Even though we're not quite ready to go super in-depth about Live Topics, our live question and answer event platform built into Invision Community, we're very excited to share a sneak peak!
 

Let us know what you spot!

Also only cloud? 

Serious question: Is this available in Cloud only or also available for self-hosted instances?

Hi @NZyan,

Live Topics will be a feature available to clients on our Cloud platform only.

Thanks for your reply!

Sorry, not happy…

Andreas

Unfortunately, it is not possible to deliver Live Topics to a classic self-hosting environment. Our "cloud" is not simply "some server space" but rather a complex array of technologies wrapped up in custom configuration and code.

Live Topics is not a PHP and MySQL application. It is actually a React and NodeJS app and uses the following technologies: NodeJS via ExpressJS server, ReactJS, Web Sockets/Socket.io, JWT Authentication, Redis, AWS SQS, AWS EC2 and MySQL. Those technologies are managed via a custom SQS queue which triggers command runners and workers. All this is bespoke to our cloud environment.

Even if you managed to set up all those services, you'd still need our configuration and custom elements.

By developing on a single platform allows us to rapidly deploy new features and functionality.

This makes it unsuitable for a self-hosting environment.

I am reading and seeing a lot of clients unhappy that features are becoming cloud exclusive.

It's a cool concept and idea. If I was a cloud customer I'd be quite excited about it. Maybe have a think about keeping both sides of the fence happy? I get this would be hard to incorporate in a self-hosted environment. I would accept that, but I bet there's no self-hosted exclusive features. 🤣

IPS still rocks, just need to see some initiatives for the general scope.

22 hours ago, NZyan said:

Thanks for your reply!

Sorry, not happy…

Andreas

  

10 hours ago, Joey_M said:

I am reading and seeing a lot of clients unhappy that features are becoming cloud exclusive.

It's a cool concept and idea. If I was a cloud customer I'd be quite excited about it. Maybe have a think about keeping both sides of the fence happy? I get this would be hard to incorporate in a self-hosted environment. I would accept that, but I bet there's no self-hosted exclusive features. 🤣

IPS still rocks, just need to see some initiatives for the general scope.

 

You must understand it is a beginning of time of end of regular forums life. Any company nowadays, I would like to say "wants to" but it is rather "is forced to" go into your independence and slowly take pieces of it away - doesn't it sound like "Government"? 😅 This happens by building subscription based platforms/apps where you can only pay to use some service.

If IPS won't be doing that then I assume they would close in not longer than 10 years from now. This is because of apps like Discord, platforms like TikTok that took over all the rest, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, that also create a space for communities, discussions, etc.

Current population wants quick and rich content without minimum effort requiring using their brain. So, what you see is a process of transforming IPS into platform based service only. One day, very likely, they will stop selling self-hosted solutions - unfortunately.

However, for IPS, I see a possibility to gather extra money from existing self hosting solution. Making a bridge/connection to cloud services and allow them to use on self-hosted solution on subscription basis, cuz why not? Any extra money are good money.

Edited February 17, 20233 yr by PatrickRQ

I think it's worth pointing out that this is a Cloud feature that we've had advertised as coming soon on our pricing page for a while.

15 minutes ago, PatrickRQ said:

However, for IPS, I see a possibility to gather extra money from existing self hosting solution. Making a bridge/connection to cloud services and allow them to use on self-hosted solution on subscription basis, cuz why not? Any extra money are good money.

That may seem like an obvious 'win', but when you factor in ongoing costs, support overhead, refactoring all of our code to allow this to work. You would most likely be looking at a cost greater than one of the Cloud packages with the feature.

Yes Yes. Once, IPS lived only on self-hosted licenses, but now it will not survive, even though the price for the license has increased and for support ... It's just that most companies are now focused on making as much profit as possible. Just keep in mind that most of them do not live in the American dream, but in much poorer countries, where $50 for the lowest package cloud per month is an amount from outer space. Many people set up a hobby forum and there is no profit from it, and IPS clearly directs its cloud to companies that have a budget to maintain the cloud.

Edited February 17, 20233 yr by Grafidea

4 minutes ago, Grafidea said:

Yes Yes. Once, IPS lived only on self-hosted licenses, but now it will not survive, even though the price for the license has increased and for support ... It's just that most companies are now focused on making as much profit as possible. Just keep in mind that most of them do not live in the American dream, but in much poorer countries, where $50 for the lowest package cloud per month is an amount from outer space. Many people set up a hobby forum and there is no profit from it, and IPS clearly directs its cloud to companies that have a budget to maintain the cloud.

I would recommend taking a look at this post from @Charles he's looking for specific feedback about Cloud from those that aren't at the moment interested (and that's also fine, it won't be suitable for everyone).

1 hour ago, Grafidea said:

Yes Yes. Once, IPS lived only on self-hosted licenses, but now it will not survive, even though the price for the license has increased and for support ... It's just that most companies are now focused on making as much profit as possible. Just keep in mind that most of them do not live in the American dream, but in much poorer countries, where $50 for the lowest package cloud per month is an amount from outer space. Many people set up a hobby forum and there is no profit from it, and IPS clearly directs its cloud to companies that have a budget to maintain the cloud.

From what I hear from my USA friends, there is no more thing as American Dream. It is nearly impossible to get to the top (getting rich) from the bottom as in past. From what I have been told, USA became a country for already rich people.

 

1 hour ago, Stuart Silvester said:

That may seem like an obvious 'win', but when you factor in ongoing costs, support overhead, refactoring all of our code to allow this to work. You would most likely be looking at a cost greater than one of the Cloud packages with the feature.

