Maxxius

Dayum!!! 

This not a good sign... Especially when forums overall are in a state they are in now (in the rear view mirror of SM). I imagine people taking it more lightly 10 years ago but not today.

Feedback aka Feature Suggestions needs to be improved. As the definitive location for your clients to post any and all feedback for consideration by the company, it is by far the most important forum for our collective futures.  You literally tell retail clients to post their suggestions in Feedback, but because it's so unorganized and so unmanaged, your own company follow-through on client feedback is embarrassingly non-existent over the years.  
Feedback is a combination of site feedback, company feedback, feedback on seven apps, the admin control panel, clubs, community enhancements and integration, product guidance because people don't know where to post, and the personal planning of kmk on using community software in literally every way except as a community. Feedback needs to be broken-out per app, to be actively collated and tallied and merged, and non-feedback needs to be moved out.    
There is zero incentive for clients to search for past feedback when everything is jumbled together, zero guidance on how clients can bump or lend weight to a prior suggestion, and finally zero transparency to your client base on how our aggregate suggestions are flowing through the suggestion pipeline. Probably because it's a hot mess.  
 
If you had simply tasked Jordan to organize this section with clearly defined workflows, I would have applauded. Something like:
Prequalify all posts in Feedback: Ask for poster to provide minimum specifications as defined by the company. Until those are submitted by the poster, the suggestion shouldn't be accepted.  One of community management's best practices is realizing that great suggestions aren't written by the poster, they're elicited by the asker.      If bug, give poster instructions for sending in a support ticket.  Close and mark as resolved. If non-feedback, give poster instructions on proper navigation of site for reference.  Move as needed. If feedback that meets minimum specs, then move, organize, and merge as needed.   For site feedback: If valid, escalate to site management team. Follow-up and mark as resolved when done.   If not valid, follow-up and mark with a thanks but no thanks.   For company feedback: If positive, ask for permission and promote on social media.  Follow-up and mark as resolved when done.        If negative, escalate to company management as needed.  

This sounds like marketing BS. Cloud is nothing but a bunch of servers. Which technology would be so advanced to prevent simple features from being offered to self hosted clients?
If these features were so resource intensive, it would mean higher costs for you too to host all these websites needing so many system resources. I don't buy this excuse.
Just say that sooner or later your cloud will be the only option and this is the first step in that direcrion. It's like the saying about boiling a frog. If you do it slowly, it doesn't notice the water getting hot and doesn't jump out of the pot and only realizes what is happening when it's already too late.
Be honest and tell us that the self hosted option will at one point be a thing of the past and only cloud will be available since Invision will become SaaS.
You are a business and that is your decision to make but at least be honest about it. This way it just seems you need the self hosted clients to keep paying until you finish the transition period and make the announcement that only cloud remains as an option.

The more successful your customers are the more likely they will purchase additional products and services from your firm. This product could help many sites stick around for the long term or grow to a point that switching to your hosting platform is within their means. As customers many of us have invested thousands of dollars in your company by paying for self hosted licenses and renewals, maybe you could return the favor by investing in your customer's success. I would recommend making it available to self hosted customers with the understanding that they assume responsibility for all support and if they run it on underpowered servers they will experience suboptimal results. 
Right now we 'really' don't know how this product might enhance our communities. It will require lots of experimentation and sharing of what works or doesn't before the community will embrace the value of this new service. Maybe it will turn out this service holds great appeal to the vast majority of your customers or just a handful.  Limiting it's adoption will limit it's potential for attaining that "great appeal".

This would definitely be a good use for reaction -1.

I imagine this "Cloud and Enterprise Community customers exclusively." is down to requirements on Zapier's side, I have worked with Zapier in the past and know you have to pass their compliance, self-hosted versions of IC would each have to go through that process, so IC have taken the easy route and made it just made this for the single "Cloud" version.
But yes I agree, it's not a great direction and I'd hate to see this same pattern on future releases, self-hosting is critical for us as we have many custom applications and privacy requirements to deal with where the cloud version is not appropriate.
I built our own "webhook" application using the standard IC "hooks" available, so if you have the skills/developers, you can roll your own app integration like this if you need to.... also Zapier gets expensive pretty quick, I use http://n8n.io/ - so building generic "webhooks" rather than "Zapier" would have been the better feature to develop IMHO.
 

