AtariAge

Just a followup to this -- Invision disassociated the two apps for me, so I was able to install Community Map and import the data from Member Map.  Turns out I purchased this last September but was never able to use it since I was still running 4.4.x. 
Everything looks great, and thank you for your assistance!

I updated the subscription text and removed that silly table.  Looks much better now, thank you again.

Take care,
 ..Al

Thank you, Ehren, I just copied that text from the previous product page, and it didn't even dawn on me that there was a fixed-width table (and of course there is, looking at it).  I apologize for my earlier comment.
 ..Al

It will not change that a user can only have one subscription at a time but will improve the experience for up/downgrading a subscription during that expired process.

Seeing the same message (or messages) every day even though I dismissed the same message the previous day is supremely annoying.  Unfortunately, it's not always easy to just upgrade your forum when such a message appears.  Smaller forums, sure, but when you have a large forum with a custom theme (as well as third-party themes) and various third-party plugins and applications (many of which were custom jobs written for your forum), it's non-trivial to just update your forum on a whim, especially with major revisions of the software.  I know I need to upgrade the forum, I don't need to be reminded every single time I visit my forum or ACP.

Discord has its place.
It's a great tool if you're just starting a community and want to see if there's a need, or you want a semi-asynchronous chat that focuses on a 24-48 hour time window.

However, we have a mature support community so it's less useful. We want to encourage thoughtful posts that have a life beyond a few days. We want others to find these topics from search engines and we want to build a crowdsourced knowledgeable for Invision Community.
If we were to create an official Discord, it would create a brain drain and instead of us being able to look back and look at feature request trends, or customers being able to search for answers to their questions we have a 'here and now' relatively informal chat room.

I am also someone who attempts to search before starting a new topic, but unfortunately the search here is not very good.  It would be immensely helpful if you defaulted to AND'ing search terms, but even then I often have to use google's "site:invisioncommunity.com" feature to find relevant topics here.

Seeing the same message (or messages) every day even though I dismissed the same message the previous day is supremely annoying.  Unfortunately, it's not always easy to just upgrade your forum when such a message appears.  Smaller forums, sure, but when you have a large forum with a custom theme (as well as third-party themes) and various third-party plugins and applications (many of which were custom jobs written for your forum), it's non-trivial to just update your forum on a whim, especially with major revisions of the software.  I know I need to upgrade the forum, I don't need to be reminded every single time I visit my forum or ACP.

There is no way in which to change the caching for this block independently. I have moved this ticket over to our suggestion forum, so it can be considered.

Thanks, I must have updated this when I upgraded to 4.4.x about two years ago. 😄

I am also someone who attempts to search before starting a new topic, but unfortunately the search here is not very good.  It would be immensely helpful if you defaulted to AND'ing search terms, but even then I often have to use google's "site:invisioncommunity.com" feature to find relevant topics here.

Some random observations:
This thread is a perfect case study of the necessity of forums (you could never have this conversation on social media like Facebook) I don't know if there's a third-party plugin for this, but how about a "thread bookmark" function?  I just spent a fair bit of time re-reading posts only to later come across my own, which means I had already read much of that material yesterday. 😄 What if one could bookmark a specific response (I'm a fan of drag-and-drop, but keep it simple I guess) so that with lengthy debates/discussions like this one could jump straight to where one left off reading previously? I'm neither a developer nor an Invision employee, but I see this thread as a massive opportunity for a meeting of the minds re: productive change.  Crisis as opportunity kinda thing.  

@Matt
In my opinion, you should work more on your site's search engine and improve your search capabilities and priorities. In this case, finding solutions to problems is done much faster. A professional search engine!

