Dreadknux

Fantastic updates guys, I am aware of many spam accounts on my community that come from one particular city/country so the geolocation feature will be super useful. Many thanks for this!

This means no more sexy lonely women using the Contact Us form, lol

Fantastic updates guys, I am aware of many spam accounts on my community that come from one particular city/country so the geolocation feature will be super useful. Many thanks for this!

To be clear, we are not closing down third party development, in fact we are developing new tools for v5 to make some areas easier to add functionality to. 
 
This announcement is that we are no longer listing items and facilitating sales directly on our site. 

Yes, I will corral all of the Marketplace devs together so we come to consensus on this project. I've been fortunate to have worked with many of them over my 10 years with the community.  They all know me (for better or for worse, ha 😆). 
My goal for this new Marketplace Directory  is simple: provide an independent directory using Downloads.  It will link you to the providers' own website for support. 
 
More broadly, to anyone who is hesitant about these changes, there are some pros and cons: 
- More independence, more variation, and total flexibility for developers and themers.   They can build their own core, their own gallery, their own package of plugins.  You can't do any of that in the current Marketplace.  I expect to see some truly experimental and innovative approaches to how developers and themers work with IPS 5. 
- More independence, more variation, and total flexibility in how they charge.  Providers can charge crypto, they can offer a bundled set, they can offer discounts, they can set their own policies for chargebacks and refunds. 
- Trust will be deeper, not wider. The IPS Marketplace gave a broad stamp of trust to all providers for meeting standard IPS coding. But for clients, this is an opportunity to deepen ties to one or two trusted developers and take our most important apps private and control our own development pipeline.  I do believe the biggest developers will still offer - and can make healthy income - off a broad portfolio of single purpose mods, but those by itself aren't going to dramatically fulfill your community's specific needs.  

My goal is to provide a listing directory to make it easy for developers to list their apps.
A directory will provide visibility, scale, and ease for everyone to visit.  
Developers will handle payments and support on their own.  

To be clear, you will still be able to visit independent websites to obtain premade resources if you wish. From our standpoint, the trend has simply moved more towards custom development or stock installations. 

So it turns out this was down to a plugin I downloaded from the Marketplace... I deactivated it and the issue no longer occurs.
This plugin was created to actually REMOVE empty paragraphs from posts and content... so I'm a little bit shocked at the sheer irony of that!! Still can't believe it.
Thanks for listening to another one of my feedback topics anyway - but this is a non-issue now!

It's really weird. I can't reproduce it on any of my boards (online and local) with these settings mixed up:

Ive created a ticket on this one for you

Thank you for coming back to share 🙂

Thanks Charles. I just checked this out and I'm very impressed with the offering. I do appreciate the hard work you guys have all done at IPS to repackage this in a way that's enticing for admins like me that want to have it all 😆 I may wait until the new year to jump in on this (funnily enough my loyalty gets me a couple extra months on my plan, but if I jump in now it will push my renewal back to December which... isn't a convenient month for renewal fees! 😅 The offer is almost too good for now in that case, haha!).
I know some of us clients like to whine about this and that sometimes... but the truth is I'm very happy as a long-term IPS customer, and when I get even a flitter of a 'grass is greener' thought in moving to another platform (other forums in the same content vertical as me go for a competing software) I just think about the things I plan to do for my community/site and realise that nothing really touches IPS honestly. Especially in the comms department - people may grumble that this topic or that topic doesn't get replied to, but you guys respond when it matters (tech issues etc) so I wanted to just show my appreciation for that too while I'm here. Thanks for all the hard work!
As @CheersnGears said, I also don't believe that having "just a forum" cuts it anymore if you want to be serious about managing a community/site (although I've nothing against anyone who just wants to run a forum solo), so having all of the apps at your fingertips is the best approach for both clients and IPS (in terms of development I imagine). I know I've had great success in migrating my old Wordpress site content into Pages/CMS, and have lots of ideas of how to use Gallery and maybe even Blogs...
I hope that this new "all apps" structure for Classic allows IPS to spend as much time revamping and enhancing each app as equally as each other... either way, I'm looking forward to jumping in at the right time for me and taking advantage of the offer. Many thanks again!

