Bethanyrayne

You're not the only one who looked for a physical file.

Hello,
I just upgraded my community to IPS 4.6.8 and enabled the robots.txt file from ACP. I can see it when i type domain.tld/robots.txt but i can't find it in FTP/public_html. It is not generated in that folder?
Thank you!

It is a dynamically generated URL. It is not a physical file. 

I have been a customer since 2006 and the "Don’t worry, it’s not bad news" email newsletter was a real shock.  Whilst everyone fully understands that price increases are required over time, I am really disappointed with the huge 50% price hike that has been announced.
This makes it twice as expensive as other well regarded commercial forum systems.  So I will definitely be removing Pages and quite possibly my whole account due to this.
It appears that many of us smaller communities are being pushed out - it feels like they are trying to shift their customer base as more communities are moving to free products like discourse, discord, etc.
I still have a few months left on my account, so I will be looking at possible alternatives, but in the mean time how do you remove applications like Pages from your account?  I thought you could do this yourself, but I can not see any way to do this in the client area.

Here in lies a pretty controversial policy.
You make a professional grade product, we choose it over free software like SMF because it's more secure and coded by professional certified developers, but we don't buy it, we never own it, it's still yours and we pay a license to make use of it.
Then the inevitable security flaws are identified and we must ensure we renew our licences to obtain the fix for what are problems that weren't created by us, if only to conform with GDPR and other legislation to keep our members data and personal information secure, never mind the inconvenience of cleaning and recovering from hacked sites.
So really we have no choice, once a self hosted forum community is installed, put aside anti-spam, IP lookups, forget Marketplace niceties, forget new feature temptations and nice to haves, the only 100% real reason is because of this.
Charging for access to security patches is just plain wrong. They should be free for at least 5 years if only as a mark of quality and pride.
Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for ongoing access to Windows security fixes and flaws?
 
UPDATED to add:
"We are looking to increase the speed of releases to a monthly release schedule so everyone gets bug fixes and new features regularly."
This a bad news for theme and app developers. More work. More time consuming localdev updates. Please improve the process of updating localdev installs so they are more robust.

I have put up expiry notices on both my licenced sites and have already found one alternative at a one-time price of $59 with six months support and I can increase this to 18 months for an extra $20.25.  I'm considering another alternative for my other site which is less expensive but has the same features, again for a price considerably less than the new IPS prices.
I'm no penny pincher, but I am retired and living on a pension, I have rent and utilities to pay for so my hobby money is limited.  I understand about the price increase, just not the way it blitzkrieged its way into our lives with no alternative payment options other than annually (with a not so generous offer of a one-time split bi-annually).
I find some of the comments mildly amusing and often disturbing from IPS:
Short and sweet and couldn't care less - definitely not good customer relations. This is not a 'Hump Day' it's a 'Sad Day'.

Not my case. This is my only source of income for a couple of years or so (yes, I’m not crazy to have 200 resources for nothing) but honestly, this is becoming a pain more and more at every “new thing” IPS does.
IPS don’t listen. Just read. Try to justify things and that’s it. Nothing will change.
So for the rest (of us) stop wasting your time debating here. That’s how it will be from now on. 

@Mattwhat would you say if your barber would tell you that your haircut costs now 50% more just before they finish it, but then tell you that it's not a big deal because they didn't want to be the cheapest, just the best? I bet you would be furious and rightfully so.

It's not about the fact that prices are rising. In my country it's a constant process, they never stop. It's about:
1. That the gap between old and new prices is 50% which is a lot. I don't see many businesses do this to their loyal clients. We would understand something about 15-20%, not 50%.
2. That you guys try to sell it like "but look at monthly rate! Not a big deal!". You seem to forget that people who are able to spend hundreds of dollars on forum software are adults and wouldn't fall to cheap marketing tricks. I'm a marketer myself, and I know exactly what is happening here.
3. That you didn't inform us before this decision so any hobbyists could pay for their software. The greediness is not good.
4. That you try to sell it like IPS is the best thing ever, some premium software that is nowhere near it's competitors. But would the best software company treat it's customers like this? For real? 
5. That you tried to cover it under website redesign.
6. That you're telling us "pay more but if you have a problem - go ask community"
 
You know, it feels really bad. It's a really bad publicity. How many existing clients will recommend IPS after moves like this, how do you think?
 

Just without those of us who don't make money out of it, right? 😉

I don't believe that to be the case, Matt.
I do not expect IPS to hold its prices, but this is not just a pricing issue. There are a number of issues:
It's a big price increase (46% for me), in one fell swoop, on an unsuspecting customer. That introduces a shock factor to the equation. That is entirely of IPS's making. Smaller incremental adjustments to pricing, inline with inflation, are easier to absorb and to plan for. This increase is not. It was not communicated. I cannot tell you how furious I was to find a new price on the website, with a changed renewal term, without so much as a word from IPS. I therefore have little time to absorb, reflect or plan for it, and being on the smaller hobbyist side of your userbase, I now have serious doubts about being able to continue to be a customer. That is a shame after a decade of being a loyal customer, but I guess that's part of the game. It benefits your cash flow and hurts ours. You get a chunk of cash in one go, whereas you would have previously accepted it in two. It's stated that this is in part for simplicity, yet I can see no justifable reason for this claim. How hard is it to set 6-monthly renewals? You've done it for years. Bringing it inline with industry standards isn't a compelling reason - IPS is now just as inflexible as other industry players. The communication, when it did arrive, was completely tone-deaf. "Don't worry, it's not bad news"... Yes, it is. It's not only an unexpectedly large price increase with little notice, but it's changing the frequency too. Neither of those things are good news for me. The costs were communicated in monthly terms when the renewal is now collected annually, which screams of smoke and mirrors.

