TracyIsland

in 2003, we started with Ikonboard and used NetObjects fusion to create a website, and used ikonboard and ips to provide forums to create our community website.

In 2009, we switched to full on use of invision community, and then started creating custom applications with a third party developer for elements of the invision platform that were missing: reactions, groups (clubs), and then more specific pages applications focused on demographic elements and geographic elements of our global community.  

Our current platform remains 3.3.4.  When IPS announced they were upgrading to 4.x, it was a head on collision for us since we had spent over $20,000 in custom work and it appeared that all of that would have to be redone.  

https://www.glrf.info/glrfcentral/

Realizing that we simply had to upgrade to 4.x, we began the work with a third party developer in August 2022.  That developer worked on the upgrade through all of 2023 (December) before announcing that they were leaving the third party development space and through a unfortunate series of issues, the developer had to abandon the project at approximately 50% completion.  A total of 96 hours had been billed on the upgrade project to that point. The only progress was a devsite:

https://headstand.glrf.info 

In February 2024, we contacted another developer who indicated they could work on our project but not until April 2024.  

As of August 2024, that developer has made progress on the project and has already billed 60 hours. The upgrade work has slowed significantly.  We are nowhere close to an upgrade of our platform.  We had truly believed that September of 2024 would be the furthest outlier of a completion date.  At this rate, it is truly apparent that we won't have a completed upgrade until February or March of 2025.  

Our community is almost dead in the water.

IPS needs to develop a consulting company that provides upgrade work for both self-hosted and cloud clients.  The employees of this consulting company would be paid on an hourly basis with of course, a markup for IPS or a salary but the clients are billed out on hourly billed invoices just like a consulting company  Those employees would be certified by IPS to use certain best practices, and the attraction for using this consulting company is that the employees wouldn't have to "participate" in the community in order to advertise their work and therefore take time away from the clients.  The consulting company employees could be independent contractors or employees of the company but the point is that the employees would be working full time on the clients' projects (and yes, they might be working on multiple client project just like any consulting company).  

The reason IPS needs this consulting company is that IPS emphasizes the ability to customize their platform in an almost endless manner.  That claim is true but the square wheel that thuds along is the upgrade process.  

Given how the IPS software will continually evolve, it seems like there will always be billable hours with clients to either create applications or upgrade applications.   

Another favorable aspect of the consulting company is that consultants could confer with colleagues when an issue comes up instead of this clunky reporting an issue and developer forum situation.  

This is, of course, a suggestion.