Thanks Charles. I just checked this out and I'm very impressed with the offering. I do appreciate the hard work you guys have all done at IPS to repackage this in a way that's enticing for admins like me that want to have it all 😆 I may wait until the new year to jump in on this (funnily enough my loyalty gets me a couple extra months on my plan, but if I jump in now it will push my renewal back to December which... isn't a convenient month for renewal fees! 😅 The offer is almost too good for now in that case, haha!).
I know some of us clients like to whine about this and that sometimes... but the truth is I'm very happy as a long-term IPS customer, and when I get even a flitter of a 'grass is greener' thought in moving to another platform (other forums in the same content vertical as me go for a competing software) I just think about the things I plan to do for my community/site and realise that nothing really touches IPS honestly. Especially in the comms department - people may grumble that this topic or that topic doesn't get replied to, but you guys respond when it matters (tech issues etc) so I wanted to just show my appreciation for that too while I'm here. Thanks for all the hard work!
As @CheersnGears said, I also don't believe that having "just a forum" cuts it anymore if you want to be serious about managing a community/site (although I've nothing against anyone who just wants to run a forum solo), so having all of the apps at your fingertips is the best approach for both clients and IPS (in terms of development I imagine). I know I've had great success in migrating my old Wordpress site content into Pages/CMS, and have lots of ideas of how to use Gallery and maybe even Blogs...
I hope that this new "all apps" structure for Classic allows IPS to spend as much time revamping and enhancing each app as equally as each other... either way, I'm looking forward to jumping in at the right time for me and taking advantage of the offer. Many thanks again!

Thanks Charles. I just checked this out and I'm very impressed with the offering. I do appreciate the hard work you guys have all done at IPS to repackage this in a way that's enticing for admins like me that want to have it all 😆 I may wait until the new year to jump in on this (funnily enough my loyalty gets me a couple extra months on my plan, but if I jump in now it will push my renewal back to December which... isn't a convenient month for renewal fees! 😅 The offer is almost too good for now in that case, haha!).
I know some of us clients like to whine about this and that sometimes... but the truth is I'm very happy as a long-term IPS customer, and when I get even a flitter of a 'grass is greener' thought in moving to another platform (other forums in the same content vertical as me go for a competing software) I just think about the things I plan to do for my community/site and realise that nothing really touches IPS honestly. Especially in the comms department - people may grumble that this topic or that topic doesn't get replied to, but you guys respond when it matters (tech issues etc) so I wanted to just show my appreciation for that too while I'm here. Thanks for all the hard work!
As @CheersnGears said, I also don't believe that having "just a forum" cuts it anymore if you want to be serious about managing a community/site (although I've nothing against anyone who just wants to run a forum solo), so having all of the apps at your fingertips is the best approach for both clients and IPS (in terms of development I imagine). I know I've had great success in migrating my old Wordpress site content into Pages/CMS, and have lots of ideas of how to use Gallery and maybe even Blogs...
I hope that this new "all apps" structure for Classic allows IPS to spend as much time revamping and enhancing each app as equally as each other... either way, I'm looking forward to jumping in at the right time for me and taking advantage of the offer. Many thanks again!

Honestly, the process was fantastic, and the discussions were numerous. While IPS does want the CIC product to be their primary product, they see the value in being the best self-hosted product on the market as well.
But as they've said for a while, the self-hosted market is changing.  Sites that are "just forums" are not likely to survive long going forward, which is a position I've held for years back when I added IP.Content/Pages as the article management system on my site.  As such, it doesn't make sense to keep the apps as individual products anymore and instead sell the suite as a whole.  It allows IPS to integrate the apps even tighter. 
In my view, site owners who run "just a forum" need to sit back and reflect on where the world is today and if such a site makes sense to continue self-host, or just migrate it to Reddit instead. If you are a "just forums" site owner, I would encourage you to look at this change as a chance to grow in new ways with the new apps that you didn't have access to before.  The only limit is your imagination.
IPS published several drafts of the upgrade language to us in the group and we all took turns making suggestions and modifying the language.  While IPS certainly set the guidelines, it was a very collaborative effort between IPS and those of us in the customer focus group. I think every person in the focus group submitted a modification suggestion to IPS and IPS was very receptive towards them. 
With regard to how the licensing changes work, especially regarding renewals, it's clear that in order to make sure the self-hosted product is a viable, ongoing product, people who use the software need to chip in. The pool of self-hosted customers has shrunk dramatically over the last years. Making the renewals and catch up fees mandatory was the only way to do that in a fair manner but IPS counters that with lower renewal fees for any site with 2 or more apps.
My relationship with IPS over the last 20-ish years has been strained from time to time, but I have to say that this has been a fantastic experience for me personally.

