Bethanyrayne

That was the genius of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the guy who simultaneously led one of the most innovative teams in history, and coined the KISS Principle, i.e. “Keep it simple, stupid.” Johnson was a renowned aeronautical engineer at Lockheed Martin for more than 40 years.

That was the genius of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the guy who simultaneously led one of the most innovative teams in history, and coined the KISS Principle, i.e. “Keep it simple, stupid.” Johnson was a renowned aeronautical engineer at Lockheed Martin for more than 40 years.

Not 100% true. I pay 300$/year appx (I try to renew mostly on time but life expenses take priority on hobby expenses).
I get your 80$ calculation but just mentioning like me and many others, have your other addons, which adds to 300$/year and we haven't seen any ground breaking changes in Pages, Commerce, Blogs, etc. since few years.
Commerce is worst application for my use and I hope it can be improved, so that I can use either Commerce/Nexus or Donation but not forced to use both. Apologies for off topic on Commerce addon.
 

"Example 1: A sneaky troll decides to disrupt a corporate brand community
Example 2: A travel company"
He's already made it quite clear who this is aimed at in his examples and there are no surprises.
Get used to it most of you on this forum and those who never visit are a side hustle and beta testers and also free adverts (because of branding and backlink) for Invision Community.

Truly difficult to take this bit serious when in the blog post you mentioned that this feature is great for gaming communities. A group of people that wouldn't be in your business bracket. So a lot less tailoring and more guessing I presume?
Cloud exclusives are one thing, but also adding specific package features? This isn't going to work. I miss being excited seeing new features knowing it'll be for everyone, not having to sift through changelogs and blog posts to see if I even qualify.. It's pretty sad. I hope you realize this before it's too late.

Do you feel providing self hosted clients a "guide" to advanced IPS configuration of these features is too difficult/complex, too much work to document properly, or perhaps compromises IPS's level of IP in some way they simply don't want to expose for competitive reasons?  A lot of clients are capable of configuring their servers IF they know what it is they need to configure and how best to configure it to work with IPS, and likewise a lot of hosts are willing to help and support that effort (mine certainly is).  And many hosts are evolving to modernize their own offerings, i.e. offering NodeJS.
Beyond that, I think the general strategy would be to offer client enabling/disabling of features (even ones with complex setup/configuration) as opposed to outright removing them or reserving them for cloud-only, such that those who are capable of doing the work can and others who can't can simply disable them.  Redis is an example of this.  Granted the performance may not be optimal, but the client has to recognize that and IPS provides an alternate solution with their cloud hosting.

I will leave my two cents here. There is virtually zero way I would be moving to the cloud hosting.
If us the self-hosted guys would be left for dead at IPS 5 - I'd cling to the latest version like to many sites did when vB went kaput. Until a more viable option comes along like converting to something else if said latest IPS version becomes too obsolete after some time. Hope it does not come to this because I truly love IPS and what it brings to the table. But hobbyist niche type of forum owners just can't justify cloud prices at least in my case. It is what is is.
I understand your need to make some things cloud-exclusive but please do not cripple self hosted holders in the long run depriving them of some really cool and necessary features. An idea would be make some features available after a year or something later while cloud users get priority.

Hi Matt,
usually you don't reply to my posts, I still write 😛
To put something like two new blocks of "trending content" in a $549 package - I'd be ashamed. Already $149 is a lot, but still somehow justifiable for ambitious projects. Developing AI image moderation and object tagging, that I understand as a challenge, but not two blocks of "trending content".
And what I also still don't understand: Technically your focus is still on the forum, the gallery hasn't had a major update in a very long time. Is the AI supposed to help moderate photos in forums, where they should be blowing up most threads? Or maybe something is still happening with the gallery?
Greetings from Berlin
Claudia

Hi @Matt,
Can you comment on why trending content and similar content suggestions is only available for $549 / month and not on the Creator Pro plan or on a modular basis? And do you plan any changes of the price system here?
I am a generally satisfied cloud user so far and for many years, but it does not feel good to be excluded from such features. 
Thanks,
Markus

Of course if all significant new features are 'cloud only' why pay a license fee at all? Fixing bugs should not incur a fee.

I do this on a daily basis for one of my communities (not based on IPS software lol) and will begin to do so on another of my revived communities in the coming days - I do this on Twitter.  The reactions to my Tweets are great with lots of likes and a few comments here and there, but, engagement through my community is non-existent.  Not even one single solitary soul out of hundreds of followers has registered and attempted to strike up a conversation.  Content?  There's oodles of it and all of it what these followers purport to be interested in.  So, being vocal, adding loads of content and promoting on SM leads to 'zilch'.
I couldn't help but noticed your opening statement as being geared towards businesses - they have a different agenda to those wanting to create social content such as music, games, movies, politics and other such mainstream activities that people engage with every day.  They're out there (cue Twilight Zone music) but they are not on forum communities, they're on SM and that's where they are glued to.  The key point is how to dissolve that glue so they can become unstuck and move their tents elsewhere - like our forums.
There's no real major faults with the software, in fact it is streets ahead of SM.  The issue is people and they will always gravitate to where there the majority of other people are and they won't budge.
Here is an example of what I post every single day on Twitter and then retweet it later in my day so as to catch those just waking up elsewhere in the world.  I try to make it eye-catching and always make a comment, ask a question and provide a link to the album being mentioned:

To date - I have Tweeted 154 albums by various artists.  I add a large number of albums each week and the end result is comments and likes on Twitter, zip, nada, nix, nowt on the site itself.
So, content is important but when that content can be seen pretty much everywhere else on the Internet, why bother moving from where everyone else is?
There are two options open to people wanting to start a new site (not a business) keep plugging away and try hard to get people to sign up, or don't bother in the first place, save yourself a boatload of time and money and just join everyone else on SM.  For me that second option is not even an option, so I keep plugging away.
For businesses it's different as you already have a client base that you are selling to, so a community based site would be great for customer services, etc.  Much like this IPS site where clients are serviced and can get support.  Outside of that bubble the situation is totally different.  For sites outside the business bubble, if already established they may have a core who keep the place looking alive, for newbies it's a different story.  Such is the way of the world, which is fast becoming a crazy place, or as the film title said - It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World 🙂

Also noticed in BETA 4 that the RSS Feed Image field that is shown in the blog post is not included...has this feature been dropped or is there an issue with it that is still to be fixed in an upcoming BETA release?