Tom_F

Hello,
I haven't dared go look at my Client Centre yet! The few groats I've earned from the Marketplace are all I've had as income since 2017 since being made redundant due to UK austerity cuts. So it's a scary prospect.
Honestly... Nobody likes change. It's rarely good. Someone always gets the pointy end of the stick. It's usually me or the little guy, but rarely the enterprise corporations who can afford the change.
However I appreciate that prices haven't increased for a decade, and a reasonable increase would be understandable, we know this, it's overdue but it needs to be said these significant changes are sadly once again being poorly implemented and probably compounded by an almost total lack of notice, no dialogue, a lack of communication, causing major headaches and increasing uncertainty.
Yes, of course you don't have to consult or engage, but in my experience, just like change between employers, managers and employees, if you do, you'll often find it makes change a lot more smooth and easier to swallow. Both company and customer may come to appreciate things they were unaware of, and/or offer suggestions or alternatives.
A few points of feedback for what they may be worth...
Re the price changes...
I think there has been an obvious failure to give fair and reasonable notice of the financial changes, in particular to those needing to renew in the real short term (meaning days, weeks) but especially to everyone who needs to renew in the next few months. Hopefully Lindy and Charles will realise this oversight, take ownership of the situation from a customer service perspective and immediately ensure no financial impacting changes until the next 6 month renewal period for all non-enterprise clients has expired. After all IPS says it's all about supporting communities. So do the right thing.  This is a decision that will strike at the heart of IPS communities that were already struggling even before COVID impacted, and those under significant financial pressure. For many, having to find more than double the funds up front for a year in advance, is not an easy sell, but for many is not easy to accommodate either especially with short notice. The lack of a small discount for multiple license holders is disappointing. Don't compound things, please space them out and easier to swallow!  
Re the Support changes:
Removing Support Ticket facility is a seriously poor and frankly ridiculous decision. Increasing the license costs at the same time is pretty terrible and almost ridiculous. IPS Support should make better use of the Support Forums, absolutely, but in addition to Support Tickets, not instead of them. Many I suspect are fed up already with being to create a ticket for most Support Topics they create reporting problems. You tell us it's because you need site access to investigate or fix things, so how will this help? I don't want to name my website communities that be having problems in a public forum, my clients wouldn't appreciate it but also I like many are reluctant to post links and references to specific communities mainly because those topics appear on search results, it's unprofessional and gives a poor impression aside from anything else. Others may not appreciate doing so because of privacy or sensitivity considerations. If you don't use your own ticket system, I can see a time coming when you drop it entirely from Commerce. Maybe even move it to a separate app or module for Commerce. "Our enterprise clients use dedicated solutions like Zendesk, so we're dropping it" sort of thing.

Haha don't stress. There's a lot of things to remember! Pretty useful feature though right? 😁
Thanks @Nathan Explosion

Why didn't I find that.. oppsie.  
 
I'll go sit in the corner. 

Click this:

Scroll down:

There was one rejection so I needed update it again.

Happy Hump Day, fam. Today's a big day (I know I always say that every Hump Day but... )
*Says in a whisper* We've officially soft launched 4.6 🤫 🎉 
It's a soft launch because, well, you know how things can go 🔥. However, we're pretty darn satisfied with this rollout. Possibly The best ever. A more formal announcement will arrive in the near future.   
Right now, 4.6 is available for those on Cloud or those who've tested out our several Beta releases.
In case there's a glitch in the matrix, please make a backup of your community before upgrading. 
If you need a refresher, @Matt laid out what is new in 4.6 in our latest blog post.
Speaking of, I asked our Director of Development to share his thoughts on this release: 

🥲 In regards to 4.6, Matt said Invision Community "continues to build on its stable community platform by adding multiple new features."
Some of these include "anonymous posting; ideal for mental and physical health communities that can now allow their members to post questions anonymously, no-code integration with 3,000 other apps with Zapier, better mobile support, improved solved topic functionality and the brand new achievements system designed to nudge and reward good behavior and content."

"This release elevates your community experience with Invision Community significantly through multiple touch points."
We hope you guys enjoy 4.6 as much as we do!
Bringing this plane home... Since it's tradition, here are a list of updates since Beta 3 was released last week:
- Fixed an issue where the expiration date for a Member Subscription would not update when editing the subscription purchase.
- Fixed an issue where PayPal Billing Agreements / Subscriptions may not charge the correct value for sales tax.
- Improved performance when generating comment widgets on large sites.
- Fixed an issue where adding a theme setting to a parent theme didn't update children themes with the new setting
- Fixed an issue where the SQL Toolbox couldn't display query results
- Fixed an issue where the register button in the checkout process didn't open in a new tab if redirect registration is enabled.
- Fixed an issue where the full upgrader would show an empty error box.
- Fixed an issue where moving members after searching on a freeform custom field could return incorrect results.
 - Fixed an issue where online/recently browsing counts can be incorrect.
Thoughts on the official launch of 4.6?! Drop us a line in the comments. We'd love to hear from you!

FYI it seems to work fine in 4.6 

Just wearing down the battery on the phone ready to go..

Both 1.1 and 2 Beta's been pretty much flawless. The one strange issue I have is intermittent behaviour of last post/content view. I think it must be the rogue remains of a 4.5 plugin/application somewhere. 

Just wearing down the battery on the phone ready to go..

The real question here is do I do it now or wait till 4.30pm on Friday to royally break everything.

Just wearing down the battery on the phone ready to go..

Just wearing down the battery on the phone ready to go..

FYI it seems to work fine in 4.6 

Just wearing down the battery on the phone ready to go..

Please make it 8PM on a Friday (EST) and be sure to run the upgrader on mobile with 2% battery life left. Thanks and tell the boys in support Lindy sent you!

The real question here is do I do it now or wait till 4.30pm on Friday to royally break everything.

4:58pm on a Friday, and remove a few random upgrader files.

The real question here is do I do it now or wait till 4.30pm on Friday to royally break everything.

The real question here is do I do it now or wait till 4.30pm on Friday to royally break everything.

That's fixed it, had tried that the other way around to no avail.

Many thanks :)

lol @ -rep for posting honest feedback, nothing new there I guess.
The point of this thread is to provide feedback. Just because someone doesn't agree with it doesn't mean it's not appropriate, or deserves -rep.

Is the software decent? I can't say, its only been a few hours , but it does look decent.

Is the support acceptable? From what I've experienced (so far), not in the slightest. If putting something in the 'wrong department' (which it wasn't) means it's going to get delayed 12+ hours, then perhaps those understaffed departments need more staff, or people need to think outside of the box, and stop listening to ticket systems as to when to help someone.

Anyways, the feedback's been left. No, it's not an unreasonable expectation to want tickets answered same business day at all, especially when one is a new customer.