I have been a big fan of IPB all growing up, I was an admin on many forums using it in the past, and when I was younger and wanted my own sites (without being able to afford enterprise software), I even opted for InvisionFree.  With that being said, when my community moved away from MyBB in 2019, Invision Community was the obvious choice for me; we're entirely ran on donations, but I was willing to save up and pay for the price out of pocket because I was looking forward to an enterprise solution.
I talked up Invision Community on my forums, and while we were a bit bitter over losing BBCode (we're still dealing with posts with formatting issues in my community after all this time), we sucked up and made the migration (which unfortunately didn't go smoothly due to a bug with the MyBB conversion system, but a support ticket pulled through!).
I'm not upset about the price increase, though I think it could have been dealt with better tact (read on), but I'm pretty upset about the loss of opening support tickets.  Most of my tickets that I opened were legitimate bugs that had to be escalated to the devs, and some of them involved bugs that could have been security issues (e.g. seeing topics and posts in feeds under specific circumstances that were meant for only staff).  One of my biggest talking points to the community, and one of the biggest brags that I've done post IC was "The benefit of enterprise level software is enterprise level support!"  I could tell my community when something went wrong "I opened a ticket".  I can't do that now, and raising the price while removing that feels less premium.  Less enterprise level support.
Regarding Devs....  I'm presently terrified that this is going to lose people like @Adriano Faria.  @Matt I hope you're listening, because Andriano Faria is the reason we choose Invision Community.  Due to some specific nature of my community, being able to post between multiple accounts was vital, and without their Linked Accounts plugin, we would not have chosen this platform.  If it breaks, we won't be able to continue using it, as it was one of two mandatory requirements for a community platform (even Youtube allows me to switch between pre-selected linked accounts from a user interface, many people support this out of the box):
 
 I would pay for this 20 times over if it stayed (just not all at once!)
@Matt, earlier you listed a fair bit of features that were pushed in the last couple years; however, there's so many missing features that should be de-facto (and they are in other free solutions, e.g. MyBB, SMF, etc.) but have either been removed or haven't been included and require a plugin and some of these plugins are holding the software up.  People have been asking for night mode since 2019 for the main site (ACP is appreciated but only admins can see that), profile-specific permissions prevent 1-post spambots from joining and putting things in the website field (again, we needed Adriano Faria's plugin), searching reported content is pretty important for larger communities (plugin), bookmarks (plugin...still can't use it in the latest version), post number in thread ( @All Astronauts's Kitchen Sink took up that mantle when Tom Irons' left).  You cannot lose any more of these individuals; hire them to implement these things into the main suite if you have too, because it feels like these common sense features are simply not there when they should be.
As for the marketplace, it has burned me a couple times now, specifically with themes.  After upgrading my site's main third party, purchased, theme (which I only needed because Invision Community doesn't support dark theme natively), I shortly realized that there was a critical bug in it.  The author was prompt in giving me an updated xml with the fix, but since I already had linked the theme to Invision Community, I couldn't just upload the XML, and waiting for the theme to be approved was not immediate; my only choice was to create a brand new theme from that XML, which sucked because the theme in question was heavily customized 😞
The second time is still ongoing, since y'all rejected @Fosters' recent bookmark update (I understand that you're aiming for quality control here, but from what I've heard it can take weeks for the plugin to be in review).
As for as how this all could have been handled, it's unreasonable to never increase the price for existing users, and only introduce it for those coming.  However, it is also unreasonable to drop it on us with no prior report.  I remember when Flickr changed their pricing structure, and while it got some pushback, they not only provided a warning, but also allowed current customers to prepay another 1-3 years at the current rate before they did.  The result?  I bought 3 years worth at the old rate, and I think a lot of people did.
I think a better approach to this would be to give existing customers an additional year of the old pricing (or even just 2 more billing cycles), while bringing new ones in, but in this case even the controversial way that Flickr handled their increase I feel was more graceful than Invision Community's.
As others have said, there's still time to make this right; find a way to remedy this to show the community that you're still acting in good faith.  Let us open tickets if something is broken, but perhaps still allow "how do I do xyz" to be topics.
And please, I don't want to tell my members that we need to switch to yet another platform after arguing for this software for the past 2 years because you pushed away the developers... find a way to lesson the blow to them, or just hire them outright so they can bring these much-needed features to Invision Community (see above).
 
P.S. Also please don't make this software become another Discourse-like platform, another reason I love IPB is because it's always had the forums feel; I don't want to lose the bulletin board look.

