Lindy

I'm not sure what you're seeing, David -- but there's a valid DMARC record. 

DMARC has been enabled on that domain, which should resolve your concern. There are only a couple of DNSSBLs that major email providers such as Yahoo and Google reference for deliverability: spamhaus is one. Other sbl's have minimal, if any impact. 

Please keep in mind that the cloud email service offered by your package is shared among thousands of clients. While both we and AWS take every necessary step to be responsible stewards, minimize spam and auto remove from DNSSBLs that have impact, no provider can guarantee 100% deliverability 100% of the time on a shared platform. If email is mission critical to your community, you may wish to consider using our SendGrid integration and obtain an account with a dedicated IP add-on from them. This ensures that you are the only one using the sending IP. 

Hopefully the above will help alleviate your concern. 

We unfortunately do not have a mechanism to pause a cloud package, however, should you let the service expire, you have 60 days to reactivate before service is permanently terminated. 

On 2/14/2024 at 2:43 AM, ekforum said:

Just happened again for me, had to fill out 2 captchas in a row when clicking a link on my forum and opening up in a separate tab, around 14:41. Shouldn't it track cookies/IP address and not do that? Especially as I was also logged in as Admin at the time. It is in a general browser not a private one.
 

Sure, would be good if mainly people didn't see. But when people do see, I still think it looks very dodgy like the user has clicked onto a 3rd party website which will result in a high % of abandonment of the website/page IMO. Making it within a theme wrapper as another user suggested would be good idea if feasible IMO. 

Are you using incognito or private browsing?

We're sorry for any inconvenience. We have been hit with a run of large-scale Distributed Denial of Service attacks against a few customers that seemingly attracted a lot of negative attention. We are constantly improving our mitigation systems, but there are rare occasions when there's a delay while the system mitigates while minimizing disruption to legitimate traffic.

Thank you for your patience and ongoing business.

Please let us know if the issues editing, etc. are resolved now. 

Sorry for any inconvenience. This will be addressed shortly.

We do not currently do this for retail cloud plans, however, this is something we will look at. Thanks for your inquiry.

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

11 hours ago, Markus Jung said:

Will this also apply for Cloud customers? I need to stay on v4 at least until there is a German translation and updated versions of my apps for v5. 

We cannot guarantee v4 will be supported quite as long as Classic. One of the core advantages of cloud is that we are able to leverage the latest technologies to deliver a better experience than what can be had via the average self-hosted environment. There will likely be a time that updates to the cloud infrastructure will necessitate upgrading from v4, but there is nothing on the immediate horizon and we expect we'll be able to continue v4 support on cloud for some time. 

8 hours ago, Robert Angle said:

Well I have some mixed emotions.

On the one hand, this is fantastic for my established community. I currently have everything except for Commerce and my 6 month renewals are $105, or $210 per year. I will be converting this license to gain the extra functionality and lower my annual costs.

On the other hand, I am about to start a new community, and was was heading over here to buy JUST the forum and maybe one other app, then was shocked that it's all bundled together for $500 now. I was willing to invest a little bit on an idea that may or may not succeed, but now I'm back to wondering if I should start with a freeware script at first, and convert later. I would rather not do that because I am very fond of and very familiar with the Invision Suite. And if the new community should fail, I would use the license to try again with another one.

It would be nice if existing users got a discount or coupon code for subsequent licenses.

Please reach out to sales@invisionpower.com to see if there's anything we can do for you. 🙂 

Sorry for the inconvenience; we have deployed a change on our end to hopefully alleviate this concern. 

2 minutes ago, Kian Newman-Hazel said:

Sorry for pinging you, its just a very time sensitive and expensive situation, that the website is down. Please see my question above

Your community is under heavy Denial of Service attack. We will send this to a ticket for one-on-one communication.

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!

We are ISO27001 compliant, however, the certification process is still pending. We will also have more publicly consumable reports available in coming months. In the interim, you may find us on the CSA STAR registry and you are of course welcome to contact us via email for more information and specific questions. 

Thank you!

11 hours ago, TDBF said:

Not one word regarding this from the devs. 🤷‍♂️

Unfortunately, not every suggestion or request will reach the product, or at least within the timeframe requested. Data and privacy protection is something we take very seriously and as a provider to customers worldwide, we receive a significant amount of requests to assist customers in achieving local regulatory compliance. While we respect the DSK's position, Commerce was not designed or built to accommodate guest transactions with no corresponding account and incorporating the changes necessary to comply with this regulation would be a measurable effort with very little gain/ROI.

It's not something we have necessarily dismissed indefinitely, it is simply not on the radar in the foreseeable future for the reason cited above -- there's low demand and considerable development involved in making the platform do things that are counterintuitive to its chief goals, and thus, lacking the technical provisions for same. 

I'm sorry, we are unable to distribute old and insecure versions of the software for download. Perhaps if you can share the issues you're experiencing, someone might be able to push you in the right direction.

Thank you for posting this - we will take a look!

I'm sorry for your frustration. I've gone ahead and done this for you as a courtesy one last time, but unfortunately, the IPS retail system and the Marketplace are two different entities - the funds are not commingled. Doing this compromises the accounting on both ends, so the best way to do this moving forward would be to withdrawal the credit from the Marketplace and submit it to the client area as a normal payment. 

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your understanding and cooperation.