HighlanderICT

Is that to say we are now unable to remove certain elements we do not need? For example, I don't need the yellow highlighted area on my front page. My editors don't add articles from front end and with us wanting to put some blocks above the content this pushes the actual content down too far (IMHO). I cant move or remove it from the page editor or theme editor it would seem.

1) Thats how the terms read. 2) If you already have the full suite then it's actually cheaper. Currently I pay $150 every six months, and the new classic 'subscription' is $199 per year so $101 cheaper over the course of a year. I will likely convert 1 of my 2 licenses as it's been an active site for 30 years and has been using IPB/IPS since 2007 and I don't envisage that changing much. The other site is dormant (not paid-up with maintenance) so not switching that one yet. Based on conversations with IPS, I can leave the dormant one as it is for now and can still reinstate it later then convert it to classic if I need to. A bit of the best of both worlds really.

What about those self-hosted sites who have purchased, and have active fully paid-up support on the full suite of apps?

technically correct but a little bit of smoke and mirrors. The old licenses are perpetual with maintenance and if expired can be renewed any time. The yearly cost is $300 (2 x $150). The 'classic' terms ($199 p/yr) are closer to a subscription where you lose your license if not renewed for 24 months which may affect those of us with dormant licenses we want to reinstate later and prevent us from feeling comfortable converting. Will the beta be available to those of us with existing/original and fully paid-up licenses that we can also test? or is this restricted only to those who converted?

As asked in the V5 forum, and suggested to put in feedback, in addition to traditional subscription options, we would like to see the option to be able to state a specified subscription end date for all users/purchasers of a specific subscription. There are possibly a few use-case scenarios for this but in our case, we run a scheme to sponsor a player for our football team for the season. The season has a specified end-date. However, because we typically gather the sponsorship fees over a 3–4-week time period, the expiry dates are all over the place. We would want the term to start whenever it is ordered but want all subscriptions to end on the same date (for example May 31st each year) which we would be able to specify in the subscription. Currently I do this as a product and have to go into the DB itself and modify the expiry dates which is somewhat workable but not ideal.

Anywhere I can read about this? I cant see anything. I wonder if the option to add timed subscriptions that all expire on the same date will be an option? We run a sponsorship scheme for our local football team, and regardless of when someone joins, the sponsorship end date is the same date each year (eg. May 31st each year). We want to sell subscriptions to the scheme over the space of a few weeks but want all subscriptions to have the same renewal date. Possible in V5?

Any estimate on an open Beta we can play around with on our DEV url? Would like to put it on a test site to plan migration from V4 as obviously a lot of differences so time for a significant redesign to our site.

To @AtomiCAST - here is another perspective: We also purchased our perpetual licenses of the full suites a long time ago. One in 2007 that we have maintained until today, another we purchased in 2011 and maintained until 2018 when we decided that the forum wasn't picking up any traction and we could not justify the maintenance renewal costs. I am sure my experience tracks with many others ... I started my current website site back in 1994 with guestbooks and rudimentary discussion pages, and over the years we went through various free forum options including SMF and others as we developed and grew our community. Eventually our site was getting too busy for shared hosting and free software that needed a lot of manual tweaking, so we did a feature comparison of commercial/paid software (IPB3 versus vBulletin3 mainly). We chose IPB and actually converted from SMF directly into IPB in 2007 with barely any hitch. Patches, updates and fixes come along at regular intervals and as can be seen by the V5 blogs, they continue to develop the site features. For me, as a single owner community/hobby site, I want my/our users to have the best experience I can afford and by using Invision, along with a decent VPS host rather than cheap shared hosting, I can just about achieve that. Google Ads help the site to be self-financing and it just ticks over nicely (for me). Never going to get rich with it but shouldn't go broke either! The Venn diagram above is pretty accurate! My day job is in software asset management and procurement, and I deal with perpetual, subscription and cloud licenses all day every day from large and small vendors and everything in-between. Invision has always had this standard perpetual licensing with the option to own the software and pay for maintenance, upgrades and support. This is/was very standard for the time. Yes, its pricey, especially for an individual user, but so is paying for development, support and all the other costs. As someone said, 'You get what you pay for'. We have had the full suite since 2007 as we recognized we may need it all and at various stages we have had either all of it enabled or just some. Currently I don't use gallery or downloads as I don't need to but everything else is enabled. With the full suite I can turn on either of these as needed if I need to. All in all, IPB/IPS has been a solid and reliable platform for us to grow our site. Despite the costs, which can be a concern, we have never really looked at moving away to anything else. For us, converting to a classic license for our main site will actually reduce costs from $300 p/yr. to $199 and its pretty much a no-brainer. I do have a couple of questions on how this affects licensing of the currently dormant site/license but that's not really a concern for someone starting out I don't think. If I convert my active license to Community Classic, I should be fine. Its active, has been active since 2007 and if it were not to be renewed for 24 months then I have probably shuttered the site for some reason. However, how does this affect my currently inactive perpetual license that I would not (yet) want to convert to community classic? It was purchased as perpetual but has been dormant since 2018 and although I am constantly looking for inspiration on where or how I can use it elsewhere, that's not happened yet. Currently, even after all this time, I have had the option to reinstate this license by simply paying the 6 monthly fee of $150 to get maintenance going again (and still do according to the button in the client area). However, I do see under the new terms for the new classic edition that "Licenses left expired for more than 24 months will be expired permanently and cannot be renewed, but you may purchase a new license for full price.". Based on current standard licensing practices, this is not unusual, but does this 24-month clock start ticking once I convert? or are the original terms of the license being revoked and replaced by this agreement that will remove the perpetuity of the original license?

