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The Invision Community release train. Choo-choo!

@Jordan Miller is on vacation.
End of hump day.

A lot has been said in this topic so I will just put my 2 cents in @Matt:
Do anything in your power to keep talented developers like Adriano, Michael J., Nathan, InvisionHQ, CodingJungle and others happy. They are the reason we use IPS, stock version will never fit everyone's needs. That's why those developers are so useful and important to have. Without them my communities fall apart. Should have communicated price change sooner. Allow those who want to renew at least once using old pricing. I know I would have taken advantage of this and renewed immediately. Now for a price three times bigger - not so much. I also want IPS to succeed but you seem to be causing the opposite all thanks to everything we have been seeing lately. 
P.S. I hope native video uploading and support will not be once again made exclusive to cloud hosting just like Zapier was before all the backlash. Once you start going SaaS route I'm afraid you will loose even more customers.

@Matt I wonder if you could create a "Spoiler" like functionality that a customer could use to highlight portions of a forum topic that they don't want to reveal to the other customers.  Support staff would be able to see the masked text not anyone else. These kind of postings would be left up to support staff to deal with.  Other customers may find value following along (as best they can with some details missing) if they think an issue being reported might arise on their site or is already happening.  
 

A lot has been said in this topic so I will just put my 2 cents in @Matt:
Do anything in your power to keep talented developers like Adriano, Michael J., Nathan, InvisionHQ, CodingJungle and others happy. They are the reason we use IPS, stock version will never fit everyone's needs. That's why those developers are so useful and important to have. Without them my communities fall apart. Should have communicated price change sooner. Allow those who want to renew at least once using old pricing. I know I would have taken advantage of this and renewed immediately. Now for a price three times bigger - not so much. I also want IPS to succeed but you seem to be causing the opposite all thanks to everything we have been seeing lately. 
P.S. I hope native video uploading and support will not be once again made exclusive to cloud hosting just like Zapier was before all the backlash. Once you start going SaaS route I'm afraid you will loose even more customers.

A lot has been said in this topic so I will just put my 2 cents in @Matt:
Do anything in your power to keep talented developers like Adriano, Michael J., Nathan, InvisionHQ, CodingJungle and others happy. They are the reason we use IPS, stock version will never fit everyone's needs. That's why those developers are so useful and important to have. Without them my communities fall apart. Should have communicated price change sooner. Allow those who want to renew at least once using old pricing. I know I would have taken advantage of this and renewed immediately. Now for a price three times bigger - not so much. I also want IPS to succeed but you seem to be causing the opposite all thanks to everything we have been seeing lately. 
P.S. I hope native video uploading and support will not be once again made exclusive to cloud hosting just like Zapier was before all the backlash. Once you start going SaaS route I'm afraid you will loose even more customers.

Yesterday when I requested to remove Blogs and Gallery from my license they were $30 renewal each. Now I see they’re $15 each. 

If it’s right and if it’s possible to do, I would like to return Blogs and Gallery to my license so I keep supporting them.

A lot has been said in this topic so I will just put my 2 cents in @Matt:
Do anything in your power to keep talented developers like Adriano, Michael J., Nathan, InvisionHQ, CodingJungle and others happy. They are the reason we use IPS, stock version will never fit everyone's needs. That's why those developers are so useful and important to have. Without them my communities fall apart. Should have communicated price change sooner. Allow those who want to renew at least once using old pricing. I know I would have taken advantage of this and renewed immediately. Now for a price three times bigger - not so much. I also want IPS to succeed but you seem to be causing the opposite all thanks to everything we have been seeing lately. 
P.S. I hope native video uploading and support will not be once again made exclusive to cloud hosting just like Zapier was before all the backlash. Once you start going SaaS route I'm afraid you will loose even more customers.

