Rikki

They are on our radar but aren't particularly viable right now. We still need to allow for CSS editing via the AdminCP, and so we would need to compile LESS or SCSS on the server. While some libraries appear to be available to do that, integrating them and updating our own CSS is simply too big of a change for a point release.
Depending on the scope of our next major version, it may be something we're able to contemplate then 🙂 

They are on our radar but aren't particularly viable right now. We still need to allow for CSS editing via the AdminCP, and so we would need to compile LESS or SCSS on the server. While some libraries appear to be available to do that, integrating them and updating our own CSS is simply too big of a change for a point release.
Depending on the scope of our next major version, it may be something we're able to contemplate then 🙂 

Yeah, other widgets will be below the new info panel. That was one reason we added an option to show a slimmer horizontal bar under the first post instead.

In the horizontal slim mode, the ad displays above the summary box. In sidebar mode, the ad will under the summary box but above any other widgets.
Note this is all easily themeable though, you can move the includes around if something else would work better for your site.

Yeah, other widgets will be below the new info panel. That was one reason we added an option to show a slimmer horizontal bar under the first post instead.

An insider just told me we may be able to include a setting to control how many are shown 🎉

An insider just told me we may be able to include a setting to control how many are shown 🎉

In the horizontal slim mode, the ad displays above the summary box. In sidebar mode, the ad will under the summary box but above any other widgets.
Note this is all easily themeable though, you can move the includes around if something else would work better for your site.

Yeah, other widgets will be below the new info panel. That was one reason we added an option to show a slimmer horizontal bar under the first post instead.

In the horizontal slim mode, the ad displays above the summary box. In sidebar mode, the ad will under the summary box but above any other widgets.
Note this is all easily themeable though, you can move the includes around if something else would work better for your site.

An insider just told me we may be able to include a setting to control how many are shown 🎉

An insider just told me we may be able to include a setting to control how many are shown 🎉

Top post is already included, but you can toggle each of those sections on/off to suit your community 🙂 

An insider just told me we may be able to include a setting to control how many are shown 🎉

An insider just told me we may be able to include a setting to control how many are shown 🎉

An insider just told me we may be able to include a setting to control how many are shown 🎉

Top post is already included, but you can toggle each of those sections on/off to suit your community 🙂 

It'll only allow one solution per topic.

I also suggest looking into local coworking spaces. It can give you the option of working out of the house but without the drawbacks of public areas like coffee shops etc. Everyone else is in 'work mode' too which I find helps my state of mind immensely.

I joined in May 2011 and purchased the software for use with a gaming community. Since then it's also been used for a photography community, horse rescue charity and, currently, an astronomy community.
I've never, not once, considered leaving for a competitor. The software and support has been top-notch throughout.
P.S. Please do tell about @Lindy being locked out of his own data centre...

My personal recommendation is use a password manager, preferably one that stores the encrypted passwords on your own storage (e.g. your own cloud account) rather than a central server. That way you can generate extremely good passwords and maintain a different one for every site without any hassle.

Just to note, we decided to go ahead and support lazy loading for external embeds like YouTube too for 4.4. Most embeds (Facebook, Twitter etc.) already lazy loaded because they routed through a local URL, but external embeds will also lazy load now. You're welcome, @Mr 13 🙂 

@Mr 13 We've actually optimized all images in the suite too; the default coverphoto image is now ~280KB. Also, cover photos across the suite are indeed lazy loaded too.
@Joel R Yes there's a background task that will clean up the existing letter photos.
For developers, I wanted to add that our lazy loading utility is very flexible, so you can actually use it to lazy load whatever you want, and pretty finely control what happens (with preload, load and post-load callbacks). We hook into IntersectionObserver which is a new(ish) API in browsers that make it super efficient to check when an element comes into view. Of course, our regular content controllers already handle lazy loading images and videos in UGC for you, but if your apps have other areas where it'd be useful, you can do that quite easily 🙂 

Facts!!
Thank you for this Joel.
 
One of our "Rookie Mistakes" back in 2017 was that we tried to have every single app and plugin that the marketplace offered, then try to "cram" it all into One place, not creating "doors" that led into other places to find "More"
Also we were changing Themes way to much and too often
 
Now, we have staff meetings every week, we have each staff member familiar with IPS and it's Powerful Core Features, then they are always going thru the marketplace to research key apps and plugins to make sure they are needed, not needed, and pro's vs con's of having them

My culture is academic and scholarly, so I've never had a problem with the concept of "forums"...especially since the discussions we have (when you can get academics together on a website long enough 🙄) could never be seriously carried on in Facebook groups or anything of the kind.
Likewise for teaching and tutoring academic writing, critical thinking and English - the ways in which forums allow you to excerpt ("quote") and analyse specific parts of an argument or debate win the day as far as collaboration goes.  Forums are key to creating meaningful exchanges which can be revisited and amplified by students and educators alike - especially when more recent functionality allows them to be appended to other content such as Articles.  Not one of my students or other clients has ever had a problem with "forums."