I can see how you might look at it that way in terms of saving money. But we spent a lot of time, resources, and money in development of those 3 years of features and other clients have an expectation from us.
The only way to make self-hosted viable for the future is to ensure people are paying for the effort put into developing it. Otherwise we really should just get rid of it. If you are not willing to do that, there are cheap or low cost alternatives out there but you don't get the owners of the company replying to you and you most certainly do not get monthly updates and constant improvements. Look at literally any other community platform and you will see many are at worst dead and at best barely supported.
It is also very, very common. I'm not sure where you have been living in 30+ years of the software world. It's very normal for software to require a subscription fee or to require a re-purchase at major versions. I get emails all the time from software I own that says "new version pay up!"
We are not requiring people to re-purchase for v5 as other platforms would. The "catch up" renewals only apply to the monthly option as it is basically a finance version of the annual fee. You may wish to review the new terms in the client area as you seem incorrect here.
We are growing and, if you are actually serious about your community, a few more dollars a year to get a platform that is actually alive must be worth it. If having something that is actively developed is not worth it to you, then your community will probably suffer with another platform.
But, as has been said a lot already in this topic, you don't have to do anything. You can stick right where you are on your current terms.
 
TL;DR: We are committed to our clients using Classic, self-hosted who are committed to their communities being a success. It is a joint venture.
 
And to your examples:
1. Insurance companies actually do charge you more if you have a huge gap in coverage. They see you as a greater risk. Same idea here.
2. Microsoft does not do upgrade fees they just make you buy the new version outright. If you would prefer that, I would be HAPPY to do that as it would make our software cost way more.

First couple of lines:

Anyway...yes, it provides you with the ability to
 

@Dreadknux and @Miss_B If you click the "switch" button in the client area on your license, it will show you a lot of information on your options. It does not actually switch you over until you approve it.

The AdminCP setting to "Automatically embed links" applies to every platform that is supported, and while I want to be able to allow embedding of YouTube videos etc I want to DISABLE Twitter links specifically. There appears to be no sub-setting to choose which platforms you can allow embedding on - it would be good to have support for this.
There are multiple reasons I want to disable Twitter specifically:
Embedded tweets take ages to appear on page load, making for a crummy UX for my users Distracts from community content, which is not helpful when Twitter etc are platforms that forums constantly have to compete with for attention - if people really want to see what a tweet says, they should just click the link Twitter going the way of the dodo generally and I really don't want to support it In a perfect world, would be good to have a sub-setting in AdminCP where we can pick and choose which links automatically embed and which ones we can disable... but in the short-term there should just be a mod/hack to allow disabling of Twitter embeds and auto-embedding of everything else. 🙂 

The AdminCP setting to "Automatically embed links" applies to every platform that is supported, and while I want to be able to allow embedding of YouTube videos etc I want to DISABLE Twitter links specifically. There appears to be no sub-setting to choose which platforms you can allow embedding on - it would be good to have support for this.
There are multiple reasons I want to disable Twitter specifically:
Embedded tweets take ages to appear on page load, making for a crummy UX for my users Distracts from community content, which is not helpful when Twitter etc are platforms that forums constantly have to compete with for attention - if people really want to see what a tweet says, they should just click the link Twitter going the way of the dodo generally and I really don't want to support it In a perfect world, would be good to have a sub-setting in AdminCP where we can pick and choose which links automatically embed and which ones we can disable... but in the short-term there should just be a mod/hack to allow disabling of Twitter embeds and auto-embedding of everything else. 🙂 

The Record Image field in a Pages database provides the correct og image for external linking.
Just make sure the field is enabled in your Database (AdminCP > Pages > Your Database > Fields and then the ‘Record Image’ field under “Publish Fields”). Then, for each Page record, you just select Edit, find the image field, upload up it desired image to the field and then save. 🙂

It's hard to give dates, but we have a fairly aggressive timeline to meet and we're on track. I would say we should be in a position to showcase Invision Community 5 in some way during Q4 this year.
I hope this doesn't become a "coming weeks" moment for me. 😅

