Joy Rex

Against 1M records? IPS should give you a free license for massively optimizing their script!
I see what you mean - so how they've changed the upgrade/install process has made it more difficult for users like yourself with the knowledge and understanding to be able to tinker under the hood so to speak - well, you can't say they didn't deliver the Apple Experience™ you were wanting!
Hopefully IPS' support can help you out, especially when it seems you've done most of the heavy lifting for them.

You've never done software development, have you?
I cannot think of the hundreds, nay, thousands of hours IPS must have put into 4.5 - all the testing, planning, trying to make things as smooth as possible for their customers to upgrade their sites, etc.
If the connection between the host and client is terminated, there's usually no way to tell the host process "hang on, something's wrong" and stop whatever processes are running, and record a stopping point (can you imagine if it was inside a query - I suppose a rollback is possible, but again, a lot of overhead for something that isn't likely going to occur).
The absolute safest way is to run the upgrade via a RDP or similar process, so that way if the client connection is cut, the VM running the upgrade can continue uninterrupted (because presumably the host machine is on a solid connection with redundancies for power, etc.).
This was unfortunately a case of bad luck on @Paul E. part, but I take exception blaming or insinuating that IPS is somehow "not determined enough".

Any application with issue tracking would do. You can look at things like Atlassian Jira, Gitlab, Github, etc. We happen to use a suite developed by Facebook called phabricator.

Your theme may or may not need updates. I can't really give a blanket answer on that I'm afraid. If you used the "easy mode" then the theme should mostly work, however theme settings have changed here and there and new ones introduced, so you may want to tweak it.

For managed clients that I've worked on I've effectively done the same. We have a tracker that lists any custom applications and plugins, and further separates them by "marketplace" (or third party) resource vs a resource we've built in-house. For anything we've built in-house, we review the code and test locally. For third party resources, we check the marketplace to see if the resource is compatible with 4.5.
That's it in a nutshell. You can then decide if you have resources that aren't compatible if you're willing to forge ahead or if you need to wait for updates.

60 characters is crazy short for thread titles here, yes. If I were a new customer, I'd think that was out of the box, unchangeable behavior, and it would have been a hard pass. 
What we did was create an issue in our tracker for each dependency, find each dependency in the Marketplace or in our own repository, tested each resource, and linked back to the Marketplace entry.
We then performed test upgrades using a copy of our production environment and make sure that our results matched what Marketplace thought it did using our test license. It didn't, we reported those issues, and they've since been fixed by IPS. We do this in a way that we can repeat it quickly over and over again by utilizing virtualization.
This helps us know exactly what to expect when we "do it for real." You can see after completing marketplace onboarding and checking for updates what applications/plugins/themes/language packs have updates available, and see what happens if you turn on the ones that do not. Our beta testers play around and try to break things.
We then update our tracker and we know we're not ready to go until we've successfully completed the issues attached to the 4.5 upgrade milestone.

Squoosh is an image compression web app made by Google Chrome Labs. It allows you to dive into the advanced options provided by various image compressors.

Squoosh is open source. and it could be integrated into IPS.

Here is why it's important:

1. The image below was pasted directly into editor using CTRL+V, and it's size is 875 kb.

2. The image below was pasted into squoosh.app using CTRL+V, saved with default settings and then uploaded to the post. Its size is just 42kb (x20.8 times better).
*If IPS supported webp, then it could be just 32 kb, x27.4 times better.


My suggestion is to give us an ability to save pasted images in the most efficient format instead of PNG.

It's supported across 78.37% of all mobile web users and 81.29% of global desktops.

https://caniuse.com/#search=webp
Now supported by Edge 18, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari is experimenting with webp support.

I came across this neat article on how to have an SVG favicon that will honour a user's browser/OS light/dark mode using CSS: https://codyhouse.co/nuggets/svg-favicon-dark-mode
As you can see, modern browser support is pretty good: https://caniuse.com/#feat=link-icon-svg
I notice that one of the allowed file types for favicons isn't SVG - would that be something we can add in ourselves (it would be better if IPS officially supported it though)?

@RocketStang There is an addon that provides this:
 

The sites are being approved and are usable already. There is a search bar and a category overview to browse the communities. 

@Rikki The way that “Entertainment” is shown is such an evil OCD trigger. 
 
 

Found the issue - Joy Rex was right - it was that the domain wasn't registered with LiveChat.  Our MAIN domain is, but the specific subdomain wasn't.
 
Thanks Joy 

Is your forum domain registered to use LiveChat?

Don't you mean "customize my logo"?
Have you considered creating a logo that would work on any theme (e.g., a treatment of your logo that generally works against both light and dark themes)?
The biggest issue with what you're asking is lining up (presumably) HTML text with a graphic - maybe what they should do (or an addon creator) is create an editable area (using the CKEditor) for the logo, and that way people can use the controls in the editor to position their logo graphic (if they have one) and/or text of the site name (possibly as a variable so it changes as the site name changes).

