Lindy

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! 🙏

I'm sorry for the delay and your frustration. Your transaction was caught by our fraud screening filters with an unusually high risk score. This transaction should have been automatically declined, which would have provided immediate feedback. I apologize for the lack of communication. 

As noted in your ticket, we have manually approved your second transaction. We appreciate the opportunity. 

This ONLY impacts legacy "Standard 25" and "Plus 40" customers at this time. If you did not receive an email, it is because you are not on those packages and no further action is necessary.

On 12/22/2021 at 3:50 AM, opentype said:

Can you please clarify how and when this is processed?
What date exactly will that happen? Is is a specific date or tied to the renewal terms?
What happens when someone doesn’t upgrade in time? Will they have their accounts put on hold? Or deleted entirely and instantly?

On January 22, 2022, cloud service will be temporarily suspended until such time that a new package is selected. We felt this was a better (albeit less than ideal) alternative to automatically upgrading packages. There will be a 60 day grace period to reactivate an account on a new package, or receive a full backup of the account. After the 60 day window, the account would be purged, per data retention policies

I hope that answers your questions and helps alleviates some potential fear and uncertainty. 

Yes; by upgrading. 🙂

Seriously though, there is no other way to dismiss it permanently, I'm sorry.

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. 

16 hours ago, Tom_F said:

The real question here is do I do it now or wait till 4.30pm on Friday to royally break everything.

Please make it 8PM on a Friday (EST) and be sure to run the upgrader on mobile with 2% battery life left. Thanks and tell the boys in support Lindy sent you!

I apologize for your frustration. I have chased down your ticket and responded accordingly.

It should fetch the delta via http. FTP is a forced option. Double check the file / dir permission requirements and submit a ticket if those are correct and it's still prompting for FTP.

If you're using it for true mass payment purposes, you should still be within the spirit of the AUP. That policy suggests you would not be in compliance, however, if you are making payments through the system on an individual basis. 

In any event, there doesn't appear to be any technical changes or impact; it's merely a clarification of policy. 

Sorry you're having difficulties, @MorriganIt's certainly not been a wonderful 10 months, by any stretch. 😞

I'm also sorry the notifications are causing you stress. They're intended to emphasize the importance of updates - if you're like me, you've likely clicked the "remind me later" button on OS updates a few dozen times before actually going through with it. Unfortunately, there is no distinction between licensed/unlicensed at this time - if we recommend an update, it's recommended regardless of license status. Nonetheless, I truly understand and empathize with the sentiment -- these are difficult times for many and we don't necessarily want reminders. I'm sorry this has been an example of that for you. 

I hope things improve for you soon. 

Hi there. Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback and I'm sorry for your disappointing support experience. I've taken the liberty to review your ticket history as well as your community itself. I counted almost 50 third party plugins, 15 third party applications for a total of over 200 "hook" points. That is, by most definitions, a fairly significant amount of modifications. There is nothing inherently wrong with that and we of course welcome and encourage you to personalize and tailor the software to meet your needs, however, it does limit the amount of support we are able to provide.

I often use an automotive analogy... there are some vehicle owners that make a significant amount of customizations to their vehicle. Some, such as cosmetic changes (tinted windows, spoilers, etc.) have no real impact on the integrity or reliability of the vehicle and there are no warranty issues with the dealer. If, however, you add an aftermarket device designed to change the behavioral parameters of the vehicle (eg. an ECM 'tuner', an electronic device that plugs into the ODB port, an aftermarket head unit, etc.) - it is not a realistic expectation for the manufacturer (and dealer) to warrant and support the vehicle unless the concern is directly related to a "stock" defect or root cause.

In the case of your current support request (RSS feeds and image dimensions) - I've looked at the origin feed and the height/width attributes are indeed being sent in the feed itself. Invision Community simply imports what is provided in the feed. You would, as noted in the request, unfortunately need to work with the feed author to remove the hardcoded attributes in the feed.

I wish I had better news for you and I understand how difficult and frustrating it is sitting between developers/manufacturers and third parties/aftermarket, as a consumer.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and I hope your experience improves moving forward.

On 10/25/2020 at 12:13 PM, Chippy365 said:

 

Unfortunately not - moderators are instead editing the post that gets a user banned to say that the user has been banned for the particular post. It's not ideal but at least users are aware the user has been banned so they don't expect a reply anymore.

