I'm into. I started researching the various forums applications. I did end up on IPS page, but for some reason, I thought IPS only did subscriptions. I tried WordPress and a forum plugin. I then found out that to have WordPress running the way I needed it, I would have to invest in a lot of plugins, and I was not too fond of the fact that all those plugins were calling home. I tried Joomla, which was a bit clunky. I then saw a post on a forum where someone mentioned IPS self hosting package.  I checked IPS website again, but the price was out of my range at the time. So I did a search, and lucky me, I found a guy selling the whole IPS self hosting package licence at half the price. The main thing that drew me to IPS was that all the various applications I needed were under one roof. I got my site up and running and gradually started to post content in my free time and offer some free files I created. For two years, the website laid dormant with only 50 members. Still it felt great having my own system so I kept at it. I then realised one of the things I was into, there wasn't much info about it on the web, so I started focusing on that topic. All of a sudden, in less than five months, I had over 1200 members, and my ball started rolling. Touch wood, it continues.

Evolving is a must. However, evolving grows hand in hand with success. If there is no success, things don't evolve, so one has to have success in the equation if one wants to survive.
I think a few of the main reasons why forums are on the decline are the forum cost, forums usability and YouTube. In the present time, when folks need information, the first place they turn to is YouTube. YouTube is free for content and discussion, videos are visible, plus it's lucrative for the content creators.

An idea for big success for IPS would be, IPS offers a basic forum package free to all users and spend more on promotion.
Look, many internet giants who have grown to be very successful started by offering things for free.
You give away £10 today to earn 20 times that amount tomorrow.

My idea might sound farfetched and a joke to some. However, the statistics are out there. 
The aim of the game is always to get the masses to follow you, and free is the best calling card.

        

[Matt]

8 minutes ago, beats23 said:

Look, many internet giants who have grown to be very successful started by offering things for free.
You give away £10 today to earn 20 times that amount tomorrow.

We did actually start by offering a free version way back in 2002.

Honestly, I don't think people really want a collection of PHP scripts in a zip file for free when they can start a Discord for free and skip having to get a host, learn how to administer it, learn how to FTP and CHMOD and create a new database and on and on and on and on. There are plenty of free forum scripts out there that are largely dead which proves this.

We've all moved on. I remember the early days of the internet fondly but it's all in the past now.

[Sonya*]

@Matt just big thanks for your words. There are so many insights for me, so many hints between the lines. I appreciate it.