A lot has been said in this topic so I will just put my 2 cents in @Matt:
Do anything in your power to keep talented developers like Adriano, Michael J., Nathan, InvisionHQ, CodingJungle and others happy. They are the reason we use IPS, stock version will never fit everyone's needs. That's why those developers are so useful and important to have. Without them my communities fall apart. Should have communicated price change sooner. Allow those who want to renew at least once using old pricing. I know I would have taken advantage of this and renewed immediately. Now for a price three times bigger - not so much. I also want IPS to succeed but you seem to be causing the opposite all thanks to everything we have been seeing lately. 
P.S. I hope native video uploading and support will not be once again made exclusive to cloud hosting just like Zapier was before all the backlash. Once you start going SaaS route I'm afraid you will loose even more customers.

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

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Generally speaking, after so many years I feel I can say that invision is a company that thinks well about the choices it makes. But this time, as others have already written, I am very concerned about the collapse of the Marketplace. It is quite clear to me that the new pricing policy and the type of support offered for a fee is aimed exclusively at the business sector. This means that hundreds of hobby forums will be looking for alternative software solutions and this also means less appeal for me and many other developers to develop app and plugins.
Although I don't know the reasons for a series of "blows" thrown at the customer at the same time, I find some of the choices made by Invision risky.
Even if I accept the price increase, which is something I can live with, I think it was a mistake to remove the possibility to pay every 6 months. This has disoriented customers even more, even giving a perception of a heavier increase than it really is.
Furthermore, it must be acknowledged that one of invision's greatest assets has always been its ticket support. 
In short, I'm a bit worried, I'm sure I'll be one of the last to abandon ship... I've been here for 20 years... but I confess that I've been looking for alternatives for the first time in many years.
The problem is not the price, I am more concerned about the choice to let the hobby communities go.
Unfortunately I don't think the the fresh new green buttons can turn this into good news.

Let's see, I understand that even the pandemic period is not the best but let's try to give confidence to Invision as Jordan asks. Instead I would ask invision to review at least the possibility of returning to payment every six months, not for me, but I think it would help many.

I would say the thing that is most important is to lower the entry level for new users.
Add 5-10 templates for each of the category listing, entry and start page with icon representations that show the structure. That way, you can pretty much build anything you want out of the box and never touch any code. Custom templates should of course still be an option for those that want to tinker with that.
The second thing I would suggest is a WYSIWYG for custom fields in the templates. Make it easy to drag and drop custom fields into the template structure, and also how to present each of the types of fields.
Third, I would suggest reworking the way database relation fields work so we get a new template in Pages rather than in the theme structure to control output. Again, this should come with a few preset templates that is easy to get started with.
 
I think this would increase the adaptation from people that don't want or can't do code. Make things easy to use out of the box, and then build tools for the advanced users later.

Some smaller (but useful!) suggestions I've made in the past:
Allow Multiple Categories to be assigned to a Page record Options to change URL slug format on a database level (by [YYYY]/[MM]/[record_slug] for example) Remove the "-r" at the end of a record's URL by default (this one is really annoying) Allow Page Categories to be set in Menu Manager Ability to pull records from multiple databases in Widgets/Blocks/Loops But in particular, I'd like to throw in a more inspired idea. I'd like InvisionCommunity to really focus in on the relationship between Pages and the Core community. @Jordan Invision I enjoyed reading about how you were able to migrate your news/blog into the core InvisionCommunity software to great benefit, so I figure you might appreciate this suggestion as well. I think it would really help integrate the two apps together and encourage community activity/contributions. 🙂 
The concept is to improve the 'Copy to Database' feature. Let's say that I run a movie news website/community. Oftentimes, the community will post (and react to) a piece of movie news (a new trailer or celebrity interview) as a Topic in the Forums, before the admin's staff writers get a chance to write a story about it. To avoid duplication of content, Copy to Database can be a powerful tool - admins can import a user's existing topic to a 'news' record in Pages.
But there's a problem; by doing this in the current InvisionCommunity system, you either destroy the original community user's content (if your site editor writes new content when Copying to Database) or you create a duplicate topic in a different forum to where the original Topic lives, creating redundant content (which will return duplicate results in searches).
This can be alleviated in three major improvements to the system:
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Step 1: New AdminCP Settings to 'Keep Original Topic Content' & 'Add Post Meta' When Copying to Database
The above image is a mock-up of two new options that could be implemented into the AdminCP. The first makes sure that any content in the original topic/post is not modified in any way when an admin Copies the content to Database - even if the admin decides to write entire new content for the news story.
Why would someone want to rewrite a topic's content when importing to Database, but keep the topic itself the same?
An admin may wish to simply unify Page comments and Topic replies, and keep the tone of both separate It gives the freedom to reword the information in the original topic to reflect the site's "house style" of writing, while keeping the topic's original informal tone It helps to acknowledge the community source of any resulting story (and avoid annoying the community by "censoring/deleting" their posts)... ...which can open the community up to special rewards for helping contribute to the site blog, via custom Achievements or Badges  

