Maxxius

Such a great idea!  
So happy to see others have the same lightbulb go off of crafting smarter menus of links.  The hard thing now is how do we customize and craft those menus for different member journeys??  🤔

Some thoughts: 
1. This is only an observation.  I find it interesting that IPS approaches time spent on a community from a position of scarcity. To be clear, this makes sense - we have busy lives and many sites that we visit, so we need to optimize the time spent on the community to make it impactful.  Get me to what I want in the most efficient manner.  
On the other hand, I encourage IPS to also approach it from a position of (maybe just a little) greed.  Yes, get me to what I want to read or reply as quickly as possible, but also encourage and push and motivate me to also get involved or read something extra.  Help me go down a rabbit hole. That's the only way to grow my involvement in the site.  
Not asking IPS to adopt a full blown social media orientation where attention is the only point, but adding attention hooks and pushing engagement can only help our communities. 
2. The prototype of the topic as stated above is highly limiting. It matches a support topic.  
But it doesn't match topics where the discussion and commentary are the point.  For example, this topic! This topic doesn't have a "right answer" that anyone can Mark as Solved.  The breadth of conversations by clients and the diverse things we care about - developer updates, the edit button, content denseness, polite fanboy applause - is the point and the noise at the same time.  
Going to be curious how IPS innovates on these social and conversational topics. 
3. I wonder how we can cut down on the noise and distraction of a question by helping users ask a better question to begin with?

To be clear, we have no plans to remove jQuery from 5.0.0. We expect to begin a fairly lengthy migration process over several releases where we'll start rewriting our UI and utility classes to use native.
That said, I do not think it is critical to remove jQuery to improve page speed scores. We can probably get away with using jQuery slim, which is about 23kb of data sent once, and then your browser caches it. 23kb isn't insignificant but then a single image added to a page will negate any savings. Removing jQuery now would add further stress onto third party developers and delay v5 by 6-9 months given the huge amount of JS we are using for really little gain.
Anything significantly new is using native.
Here's the result of running Lighthouse for mobiles on my development install running with IN_DEV on (so no caching, no compiled or minified CSS, hundreds of script tags, etc). I would expect that to hit high 90s when not using IN_DEV mode.

To unpack your post which has a lot of good points, are you asking about: 
1. Showing / hiding elements for user expertise, authority, and trust? And / or
2. Content denseness on the view screen? 
These are both important topics for deeper conversation and consideration for each community.  For some communities that are support oriented, showing reputation is important: getting an answer from an expert or an official company rep is important to validate the level of authority or expertise in the topic.  For fan communities around interests and hobbies that are more social based, you may want to turn off the feature.  
For content denseness, I agree.  Making sure that the screen above the fold packs as much information as possible.  Lots of opportunity in UIX for designers and themers to explore.  

In addition to Matt’s post, each of your members (where a new group permission allows) can also choose their own preference out of the views. So if you’d prefer to use the traditional table view for the forum index and the traditional column view for topics (even if the admin has assigned other layouts), that’s of course possible. We’re absolutely not forcing change, just offering more options than before 🙂 

Don’t get obsessed over things like compact mode 😀
These new modes are options and you can keep a traditional mode like we have now or experiment with new modes. It’s all just a toggle and you can mix and match to create endless customization possibilities. 

Agree with the above. The user mini profile while a good idea, hides away who you are on a post. If this is toggled, then great. Or, even if the username can still be coloured to their associated group would be a nice touch. Other than that, I like this!

Some nice ideas there. 
I’m not a fan of minimizing the user info in the topic view though. The personal touch of clearly seeing who you are interacting with is getting more important these days, not less. If anything, this view should only be triggered if there is not enough space, not in full desktop view. As a typographer, the example screenshot is painful to look at.  3 posts with just one or two lines each that are waaaaaaaay too long for comfortable reading. This was always a problem with a default IPS installations but now it was made worse, not better. If the user info remains to the side, it also improves the readability of the post content. 

Welcome to Invision Community 5!
Over the coming weeks, we'll be exploring a bunch of new features and improvements coming to our user interface including our brand new theme editor, a new mobile UI, dark mode and performance improvements thanks to a reduction in both JavaScript and CSS. To kick off this series, let’s take a closer look at the new sidebar layout and new view modes for the forum index and topic pages.
Sidebar Layout
Traditionally, Invision Community has shipped with a horizontal header and navigation bar at the top of the page, which is still available in version 5. We're introducing a brand new (and optional) sidebar layout, which can be enabled or disabled easily from within your theme settings. The sidebar not only provides convenient access to your applications, activity streams and search bar, but you can now add links to nodes for even easier access to popular or commonly used areas of your community. For example - a category from your forum, an album from the Gallery, or a product group from Commerce.
Sidebar-zoom.mp4
Forum Index: Feed view
One of our goals for version 5 was to re-imagine new ways for your visitors to consume content, and the sidebar layout is just one of our solutions. Table view has been the typical way of displaying forums, providing visitors with a simple summary of the most recently active topic. Grid mode introduced cover photos to forums and is a great way to make your page more visually engaging, while fluid view allows visitors to filter through a list of topics to easily focus on multiple areas of the community.
Joining these view modes in version 5 is our new Feed view. Optional cover photos and featured forum colours allow you to personalise each forum, and a list of recently active topics with snippets of the most recent reply allow you to easily see what each forum is focusing on at a glance. The topic list drops below the cover photo and converts to a scrollable list on small devices. It's our fresh take on content display, and we can’t wait to hear your feedback!

