Lindy

We went ahead and pulled the raw connection logs for your community to compare against what GA4 is reporting, and the two don't line up. Looking at actual server level connections, the traffic is overwhelmingly from France and from known search engine crawlers, primarily Googlebot, Bingbot, and Facebook's link preview fetcher (facebookexternalhit). For the specific window you referenced, we only see 53 total connections from Colombia, nowhere close to the 680 page views GA4 attributed to that country. The same gap holds for the Brazil, and Ecuador numbers you sent over. That mismatch tells us much of this traffic isn't even hitting your site. If it were real requests, even automated ones, they would show up in our edge logs regardless of what GA4 does or doesn't capture. Since they're not there, the traffic GA4 is counting never actually reached your server. What's most likely happening is that your GA4 Measurement ID is being hit directly by scripts sending fake data straight to Google's collection endpoint, without ever loading a page on your site. This is a known issue sometimes called ghost or phantom traffic or GA4 measurement spam, and it's unfortunately common when a Measurement ID is exposed in public page source, which it always is by design. Because it bypasses your site entirely, there's nothing at the server or WAF level for us to filter, rate limit, or block, since no request is being made to your infrastructure in the first place. A couple of things on your end that should help confirm this and clean up your reporting: In GA4, check the Traffic acquisition report and add the Hostname dimension. Legitimate hits will show your actual domain. Spoofed hits typically show blank, "not set," or an unrelated domain. Consider setting up a valid hostname filter in GA4 so only traffic reporting your real domain is counted. This is the standard fix for this exact issue. If you want to fully cut this off, the Measurement ID can be rotated, though that requires re tagging your GA4 setup. You should Google "GA4 phantom" or ghost traffic. There is a lot of information and potential solutions. In any event, it's not something we can solve on our end as it's often not real traffic. Even in the event of legitimate automated traffic passing through, we unfortunately just do not live in a world where we can toggle a one-size-fits-all "desirable traffic only" button. I wish it existed. At a retail platform level, we have to make adjustments that capture as much malicious/automated traffic as possible while balancing false positives. It's a never-ending game of cat and mouse.

There were no widespread incidents. There was a period of latency yesterday due to a series of attacks on specific communities, coupled with tenants on certain clusters in excess of 6-10x their plan usage boundaries. We've been forced to tune our systems and policies to become a bit more aggressive in ensuring fair use for all clients. We are in the process of migrating to a new monitoring and status platform. Further, there are obvious gaps in communication with impacted clients such a the OP, for which I apologize and take full responsibility. We will be baking in better notifications to our mitigation systems in the rare circumstances in which a community needs to be disabled. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

Sorry for the inconvenience. We've identified and corrected the issue, but please let us know if further issues arise.

Thanks everyone for the feedback and discussion. This topic was intended as an announcement to share upcoming changes and direction, rather than an open debate. We understand that not every decision will align with every individual preference. To clarify a few key points: Self-hosted (Classic) remains part of our offering, and we will continue to support it. However, it represents a relatively small portion of our overall customer base, and our product direction reflects broader market trends and the needs of the majority of customers. Regarding the Providers Directory, the way people connect with third-party developers and extend the platform has evolved significantly over time. At the same time, many listed providers are no longer active, and we regularly receive complaints about unanswered inquiries and outdated information. Maintaining an accurate and reliable directory requires ongoing oversight, which is not something we can reasonably dedicate resources to. Additionally, inclusion in such a directory can be perceived as an endorsement, which introduces expectations we are not in a position to meet or guarantee. Our key focus is on continuing to improve the platform as a whole in a way that is sustainable and forward-looking. We’ll be closing this now. If you have specific questions or need assistance, please reach out in the appropriate area. Thank you again.

That’s not accurate. Classic (self-hosting) actually makes up less than 10% of our business. There’s a relatively small segment of customers who still want to deal with hosting, deployments, and maintaining their own environment. What you’re seeing on the forums isn’t representative of the customer base at large, it’s a support bias. Self-hosted environments inherently generate significantly more issues (85-90% in fact) due to hosting quality, server configuration, database management, and so on, which naturally drives a disproportionate amount of discussion (and is part of the reason behind the forum restructuring). Cloud customers, by contrast, require far less support... which is exactly the point of the platform.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! HTML in forum posts is not something we’ll be bringing back and the decision to remove it, I assure you, was not taken lightly. While it may seem like a convenient feature, it was in fact a source of client breaches in the past. Allowing direct HTML injection left communities exposed to cross-site scripting (XSS), session hijacking, and data exfiltration. Even when restricted to admin roles, the risk didn’t disappear. Compromised accounts, reused passwords, or simple internal mistakes often turned raw HTML access into persistent exploits that impacted every member who visited the community. Beyond the immediate security exposure, this created a poor impression of community management and, more importantly, lent an unfair perception that the platform itself was insecure. That’s not something we’re willing to reintroduce. For those reasons and more, we removed the ability to post raw HTML and replaced it with safer formatting tools and the editor suite. These provide rich content creation while ensuring the security of your community. You will find, apart from a few legacy platforms, most modern solutions do not provide a mechanism for injecting or modifying raw HTML in posts. We know some community managers liked the extra flexibility, but protecting client data and community integrity has to come first. If you can outline your specific use case(s) maybe we can point you in a more secure direction. We also always welcome feedback on enhancing the embedding functionality to get you closer to the outcome you want while being safe in doing so. Please note that while we encourage the use of third-party solutions to customize and enhance your community if you so desire, we cannot permit promotion of modifications that weaken the security of the platform. For this reason, the link has been removed. Thank you for your understanding.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts — I truly do understand your frustration, and I'm really sorry this experience has been disappointing. As mentioned in the email we sent, we’re offering the Creator Pro package at an introductory rate for six months to help ease the transition, should you decide that upgrading is the right path for you. Of course, the decision is entirely yours, and we’re not imposing any changes without your consent. I wish I could offer more beyond what’s already been extended, but we’ve done our best with what was mentioned. Since this is now more of an account-specific matter, and you already have a support ticket open, I’d be happy to continue the conversation there. This forum is meant primarily for general platform feedback — which you’ve provided, and we do appreciate. Thanks so much for your understanding, and I look forward to assisting you further through your ticket!

