----- Posted August 22 Posted August 22 (edited) Hello, I recently came back as a designer after some years of pauze from theme design. I used to be a theme designer here on IPS, and as most theme designers, the marketplace was THE backbone of the community driven development and designers group. It brought life, passion and energy in an area that would otherwise be plain boring. I hope it's not against the rules to debate this, but I was really surprised, to see that a community software package, has decided to take the 'community' and drive out of their community basically, with the removal of marketplace. The reason for this was that marketplace sales had gone down for 75% for a while, but this also means that 25% was still active. I do believe that in a community, money should never be the factor, to remove a big chunk out of the social aspect out of the community. Specially not when a majority of the market place was free stuff, free mods, free addons, free themes. My question: Is there any chance that we will see something like a community design and marketplace back? We all know that community software, without a solid design and developer community cannot sustain for long-term. As the community itself is the backbone and the foundation, to keep the software itself going, isn it. If money was a factor to remove the backbone out of the community, for a community software package, it seems as if development might shoot itself in the foot with this decision long term. It reminded me of games like world of warcraft, who were once considered Massive Multiplayer Online game, who then decide to make their game mostly a single player experience, by removing many of the social aspect out of their game in the last few years. It is no surprise that since then, their sales and subscribers have gone down. The same goes for games, and their map designers. It's these kind of map designers and mod designers, that keep the game surviving and interesting for a very long time. Consider the community your "map designers". I do not know if the right decision was made with the removal of marketplace. I'm also surprised, that there is so little questions asked by the developer and theme community. Hope this helps provide some feedback from an old-school designer of this once cheerful and bright passion driven community. Kind regards, Sarah Edited August 22 by Sarah Joy Sokoloff Kjell Iver Johansen 1
----- Posted August 22 Author Posted August 22 (edited) To prove my point. Count the total number of posts of all the forums. Marketplace is THE one, with the most activity and posts. 82.6k posts! The other forums don't even come near that number, from the forums which my account can see. You basically removed the most active community out of your community suite ... for money? Logic tells us, a less active community results in less sales, and even less money. Even tho money should never be a factor in a community. Marketplace was mostly free stuff. I hope to see this decision reverted at some point. This can be better. Edited August 22 by Sarah Joy Sokoloff
Jim M Posted August 22 Posted August 22 19 minutes ago, Sarah Joy Sokoloff said: The reason for this was that marketplace sales had gone down for 75% for a while, but this also means that 25% was still active. Unfortunately, that 25% was not enough to offset the losses and time which our team was spending on the Marketplace. It was operating at a loss when it was at it's peak, I'm afraid, and even more so at 25%. 7 minutes ago, Sarah Joy Sokoloff said: Count the total number of posts of all the forums. Marketplace is THE one, with the most activity and posts. 82.6k posts! Think that may be a glass half full type approach to that forum. The other is that, the marketplace generated a lot of required support for these third party items 🙂 . Our team had to facilitate and handle a lot of that and direct them to the right avenue and that also stole support time from our customers. We also were not very active on our own community for our own software support prior to 2 years ago (don't quote me on timeframe, I'm pre-coffee 😄 ) so a vast majority of individuals were here because they needed marketplace support or wanted to give feedback on our software. Now that we do give support over our community for our software, it will continue to grow the community here as a whole. We 💗 our third party providers but us facilitating payment and being involved in the Marketplace was simply not working. It may not be a popular decision but ultimately, it was one that had to be made to ensure continued success of our business and be able to focus on more development of the software. This change though does open up possibilities in the free market for third party providers and also allows them to get more revenue, less restrictions, etc... There are a few topics debating and covering a lot of these points more in depth so you may wish to read through those.
Meddysong Posted August 22 Posted August 22 32 minutes ago, Sarah Joy Sokoloff said: We all know that community software, without a solid design and developer community cannot sustain for long-term. Invision Community has those; they're salaried employees. And they also have plenty of enterprise clients paying big money. I'd say they're doing just fine.
----- Posted August 22 Author Posted August 22 (edited) 34 minutes ago, Meddysong said: Invision Community has those; they're salaried employees. And they also have plenty of enterprise clients paying big money. I'd say they're doing just fine. Here is the concern exactly. The wishes and desires of 1% big and rich enterprise companies, who thought it could be bad publicity or business for them or even if it looked less professional to them if IPS had such a "normal people" marketplace. So I sincerely hope this was not the case here, that IPS bowed down to the wishes of some enterprise company and therefore willing to gut 99% of their customer and passion driven community for that. Other than that, I understand the concerns that Jim M. has expressed. But let's leave big enterprise biss out of the equation when speaking about a loving passion driven theme and development community. Because that's troublesome as the big guys, don't really care about that. I was speaking about the small man. The man on the street. The gamer who wishes to make a clan forum. The artist who wishes to make an artist forum. The musician who wishes to make a community around his work. A normal to middle size company. The normal man. The majority of mankind. Humble people. Humble companies. The humble communities. The start of every humble company and person. Edited August 22 by Sarah Joy Sokoloff
Jim M Posted August 22 Posted August 22 2 hours ago, Sarah Joy Sokoloff said: Other than that, I understand the concerns that Jim M. has expressed. But let's leave big enterprise biss out of the equation when speaking about a loving passion driven theme and development community. Because that's troublesome as the big guys, don't really care about that. I was speaking about the small man. The man on the street. The gamer who wishes to make a clan forum. The artist who wishes to make an artist forum. The musician who wishes to make a community around his work. A normal to middle size company. The normal man. The majority of mankind. Humble people. Humble companies. The humble communities. The start of every humble company and person. The trends would suggest the persons who want to do these customizations to this degree are becoming less and less. To be clear, themeing and custom development aren't going away. Just the Marketplace did. We still have areas on the community to discuss custom development and design to interact with other customers and our team.
