Lindy

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 At the same time, many listed providers are no longer active, and we regularly receive complaints about unanswered inquiries and outdated information.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.

56 minutes ago, DracoBlue said:

I don’t think that’s true when it comes to the number of users choosing cloud vs self-hosted - unless you’re referring to revenue from cloud compared to self-hosted. Let me clarify - what I mean is that, in my humble opinion, the majority of users still prefer self-hosted solutions over cloud. You can clearly see this reflected in the discussions on the forum.

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.

2 hours ago, Jordan Miller said:

Congrats on the launch! 👏

🙏

44 minutes ago, Joey_M said:

Would Invision allow us to schedule the upgrade process? I assume currently it would be on a queue basis, for those who click first, and they would need to be ready.

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.

4 hours ago, Genestoy said:

Where are "KEYS" so we can get the paid for apps from the developers?

This will be rolled out very shortly!

3 hours ago, Hisashi said:

That's the biggest rewind I've seen from IPS in years of service. 🤯

The marketplace is an excellent showcase for small and big developers to publish their work that would have a potential chance of being bought, you've killed every chance for these products to be discovered.

There are many small modifications that enrich the IPS, and now they will no longer have visibility.

People will now have to apply for paid service one by one, for features that were already available in marketplace.

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.

1 minute ago, sudo said:

Will we still be able to get keys/method of transferring you speak of after October but not download in suite?

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

21 minutes ago, Dreadknux said:

Hm, I can see why IPS made this change but to be honest, asking clients to seek custom app/plugin development is going to be a lot more expensive than finding an app on a marketplace that many customers will be able to purchase. I guess it will make me a lot more hesitant to spend my money on third party apps.

To be clear, you will still be able to visit independent websites to obtain premade resources if you wish. From our standpoint, the trend has simply moved more towards custom development or stock installations. 

5 minutes ago, IPCommerceFan said:

I wonder though, since the Marketplace is essentially a portal for paid downloads, will this change affect the need/desire for IPS to continue developing/maintaining the Downloads or Commerce apps in the long run (V5)?

Not at all; both apps are very popular outside of our own use. 

We would like to take this opportunity to inform you of an important decision we've made with regard to the Invision Community Marketplace. After careful evaluation and consideration, we have decided to discontinue the Invision Community Marketplace, effective October 30, 2023.
 
Over the past several years, we have noticed a decrease in usage of the Marketplace, with a staggering 75% decline in sales. In addition, we have observed a growing trend away from off the shelf customizations towards bespoke tailoring of a community by working more closely with developers. While it has been a platform for many dedicated and talented contributors to share their work, we believe it is time to re-focus our efforts and resources to better serve your present and future needs.
 
We understand that change can be unsettling, but we are excited to share with you our new direction. We are putting our efforts into enhancing the newly introduced Providers Directory, a platform that will enable you to connect with third-party providers for a wide range of services, including custom development, community management/support, conversion services, and other valuable resources. Additionally, many providers will have independent websites you will be able to visit to explore and obtain existing and new premade resources.
 
More details are to follow soon, but we would like to highlight a few key points:

     • Marketplace renewals will cease effective immediately
     • New purchases will end September 15, 2023
     • The Marketplace will be removed in the October release and disabled on October 30, 2023
     • You will continue to be able to install and manage existing and new resources via the methods provided by their respective authors
     • You will be able to obtain a key for each of your current Marketplace purchases and provide that key to authors to transfer your purchases directly to the author

We invite you to visit the Providers Directory and start exploring the opportunities it offers. This will allow you to familiarize yourself with the database and the resources it will provide in greater depth. Many of the current Marketplace contributors have already created their profiles – please check them out!

Of course, this does not mean the end of aftermarket development with Invision Community. We are currently building new development tools for Invision Community 5 which have easier ways to add new functionality.
 
We want to express our sincere gratitude for your ongoing support and trust in Invision Community. We believe these changes will enable us to better position ourselves to continue moving forward in meeting the present and future needs of our customer base.
 
If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out.
 
Thank you for being a part of the Invision Community family.

Update

We have posted our next blog covering the next steps for obtaining purchases from 3rd party developers.

View full blog entry

We share your frustration and I assure you that although this is the first major outage event in years and we have a solid 99%+ record, we are taking this very seriously and have already taken both internal and vendor related steps to minimize the risk of this happening again. We have also made improvements to our status and communications system so you remain better informed throughout these unlikely events. 

I'm deeply sorry for the inconvenience this event has caused. Cloud clients with further concerns are welcome to send a support email and we will be happy to discuss. 

Thank you!

I truly appreciate the fresh perspective and positive energy you brought to us, Jordan. I wish you the very best in your future endeavors and have no doubt that you will carry that ++ vibe wherever you go. 🙂 

You are certainly leaving a void, however, I'm hopeful you'll continue to check in, let us know how you are doing and sprinkle some of that magic Jordust™ that the community has come to love and appreciate. 

Best of luck! 🙏

19 minutes ago, Arcade King said:

I obviously didn't make myself clear. It was a general observation about people having to complain before action is taken where a bit of foresight and planning could have avoided the mess. I think this is the biggest grip people have right now.

I genuinely believe the IPS staff are doing a great job. I recently had my VB migration issues resolved by @Stuart Silvester and my forum has never been better.

Going against the grain here and I know the decision has been reverted but yearly payment was another non issue for me, shame we can't have both options. I like to pay my bills and not have to worry about them but I understand people don't like change and if that's the way its always been done here in the past so be it.

I appreciate the feedback, candor and your kind words as well. Annual payments are something we would still like to explore and if we can modify the infrastructure to accommodate both, I personally have no issue with doing so. It will be something we revisit at a later date.

3 hours ago, nodle said:

I'll be honest, the other day reading this thread I was really worried about the prices changes, lack of support, and wondering if I had made the right move from moving from Xenforo. But now that people have voiced their opinions and frustrations (myself included), it looks like things may be going on in the background with their support that we don't know about, and @Matt made some good changes already. I think we are going to be alight guys, now get in here for a group hug. ❤️

 

I am truly appreciative of this post; your earlier post(s) troubled me personally as being evil, disconnected and full of marketing fluff is not the image we want to project. I'm grateful you provided the opportunity for the dialogue to evolve, for feedback to be heard and actioned and to witness some of the thought and care that went into some of these changes behind the scenes. I apologize that our communication missed the mark and again appreciate the constructive feedback and patience while we digested and acted upon same. 

I'm all in on the group hug.