I agree. So many people are using Sendgrid so it doesn't really make sense to remove it, but it's not up to us to decide that unfortunately.

Nope. Father IPS always knows what's best for us.

Is Sendgrid going to be removed in the future as I see it’s still there in v5?

I no longer use Sendgrid as I find Amazon AWS SES cheaper. My AWS SES bill is around $1.60 monthly before that I use pay $20 I think.

 

Nope. Father IPS always knows what's best for us.

Yes, it looks that way lol.

 

And to be clear, we've not thrown a dart at a map, we've made decisions based on our knowledge of the market, and how communities work.

The truth is that there is no future for a business selling just a forum. There are plenty of successful forum-only websites, but those are in the minority and shrinking and not enough to sustain a business without accepting that it will get smaller and smaller until it winks out.

There is a good future for independent and brand communities but you need to leverage articles, databases, possibly galleries and more to build something up and to keep people coming back. I know you said that you don't need those apps, but I wonder if you really tested them and thought about your community design if they would actually come in useful for you and help you grow your community.

With all due respect, to me this looks like you are trying to justify the reason for the price increase for the Ipb 5 license for the self hosted customers and your cloud hosting prices.

My question is, if what you said above is really true, why not sell those apps separately like it was the case before, and if the customers will share that same belief then they would purchase those apps themselves willingly? i.e. let the customers decide for themselves what's good for their business or hobby forums and what not, and don't decide for them. Frankly I think that it's kind of insulting too, as it looks like to me that the customers are too stupid to know what's good for them.

Anyways, changing the license by increasing the price and making those apps not optional anymore speaks a lot in itself. Otherwise there would have been no need to make them obligatory.

 

Is Sendgrid going to be removed in the future as I see it’s still there in v5?

I no longer use Sendgrid as I find Amazon AWS SES cheaper. My AWS SES bill is around $1.60 monthly before that I use pay $20 I think.

What will end up happening is that you can use it for now until Sendgrid makes some update to their API and IPS will just say "sorry, unsupported. Move to the more expensive service that we prefer. no choice for you."

 

What will end up happening is that you can use it for now until Sendgrid makes some update to their API and IPS will just say "sorry, unsupported. Move to the more expensive service that we prefer. no choice for you."

Ok. I see.

 

What will end up happening is that you can use it for now until Sendgrid makes some update to their API and IPS will just say "sorry, unsupported. Move to the more expensive service that we prefer. no choice for you."

Can I suggest you look into ses in the meantime, as it's cheaper and just as simple to use.

Edited March 2Mar 2 by Dll

Amazon SES API -> Should be supper as a basic feature in today's world. I mean seriously which forum doesn't send email..

 

Amazon SES API -> Should be supper as a basic feature in today's world. I mean seriously which forum doesn't send email..

I agree. There is native support for AWS S3, so there should be native support for AWS SES.

 

My question is, if what you said above is really true, why not sell those apps separately like it was the case before, and if the customers will share that same belief then they would purchase those apps themselves willingly? i.e. let the customers decide for themselves what's good for their business or hobby forums and what not, and don't decide for them. Frankly I think that it's kind of insulting too, as it looks like to me that the customers are too stupid to know what's good for them.

Anyways, changing the license by increasing the price and making those apps not optional anymore speaks a lot in itself. Otherwise there would have been no need to make them obligatory.

I remember that IPS already addressed this question (I can't recall where, sorry) a few years ago. The reasoning for this, IIRC, was that offering a 'bare bones' suite with Core+Forum only and allowing for additional apps to be 'bolted on' (as used to be the case before, and what you're asking for) is simply not viable anymore - neither in terms of development, nor in offering a quality product. The apps that didn't sell would be less developed in terms of feature-set, and connectivity/interoperability between those apps would suffer as a result because IPS would only consider spending dev time on improving/upgrading the apps that people actually bought.

We have all actually seen this to be true - I have seen many complaints in the past about how updates on V4 favoured Forums and Pages, with little care or attention paid to Gallery, Blogs or Commerce. This way, with V5, development time can be focused on all apps working together (and the dev team would not have to spend so much time considering use cases where a client might have the Blogs app but not Gallery, or the Commerce app but not Pages, and the many variations of this).