Wouldn't it be easier to create a 'Banned' group for visual representation if you're going through that trouble?

The Marketplace is a service. While you are of course acquiring third party resources, you are not obtaining them directly from third party authors and it is really no different than other app stores. Your transaction is conducted through IPS and the Marketplace is a remote service. The point here is just to dispel the silly notion that we're in "breach of contract." The EULA makes clear the fact that a renewal is required for all updates, services, etc.

To provide further clarification, an expired license does not shut off the software and you may continue its use in an "as-is" state (at time of expiration), but it does effectively render both the license and status as a customer as inactive. It is no secret that our company is based on the recurring investment model, so while we don't want anyone to feel held hostage to renewals and we try to reasonably accommodate all customers past and present, our decisions and prioritization of goals will ultimately be in the interest of those continuing along side of us, sharing our overall vision.

With all of that said, this topic has been discussed several times and ultimately, the Marketplace was moved to the AdminCP for what I hope are obvious reasons. A significantly improved and smooth experience for the majority of customers who want a point-and-click experience, consistent with most non-classic "forum" platforms. We want to take every reasonable measure possible to ensure that when you click to install something from the Marketplace, it will be a successful and safe experience for you. We've tightened the framework around that to ensure you're notified with seamless updates from authors and anything installed through the Marketplace framework has been reasonably reviewed by us. We made the decision to disallow manual downloads from the Marketplace as it is entirely counterproductive to the goal we set out to achieve in the first place.

I want to stress that you are welcome to contact an author for manual file provisions if you would like and we do not prohibit them from providing it. You may also purchase from some authors directly if you wish. The only caveat for both cases is, you would use the manual (old) framework to install and update these resources manually. A warning will also be generated because these are untested files - similar to Mac and Windows. Beyond that, we're not standing in your way of using the "old school" way - we are just not facilitating it as again, it is counterproductive to our goal of something that resembles more of a proper app store and not just a repository of "files."

I'm sorry for the disappointment to those find the previous method to work better for them. As you know, we try to take on board as much feedback as we can - after all, there's no point to any of this without customers. Nonetheless, while we've heard the feedback loud and clear, we do not intend on reversing course on downloads or policy changes, so at this juncture, I would very respectfully ask that we move on to other, more actionable feedback items.

Thank you as always for your continued business.

8 minutes ago, Fast Lane! said:

Hi @Lindy, just trying to dissect your reply. Are you saying you have no plans to drop the ability to self host but may just have new feature mapping (some saas only) and potentially different cost structures for self hosted support. This is a super soft spot that could undermine my business if self hosting were to go away. 

Hi there - it's been a while! That's exactly what I'm saying. I can't say never (because that always comes back to haunt us on the Internet) of course, but we have no plans to drop self-hosting at this time.

On 9/16/2020 at 9:11 PM, Allegheny said:

So does this mean that "self hosted server licenses" will be phased out at some point?  It sure seems like that's very much on the table.

 

I always try to be honest and transparent, as you know - that doesn't mean what I say today will ring true forever and ever, however. There will most definitely be certain future services/features (those that depend on our infrastructure) that will be cloud / SaaS only and there may be changes to how we provide support in a self-hosted environment, but the on-premise segment of Invision is currently very healthy and viable - it would be silly to mess with that. 🙂

1 minute ago, Malwarebytes Forums said:

All good. Perhaps just a tough day and too many months cooped up. Sorry about that.

Thank you and your team for your support

2020 will forever be known as the year of "on edge." Thanks for your support, continued business and understanding. 🙂

7 hours ago, Ziggs said:

I just paid the $15 fee out of ignorance because I was scrapping one project and using my license to start another.  Had I realized that I could open a support ticket for this, I'd have done so.

I feel a bit chapped about this, but I'll remember it next time. 😡

I've reviewed your account and under the circumstances, refunded that fee.

3 hours ago, AlexJ said:

You are not the only one. I personally feel, IPS did it to force people on renewals. 

I really was super pissed on updating site. Like, I had to spend freaking 1-2 hr to link all my addons and plugins with the useless search from admin CP. I wish they had direct link option. Two developers, decided to change their addon name and I ended up searching for minutes for right new names. 

