Summit360

What about current customers?

Thanks, Charles. This is a serious change that should be described on a blog or in a dedicated topic.
For me and for many clients it is breaking news 😬

The problem for Chris were many very old orphaned posts which we removed for him via a ticket. 

Am tempted but it's such a huge leap 🤣

 

So I'm currently self hosting a couple of forums
Both are old sites that have been running since around 2004 or so
They're large in size of database but also storage due to uploads over the years of images etc by members

I've tried Invision hosted communities a few times over the years but always had issues with it in terms of speed, downtime or issues but due to price increases by my current hosts I'm tempted to try once more

Could I get some advice as to whether I should trust Invision to host my stuff or not?
 

Yes that is unfortunate. 

I don't believe the solution; as marked by Marc, is 'the solution'.
I wonder what the eula was when I purchased it all those years ago...
As Dean says, two parties, one dormant license to be reinvigorated, more revenue, another ipb community to potentially flourish.
 
Customers be like buffalo, loads one year, then gone tomorrow.
 

I don't believe the solution; as marked by Marc, is 'the solution'.
I wonder what the eula was when I purchased it all those years ago...
As Dean says, two parties, one dormant license to be reinvigorated, more revenue, another ipb community to potentially flourish.
 
Customers be like buffalo, loads one year, then gone tomorrow.
 

This has happened in the past, Marc. A dormant licence isn't going to earn you anything. But, someone willing to take it over and take up the payments should surely not be discouraged. If both parties share information with IPS, and account name/email are removed and then readded, then why wouldn't you accommodate that?
 
Mark
Lindy
 

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.

It's version 6, was fine... It was on 6Gb of 8Gb storage per node. guessing it didn't have enough storage to do the rebuild, just scaling it up to a larger storage... Still a good chance to find out a deployment isn't quite as tweaked as one hoped for 🙂

I removed it, refreshed, and then added it back in. 
Caching is afterall one of the two hardest things right...
Initial review seems to show a few users now. The old turn it off and on again trick worked. Onwards to the next niggle 🙂

I removed it, refreshed, and then added it back in. 
Caching is afterall one of the two hardest things right...
Initial review seems to show a few users now. The old turn it off and on again trick worked. Onwards to the next niggle 🙂

It's version 6, was fine... It was on 6Gb of 8Gb storage per node. guessing it didn't have enough storage to do the rebuild, just scaling it up to a larger storage... Still a good chance to find out a deployment isn't quite as tweaked as one hoped for 🙂

I removed it, refreshed, and then added it back in. 
Caching is afterall one of the two hardest things right...
Initial review seems to show a few users now. The old turn it off and on again trick worked. Onwards to the next niggle 🙂

My thoughts turned into a blogpost instead 🙂
https://jimiwikman.se/articles/professional/the-importance-of-communication-when-trust-dies-horribly-and-organizations-fail-r229/
 

I really feel like there are four issues at play in all of this. 
The price rise
Personally, this is the one which, although I can understand the issues it's causing for some, is in my opinion, the least controversial of all that's gone on over the last few days. Things get more expensive, the product is very different to what it was since the last increase in price, and so personally I have no problem with it. As long it goes hand in hand with a discernible and ongoing improvement in the quality of the product. There's work to be doing, rough edges to smooth and features which need adding. I do see why this may cause people to move away from Invision though - everything has its price and there are (and always have been) cheaper (and even free) alternatives. 
The support change
On the face of it, this looks terrible. But in a way it's all in the telling as it's not really a big change, assuming it works as Invision are saying - eg things that need a ticket will end up in one. For me it's one of those that needs to be given a chance to see if it works as advertised or not - if it ends up being poor then it'll need addressing/reverting to tickets urgently. 
Communication
This leans into everything else really. Had the price rise been communicated in advance, then that may have mitigated a lot of the upset it's caused. If the support changes had been communicated more clearly, that would also have stopped so many people assuming various different versions of what it is that Invision are apparently planning to do. It's an ongoing weak point with Invision in my view. There's no doubt that Invision make us feel less valued as paying customers than anyone else we spend our money with, sadly.
Does Invision care?
This is often about communication and the perception that it gives. I mean how many times can you screw it up so royally that you leave your customers confused or angry or both? With Invision it's frequent, it's frustrating and it's entirely avoidable. If you refuse to learn, refuse to take it seriously and don't change the way you do things after so many years and so many occasions, why should your paying customers keep giving you the benefit of the doubt?
It's not enough to say you care as you're picking up the pieces of another mess, or arriving back onto the scene of another feature left on the shelf for months with zero communication (think mobile app, as one example). You need to show you care, and you need to step up and own the problems that are of your own making by showing some flexibility.  EG - maybe look at a longer period of 6 month invoicing for existing customers who request it, offer a discount code for those with renewals within 3 months or something - just do something, anything to show it's not all pr style fake 'regret' just to play for time until everyone calms down or gives up. It's very little effort on your side in the great scheme of things, but could make a massive difference to the customers you're doing it for.
Oh, and finally (long post, sorry), look after your third party developers - you need them, so show some gratitude and a spirit of partnership by working with them.

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.

Principally the conversion to dynamic didn't solve it. The reindexing is underway, and activity is returning.

Dynamic is default on mariaDB 10.2, which is next on my long list of todo's. Well 10.1 > 10.3 🙂
So now just that one table and the duplicate entry problem to tackle 🙂

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.

I've already canceled the self-hosted license because of the open forum support policy. The ONLY reason I have not canceled my Cloud license is proper ticket support is continuing.
For me it's basic principle. I pay for a product. I expect proper, private support for that product from the company with whom I have a business relationship. No one else. It is not my responsibility to create a living knowledge base, nor contribute to it. I have no interest in being part of a "community". I am a customer. That's it. That's the end of the relationship I want, and need, with IPB.
It's crazy that I've posted more times in this thread than I have in 17 years.
Suffice it to say, should ticket support end with Cloud, so will my license for it.

Given the fact that you provide no valuable info on how to configure the server, you should expect that.
Maybe i missed it but i never saw a list of basic Mysql/apache/php key config items for IPS. Providing basic key settings value for typical community sizes would help a lot. Theses settings depend on the code so nobody can guess the best settings for IPS.
By the way, most of the time the hoster says it is a code issue and you say it is a server issue. And this is often right for both as optimization on both sides would probably solve the problem.
 

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.