 

This way, with V5, development time can be focused on all apps working together

Based on my experience with V3 and V4 -> I am telling you, IPS team will focus on certain apps and rest on need basis. IPS doesn't have infinite team, so I understand from prioritization perspective but if I want basics/bare bone, I would use phpBB, XF, vBulletin, etc. forums.

When the cost is increasing, we can't have less features. I am sorry but that's just how I see. I personally need full blown solution and let me choose, what I can enable/disable based on my needs.

As everyone said, IPS removing feature doesn't help but I understand IPS position as long as they provide path so that we admins/community, don't loose data.

It's one thing to render data in different format/location vs loosing it all together. I think, folks are bit grumpy at present because all status messages, tickets, etc. info is lost.

Now Matt has agreed to covert tickets to private topics.. and I am hoping he create another category to convert status messages to topics. This way their is no informational loss.

I moved away from 3rd party app because of same issue i.e. app not supported and suddenly their is data loss. If same thing happens from IPS Core apps, then folks will find start finding another solution because we can't take data hit on each major release.

If Windows XP to Windows 11 upgrade path involves loss of data, no one would update. However it doesn't and hence the people upgrade to latest versions.

Also it's beyond me, why IPS wouldn't integrate Amazon SES with Email mgmt system which is basic need for any forum to send email. It's cheapest, most reliable and just works consistently. But for something common, we are told, use 3rd party which IPS doesn't officially support 3rd party add-ons.

PS I am still grumpy a bit that IPS doesn't have official marketplace anymore, so people can at least list their addons on IPS site. I recently registered on another forum and they reloaded data and all my conversations are gone which happened in last month.

Edited March 4Mar 4 by AlexJ

 

When the cost is increasing, we can't have less features. I am sorry but that's just how I see. I personally need full blown solution and let me choose, what I can enable/disable based on my needs.

I think we've lost a bit of sight on what constitutes value, and it is not tied to the number of features. Features themselves are just bits of functionality, and random functionality won't help a community grow. The value is derived from the whole; how it all goes together and the opportunities the platform can offer.

We've added a lot of new value with Invision Community 5 in terms of putting the power in your hands with the theme editor, page editor and so on. These are not trivial changes and have transformed how you build content around a community.

 

Based on my experience with V3 and V4 -> I am telling you, IPS team will focus on certain apps and rest on need basis. IPS doesn't have infinite team, so I understand from prioritization perspective but if I want basics/bare bone, I would use phpBB, XF, vBulletin, etc. forums.

Yes, that has been my experience with V3 and V4 too. That's my point: that this will likely change with V5. And it's not just a prioritization matter; I imagine it no longer makes business sense for IPS to dedicate resources in splintered development across six separate apps that may or may not be interacting with each other. Matt and the IPS team have already said many times that Self Hosted is becoming less valuable to them in terms of revenue and more of a burden, so being offered the entire suite in a single package was really the only way you were ever going to see V5 in a non-cloud offering. Of course, it's up to you if you wish to use another solution instead, but that is the offering that IPS has now.

The rest of your post doesn't seem relevant to what I said, so I won't comment.

Having gone through the V3 -> V4 conversion, I will say that V4 - V5 is orders of magnitude smoother than the prior jump. I am not known for holding back my criticism of IPS, but they've done a superb job on this.

Will all your apps and themes transfer over? No, they never do, so why expect it this time? I'm going to lose the Collections app but I've already started to rebuild a Pages clone of it in V4.

Pages is finally going to be the transformative app I've been pushing IPS for since the beginning of V4 and I encourage everyone to use their imagination for what will now be possible without coding. From a content generation perspective, Pages is just a couple minor revision numbers away from being superior to Wordpress out of the box for non-coder site admins. If IPS adds a little more non-code customization to the article feed blocks, I think they will genuinely achieve that.

I say that as someone who runs several Wordpress sites, and even with 15+ years WP experience, still fights with block builders daily. I upgraded my V4 to V5 and had my front page rebuilt in less than 30 minutes and will be fully complete once this change comes to 5.04. I'd spend more time than that just setting up all the damn plug-ins in Wordpress before I even got around to page layout.

It's new software, so there are bugs, and there are things that are annoyingly depreciated for no good reason, but very few of us are going to hit a wall that we cannot work around.

The software isn't ready for me to move to yet, but it's so darn close that I can taste it already. Again, a huge congrats to the entire IPS team from one of your long-time curmudgeons. You've all done a fantastic job.

 

I'm going to lose the Collections app

The Jimmo

Garage

Garage allows users to create online "garages" on your community. Users can share information about their cars, upload photos, and other users can make comments. Features: Organize vehicles into li...

 

The Jimmo

Garage

Garage allows users to create online "garages" on your community. Users can share information about their cars, upload photos, and other users can make comments. Features: Organize vehicles into li...

yeah, I saw. I have abandonment issues. I want it in pages rather than a dedicated app where a developer could disappear like MikeJohn.

 

yeah, I saw. I have abandonment issues. I want it in pages rather than a dedicated app where a developer could disappear like MikeJohn.

Respect that. I use it on my community that's been around for 16 years and plan to continue to do so, if that is any comfort.

Has the source mode/HTML mode been removed in v5?

Edited March 11Mar 11 by Donnie95

 

Has the source mode/HTML mode been removed in v5?

Yes, this is correct. You can no longer add HTML directly to the editor. What is it you are trying to use this for?

 

Yes, this is correct. You can no longer add HTML directly to the editor. What is it you are trying to use this for?

I'm using this to create the Terms of Use & Privacy Policy. That is a downgrade compared to version 4. (Term of use generator, raw html)

 

I'm using this to create the Terms of Use & Privacy Policy. That is a downgrade compared to version 4. (Term of use generator, raw html)

What exactly are you doing in HTML which cannot be done via the editor? This will help us determine and expand on the editor functionality or help you accomplish what you want another way.

 

What exactly are you doing in HTML which cannot be done via the editor? This will help us determine and expand on the editor functionality or help you accomplish what you want another way.

Since you are asking, any chance of including indents? :)

 

I'm using this to create the Terms of Use & Privacy Policy. That is a downgrade compared to version 4. (Term of use generator, raw html)

If your generator produces fully marked up text like a Word doc, you should be able to just paste it into the editor.

 

What exactly are you doing in HTML which cannot be done via the editor? This will help us determine and expand on the editor functionality or help you accomplish what you want another way.

I agree we should not allow HTML to 'regular' members. They can mess things up and it can even be a security issue.

The new v5 editor is very easy to use. It is perfect for 99% of users on our forums. In this aspect v5 is a nice update over v4. Thanks for that.

but it should still be allowed for mods and admins . There are a few things the new editor cannot replicate. (yet)

example from our forum:

X-Plane.Org Forum

E-Jets Family 2.0 & Lineage 1000 is Here—Get It Before th...

Game-Changer I am so extremely excited to share that the E-Jets Family 2.0 Open Beta is here! With this release, we’re not just expanding the fleet—we’re redefining what’s possible in X-Plane. Vers...

X-Plane.Org Forum

Airfoillabs 737 MAX 3D WIP

Development Update 03/09/2025 Hello AFL 737 MAX Community!  We’re excited to share our latest progress focused on enhancing the visual authenticity of our cockpit. Our texturing team has been hard...

 

I agree we should not allow HTML to 'regular' members. They can mess things up and it can even be a security issue.

The new v5 editor is very easy to use. It is perfect for 99% of users on our forums. In this aspect v5 is a nice update over v4. Thanks for that.

but it should still be allowed for mods and admins . There are a few things the new editor cannot replicate. (yet)

example from our forum:

X-Plane.Org Forum

E-Jets Family 2.0 & Lineage 1000 is Here—Get It Before th...

Game-Changer I am so extremely excited to share that the E-Jets Family 2.0 Open Beta is here! With this release, we’re not just expanding the fleet—we’re redefining what’s possible in X-Plane. Vers...

X-Plane.Org Forum

Airfoillabs 737 MAX 3D WIP

Development Update 03/09/2025 Hello AFL 737 MAX Community!  We’re excited to share our latest progress focused on enhancing the visual authenticity of our cockpit. Our texturing team has been hard...

Have you considered making it a Pages page or Pages Database? These allow for more customized HTML and making it a template so you don't have to worry about modifying the HTML itself for each topic you create. A Pages Database also can allow for a forum topic to be created for comments.

 

Have you considered making it a Pages page or Pages Database? These allow for more customized HTML and making it a template so you don't have to worry about modifying the HTML itself for each topic you create. A Pages Database also can allow for a forum topic to be created for comments.

Good point Jim, Thanks

But we would need more examples from Invision on how to customize v5. I know it's powerful but we need help to get the best of it.