 

I'm unsure what domain resets have to do with renewals - there's two different dialogues seemingly occurring in this topic. To your point, however, the goal isn't to "force" renewals - that's a bad business model we've never subscribed to. The reasons for this change have been outlined elsewhere.

I am sorry you had a rough experience and we're open to ways to improve the initial transition. With that said, do note this is a one-time transition. Once done, your authorized resources will be linked to the Marketplace for seamless upgrades and maintenance moving forward.

As this topic is going in multiple directions, we're going to close it down to prevent further confusion. As always, even in cases where we can't accommodate specific feedback, we do appreciate it nonetheless, as well as your continued business!

1 hour ago, Paul E. said:

If anyone else encounters this, we tracked it down to memory exhaustion in php. Increasing the value of memory_limit resolved the issue. Not sure if the memory requirement for 4.5 changed.

What was your before/after?

Thanks for sharing the information.

I'm really sorry you're taking this so personally @Malwarebytes Forums - the intent wasn't to vilify or offend you and I apologize for coming off snippy. I also apologize for misunderstanding the second component to the feedback - placing the actual post ID number from the database in the post.

I can understand, from your perspective, you're simplifying things for yourself and staff. Fair enough if you're able to remember ID numbers (I'm impressed to be honest.) From our perspective, it's far more end-user friendly (and if end-users aren't happy, none of us succeed) to provide a link (and you can prevent that from embedding if you'd like) to content, so a user can bookmark the content, re-share it for peer-to-peer based purposes (which is often a strong point of support communities), etc. The references to Twitter and the "rest of the web" were simply to illustrate a sense of familiarity to end users. Nothing I'm familiar with outside of legacy forums handles or references public facing content in such a manner - blogs, social media or otherwise.

I certainly did not refer to you (or anyone else) as inconsequential. I was clearly referring to the number itself. I realize now you personally were not talking about arbitrary in-line numbers that are in fact subject to change, but while the number is no longer arbitrary, it's still nonetheless not user-friendly if you have a 30 page topic and are told "see post 390."

I digress and am happy to concede that we simply disagree and that's ok. To address others' point "let us choose" - we'd love to accommodate every request vs an on/off setting, I'm unsure why there's a limited perception that we strip things out just to alienate folks. The reality is, everyone has their own "thing" and unfortunately, accommodating them all leads to a bloated management interface, increased development time via implementation, maintenance, etc. -- a "simple" setting doesn't seem like much on an individualized basis, but cumulatively it adds up, so we have to prioritize and we don't do so based on our own personal preference, but based on the demand of the majority. As I've said, our majority prefer moving forward and thus, software real estate is reserved - so-to-speak - for that purpose. Fortunately, the Marketplace is intended to accommodate things like this and to alleviate concern in that regard, no, we would not reject a resource that put this back. There's no performance overhead or functional backend issues. Mere cosmetic re-introductions are permitted.

As noted in line number 1 of this post (post number TBD after submission) in topic ID 457939 (I kid, I kid! Too soon?) - I do apologize for the seeming hostility. You're right in that we needn't agree on subject, but I don't want you to feel disrespected personally.

I'm sorry it's felt that we were dismissive and it's never our intent to insult anyone who are trying to provide us heartfelt feedback. Admittedly, I think our frustration with demands for legacy functionality does bleed through on occasion, for which I apologize. It is taxing at times when you are moving forward, the vast majority of your clients are happy, but there's the occasional desire to pull us backwards and believe me, cluttering up the interface with inconsequential numbers, is by ALL modern web standards - a step backwards.

I know it sometimes feels like we make decisions in a vacuum and without regard to clients, because you are the client that feels passionately about a given issue - it IS an issue to you and we get and expect that. Nonetheless, I sometimes wish some of you had the vantage point of being in our office and on our internal systems in which we gather collective feedback from various avenues, technician notes, sales notes and see the exhaustive vetting that goes into something. You would see that this, for example, was removed because:

1) It's 2020 - post 390 right now, may not be 390 5 minutes from now or may not even be 390 right now to another user.

