Randy Calvert

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

My guess is you’re running into an issue with content security policies which prevents your site from being embedded into third party sites  
Search the admin CP for:
Allow community to be embedded in an iframe
You might need to change from the default X-Frames-Options which allows content to be linked from just your domain to a custom Content Security Policy. 

You can Google how to generate a custom CSP header that you can paste into that section when you choose the option. 

Just as a quick update to this, while you are now of course a customer, your experience with demo conversion has given us some ideas on how to make this conversion process easier for new customers going forward. So thank you for your feedback

Someone is assigned or is part of a specific member group.  (Such as a Contributors group, or Publisher group, etc.) Someone makes a purchase.  (Existing rules are for Subscriptions or recurring subscriptions.) Someone makes a donation. Add photo is already included... add "New Content Item Is Posted" and set "Its a Gallery Image".  (You could also do one for an album.)
I love specific date, as there are certain big events that have happened....  the day we converted to IPB, a day that we recovered from a large outage, etc.  Giving a "survivor" badge would be fun for members as of X date.  

The guide is still valid.  I'm guessing your problem is not being able to download the marketplace "S3 Compatible Downloads" plugin from the AdminCP.  That's because it has not been flagged for 4.6 yet even though it actually works.  
Just download it from:
Choose that you are installing version 4.4 which will let you download the file without being told to go through the AdminCP marketplace.  Once you have it downloaded, go to your AdminCP.  Install it by going to the Plugins section and choosing "Manual Installation".  
Outside of that, follow the guide as written.  

I've had a LOT of spam registrations from both China and Russia.  It got to the point where I finally used the Cloudflare WAF to deny traffic from those two countries.  

Force it to rebuild from the achievements settings area. 🙂 

Compatibility for the file is marked as 4.3 and 4.4. So if you’re running 4.5 or 4.6, it’s most likely excluded it as it’s not known to be compatible. 

Someone is assigned or is part of a specific member group.  (Such as a Contributors group, or Publisher group, etc.) Someone makes a purchase.  (Existing rules are for Subscriptions or recurring subscriptions.) Someone makes a donation. Add photo is already included... add "New Content Item Is Posted" and set "Its a Gallery Image".  (You could also do one for an album.)
I love specific date, as there are certain big events that have happened....  the day we converted to IPB, a day that we recovered from a large outage, etc.  Giving a "survivor" badge would be fun for members as of X date.  

Someone is assigned or is part of a specific member group.  (Such as a Contributors group, or Publisher group, etc.) Someone makes a purchase.  (Existing rules are for Subscriptions or recurring subscriptions.) Someone makes a donation. Add photo is already included... add "New Content Item Is Posted" and set "Its a Gallery Image".  (You could also do one for an album.)
I love specific date, as there are certain big events that have happened....  the day we converted to IPB, a day that we recovered from a large outage, etc.  Giving a "survivor" badge would be fun for members as of X date.  

I'm aware of this bug, I noticed it after submitting 4.6 compatible version.
Unfortunately marketplace doesn't support submitting new version while another version already in queue.
By the way I submitted new version that fixes this bug, hope IPS admin check it ASAP.

Hello,
I am interested in finding someone to help me develop a plugin that would allow for a image to be added to the gallery by URL.  I have a number of users who have images already hosted elsewhere and does not want to separately upload them.  The desired behavior would work similar to:
User clicks "Add Images" in Gallery, and picks where the image should be placed (category/album, etc). Under existing "Add Images" box that lets a user upload an image would be a box to let a user enter an image URL. Once the image URL is submitted, the plugin would download the image from the remote host and add it to the gallery as if the user uploaded it.  (It should pick up the normal IPB workflow once an image is uploaded where a user can assign tags, comments, etc.)

You can do this outside of IPB through the use of robots.txt.  
Some examples of robots.txt blocking bots can be found at:
https://www.inmotionhosting.com/support/website/how-to-stop-search-engines-from-crawling-your-website/
 

Invision Community represents what I've looked for in community management software for nearly a decade.  
Simple/intuitive content management - CHECK Powerful member management tools - CHECK Robust engagement capabilities - CHECK Ability to extend built-in capabilities via API - CHECK I can now easily deliver a fully dynamic and engaging user experience to my members from within a single tool.
Rob
STSF.net

Invision Community represents what I've looked for in community management software for nearly a decade.  
Simple/intuitive content management - CHECK Powerful member management tools - CHECK Robust engagement capabilities - CHECK Ability to extend built-in capabilities via API - CHECK I can now easily deliver a fully dynamic and engaging user experience to my members from within a single tool.
Rob
STSF.net

Invision Community represents what I've looked for in community management software for nearly a decade.  
Simple/intuitive content management - CHECK Powerful member management tools - CHECK Robust engagement capabilities - CHECK Ability to extend built-in capabilities via API - CHECK I can now easily deliver a fully dynamic and engaging user experience to my members from within a single tool.
Rob
STSF.net

I can just see it now...

Charles> Hey guys... I found a bug.

bfarber> Here... have a can of raid. Go back to your office.

Charles> No seriously guys... I found a bug!

Matt> Yeah, and I'm Madonna.

:ph34r:

I can just see it now...

Charles> Hey guys... I found a bug.

bfarber> Here... have a can of raid. Go back to your office.

Charles> No seriously guys... I found a bug!

Matt> Yeah, and I'm Madonna.

:ph34r: