Fast Lane!

Lindy I just tried to message you privately. Doesn't seem to be possible. I'll post my PM here with my site redacted (I'd love to send it to you though so you can see why I am talking about): "Hi Lindy. I replied on the forums but self hosting is pretty critical to my business. Both because I can control upgrades/changes and because we make the forums an integral part of a larger website (and try to make it seemless). We have tons of custom parts of our site that work with the forums but are not IPB based. If it's just a cost structure change for self hosting I'd be cool with that, but

Hi @Lindy, just trying to dissect your reply. Are you saying you have no plans to drop the ability to self host but may just have new feature mapping (some saas only) and potentially different cost structures for self hosted support. This is a super soft spot that could undermine my business if self hosting were to go away.

We have to many custom mods and site integrations. If IPB dropped self hosting I would have to change to another platform. I love IPB and have been using them since they were free! That long. But serious, we have a huge site and I expect most large sites do want/need the flexibility of self hosted if they are anything but a pure forum.

Not in 4.4.x at least.

Title says it all. It would be great to allow segmentation of emails by customer profile fields. This would add a powerful tool for audience targeting based on interest or any other profile value.

Except Google frowns on content being pushed so far dow below the fold. Bad SEO.

Yeah. Feels like the app wants to make our forums "facebook groups" in an IPB social platform. I run a business so I agree with the OP that we need Advertising and an ability to show more than just the default IPB if this is going to work and not break our entire site (business) experience to our users.

What's the SES cost delta versus sendgrid?

Does IPB get a $$ cut for sendgrid? Maybe that's why there isn't a native mode for SES.

I worry this will cause the IPB staff to have to maintain 2 code sets (strike that, 3... for iOS, Android and web). Assuming no additional revenue, then will this slow the development of future releases? Keeping 3 code bases in sync is far harder than 1.

Do you have anything thoughts on the concerns several of us have raised? Fracturing sites that contain content not "IPB" based Adding custom features and skins that sites have (but the app cant) Additional costs to maintain a custom app (versus responsive web skin) Decreased Monetization (especially advanced schemes like header bidding) SEO when web traffic drops due to app usage versus web

We are talking about non IPB parts of our site. Even if IPB allowed the source code out to us, I'd now have to make custom edits to the code to add the others parts of the site and then maintain the code over time. This costs money and time and is in addition to having to maintain both the mobile web and desktop version. Assuming at best the app had equal monetization then this is a net loss in income. Do you monetize your site and if so I'm curious on your take? To me if a feature leads to increased cost / decreased monetization overall, then I'm not quick to want to us it. I'm runnin

How on earth do you monetize this nearly as much as a website? Also, many sites have far more features to them then the forums. Having an app for one segment of the site and not others fractures the experience of the site. Fwiw I get email alerts and they pop up just like push notifications on my phone. No major delta imo. That can't be the only reason. You can get push notifications via 3rd party services if that was all it was.

I'm curious. Compared to the mobile version on the web, what advantage does it carry for you?

Seems just like the mobile site. Just worse. At least on Android it seems to have tons of bugs too. I'm sure a lot of hard work has gone into it, but what's the point of the app versus the mobile website experience? It seems to be basically the same things but now with what I assume will be rigid formatting (skin) experience that doesn't allow any customization. This makes many of our sites incomplete on the app. It also precludes other non IPB areas of our site which does who knows what to our usage. With no ability to monetize effectively (this is a business for me... ad reven