Leaderboard

I've been watching La Palma series the first episode and I found this commercial for IPS 😄 Congrats!

Live community features, and the topic summary feature relies on our own cloud platform. The topic summary is actually pretty clever in that our cloud platform pulls data directly from the database outside of the software and runs the whole thing through a custom algorithm written in python to calculate a score for each post. It then updates the database. This isn't run via tasks or cron it's run via our own queuing system on cloud. Topic assignments is likely to be added to the business tier and all those above. We are no different from others selling services that restrict some features to higher plans. In the past, plans were based around storage GB and bandwidth but that's rarely the case now. Tiers are now based on feature sets. I know it can be uncomfortable to talk about the cold realities of running a business, but the landscape has changed for community platforms. We feel that relaunching self-hosted with the Classic license has allowed self-hosting to remain viable for the life of v5. That doesn't mean it won't be the case for whatever comes after, it just means that no one internally is even thinking about v6, let alone making plans for it. I can't give you a cast iron guarantee of something that may not exist. Who knows where we'll be in five years time. In 2024 to date, cloud represents 86% of our income. Without Cloud, Invision Community would not be here, or at least not as we know it now. By having a profitable model, we can still provide a self-hosted option which just about breaks even or makes a small loss depending on how many bugs us developers add in. We are happy with this. Hopefully you are happy with this. We have committed to this model. But it does mean that there will be a divergence in feature sets. Partly because it's hard to build modern features with just PHP and MySQL and partly a business decision to entice people up the tiers. We could create a docker image with node, etc and be incredibly rigid with hosting environments to the point only a few hosts are supported with droplets, etc. But that would decimate our self-hosting customer base with most not being able to run the required servers, or not having the knowledge to set it up and it would decimate our cloud business by offering the same functionality but elsewhere. That's the business stuff, let's move on to transparency. Part of the discourse around self-hosting versus cloud (even though we never frame it like this) is toxic. There is a small but incredibly vocal minority that refuse to accept that they cannot get every single feature we write and drag every feature release blog down with negativity, angry posting about cloud's existence, and accusations of 'money grabbing' (you are very welcome to pay our AWS bill). This can be hard to handle in a public forum. We have two options; endlessly have the same conversations or hide/block/ban posts and people which then comes across as thin-skinned and unable to take criticism. Ahrefs does not have the problem that we have. Their customers are all 'cloud' customers and they're used to not getting all the features, so to say "yeah we'll test it in beta but you might not get it" will not be met with (much) anger and resentment that we seem to get when we mention "cloud only". This has been ongoing for years and is the reason why we heavily moderate comments on our blog posts. You don't get to see a lot of the rage posting because we never approve it. But it's there. It's always there. With v5, live topics, live community and topic summary were only ever going to be cloud only due to the underlying technology. Two out of three of those already exist on cloud so should come as no surprise that they remain so. The other features we were undecided. From our point of view, everything is a tier. We could bring topic assignments to Classic, but then it would mean that we'd need to bring it to all cloud tiers. Which means that there's little incentive to pay for a higher tier level. We could have said "this feature may be on a higher tier than classic" on the blog announcement but it would only invite more toxicity and more anger from this minority group. We wanted to wait until we had it decided. And part of that decision was based on how it went over during the alpha and beta stages. When we create a feature, we never truly know how it'll shape up, or even if we'll keep it; more true during the early stages. Now we're in the beta stages, we have a firmer idea of its usefulness and future direction and are more able to make those decisions. That's the honest truth. There is no conspiracy. We have customers who run large enterprise communities testing these same features and offering input too. We could have done better for sure. But it's a really tight line we're trying to walk on between informing customers about where possible features may end up without instigating another round of self-hosted versus cloud which is draining quite honestly. Not to mention demoralising for our team who proudly present their work and a good portion of the feedback is on why self-hosted licenses aren't getting it. But moving back to features, if you look at the volume of work that has gone into v5 and all the good stuff that's been added, it really is a very small percentage of features that will not make it to every single product tier we offer. As always, we may not be perfect, but we're here and talking about it.