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol

"Zapier is the first smart community enhancement available for Cloud and Enterprise Community customers exclusively."
Not liking this direction...

This is a bit of a slap in the face to self hosted clients. Nothing to celebrate here. 👎

There is one hole in this line of thought, not that I totally disagree with it, but vulnerability can lead to exploitation, so you would need to measure this with some other form of displaying firmness.  How you would do that will depend on the individual.  Some people don't like to portray vulnerability, because of the issue of potential exploitation. I would replace the word and the meaning with "understanding" and finding out what leads to the toxicity.  It's extremely easy to ignore the root of an issue and react rather than discover.
Some people are just generally nasty, that's in their nature and these kinds of people will swarm on displays of vulnerability and exploit them to the full, which will raise the toxicity levels higher. So, show some understanding, discover why and then decide on how to deal with the issue.  It may be that some people will be toxic to get attention, their rational posts may be ignored whilst their toxic ones attract attention.
I don't believe there is a one-stop-shop-solution to people's behaviour and every case needs to be measured with the right kind of response. Of course, this means that Admins and Moderators need to be more understanding of people's foibles and ways and get to the root of an issue and then sort it from there.  Many Admins and Moderators may not see this as the right approach and deal with issues differently, it's about finding out what works best for them and whether their methodology actually works in turning toxic into enjoyable.

Looks nice, but I'm completely satisfied with the current ACP theme. 🙂

I'm sorry that you've had a poor experience, but that doesn't mean we're not listening to the community.

The marketplace changes have been much discussed, but on the whole most people are very positive about them now. We recently made a change so that even when you have an expired Invision Community license you can still access paid-for marketplace items. This change was directly from feedback.

Your issue sounds very much limited to your set-up.

Congrats! You can Breathe Easy now 😉

Jordan - Congrats
Matt - What does this position actually mean for clients?  How will he triage, prioritize, and escalate client feedback to the IPS team, all of whom can and do visit the forums themselves? What are the parameters for clients to help highlight and channel our feedback in an effective manner?  And finally, as a community advocate, what does he actually advocate?  Whom does he represent, and to what extent?  
Until the company articulates - and the community can validate - these above questions, this new position is entirely aspirational.  
Invision has attempted multiple community engagement tactics over the years.  And I have a long history of memory:
I remember IPS Release Notes when Charles said you were going to provide a roadmap.  That quietly disappeared and failed.  I remember Tagging when Lindy said you were going to tag the status of features.  That quietly disappeared and failed.   I remember how you removed Pre-Sales and merged Feedback from all product lines together.  Product Feedback is now a mess.   I remember how you recently launched a Slack channel for Marketplace devs.  How is that going?   I genuinely and honestly don't mind you guys trying new things - that's great.  Every community (and company) should always be experimenting and launching new initiatives.  But the past history of your community engagement is littered with no follow through.  How is this time different?    
To be blunt and on behalf of all of your retail clients, we don't need a Community Advocate to post memes.  We need a Community Advocate with the power to deliver and communicate on meaningful actions to drive our communities forward.

Thank you!

Congrats! You can Breathe Easy now 😉

Congrats! You can Breathe Easy now 😉

Congrats! You can Breathe Easy now 😉

Congrats! You can Breathe Easy now 😉

1. I agree with @Abies to make this board-specific.  
2. Will you turn this on in your own community? Asking for a friend.  And every IPS client who has ever posted in the feedback forum.  
3. Parity of apps - will we see this badge on other apps? 

1. For the User Profile enhancements, this new type of Answer prestige can be better integrated into the rest of the suite.  In particular, on postbits and hovercards.   
2. For the ACP Statistics, these statistics are tied to changeable timeframes?  For example: Last Week, Last Month, Custom Timeframe, etc.  

Good addition. Well done.

Very good improvement, step in the right direction of course! Congrats!
However I did not understand if it will be possible to change the layout as we see fit? Take for example like WPBakery where you can set how you want it 1/2 + 1/2 or 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 and so on instead of being forced to have this 2/3 (main center area) + 1/3 (sidebar).

That's the great thing about promotes, it happens inline. You read something cool, hit Promote, tap in a few custom words (you do not need to do this, it pre-fills in relevant content) and hit promote. If you set up a schedule, it'll stack them up and send them throughout the day.