thank you, this did work and no themes were adversely affected in the process 🙂

I am encountering this issue too ... My main site seems to be working well (no errors) but after several weeks of getting the upgrade message on screen and not doing it because it wasn't convenient, I decided to upgrade today. Clicked the upgrade now button, prompts me to login, and then i get the error message Have looked at this thread and tried some suggestions like looking in the datastore folder, and checking for crashed tables - nothing appears to be wrong there. Happy to now try the recovery mode but my main question is whether this resets the frontend themes my users are getting or just the ACP? Our site is little busier than normal this week and the two themes I created, while mostly just color customizations from the default, took a fair bit of effort to get in place. They appear to be working normally for users at the moment so while I may need to work on recreating them if corrupted, I would like my end users to be blissfully unaware of any behind-the-scenes theme recreation if at all possible. OR - is it better, or even possible, to do it the old-school way and upload the new version files via FTP and have the site recognize a new version needs to be installed.

I installed this plugin in the timeline shown above when we were getting absolutely slammed, and almost immediately our registrations and visits dropped to 0. These are my stats for the 7-day free trial and just purchased the 2-year subscription with 6 months free so about USD$22 for 2.5 years. (...And another 6 months for writing an honest review!)

We were getting hammered first day by a group of IPs in Delhi so i blocked those and today it was Russia so blocked those too. Its a website for a Scottish football team so not really visited a lot from outside of 5 or 6 countries.

another dozen registrations overnight. all had either not responded to validation email or needed admin validation. flagged them all. Installed the plugin from @CleanTalk and set it up, registered for free trial and within 5 minutes it blocked its first registration attempt. Will see how it helps me during free trial. At $12 per year it seems value for money if it does what it says on the tin.

We got absolutely slammed over the last 12-15hrs. Normally we get 0-1 spam registrations per day as we have all the typical measures in place - captcha, registration questions, email validation etc. In the last 12-15 hours we have had more than 50. The Spam Defense system also helps but our license expired last week and I had not renewed it so registrations did not go through there (my bad), but all other measures were still in place. Last night we had about 35 registrations, all spammers, and all got through. They posted with merry abandon! My mods flagged them as spammers in a game of cyber whack-a-mole. I renewed my license this morning to get the Spam Defense working again and also tweaked it so that registrations require admin validation now until this (hopefully) dies down. Since I did this, have seen another 15 or so registrations. Spam defense caught 3 of them. 2 with a score of 4, the other with a score of 3. I flagged them as spammers which hopefully adds them to Spam Defense? My concern however is that the StopForumSpam site which I used to check the rest shows some combination of username, email address or IP address, and in some cases all three values for each of the others so how could Spam Defense rate these as 1 when they are already blacklisted?