Yes, it's that time of the week where I spend 20-30 minutes of my life thinking of a terrible pun on a number. Our weekly beta release is here! We have a bunch of fixes for you, along with a tidy up of the new tag page and an update to the editor drop down menus to make it clearer what everything does and to make it a bit better on mobile. Let us know what you think!

Beta 9 is here, and there's a little addition to the editor! Along with the usual weekly round up of bug fixes, we've added a basic implementation of tables in the editor. We're testing this out to see how it goes before we build on it, but you should be able to add rows and columns and do all the usual table-y things. Let us know what you think!

We’ve got some exciting news! All communities hosted on the Invision Community platform will be switching to Cloudflare Enterprise edition for CDN and Firewall services. This transition starts now and will be complete by the end of January 2025. Don’t worry, you won’t experience any downtime during this transition. If you do see any issues, like a secure certificate warning, just clear your cache and try again. If your community keeps getting connection errors for more than 5 minutes, please reach out to our support team. We’re thrilled to offer you these improvements, including enhanced security, faster speeds, and more redundancy. We’ll also be able to better control bots and filter bad-bots while still allowing Google, Bing, and other safe search engines to crawl your community. AI content scrapers have become a real pain for communities, constantly searching for great human-generated content. This change will help us control those AI bots. We’re confident that this transition will be smooth and hassle-free. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We’re excited to see these improvements and many more in the coming months!

I appreciate the various layout options and the inclusion of more images in the 5.x widgets, but it seems the new widgets don’t use thumbnails even if they are available. Example: Here is a Record Feed widget which shows the images in a size of just 30×30 pixels, yet it loads the full size record images, which might be 5000 pixels wide each. 😱 Please add a condition to use the thumbnail when available.

I find the downloads homepage has too little info on it compared to its v4 version: Featured box: The button to directly download the file without opening its page is no longer included. I can see why it was removed, though. However, only the number of downloads is shown. Nothing for comments, reviews, purchases, or rating (well, I don't really care about this one 😹). What's New box: Lots of empty white space below the image/title since only the uploader name and date are shown. The image being much bigger than before only further increases the wasted space. I can only see "3 and a half" files compared to "5 and a half" v4 provided a lot more info that's missing: downloads purchases comments (it seems the template includes code for this, but the count is hidden and there's a broken pluralization string) rating (it seems the template includes code for this, but the element is hidden with CSS) Highest Rated & Most Downloaded boxes : Maybe you could also include the number of comments/reviews when there are some? While I can change some things through CSS (image size and rating?) I can't add what's not there since we can't edit templates directly anymore and there are no hook points. 😕 === P.S.: I tested the page on both 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 resolutions. So it's not like the data is hidden because there is no space (for example: phone).

There might be an issue with the patch system, so just update these files. Any cloud customers can just PM me their URL and I can push the updated files from our end. Patch.zip

Beta 7 is here, and I'm digging deep into my Bingo Lingo today! As always, check out our release notes for a full list of this week's fixes. Update: If you notice Pages article comments have vanished, do one of two things: Edit each database and under display add a value for comments per page. Wait until after 3pm GMT and apply the patch. 😇

You may notice that Beta 9.1 is now available. We no longer talk about Beta 9.0.

