Marketplace Closure

[Chris027]

8 minutes ago, Matt said:

I hear you 100% but we are not the arbiters of human habits, we just respond to them.

There are loads of old forums still busy but the bulk of those members and that content was generated a decade ago and they are kept alive by an older member base and probably good authority with Google bringing people in for short transactional exchanges.

We have a responsibility to you and our other customers to keep driving forward, it is pretty relentless. The worst thing we could do is just continue doing the same things and we lose marketshare and your community stagnates and goes into a slow decline.

Communities are more complex than a basic forum and very few have the patience to click loads of links in the hopes of having good content to read.

v5 will help with transactional content (I need an answer to this problem) and more social content (Lets discuss Thing) as well as content discovery.

Thank you Matt. This gives me confidence. 

[Hisashi]

Perhaps this would be the perfect time to come back with the "Requests Forums"? @Matt

Honestly, I feel it's too intrusive to have to message each developer. Creating a topic telling about your project and letting a developer be interested in it is more pleasant for both sides.

[Ocean West]

I am curious what was the impetus originally to move the MP into the ACP was it mostly for the compatibility checker?  

Will the compatibility checker still be a thing, or is this deprecated too? 

 

[Matt]

3 hours ago, Ocean West said:

I am curious what was the impetus originally to move the MP into the ACP was it mostly for the compatibility checker?  

Will the compatibility checker still be a thing, or is this deprecated too? 

 

We did that three years ago in a genuine attempt to increase sales and viability. It helped for a short while but the trend didn’t hold. 

[Clover13]

13 hours ago, DawPi said:

Why everyone speaking about exploits form 3rd party developers still? When someone did something like this? This is a definite exaggeration and I ask you to stop such claims.

To be clear, as I was one who brought up the security concerns in this topic, I absolutely was not referring to any known instances or developer here, but merely the potential for it to occur and increasingly so when IPS becomes 100% hands off with third party applications.  Apologies if it came across that way.  I've seen enough security exploits in my own career (not anything IPS or IPS third party related) to warrant the concern.  Again not a reflection of any developer here or the quality of their code, I'm simply proactively thinking about the possibility and considerations regarding preventative measures.  If anyone feels such a security concern is  completely unnecessary or overkill, I would appreciate your particular insight as to why.  I certainly don't know the underpinnings of IPS code, so perhaps there is a reason a client doesn't need to have an elevated concern over it.

I'd still like to know what IPS corporate customers do, if it's anything like the corporations I've worked with (unrelated to my IPS projects), there is full fledged InfoSec and AppSec scanning of all application code before any deployment with Production (real user/member) data.  Generally for a hobby site, I'm not very concerned with data loss (with regular backups available to restore as needed), but I am concerned about data breaches involving PII.

[H5K]

On 8/18/2023 at 1:21 AM, bing11 said:

I don't think it is good idea  do this.

Apple and google never think about  to close apple store and  google play.

 

Marketplace is not making money or it is making more job . But It can make me go to this site everyday.

 

Yeah, because Apple and Google know the value of creating a  "platform" and empowering developers.

[Randy Calvert]

10 minutes ago, H5K said:

Yeah, because Apple and Google know the value of creating a  "platform" and empowering developers.

They also have the size/scale AND the budget for it in terms of people and money. 🙂 

Thats like saying a little league baseball team should be able to do something simply because a professional league baseball team can. 

I can see why and agree that it makes sense to pull IPS out of the transaction. What would be nice is if there was a better aggregated resource discovery tool. Nothing that handled the sale… just discovery.  

[Joel R]

22 minutes ago, Randy Calvert said:

What would be nice is if there was a better aggregated resource discovery tool. Nothing that handled the sale… just discovery.  

Something is in the works! 

Should have something to announce in October. 

[Genestoy]

Where are "KEYS" so we can get the paid for apps from the developers?

[Lindy]

4 hours ago, Genestoy said:

Where are "KEYS" so we can get the paid for apps from the developers?

This will be rolled out very shortly!

[Disruption]

As a hobbyist of the product, I really held off on doing anything major with this product (beyond just renewing my self-hosted license to tinker). The reason? A lot of what my community requires truly requires plugins and convincing my demographic to visit a website over Discord is truly a challenge. Incentivizing things like that will always be a challenge unless web apps, as you guys showcased, become a norm. However, telling a younger demographic about web applications and how to get one on your phone so its like an app is unlikely to yield the results. 