Daniel F Posted August 23 Posted August 23 And you can also visit https://www.invisioneer.org/marketplace/ if you're interested into a directory with available 3rd party apps and plugins
Joel R Posted August 23 Posted August 23 Some thoughts: 1. Thank you for the shout outs to Invisioneer.org, an independent and free marketplace listing. If anyone has not visited yet, it's a link directory of files. You will be linked to the actual developers own website for purchase and support. No files are sold by or on Invisioneer itself. 2. The revised codebase to use event listeners and extensions is fundamentally geared towards making 3rd party development much more stable and non-disruptive to the core codebase. Right? I wonder - and just throwing this out there - if this new development paradigm itself would warrant a re-review of bringing the MP back in house. IPS fundamentally does not need to do the same in-depth code review to see whether 3rd party code breaks anything in the core code. If it doesn't work, uninstall and move on.
----- Posted August 23 Author Posted August 23 (edited) 30 minutes ago, Joel R said: I wonder - and just throwing this out there - if this new development paradigm itself would warrant a re-review of bringing the MP back in house. IPS fundamentally does not need to do the same in-depth code review to see whether 3rd party code breaks anything in the core code. If it doesn't work, uninstall and move on. Exactly. They made it very difficult on themselves, by taking responsibility for what their community creates for their product, by reviewing in detail every single release from the community. That obviously leads to burnout on their team. Very rarely does a developer take such responsibility over whatever addons their communities release. They could add a simple disclaimer, that those themes and addons are to be used at own risk, and that they are not affiliated with IPB in any way. vBulletin pulled off something similar, gutting their entire scripting community, by making it very hard for their developer community to make mods. It's very odd to say the least that 'community' packages, who need THE community, would do something so "upside-down". BTW, respect to you, Joel R for being stubborn with your theme and modding business. Many had given up. Nice to see someone that keeps going against the mainstream with his business. And that being said, for most it wasn't even a business, it was just an incredibly fun community hobby and experience. It's such a sad sight to see so many "bland" looking communities out there these days. The creativity on design and modding used to be next level. Even inspiring official companies to improve their products with it. Sadly, they need a "visible" place, where many visit, to inspire. MP was just that. Post 2020 Google really doesn't help finding hidden gems with their war on "misinformation". Edited August 23 by Sarah Joy Sokoloff
Jim M Posted August 23 Posted August 23 7 minutes ago, Sarah Joy Sokoloff said: They could add a simple disclaimer, that those themes and addons are to be used at own risk, and that they are not affiliated with IPB in any way. This was always the case. However, that does not stop opinions and expression that it is our fault and support workload to battle that with clients. We've tried no reviews with guidelines and then cursory reviews to prevent basic issues, bad practices, malicious practices, etc... Ultimately, it was a headache all areas where that needle was placed and a lose-lose situation for us. As Matt mentioned in your other topic, this has been discussed endlessly and it may be advantageous to go review those to have your questions answered. We appreciate the feedback, but I don't think there is any immediate change in this process.
----- Posted August 24 Author Posted August 24 (edited) To combat those issues. Why don't you try something like twitter has done to combat misinformation, but apply it to bad mods, bad addons, even faulty themes, and more. Add something like "community notes" smartly implemented. (not reviews) Let the people who love the community themselves do the hard work, and ease the burden on your team. The complaints will go to the community notes aswell, so no stress on the dev team either. It will increase the community feel again, the modders, designers and themers have something to do again, but now everyone will be able to play a role in it. Community notes works pretty well it seems. You will have a blooming community again, working together for the common good. The succes of social media does not have to mean bad news or the downfall of community software. Learn and apply their succes in the software package. Just a tip for consideration. Edited August 24 by Sarah Joy Sokoloff
----- Posted August 24 Author Posted August 24 (edited) The community can even create their own "volunteer team" of trustees to take a "community notes" role upon them, with a "badge" award system, for their contributions to the community notes. This is something completely different from reviews. It can even be public for all. The award and motivation is in the badges. There are so many ideas and fixes for every problem. World Goodwill (not money) is the start for all that becomes beautiful, and for all that lasts. Another tip. Solutions. It's in the community their hands. Edited August 24 by Sarah Joy Sokoloff
Jim M Posted August 24 Posted August 24 The Marketplace operated in the early days based off of feedback from those who installed the add-ons being sold/downloaded. However, that did not take the blame, workload, etc... off of us. That led to us personally reviewing the files before approving them to be downloaded/bought in the Marketplace. Ultimately, I want to stress that this wasn't something we woke up one day and closed the Marketplace. It was something highly discussed and researched on our part on how to make it viable for all. The best solution for everyone was to put it in the hands of the third-party providers. We have beat this horse quite a bit over the years since this was done so I believe this topic has run its course. Gary 1
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