I think the main reason is that the search facility is crap. When they dropped specific forums per app, it made finding solutions to say Pages very difficult.
This is another reason I've said for years there should be a FAQ and Knowledgebase.
Lately I've been using and learning about the REST API lately to import Invision Gallery into Wordpress Media Library and the documentation examples are almost nonexistent. I got it working by a mix of consulting Stackoverflow and the Wordpress docs, where users post some handy tips and code snippets.
PS. Kudos to Matt for weathering the storm blowback today. He must need a cold beer this evening. And whatever happened to that Lindy chap? 

I am also someone who attempts to search before starting a new topic, but unfortunately the search here is not very good.  It would be immensely helpful if you defaulted to AND'ing search terms, but even then I often have to use google's "site:invisioncommunity.com" feature to find relevant topics here.

As Ballmer would say:

It is one of the reason several of your competitors were not options for us, they are so so valuable to a platform even if a customer doesnt buy an addon, its the perception that they can and there is a diverse ecosystem of addons as options.
Nearly all big platforms over the last decade have been powered by very strong developers adding value. iOS, Android, forum competitors all have got where they are because of developers. Windows Phone died because of the lack of developers. Keeping them onboard and happy is a huge deal, it wont necessarily affect huge enterprise customers but it has a big effect on your long tail customers.

I dont think devs need a free license as such, they should pay the initial fee for the licenses but I do think you can work some magic for renewals.
I know you wont be able to move fast on this as it will require thought but I did suggest a few approaches earlier in this thread.
You could get dev's apply for reduced renewals based on the agreement the install wont be used to run a non-related purpose. They can have a public site but its for marketing/demo the addons, testing and direct support, that would mean even though they are selling lots of addons its adding value to your platform and allowing them to continue.
In addition (or as a different approach) to this you could tier the commission for sales, they get a big discount on renewals but they have a higher tier of sales commissions for addons sold. Then if they hit a certain sales point they can pony up full renewal but reduce the commission they are charged by yourselves. This approach would allow people who make a lot of free addons to continue and feel hopefully more valued and it would make the whole product stronger.
I dont expect a big in depth reply to this, I am more throwing suggestions to you so that it can be discussed behind the scenes as losing developers is one of the huge concerns I have and is a major issue for us. Its very conerning when some of the best devs on here have voiced concerns and also said they will be removing ipb addons from their package removing the ability for them to develop and expand those addons.
I am considering releasing a few addons I have made privately but they would be free and our license would be used for a full separate site so I would not be eligible for the discount above which I would have no issue with.
Man this is sad to read, I love your work and to see you doing math about its future.
IPB try harder to help developers, they may not be your bread and butter with commission profits but they are so so important to the platform. They should get a very generous discount to continue to make addons
 
Also I still think you could have done the price increase, kept everyone's next period 6 months (aka yearly switch happens 7 months from this date, 7 months to allow people to find out) and kept email support while steering people to the forum more. The price increase + losing direct email support is a big deal.

We would certainly accept this pricing policy (at least personally) if and only if our requests were taken into account regarding Ipboard.
Starting with the most important one, the page loading speed and a mobile friendly version.
Compare IPB to any other forum system, you will understand, the pages load much too slowly and this problem has been raised many times.

You should know after so many years in this business that people DO NOT search. You will have repeated topics with same matters in same day/week.  People don’t like to waste time checking a huge list of topics.

Three of the most active third party devs have been active on this very discussion. At least two of them clearly stating this would impact their future projects.
Honestly, how many active devs is there ? what would-it cost to give free licenses to developper having more than xx downloads/intalls of their apps/themes/plugins ?

Let’s just not forget that it can (and it will) get worse for devs:  the increase of IPS comission from 10% to 20% per sale and the weekly payment to monthly payment!
I understand that this is an “internal” issue but these two will certainly be the the latest straw to me.

These news are nonsense. From what they are to the way they are being communicated.
"It's not bad news" - yeah, that's right. It's not bad news, it's terrible news. You can't call a 50% price increase "modest" while removing e-mail support and pricing it 1250$ annually. 
By doing that you effectively cut hobby sites like mine. Paying 215$ for software that isn't making money in a country where median salary is 400$ is not a good idea at all.
But what's even worse is that you lack honesty in this. Instead of communicating this like "guys, there's a huge change in our business model, we now want medium and large businesses as our clients" you say something about "modest" price increasing and "strong community" that will help with bugs how? Why would I want to pay 215$ annually for not being able to deal with bugs at all? And I've found many before, which I was able to resolve thanks to your now gone support.

