Maxxius

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.

If I was a new developer trying to gain trust, I'd spend some time in the community being helpful and getting to know people. You can quite quickly gain trust this way and then start to offer your services and products.

I understand that the shutdown of the Marketplace is a huge shock to everyone, thinking it's the end of the world when it's honestly not. 
 
3rd party developers will still be able to offer their applications, and with the help of @Joel R building a directory, that is bound to be good. Have a little trust everyone.
 
Also worth noting: Other forum software developers don't maintain an official marketplace and don't review codes or anything that is being released. It's entirely on the BUYER's responsibility to check for recommendations, reviews, sales, and reputation of the 3rd party developer. As always, think and do research before you buy and if it's too good to be true then it most likely is.

Please please please with a plugin for TOC. 🙏

UI Extensions part 2 of 3:
 

Ban users from topic.
This has been a problem ever since the start. I don't want to ban posters from certain forums, but this is what I've had to do to prevent those posting in certain topics. Even the banning from a forum isn't ideal, I have to create a new member group and place those members in there, but thats what I've done. It would be so much easier to just have a ban from topic option though.

So excited to see what is coming next for Invision. As far as a wishlist one thing for me is just a general thought, but SEO SEO SEO. Any SEO improvements that help our forum threads get indexed would be huge.

Otherwise, one thing I have always wanted are Notification filters. When I see that I have 20 notifications there are times that I don't need to check every Reaction notification. But I definitely want to see all @ notifications so I make sure I respond to them all.

It's hard to give dates, but we have a fairly aggressive timeline to meet and we're on track. I would say we should be in a position to showcase Invision Community 5 in some way during Q4 this year.
I hope this doesn't become a "coming weeks" moment for me. 😅

Don't forget about visual experiences as well; most forum owners are laymen and pay more attention to appearance, simplicity, and functionality rather than source code. I hope @Ehren comes up with something cool.

IPS has a larger development team and is more familiar with the codebase so they will invariably release a new product or feature that will widely be used by the vast majority of their customers, but occasionally a developer might create a better version that "some" customers may prefer to purchase.  
An open marketplace should encourage innovation by all developers including IPS.
This would also better address continuity of service. 
Products are often supported for finite periods of time by both IPS and marketplace developers and once a product is no longer supported it leaves customers in a precarious position. 
Having the ability to have more than one version of a product in the marketplace gives everyone the option to be able to migrate to a competing product if the need suddenly arrises or a competitor offers a far superior product from other marketplace developers or IPS themselves.
 
 
 
 
 
 

If you mean the restriction to receive news and information, which bulk mail relies on:
 

Fun times ahead. AI-powered bots trying to post spam and getting into an endless back and forth with AI-powered moderation tools. 

We can probably work on the labelling, but I'm not keen on making it a high level item like that. It's not something most people will want to think about when they are on the site.

For now, we'll keep it so administrators must approve until we get a little more comfortable with the features. We wouldn't want large parts of an established community destroyed by content being de-attributed or removed without a final admin check.

2.4 spotlight

Classifieds home before

 
Classifieds home after
 
Advert view before

 
Advert view after

100 percent this.  I’m still trying to fully wrap my head around the actual value it can bring.  I’m sure it’s there… just have to find it. I was thinking as a way of looking at trends or reviewing registrations, or running a FAQ, etc. Not replying to posts.

And absolutely agree on the spammers!  Typically bumping an old 2 year old post with a half wit reply, and then hours/days later, replying again (often quoting themselves) with links. 

Looking at my sites, it seems like spammers are already using it. I get more and more replies to old topics which somehow are on topic but still somehow make so little sense that I can’t believe a human registered to post it. 
I’m not afraid of AI and use it myself, but only like a brainstorming partner, where I judge which replies are actually useful and correct. I can’t imagine having AI (auto) reply/publish anything on my sites at the moment. And I think it would only dilute the value of a community. Because the AI answers will soon be available directly within search engines and other apps and services. I rather run the place where answers can be different and better than that. 

Just an update. I will be discontinuing any further development of this plugin in the future.
I have, however, totally rewritten this plugin from the ground up as an application instead. Not only that, but I have removed some features as they are no longer required due to being in the core now, and plan to add more features in the future.
The first release will be a beta version for testing purposes. if you would like to help out, let me know, and I will send you a copy to play with.

Wow these are cloud only? I literally paid close to 2k CAD for the full suite and I don't get the ability to utilize these features? 

It's noted and will definitely be included, may not be the very next update if IPB 4.5 is released soon.

My apologies again from dropping the ball with this issue. It really isn't our normal level of service and we're reviewing processes to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Perfect learning a new thing, but I do suggestion such information like this link should be mentioned in the guide's article.
 

Just for reference since this question came up again by somebody linking to this topic:
This is the custom redirect rule which you need for nginx for the API folder URL redirect:
location /api/ { if (!-e $request_filename){ rewrite ^/api/(.*)$ /api/index.php; } } Thanks to @Chris027 for sharing this a while ago.
 

I just wanted to clarify the NGINX 'issue' (although this would apply to any server/proxy/CDN setup that doesn't pass the required header).
You will need to make sure that the HTTP Authorization header is passed through to PHP. Making that header available will enable Zapier to communicate with your community. You'll also need to do this if you want to use other features that use HTTP authentication such as the REST API.