It seems more and more other companies are leveraging forums (Discord being one) and finding ways to enhance their product while keeping it true. While your bulk customers have probably not leveraged the marketplace, it seems your vocal minority has. I do get a bit lost in what exactly losses you were experiencing beyond chargebacks. 

 

Thank you as always for your insight. 

[jaeitee]

On 8/15/2023 at 11:47 PM, Lindy said:

but we are excited to share with you our new direction.]

 

I'm not excited, I'm disappointed.  

Bring back ibplanet, invisionize and we'll be alright 👍

[Aiwa]

I’m a little disappointed, I was just getting going again. I’ll likely move everything to a public GitHub repo. Forgo the transaction troubles that have plagued the MP. As a hobbyist, that still works in corporate America, doing so will build a profile for the job market.

I have heard the same financials from IPS staff over many many years, regarding the MP viability. It’s not something they’ve made up just now for justification. 

[AlexJ]

How app renewals / paid $$ will be tracked? I don't have track of what applications, i have purchased over the year. I really had liked the idea of install apps through ACP (marketplace). Easy, less worry and headache. 

Can I please get the list of paid apps? So on next renewal, I can talk to app owner? Thanks. 

  

On 8/15/2023 at 3:52 PM, Stuart Silvester said:

After October you'll need to get any updates from the author, we're not going to be allowing files to be downloaded directly, that isn't part of the agreement we have with authors. There will be a means to 'prove' your existing ownership to them on their own sites so you can continue to receive updates and renew the purchase (if required)

I can't even download files today. Can you please tell me how can i download the files/apps which I paid for? I would like to save the local copy. - Thanks. 

Edited August 24, 2023 by AlexJ

[Adriano Faria]

15 minutes ago, AlexJ said:

Can I please get the list of paid apps? So on next renewal, I can talk to app owner?

https://invisioncommunity.com/clients/purchases/

[AlexJ]

49 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

https://invisioncommunity.com/clients/purchases/

Thanks! Is that going away or it will stay? Also any thoughts on how to download the applications? 

[Adriano Faria]

On 8/15/2023 at 10:47 AM, Lindy said:

You will be able to obtain a key for each of your current Marketplace purchases and provide that key to authors to transfer your purchases directly to the author

@AlexJ

You just have to wait. 

[Square Wheels]

16 minutes ago, AlexJ said:

Also any thoughts on how to download the applications? 

I believe @Charles said you will not be able to.

[Stuart Silvester]

1 hour ago, AlexJ said:

Thanks! Is that going away or it will stay? Also any thoughts on how to download the applications? 

When the Marketplace closes you'll need to obtain any future updates from the author. Many 3rd party authors are (or already have) setting up their own websites to sell their products. With 4.7.13 you'll be able to manually upgrade resources you installed from the Marketplace.

We will be providing a 'proof of purchase' system in the near future but in the meantime authors may ask you for another proof of purchase if you want to obtain updates directly.

[My Sharona]

A detriment to the devs will be the loss of all the reviews their plugin/apps have generated. It would be a nice gesture on IPS' behalf if there was a way to salvage them.

[Riley Anderson]

We will have to go to tons of differents platerform for keep our products purchase up to date.
Gonna be a pain to handle. Not gonna lie. 

[Craig Gingell]

We have some digital membership "products" in our store that members can purchase. These products are set to auto renewal every 12 months. Will the changes in October impact the way we manage renewable products? Cheers

[Jim M]

4 minutes ago, Craig Gingell said:

We have some digital membership "products" in our store that members can purchase. These products are set to auto renewal every 12 months. Will the changes in October impact the way we manage renewable products? Cheers

If this is on your community using our Commerce application, this is not related to any of the discussion in this topic. Commerce is an application created by us and is not third party.

[Craig Gingell]

1 minute ago, Jim M said:

If this is on your community using our Commerce application, this is not related to any of the discussion in this topic. Commerce is an application created by us and is not third party.

Thank you for the clarification

[iamART]

On 8/18/2023 at 11:02 AM, Matt said:

v5 is a significant step forward for UI, discovery, noise versus signal and brand matching. Change is hard but it is kind of inevitable.

If nothing changed, then we'd still be using this:

And while you could absolutely run a successful community on that product even now, the chances of attracting new members would be low given the expectations modern audiences have for UI and ease of use.

What an era THIS was, though, huh? I feel old seeing this now, as this is what forums looked like when I started using them.

Getting back on topic, and forgive me if I missed it, are there any alternative marketplaces being created that can provide 3rd party plugins/themes?