I love the cloud. Extremely happy customer and for all of the criticism over the pricing, it’s worth every penny to me even without the additional features. I don’t doubt for a second you can go and buy a dedicated server for a fraction of the price, however it’s the time to manage that server, the continuous updates to ensure efficiency and security, the time it takes to understand how to manage that server. Many, like myself don’t have the time or posses the knowledge, that’s why the Cloud has been a godsend. Prior to the Cloud I was on a VPS playing piggy in the middle when issues arose. They said this, tell them that, it’s not us it’s them and so on. Now it’s one email sent, problem solved within the hour, all done for you sir, anything else please let us know. Shout out to @Marc. And that’s happened maybe a couple of times in at a guess closing on 2 years in March. It just works. I see the criticism, I understand the frustration over the tiers, however don’t go dissing the Cloud as for some of us, and I would guess 85% of the 85% Cloud users find invaluable. I’ll also say this, a future where @Matt and the team ever decide this all isn’t worth it, the time, dedication, stresses are not worth the financial returns, it’s a future I genuinely fear as you look at Xenforo, you look at vBulletin, with all due respect that’s not a future I want for my site. If they were trying to sell us a car but the wheels were an optional extra for £1000 each, or headlight bulbs not coming as standard I would get it. You’re getting a fully functional car for the sticker price, but if you want the extra comforts, something to pleasure your passengers like heated seats, it will cost you a little extra and we’ll chuck in a driver as well for you so you can sit in the back and enjoy the ride with your passengers. More time to catch up. Matt, I’ll send you the invoice for this post later, cheers!

Which doesn't really bother me or my members. It has never taken that long for any part of my site to load, whether it be on a mobile or a desktop. Especially considering my target audience are those in Australia and New Zealand. I much prefer focusing on content rather than squeezing every millisecond for a score.

Nice to see Invision finally get over their apparent pathological dislike of all things cloudflare and embrace its obvious advantages

I disagree. Consider a member gets in a huff and decides to delete their account. Two things happen: 1) You end up with a lot of anonymised content in your community 2) The member cannot recover their account at all. So if, when they calm down, they want back in, all their history is gone, and their posts unattributed to them. Having an admin step in and evaluate it keeps the integrity of your community together and ensures that members don't regret their decision to remove their data.

Oh yeah. I didn't press a button. I pressed it now. It should appear.

Thanks for the feedback, I agree with all of this. I'll likely remove the "mobile carousel" feature for the moment until I can find a better solution in the future. The tall widgets make smaller ones look too empty which isn't ideal. I've also simplified the Followers area by removing the "See all followers" link (clicking/tapping on the row takes you to the same page anyway). And if the box gets too narrow, the avatars will wrap to a new line instead of squashing the text. 🤝

Haha, sorry - I've been on planning calls today and I don't think there's time to run through the open PRs, build and test before my end of day. It'll either be a lot later today, or tomorrow morning.

As punishment, I will remove one random template hook point.

Use your "Find My" to locate your laptop, then open your laptop. Kidding aside, we will continue to build on this basic implementation.

ß8 -> ß9 without a hitch. The new "Table" function is a great addition to the Editor.

Been trying to "skin" it a little further, see what I can do. This is what I've got so far: Added an old school image to the ips header from an ipb 1.3 skin I had: There's definitely potential in customization. :D I don't really have the knowledge to mess with placing, but from what I can see and do, I'm pretty happy so far.

@Adlago, you appear to be misunderstanding how the caching works. It's not a local cache on a users machine, it's caching the html for the block server side, so the backend isn't generating it each visit. If you cache it for 1 hour, it'll retrieve the html from that cache for 1 hour, and then check again for an update the first load after that. Once it's done that, it'll cache it again for an hour. So, setting it for one hour will make it faster across the hour than setting it for 5 minutes.

/* Menütags */ li[data-navapp="blog"] span:nth-child(2)::after { content: "Pro"; display: inline-block; background: #FFB343; padding: 2px 5px; font-size: 10px; text-transform: uppercase; border-radius: 4px; color: black; font-weight: bold; margin-left: 10px; letter-spacing: 0em; } li[data-navapp="gallery"] span:nth-child(2)::after { content: "Neu"; display: inline-block; background: #00cc66; padding: 2px 5px; font-size: 10px; text-transform: uppercase; border-radius: 4px; color: black; font-weight: bold; margin-left: 10px; letter-spacing: 0em; } I did this for my testsite... here you control which app it should affect

Ah, found it. Group settings -> Permission -> Change layouts

Backblaze is S3-compatible. It, and every other S3-compatible service, can be used right now. However, we are adding a direct Backblaze integration for those who don't know that but it's really just a copy/paste of the S3 integration with wording changed to say Backblaze instead of AWS S3.

