Fast Lane!

Fair enough, I've raised it internally.

I think dialogue is good.  And do nothing is an "Apple" approach ("it's a feature").  There are many well thought out replies on this thread where people took the time to suggest css and layout changes that would help improve things. Many are excellent suggestions. I'm hopeful many get included -- but understand if not all.
Fwiw this is why I typically wait 6-12 months to upgrade my website to the latest .X version.  Rev .x.0-5 are typically loaded with minor issues that iron themselves out over time. The traffic impact (what we should all care about more than a new version of IPB) is the ultimate measure and waiting longer rarely does anything but help. 
 
 

I appreciate the feedback here. We're listening as always.

My only request is that we keep it polite. We don't need to scream in each other's faces to be heard. If we don't reply or action the feedback immediately, it isn't because we disagree, or are ignoring what you're saying; it's more likely that we need to consider every change as a team and this takes time.

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

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 losing the ability to self host would be earth shattering.
Here is my business, so you can see what I mean: www.****.com. We are a sizable site/business with around 50k users a day.
 
We cross posted. Thanks for the quick reply. I'll sleep better :-).

I'm sad to say this, but these recent decisions of Invision Power to make it harder for their customers just to prevent Piracy has given Xenforo a complete monopoly in paid forum software. 
Vbulleting and IPS are running further and further behind focusing on the wrong things.
For example my one big issue before 4.5 was IPS inability to create small thumbnails for every image attachment automatically like Xenforo does. you could argue that it does if you change the image size but you will never be able to choose between a tiny or large image, you will be stuck with small images then.

@onlyME is a great developer and one of the biggest reasons why I stayed on IPS so long, however his addon : https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/7436-bim-topic-thumbnail/ BIM Topic Thumbnail needs to create his own thumbnails in order for your website to load in a couple of seconds.
Compare that to xenforo where the developer just can use the thumbnails from the inherent system. @onlyME had to make one himself.
In my opinion something like that should be a priority including a new text editor that apparently you'll add in 4.6, because the current editor takes a couple of seconds to load.
You have lost a customer with me, I and many others don't like a closed system where the creator tells you how to do things, and you can't do it any other way. 
In the long run you will financially lose more from this than piracy ever will, this includes 3rd party developers. 
I'm not defending piracy at all here, just your customer treatment in limiting their freedoms the way they use your products. I probably spend 1000+ dollars on custom development, plugins, themes, and the core products during my membership here.
I don't want to be rude or disrespectful just giving my honest opinion, I suspect a lot of other customers feel the same way.
 

 

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 losing the ability to self host would be earth shattering.
Here is my business, so you can see what I mean: www.****.com. We are a sizable site/business with around 50k users a day.
 
We cross posted. Thanks for the quick reply. I'll sleep better :-).

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 losing the ability to self host would be earth shattering.
Here is my business, so you can see what I mean: www.****.com. We are a sizable site/business with around 50k users a day.
 
We cross posted. Thanks for the quick reply. I'll sleep better :-).

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. 

I hope not as well.
We'd be right behind you...

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

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.

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. 

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 revenue matters) and perhaps a negative effect to website traffic and SEO/rankings as a result, I for one will stick with the current responsive design and disable access to the app. 
My two cents. I'm truly not trying to rain on anyone's parade.  It just doesn't work for me. 

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. 

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

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 revenue matters) and perhaps a negative effect to website traffic and SEO/rankings as a result, I for one will stick with the current responsive design and disable access to the app. 
My two cents. I'm truly not trying to rain on anyone's parade.  It just doesn't work for me. 

I see it, and the core issue. I'm working on it.

Whatever the new view is that shows the first paragraph of each post is super slow to load.  I can imagine it would be horrible in production for users.  Hopefully this can be sped up.  Check this forum as an example. 

My biggest fear with an app (and why I won't offer it to my users) is as follows:
- it breaks the site wide experience since I have many elements of our site beyond the forums. I want them to have the full experience. Not just chat. If they used the app they would probably not use the mobile site much (which has tons of other content) and when they did click on links to those areas of the site it would be a jarring experience swapping to the browser and back. 
- there is no way to monetize the app well.  Def not as well as the web. 
My expectation is that I'll stick with the mobile responsive view of the site which works just fine. 
 
 

Does the current version of IPB support MySQL 8.0.x?  Thanks!

Seems like their server could get bombed if someone posted rapidly. Maybe a way to throttle emails to once every xx mins would be useful.

How significant is this change?