Thank you for reaching out and I totally understand that this is a significant change. Several years ago, we transitioned away from our legacy packages as we moved to a modern cloud-based infrastructure. The older plans were built around a traditional hosting model, where costs were more directly tied to the package structure. Our new cloud platform is a true cloud solution, and as you can imagine, it requires a much larger investment on our end. That said, we’ve done our very best to honor legacy pricing for as long as possible — we really don’t enjoy raising prices. While our operational costs have steadily increased each year, your current plan has remained unchanged for quite some time. Unfortunately, we've now reached a point where it's no longer sustainable to continue offering the legacy package. We’ll need to transition your account to one of our current plans in order to continue providing reliable service and support. We’re happy to work with you to find the best fit — please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

🙏

I'm sorry for any confusion, however, we haven't performed upgrades on Classic/self-hosted in years... perhaps a decade. It's fairly straightforward -- simply download, upload and run /admin/upgrade. Or, we would be happy to help migrate you to cloud. 😉

Thank you for all of your kind words. The team did a great job with v5 and I'm excited for this next chapter!

We strive to ensure our cloud platform leverages the latest, most advanced, secure and performant technologies available. To achieve this, maintenance is of course regularly necessary. While the vast majority of updates and maintenance are performed seamlessly behind the scenes, there are occasions where a brief outage may occur. On September 20 @ 10:00PM (EDT), an upgrade to our EU infrastructure will be performed. The maintenance window will be one hour, however, we expect service interruption, if any, to only last a few moments. Please note that this does not impact all EU customers; only those who are served by our EU platform. Thank you for your patience and, as always, you may find up-to-date information on our Status Page.

This will be rolled out very shortly!

I understand where you're coming from; it was indeed a tough decision. There is also, however, the side of the Marketplace that we've kept largely to ourselves and that is the costs associated with operating it. Many assume this has been an additional revenue stream for IPS, but the reality is, it has never even broken even. To explain why and in the spirit of transparency, let's use the example of a basic $5 plugin purchase; with our 10% commission, minus transaction fees, etc. we net virtually nothing, but we assume all the risk. This means, if someone decides they're unhappy with a resource (even though we have an all sales final policy), or uses a fraudulent payment method and a chargeback is performed resulting in us losing that dispute, we pay a $15-20 fee--the author is not charged this fee and usually retains the proceeds from the original sale. It takes dozens and dozens of sales of that single resource to break even on that one transaction. Multiply that by countless chargebacks and incidents of fraud in addition to the immense development time required to review resources, the administrative time to handle customer vs developer disputes, support overhead, payout fees, etc. the Marketplace actually costs us a significant amount to provide and maintain. The costs have actually exponentially increased as the use of the Marketplace has decreased. Previously, there were more good sales to help lessen the blow of the bad sales, however, with a 75% decline in usage over recent years, the volume is simply no longer there, so the losses are subsequently no longer sustainable, even if we were to triple our commission rates, which would only hurt us and the resource authors. On a scale of full app stores such as Apple, Google, Steam, etc. you have enough volume to chase the bad with good and the numbers add up. We are, of course, not Apple. As has been said, the vast majority of our customers today appear to either prefer their installation to be "stock" or to have custom development performed by third party providers. The top three Marketplace resources are currently installed on only 2% of communities (that report statistics to us, to be clear). I know how easy we've made it for those who like lots of tweaks and resources and we hope you will continue to enjoy these resources, but unfortunately, we can no longer prop up and absorb the losses of a declining ecosystem. I fully meant what I said in the original announcement - we are excited to be able to redirecting the resources expended in supporting the Marketplace towards improving the platform on the whole and creating new opportunities for motivated third party developers to connect with interested customers for custom development, integrations, services and yes, premade resources. For those that are active in third party resource utilization, I'm very encouraged by and grateful to @Joel R for his interest and commitment to bringing our loyal third party contributor community together again in a way that provides them more freedom and opportunities.

Yes, you'll be able to transfer after the closure as well.