 
Topic pages: Compact view
In addition, Invision Community 5 also introduces a new, compact layout option for topics. We wanted to create a layout which placed focus on your content while still keeping all of the authors profile information easily accessible within a mini profile. Stats, rank, badges, reputation points and more can be found by tapping the icon at the top of every post. The mini profile strip has also been added to other areas of the software too, such as comments and reviews in applications like Gallery and Blogs, and will appear on the mobile layout when the traditional "table view" is used in topics.
Switching between the new compact view and the author sidebar view takes just seconds giving you complete control over your community.
Mini profile.mp4
 
As part of this view, you also have the choice to feature/pin the original post to the top of every page, making it a breeze for your visitors to easily understand the context of replies without navigating back to page 1. Pinned posts have a slightly larger font-size to distinguish them from replies, and we've thoughtfully truncated them on pages beyond the first to keep scrolling to a minimum.

 
The new sidebar layout and view modes offer a fresh and innovative approach to navigating and interacting with your community. We’re really keen to hear your thoughts on these new views and whether you’ll be unleashing them on your own sites! We appreciate that no two sites are the same, and those who are a fan of the classic header look will benefit from quick styling tools and a visual way to re-arrange the header elements which we’ll cover in a later blog.
We’re looking forward to showcasing a whole bunch of new features over the coming weeks - so stay tuned, and we’ll see you then!
 

View full blog entry

Ehren is a superstar, he's barely scratched the surface on what he's been working on for the past six months. I'm really excited by these new views and the sidebar mode gives a very desktop app like experience, whereas the new mobile view is truly fit for purpose and not just a squished desktop view.

I honestly believe you should concentrate into achievement enhancements and discontinue this mod. Supply a converter if people need it.

This is correct.
We have a new license for v5 which alters the renewal structure and removes the ability to "mix and match" apps. To download v5, you'd need to first switch licenses via the client centre. To be clear, you won't need to re-purchase a new license, just agree to switch to the v5 license.

Please can you add Gallery to the available RSS Import areas (under AdminCP > RSS Feed Imports)?
We only have Pages and Forums, plus Blogs via the front end.

Example:
Import Nasa's image of the day from their RSS Feed:
https://www.nasa.gov/rss/dyn/lg_image_of_the_day.rss Many thanks!

Please do, Adriano!

With all our respect for Adriano, his work and applications, we can be sure of the quality of the development of a new application. 
But, the main problem is that the vulnerability remains, with the consequences of which we are now dealing - all users again become dependent on a single developer ...

Another option: do it from the scratch and charge $100 per license.

Sure... if you pay me the 200 purchases it had in between.

Is there anyway to show an advertisement banner after the first post or topic but only in ONE subforum?  I want to show an ad banner just in my classified forum section not in any other forums!  I can't see a way to do it with the built in advertisement system??

You can literally use profile fields for this!
Create a new Profile Field with the type "Select" called "Interests". Keep in mind that profile fields don't have to be shown anywhere. So if you want to use them only for the bulk mail or group promotion, you can:) Members can set their interests by setting the field. Create your group promotion or bulk mail and use the Interests profile field filter to sent / promotion only the users which are relevant.  

How app renewals / paid $$ will be tracked? I don't have track of what applications, i have purchased over the year. I really had liked the idea of install apps through ACP (marketplace). Easy, less worry and headache. 
Can I please get the list of paid apps? So on next renewal, I can talk to app owner? Thanks. 
  
I can't even download files today. Can you please tell me how can i download the files/apps which I paid for? I would like to save the local copy. - Thanks. 

I’m a little disappointed, I was just getting going again. I’ll likely move everything to a public GitHub repo. Forgo the transaction troubles that have plagued the MP. As a hobbyist, that still works in corporate America, doing so will build a profile for the job market.
I have heard the same financials from IPS staff over many many years, regarding the MP viability. It’s not something they’ve made up just now for justification. 

From now on I'll handle payments & support only from my site: https://invisionbyte.net/
 
IPS disabled renewals since they're closing the marketplace: https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/marketplace-closure-r1283/
 
IPS also posted this in the closure news:
We haven't received any info about it yet, because IPS is still working on it.
I'll post an update in all support topics here, and a topic on my site as soon I know more about it. 👍
 

Is anyone else interested in this feature? 🙄

The new version has been approved. 👍

No. Just because a feature request is popular, it doesn't mean that it's right for the product, will enhance the community experience for community members and move the product forward.

It is also unfair to have the product guided by a small number of customers that visit the forums and take time to comment on feature requests. The forum does not record the hundreds of conversations we have with other clients over email, regular meetings and so on.

We try and account for most things but more often than not what is suggested in feedback is generally minor tinkering around the edges when more bold action is often needed. That is not to say that we do not read every topic and discuss most of them. Quite often a popular request that we hear over and over makes its way into the software but perhaps not in the way that the topic author described.
I completely understand this feeling. The last six months or so have been a pretty dark timeline of mostly negative news, especially for self-hosted customers. The introduction of cloud exclusive features, talks of falling profitability for self hosted license sales, a long list of deprecated features people use, v5 dev tools overhaul, the marketplace closing - it's been a lot and we recognise that.
Now that the bad stuff is out of the way, we can start talking about v5 and there is a lot of fun stuff to get into. Invision Community 5 is a new chapter for the product and us as a company. A more streamlined and focused operation fit for the next decade of community building.