Same, I appreciate your point of view. As a businessman myself, the reality is that the smaller accounts usually cost the most in support, in both time and money. And, let's be honest, your job is to increase net margins. And these changes serve to streamline that. In most cases, changes are usually met with a public backlash, a lot of huffing and puffing and sky is falling talk, and that's the extent of it. And the truth is, IPB will not miss smaller accounts like mine. Such is life. I get that.
As a thought, you could have simply retained proper ticket support as part of a monthly subscription -- or even capped it at 3 or so included support tickets a month, then a fee per ticket afterwards -- as incentive to go post publicly in the forums. At the same time, IPB could easily aggregate information from private support tickets internally to then create an official knowledgebase of answers that could be the first line of support within people's admin areas. But still offer private ticket support directly.
FWIW, and I will preface by saying the following is via conscientious choice when making a purchase. There isn't a company I deal with that does not offer a direct line of private support communication as part of my subscription/lease/product cost -- it's a big reason why I pay for services instead of the "free versions". I expect products I pay for to be properly supported, privately. I admittedly never expected IPB to shift away from this model.
On that note, I'll bow out of this discussion.
Best regards.

I would be more concerned about the clients who are keeping quiet than the ones making a noise.  My mom was a fountain of wisdom right up until her demise at the grand old age of 89 years.  She used to drum this into me:
"It's OK to make mistakes, but always be sure to admit to them, take ownership and make sure that your mistakes never have a negative impact on others and if they do, then do something positive to make amends."
There's also a saying that everyone will be familiar with "Act in haste, repent at leisure"  Hindsight can be an awakening moment, but often it is too late when realisation hits home.
It's not too late to do something positive and resolve this horrible situation, but you need to act now to enforce damage control - I can see your competitors rubbing their hands in glee just waiting for the torrent of new clients heading their way. I cannot get my head around the rationalisation of this move - it really does beggar belief.

Oh but you are forcing me out because in one fell swoop you have taken what was affordable to unaffordable.  Instead of making excuses for the rest of the team (who are noticeable by their absence in this discussion) and just admit you all read the potential outcome wrongly and actually do something positive to mitigate the appalling mess that this huge error has caused (possibly damaging the reputation of IPS irreversibly), instead you are attempting to defend the indefensible.   
When I was running my own website development business (for 20 years until I retired last year) I wanted to be the cheapest so I could gain business from potential competitors, but I never lowered standards and had hundreds of highly satisfied clients over that period of time.  When one of them asked me why I was so cheap compared to the rest my reply was two-fold:
1. I wanted their business so I offered them lower prices than my competitors
2. I wanted to be the best that I could be so that they would be happy with my endeavours and recommend me
I also pointed out that 'something is better than nothing' if I wanted to pay my bills and live a comfortable life. Without that philosophy of giving good value for money I would not have survived for the 20 years I did and I gained clients who would otherwise have moved on and not had what they could afford.
Cheap doesn't always equate to being crap, and expensive doesn't always equate to being great, or even the best.
I often use this tactic when I negotiate with utilities and I ask them "would you rather have something, or nothing". When you're dealing with your clients you have to understand the affordability equation and if you price yourself out of a market that has sustained you throughout the early years, then it's understandable that you will lose them.
You really should consider giving your clients some breathing room and not lumber them with a lump sum they had no time to plan for or even decide whether it was affordable or not.  We all realise that prices rise, but your team decided not to implement yearly rises for a decade, and you survived and grew, but now it's all OK to just make sweeping changes without warning and you expect everything to be rosy and everyone will be happy campers.
IPS made a huge blunder by leaving price increases for ten years or more and then just hit everyone out of the blue with patronising PR babble as a defence.  You need to negotiate with your clients, not dictate.
I've waded through the years of complaints railed against IPS for some blunders made in the past, this is not the first toxic topic, but man it has quickly become the one to beat.
 

I couldn't agree more - I've been in two discussions about how lamentable the Pages app is in a modern day environment where so much is streets ahead, but that's in another discussion.
Can you provide me with a link to your site and where your pages listing is - there may be something different about your layout as it doesn't appear correct even though you're using the default template.  If you want to keep your site private from here you can PM me a link, once I see how things are being displayed I should be able to help you more, also can you tell me what version of IPS you are using? If you want to give me ACP access that may be quicker 🙂
 

He did say "name your price"

He did say "name your price"