Managed the entire upgrade and refresh over a weekend: https://opentype.space

After updating to beta 7... 😇

Fixed in the next beta.

Probably tomorrow.

There's no need for apologies for this topic. It's better to air concerns and have a discussion than let the fester in the dark. I appreciate your custom and sticking with us. Our primary aim is to safeguard the future of Invision Community, not just for those that work here but for the thousands of communities that rely on us to keep delivering updates and new features to help keep their communities active. It means making tough decisions at times, and these aren't always popular but they really do help secure a future. The most profitable model possible was the one we had 15 years ago when we were selling hundreds of licenses a month at $149.99 a go and our only costs were answering support tickets. Our monthly AWS bill is quite frankly a hate crime.

I think your post, @Matt, needs to be featured, bold, highlighted, underlined, pinned and made a permanent announcement (at least until v6). If there was a love reaction, I'd be hitting it! Despite the minority, the majority are behind you and support you and the rest of the Invision Community team. Hard decisions need to be made sometimes and standing by your decisions shows true character and just how much the software means to you all. You simply cannot please everyone. However unfortunate that may be, it's reality.

I use snagit https://www.techsmith.com/store/snagit?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=20656219147&utm_content=157033822040&utm_term=snagit&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA9bq6BhAKEiwAH6bqoHGzXToCNDSir8sExeSdyvgSySO6-8pblp7kOgLD0zJVTZ0KD95YCRoCMHIQAvD_BwE Oh, unless you mean the profile photos. If so, Im not sure. @Matt had them done at some point back when I had hair. So must be a while ago 😄 Actually if you zoom in, you will realise why it looks to have a white line on it

This will do it. Nice and simple 🙂 /* Reverse user navigation */ .ipsUserNav--member{ flex-direction: row-reverse; }

We will maintain v4, but there will not be any new major version, such as 4.8.

I could certainly see uses for having sidebars on each side, so hopefully yall will take it into consideration

That would great. Imagine waking up early on Christmas morning to find that Santa has left IPSv5 present under the Christmas tree 🎄.

We have released a patch to address this issue. Please go to AdminCP > System > Support and apply the patch from the first/top left box. If you do not see an option to install the patch, you already have the latest release.

That's because Xenforo uses the "AND" operator while here they are using the "OR" operator. But you can change that in the Search settings.

There was a third party resource that added this functionality. It’s never been a part of the base software. IPS can’t advise on things done outside of the software. You would need to find a third party developer to see if they are going to offer this for v5.

This should be fixed now.

😉

It took a while to figure out, and yeah it was just a few lines of code in the end.

You can work around this by changing the 'Remove guest details after' setting on the 'content reporting' page to a large value instead of 'never'. We'll fix this in an upcoming release.

Yes to 7. Of course as beta 8 would depend on beta 7, thats an unknown 🙂

Thanks Day! Let me know where to send the money. I have two briefcases and the combination on both is 1337. I like the car analogy. I have a Tesla Model Y, and it doesn't have full auto-driving because I didn't pay for it. I don't see that as a missing feature though. I think a lot of that thinking is just down to our legacy of having a single product for all. And don't worry, I love what I do and I'm genuinely thankful that I get to do it. The only constant in life is change, and we've had to change and adapt over the years. Some use it as a stick to beat us with but without adapting we'd have vanished years ago.

That's not really a big thing, Marco. Any 3rd-party developer can replicate this in a custom job for you: https://www.invisioneer.org/forums/forum/17-custom-requests/

While I understand the sentiment, please bear in mind there 1024 pages of what are mainly small asks 😄