2) There are legacy forum platforms that have grown to be quite successful in maintaining legacy functions for a niche demographic and that's great for them, but we our goal is not at all to compete with legacy forum platforms. Consider us the FedEx of Communities: Moving Foward. 😉 We are a modern community platform and very respectfully, there isn't anything modern social related that uses arbitrary, visual IDs. I can't imagine you would tell a colleague "Hey Bob, check out tweet 9832441068311 on Tim's twitter feed" - nobody does that, right? 🙂 You send a link to the tweet and save Bob 10 minutes of needing to energize the flux capacitor to find content. Same with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and other platforms the majority of customers and their end users are going to be familiar with.

3) Because, as noted in #2, it's inconsistent with literally the rest of the Internet, it caused confusion. "How do I remove this?" "Why is this here?" etc. It all prompted the question "why IS this here? it serves no functional purpose beyond familiarity and personally speaking, I would be extremely annoyed if someone sent me an arbitrary ID number for content I'm suppose to find myself when they could literally click the date of the post and send me the link to it.

I realize it used to exist and at one point, it was a good idea. Hand cranking an old Model A was also a good idea too before electric starters. I think we can mostly agree ehhh, maybe we'd rather just jump in and turn a key and/or push a button. Likewise, most agree they don't need an arbitrary number as a visual cue or as directions to a post - that's not how the 2020 Internet works. Simply click, copy and paste the link. Bob thanks you in advance.

@BankFodder I could see how that number could be misleading. I just looked, as I was curious too, but there are folks who have downloaded i 10+ times and it counts each one. This is the number of reporting installations that have ever had the plugin:

Paul, the feedback truly is appreciated. With anything, there are inherent risks. You can buy anything and it can go unsupported, warranty denied, or any number of things you hadn't hoped for. The Marketplace is an inherent risk to IPS as well. Anytime there's a fraudulent purchase, a developer disappears and/or there are chargebacks, IPS bears the burden of such - financially and otherwise. When you are dealing with inexpensive resources at a 10% commission, one $15 chargeback it can take dozens of transactions to recoup the loss from that one previous transaction. The Marketplace, from a financial standpoint, is a loss leader for IPS, but it's something that adds value to the product and enhances the customer experience. So, yes, there are risks - for everyone. We've drastically improved the footprint and presence of the Marketplace for 4.5 and thus increased exposure - which ultimately, will be great for everyone. With that, however, necessitates the need to leverage tighter control of the Marketplace. If you buy an app in the App Store or Play, you don't get the source. If the developer disappears, that's the end of the app. That is the unfortunate reality that we all face virtually everywhere else. 99% of the time, the risk pays off.

I completely understand where you are coming from, Paul. Truly. You are fortunate to have the skills and desire to get your hands dirty. I do, however, have the advantage of knowing our customer base and  very respectfully - you are indeed the exception, not the norm. Most want to point, click and go. I understand the argument that has been raised: "why not have both?" - we effectively do, even if it's not quite what you had in mind. You can manually install resources and if you wish to purchase something in the Marketplace, there is nothing stopping you from contacting the author and asking for files and likewise, nothing preventing the author from providing it to you. The only caveat is it's installed through the unofficial installation side of the framework and thus unsupported. Beyond that, if the author agrees with your assessment that you should have the ability to view and alter their resources, what we've done in 4.5 should have no bearing on you. If you're asking to have it like it was, I'm afraid we have no intention of doing so, to be completely candid. Whether that changes in the future is unknown, but at this juncture, we will continue to improve the infrastructure, processes and work with the authors to create the best experience we possibly can. There will be bumps. There always is - as we speak, there's an app I can't open on my iPhone since an update - it just crashes. I've been doing this long enough to know things happen and I don't expect the developer or Apple to catch everything. Likewise, we can't predict the perfect storm in every circumstance and when we find something, we will all learn from it, do our best to ensure it doesn't happen again and rather than mask issues that bubble up outside of the Marketplace, they will be dealt to ensure other customers don't encounter the same thing.