I won't be supporting this.

I am not sure where to start with all this. I cant believe you guys did all this along with a site redesign at the same time and no notice period, I am speechless!
I cant believe I will be losing email support while you increase the price at the same time. I paid for priority support and now that's an insane price per year for what is email support. It takes serious cahoonas to both increase the price and cripple email support at the same time. Email support pricing should be far far more reasonable, I honestly thought $1250 was a mistake when I saw the screenshot above, I could understand having an email support pricing tier and then a $1250 priority support tier but also renewals shouldnt be going up while we lose proper email support.
Then if we dont pay for support we cant use the market place and cant even save our prior purchases so if we need to reinstall an addon we are out of luck.
We are lucky, we can afford the support increase price wise but one of the HUGE reasons I liked IPB was the email support, it can be very curt at times but I valued it and if you had only increased the price and not removed email support I would have dealt with it as it has been a decade.
I am strongly considering renewing our Xenforo license to have a play and test viability after this.
Initial feedback:
Build the knowledge base publicly first before removing support
I understand the desire to have self support with a knowledge base, its a good thing for everyone if it gets populated but you should have been doing this months ago building the knowledge base publicly before doing any changes, that way you can point to the option and say its there and useful. Get a common ticket theme in, create a KB article then have the subject field for support request do a search as you type pointing you to articles that sounds similar before submitting the email request.
We need a reported/acknowledged bugs area
This needs to be along with the knowledge base really, a bug tracker would have cut your support requests because people would be able to see if it has been reported before, I know the support forum kinda does that but its not a bug tracker and its not clear if its an active bug with a fix pending or release or even workaround.
When I hit an issue on other software I always check to see if it has been reported first on bug trackers but because of the strange mantra of open a ticket you guys have we are blind to upcoming fixes usually until release, Jordon has at least been mentioning them but its still not a proper solution.
Both things above should have been done before these policy changes with support
That way your customers would have become familiar with them and you could have iterated through any issues with them before removing email support and you could actually see if this type of support works well before causing big issues for your customers, it seems so rushed.
You guys made the whole "tickets are similar" problem yourselves with the submit a ticket mantra that is here, you should have been correcting that before making sweeping changes to support. You have entered self support mantra with none of the real tools used by others to help aid people do this. You may have plans for these tools but you literally have not shown them to us which is crazy if they exist. Right now we have a sole forum for support, I have no idea why you have rushed this through.
I have more to say but I thought I would shoot out first.
Please get the knowledge base live and a bug tracker live asap to at least help and to be honest delay the email support changes past the renewal/January deadline until this mess is sorted and people are comfortable, this should be a much much slower transition.
 
Also contributors/devs need a discount/special license to prevent the massive bleed that will happen.
Its crazy you dont have a way of reducing their burden and its a major issue to the viability of the market place and IPB. Their are fewer addons here than other competitors and it will only get worse with dev's having to pay large amounts to renew AND customers of devs having to pay to even buy their addons or even install them. This is crazy crazy crazy and so hostile to developers. Its one of the main reasons no one wants a certain v5 of software out there, regularly people complain about the lack of addons.
You could get them to apply with the proviso the license isnt used to sell addons not on the marketplace and not run a full site on. Aka they can have a public site showcasing with the options etc and even getting support there but it cant be a way for a serious site that has nothing to do with the developer to get a cheap license. Hell they could apply after they have published an addon and the large discount applies to the renewals side of it.
I am really disappointed some of the best developers here are now looking at possibly removing addons to reduce their burden rather than developing for those addons and being able to test on those addons, its so opposite and harmful because of the increased costs.
 
And there was me thinking things had improved a lot when @Jordan Miller with communications and community activity, I actually could see things improving a lot with better engagement with end customers then this whole chaos happens.

I agree and when looking at different platforms for whatever, I always look at third party apps and integrations for expansion. A healthy 3rd party marketplace tells a story of a healthy platform in my opinion.