Well I’m glad not EVERY useful feature is being deprecated! Just “semi-dead” 😅.
Seriously though, I am excited about the thinking behind “smarter” solutions surrounding this - I’m definitely not  against change (I got over Status Updates already, honest!), as long as I can get behind the general vision.
For me, part of the appeal in migrating all of my separate silo sites into IPS was in exploring ways the different apps could communicate with each other by virtue of being on a single platform (being able to reference related forum topics in a wiki Page database record, or connecting an Event to a Gallery). I don’t necessarily feel like this is ‘old news’ or ‘end of journey’ / ‘looking back’ stuff - on the contrary, I think the inter-connection of apps is an exciting future-thinking concept for IPS with currently massively untapped potential. But I can definitely wait for something like this to be explored later throughout v5’s life.
So just to be clear, I am definitely excited about what new and future things v5 would bring… but at the same time I think it would be a step back to regress the apps to siloed experiences. What would then be the benefit for customers to add Pages, Gallery, Commerce etc to their community suites if they each just acted like separate websites? If it’s just about having a shared member base across the apps, you may as well just set up a SSO for a bunch of different apps hodge-podged together (and I don’t like that idea, it’s very inelegant).
The topics/pages thing, in particular, was all about tackling content redundancy and making sure that new Pages articles can leverage existing forum discussion to prevent the site looking inactive/dead. As long as the smart solutions-thinking down the road addresses this in some way, I’m on board.
Granted, this is more a conceptual feedback now than a developmental one, but I figured I’d mention it now rather than regret not mentioning it all later when v5 is about to launch and we all find out it’s just a Rick Astley video on loop 😄

Yeah, happy to take a look. There's fewer opportunities for hooking and overloading in v5 so a lot of that likely won't work but I'm curious as to what you need and why.
What would you like to see? Email templates are like coding in Dreamweaver in 1998.
Design is definitely mobile first and @Ehren has already implemented scrolling tabs over drop downs.
App integration, specifically pages records and topics - I see this as a semi-dead feature in that I don't want to invest a lot of time into it (but it remains in v5 and no deprecation plans). I'd rather find a smarter solution to the problem it solved 10 years ago. Other stuff is fine but we want 5.0.0 to be the start of a new journey and not just the end of one, so expect a lot of change over the 5.0 lifetime. We want to do the major things and then ship so customers aren't waiting 2-3 years between versions.

A blog on theme stuff is coming but we've got a few things to finish first.

Design
I echo the comments regarding general end-user design and navigation/travel. I like the idea that V5 will be 'mobile first' as V4 is a little bit unwieldy. In particular, browsing a member's profile page is an absolute nightmare on mobile and I think design cues from social media platforms (or sites like Deviantart's user profiles) would be a good source of inspiration in terms of a do-over so everything flows better.
Tabs also need to be designed better for mobile - no more dropdown menus, make it sleek and more like a scrolling mobile navbar instead. 🙂 
App Integration
Broadly speaking, and at risk of sounding like a broken record, a better integration and cohesion of apps (on the end-user side, not necessarily the dev side) would be most welcome. I've already raised a few ideas, at the (much higher) risk of being annoying about it! 😄 
Theme Development
As someone who isn't necessarily a coder but likes to play around with theme templates, it would be fantastic if V5 had a fully-fleshed out documentation this time around. I'm talking about a complete encyclopedia/wiki of every kind of IPS code that can be used/referenced in templates, what they do, and all of the possible variables that can be used.
For example, I had to spend an unreasonable amount of time to trial and error myself, without much in the way of online documentation, the below code to tell IPS to simply display a record image in an Activity Stream entry if one existed and the entry happened to be a Pages Database entry. I was lucky I figured that out, but in other areas, trying to do things myself has not been so successful.
{{if $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_1' || $indexData['index_class']::$title == 'content_record_comments_title_4'}} {{if $itemData['record_image']}} <img src="{file="$itemData['record_image']" extension="cms_Records"}"> {{endif}} {{endif}} I know documenting all the possible little things is really long and laborious work, but it could help unlock the potential of so many more amazing communities if theme designers knew of absolutely all of the tools they have at their disposal.
That's all I have in my head right now, but generally speaking I'm excited for what you guys have planned and can't wait to learn more.
Yeah agreed, an option where you can just upload an image directly to a topic (rather than having to rely on anything already existing in a topic post) would be ideal. Something that works a bit like a 'Record Image' does in Pages, only for Forum Topics. You could even template it and have it set as a 'header image/background' for a topic?