As @Upgradeovec mentioned, libraries like FA are (relatively) massive and you're probably using 1-5% of FA's library for IPS. If you created an icon set with just the icons needed for IPS and nothing more, it would be drastically smaller.
And you wouldn't need an in-house designer; just contract with a designer on an as-needed basis to create the initial icons, and reach out as needed when more are required or a visual refresh is in order.
Hopefully FontAwesome will have as @Upgradeovec suggested a "custom build" so only the icons needed would be included to reduce the overall footprint of FA, then it could be configured to exactly each person's needs.

I think IPS should have its own SVG-based (or custom icon font) icon set for the default forum theme, and allow theme creators to specify their own or a library like FontAwesome (again, either SVG or icon font).

The biggest issue with using FA5 is which method to use - SVG+JS will render (in my opinion) cleaner icons than the other (older) method, which is using the webfont. One important thing to consider when using the SVG+JS method is performance - if you have dozens of icons on screen, the JS has to find all the <i> elements and replace them, and using ::before and ::after pseudo elements can degrade performance even further.

Nope - nobody asked for further information on how to add the button, so I didn't provide the steps. Easy...
In ACP, go to Customization -> (EDITOR) Toolbars
Click 'Add Button'
Go to the 'Custom' tab
Fill it out as you wish (track down an apple logo in PNG format, maybe?) but adhere to the following:
 - "Use option" - turn this on
 - In the HTML field, enter the following as the code
<iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *;" frameborder="0" height="150" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="{option}"></iframe> Save the button, and then move it on to your toolbar.
Then, click (EDITOR) Settings
Go to the Advanced tab
In 'Allowed iframe bases' and add *.apple.com, and then click Save
 
That should be it - then you test things out and you go from there, but keep in mind that the viewer of the content may need to do further work as they may have something in place that protects against X-frames usage.
 
Additionally - have you taken a look at this plugin, and enquired as to whether it can do what you are asking? (I don't know if it does - I don't know what the backend service is that is being used)
 

See my thread here: 
Hope it helps!

Those of you paying attention to the release notes for 4.5 will note that this was more or less knee-capped by IPS. 
On the plus side you guys are only out 6 bucks to me. On the minus side their implementation is bare-bones, annnnndddd.... I'm not entirely sure I can claw it back. I'll have to take a look deeper - I only checked to see what they were doing and not if I can hook around and patch in or what not.
Short version? They did what I did and truncate search/stream results before pushing out. However, they are now just taking the first 600 characters of the content item - period. For stream results that's a nothing-burger. Sure, my plugin lets you tweak the amount pushed before truncation but for stream results it was always the first characters of the 'thing' that you got.
Unfortunately, this is a big hitch for search results. If your search term hit in a result is beyond the first 600 character limit, the snippet in the search result will not have any search terms to highlight. If you get lucky and the search terms are in the first 600 characters you still get the highlight of course, but chances are and so forth and etc.
My plugin went out of the way to actually get the bit pushed out to at least hit on some of the search terms (simple search in the content item to match, then take x-amount before, x-amount after to get a decent amount of text, and then push it out).
There's still the stream description truncation bit and the gallery stream image count thingy - I'll check in awhile and see what's what with those - I imagine those are fine and if I can't patch the main junk I'll still clear the decks and get that stuff out for 4.5 minus the whole main thing this plugin does :(
Just giving you all a heads up. I'll take a look a little later on to see if I can get the search results page back up to snuff but it's not a priority at the moment given all the other junk I have to crawl through to get up to snuff for 4.5.
 
Sigh...

Twitter

Naturally, we try to consider anything that gains traction, however, this goes against the grain of every aspect of life. No where else that I'm aware of, other than "old school" forums, are those that have been subjected to disciplined paraded in front of the public with a naughty tag. I'm not aware of any social media platform that indicates a user has been banned or disciplined. Imagine getting a sticker placed on your car after getting a speeding ticket to let the world know you had your hand slapped. We are not likely to incorporate any feature that promotes public humiliation of members. 
As a tip for moderation - if content is being reported and you find it rises to the level of banning a user, the usual course of action would be to remove the offending content. You cited letting users know someone has been banned so they stop replying, but removing the content would accomplish this as well. 
If you're insistent on this, please consider using a third party resource or custom user group is likely your best option. You are, however, likely going to receive a higher number of GDPR "right to be forgotten" requests if you start publicly shaming your members for moderation actions taken. 

One of the biggest reasons for switching from AWS S3 to Wasabi is that you can use Cloudflare. 
Even if you don't have a need for third party storage like Amazon S3 or an S3 compatible storage, you should be investigating Cloudflare anyways with your server admin.  

Well, there you go (if that's the case) - perhaps it's time to look to another icon library (Bootstrap's new icon library is starting to look pretty good), or perhaps this is a good opprotunity to branch out for IPS and offer their own icon library as a separate product and integrated with the IPS.
So... if that is the case, how are some of these skin designers offering FA5 in their skins?