That means you had a fail on designing the product/service model, as you did not consider this. I believe that amount of work required to make it work now may be huge, therefore costs. I believe that minimum 80% of self-hosted solutions would get such service, as they would be forced to by needs of current market/communities.

Edited February 17, 20233 yr by PatrickRQ

4 minutes ago, PatrickRQ said:

That means you had a fail on designing the product/service model, as you did not consider this. I believe that amount of work required to make it work now may be huge, therefore costs. I believe that minimum 80% of self-hosted solutions would get such service, as they would be forced to by needs of current market/communities.

Not really, I was talking about a theoretical 'now' thing. I would refer you to Matt's post above 

 

Is there a thread, blog post or announcement on this community which doesn't end up with this same circular argument anymore? 

It's very tedious. 

 

Edited February 17, 20233 yr by Dll

I will happily discuss concerns and explain the “why” but the continual allegations of being greedy or dishonest are disappointing. 
 

You need more than PHP and MySQL to deliver modern features. It’s the way it is. We continue to move with the times. 

Why do you immediately conclude that self-hosted client servers are outdated and lack the features listed above? It's just a cover. Because if someone can't prepare the environment, it's their problem not yours.

Edited February 17, 20233 yr by Grafidea

3 minutes ago, Grafidea said:

Why do you immediately conclude that self-hosted client servers are outdated and lack the features listed above? It's just a cover. Because if someone can't prepare the environment, it's their problem not yours.

Our support team has first hand experience in the drama of self-hosted servers. There's multi-page topics with people having trouble just upgrading to PHP8 🙂 

5 minutes ago, Charles said:

Our support team has first hand experience in the drama of self-hosted servers. There's multi-page topics with people having trouble just upgrading to PHP8 🙂 

Yes, but this is the problem of the client himself and possibly the company where he has hosting, not yours. When deciding on a forum or website, you need to learn some basics yourself. And there's an easy way to do that. Only provide support for software issues. And when it comes to hosting settings etc, each customer using self-hosted on their own.

Edited February 17, 20233 yr by Grafidea

I'm a still convinced you could find a way to make these features work on a self hosted environment with an interface to your cloud platform and selling it as an additional paid service.

This would actually be a nice way for you to increase revenue from self hosted environment.

20 minutes ago, Grafidea said:

Yes, but this is the problem of the client himself and possibly the company where he has hosting, not yours. When deciding on a forum or website, you need to learn some basics yourself. And there's an easy way to do that. Only provide support for software issues. And when it comes to hosting settings etc, each customer using self-hosted on their own.

Yes, a lot of support volume, probably around 70% is from hosting and environment issues. We have to investigate each one that takes time. Redis and Elasticsearch already consume support volume. Each ticket can take days of back and forth and involve multiple support techs and developers. 

5 minutes ago, jesuralem said:

I'm a still convinced you could find a way to make these features work on a self hosted environment with an interface to your cloud platform and selling it as an additional paid service.

This would actually be a nice way for you to increase revenue from self hosted environment.

It would significantly increase development time to make it universal and the cost of the hosted services would likely be around the cost of our cloud packages. 

As the other Matt who headed up the development of this system, I can state for a fact that finding a way to incorporate this into self-hosting is too hard. There are simply too many systems involved, and though it wouldn't be our fault when people have incorrectly setup their environment, it certainly would be our problem when almost nobody can use the product they paid for.

Beyond this, there are many assumptions we can make when building on our existing cloud platform which ensure security and reliability. To make something like this shippable to any existing environment, we'd need a substantially larger dev team and much more time, all of which would result in a final price tag too high to expect to sell.

I understand the frustration, but just because it's "possible" to create doesn't mean it's a feasible idea for a product.

13 minutes ago, Matt Finger said:

As the other Matt who headed up the development of this system, I can state for a fact that finding a way to incorporate this into self-hosting is too hard. There are simply too many systems involved, and though it wouldn't be our fault when people have incorrectly setup their environment, it certainly would be our problem when almost nobody can use the product they paid for.

Beyond this, there are many assumptions we can make when building on our existing cloud platform which ensure security and reliability. To make something like this shippable to any existing environment, we'd need a substantially larger dev team and much more time, all of which would result in a final price tag too high to expect to sell.

I understand the frustration, but just because it's "possible" to create doesn't mean it's a feasible idea for a product.

I agree. This function in this topic is of little importance to me, but other functions only cloud have also been introduced that would not be so difficult and problematic on self-hosted.

5 hours ago, PatrickRQ said:

However, for IPS, I see a possibility to gather extra money from existing self hosting solution. Making a bridge/connection to cloud services and allow them to use on self-hosted solution on subscription basis, cuz why not? Any extra money are good money.

You used to have to pay for the IPS chat and, per amount of users, you wanted to allow.

I suppose IPS could figure a way to charge self-hosting clients for bridging into their resources, so that features like this would work. That's not going to drive people into cloud storage though, which I get features like this does. Could the live topics be worked into self-hosting, with the option of using third-party services like Facebook live or Youtube? Most likely. @Michael.J has an excellent recourse for live topics. The UI of this sneak peek could perhaps be similar to that.

Then again, could a third-party app be made to be similar to this? That's a possibility, even if its dumb downed or made to be simpler. Provided developers don't have to jump through hoops, just to please us self-hosting clients.

Regardless though, it's going to be for cloud hosting customers - to which I would echo my comments about keeping both sides of the fence happy.

27 minutes ago, Matt Finger said:

As the other Matt who headed up the development of this system

Having two Matts still sometimes scares me.

As it should.