Invision is moving in the direction that the majority of the Internet has already moved towards. Point. Click. Done. Fewer and fewer people have any interest in the nuts and bolts of things anymore. We used to have our own datacenter space long ago. I remember personally, in our earlier years, getting late night calls because a power supply failed, or one of the Cisco 6509's didn't come back after an update, or a processor failed. I know nothing about latest server hardware and I haven't had to telnet into a power strip in years... do you know why? Because I don't have or want to. 🙂 Our infrastructure is housed entirely within AWS these days. They do what they do, so we can do what we do and while they aren't perfect either... it works. That is what the overwhelming majority of customers want. Of course, if I wanted to get my hands dirty and rack a server, there are still colo providers available. If we wanted to download, hack up and mess with a collaboration and communication tool - we could, but why? That's what Slack does and I don't care what their code looks like, or what the third party developer's code looks like. It's point. Click. Done. If there's no done, they will work until there is. Again, it may not be your ideal outcome and I really do understand the mistrust, but we just can't be something to everyone and in this case, we're focusing on the things you shouldn't -have- to focus on vs carving out space for you to rack your own server. Others do that well, but we are moving away from that model and I do realize it's a big change for some. We hate to alienate or turn away anyone, we really do.

In short: I would encourage you to contact authors moving forward if you want a copy of a resource and see if that's an option, either as a courtesy or by purchasing from their site instead of the Marketplace. We are standing firm on our position with regards to how the Marketplace will function moving forward. You have my word and commitment to making that the best possible experience it can be. We will also improve communication for these types of things in the future. I think we just assumed everyone would welcome the change - who doesn't like simplicity, right? There's obviously a few that do care and we'll be more mindful of that.

Thanks again for taking the time to provide concise and constructive feedback, Paul. It's appreciated.

It's really regrettable there was an issue. You shouldn't need to download, read dev docs and debug to use the Marketplace - that is in fact the very point of what we're doing. If you have a desire to dissect third party resources, you're certainly encouraged to work with the author directly. I know there's disappointment and there's a few of us really looking for examples to illustrate the decision as a terrible idea, but it was given a lot of consideration. It was discussed, vetted and took a considerable amount of time to develop. I appreciate the feedback and am sorry for the ill will this has generated, but we absolutely will not compromise, moving forward, on the integrity of what's provided directly through the Marketplace framework. I understand the seeming irony here with this case and while we cannot account for everything in our reviews, things will continue to improve. If you have to open a code editor to use something acquired directly in the Marketplace, we have failed somewhere along the way and the solution is to fix that... NOT just provide the download , let customers fix it themselves and break the chain and overall flow of the Marketplace.

As a point of interest, the framework allows third parties to use background tasks and Michael (who is a fantastic dev) suggested he could move this area to a background task. I think this is a simply an edge case - an unfortunate one nonetheless.

4 hours ago, Deathicated said:

Was there a specific reason to disallow manual updates to marketplace apps? Not only is that creating a bottleneck, but the new update approval system is not complementing that very well. Why after all these years it's only now relevant to review updates?

I like most of the 4.5 marketplace changes but this seems rushed and not well planned out. I work with a few devs who've encountered similar issues with this miscommunication resulting in their updates taking days, not hours.

I hope it'll sort itself out, but we need to be able to update marketplace files. Having to maintain two versions just to be able to have the option to update one makes no sense to me considering how easy it is to just update the files host-level.

Yes, we had so many issues, so much support overhead and so much customer dissatisfaction with inconsistency and sloppiness prior to 4.5. We only provided cursory reviews for initial submissions and as is often the case, a new product (or resource) tends to start with a base and then future releases build upon that with enhancements. Without screening updates, we were missing some pretty significant issues that broke communities. Couple that with the disorganization of customers manually managing updates for resources, leaving their community in an unstable site with a hodge-podge of outdated third party code, we had to make a decision. Either limit the damage a third party resource could do to a community, which would mean removing some of the flexibility that makes resources so useful -- or exerting control over what's pushed through the Marketplace. We opted for the latter as it ultimately benefits the majority. The majority of contributors from a support and even, to an extent, piracy standpoint. Customers because the resources have far more stringent standards, are screened - even for upgrades - which can only increase confidence and stability in the product. IPS, because the support overhead is reduced due to out of date third party resources, poorly updated resources, etc.

We recognize there have been a few bumps and I apologize for same. I have the utmost confidence and faith in this change. Regarding approvals, more information regarding the process for critical updates has been posted in the contributor forum - please be sure to follow that forum if you don't already. In short, there's a provision for critical updates. Normal updates should be expected to take 24-48 hours or so, which is typical of an app store based on my research.