Step 2: Add Post Meta
Related to Step 1, there could be additional post meta produced when an admin Copies a Topic to Database (which can be toggled on or off). A mock up of what that might look like is above. The post meta could be situated relative to the exact time an admin takes the Copy to Database action, or it could sit at the top of a Topic much like the Recommended Posts might do. Having this feature will make the community feel like they are contributing to the overall site/blog and that their content is getting noticed.
 

Step 3: 'Post Topic' AdminCP Options Override in Page Creation Form
If an admin creates a new article in Pages, they will often want to have that story re-posted as a Topic in a designated forum. That's where the AdminCP "Post Topic" settings come in real handy. But if that same admin wanted to create an article using Copy to Database, they may not wish to have an additional Topic created. They might think that the existing Topic - and all the comments/replies that may exist in it - is enough. Unfortunately, in InvisionCommunity's current setup, if you set your database category's "Post Topic" settings, it's everything or nothing. You can't tell InvisionCommunity to NOT post a topic on the odd occasion, if you do not want it to.
That's where this Topic Override option comes in. Set at the per-post level, this gives admins the freedom to choose on an article-by-article basis if they want an associated topic to be created when the article is published.
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I appreciate the open ears and eagerness to hear feedback! 😄  🙏

Import, export database including records, categories, page, CSS and JS, blocks and so on. Include CSS/JS templates and database page into application like HTML templates. Field Button with custom PHP actions on pre-save, post-save or display (alternatively bind fields to hooks) IPS classes from CSS framework in CKEditor, like warnings, section header, blocks, any kind of typography. Custom areas in template where the fields are placed (above or below the content is not enough).  More control for the forms, like selecting tabs, adding AJAX, toggle on/off, generally all options we have in Field class. Field keys and record data available in the form - this is really essential Include custom CKEditor plugins into applications.  Rework filter block to use and/or logic, filtering by Address field Language (my personal pain). Just 5 options in language tab are not enough for the most languages out there.   

We need "Custom No Permission Error" like in forums setting in order not to mislead members whenever a group has no permission

 
Specially after they see only this.

 
 

There is now a separate page to show rank progression and badges earned.

HAPPY Hump Day! 
A lot has gone down in the last week or two. In case you need a little refresher, we recently soft-launched Achievements. It'll be available for all in the coming weeks, but for now you can get a taste of it here in our own community. 
The response has been insanely epic 👏 
The feedback even more so 🤯 
I personally took notes of all the feedback provided. We've already started implementing some key changes (shout-out to our super talented development team!! Show them some love in the comments), including:
Explanation for how you earned a badge Current position / max number of ranks shown so you know how far you have to go Added tooltips on rank badges Added lazy loading Optimized rebuild routine Fixed a bunch of bugs I know that only scratches the surface, but keep in mind we'll continue better Achievements over time! 🤠
Lots to absorb here. Now that you've had some time to digest Achievements, how are you feeling about it? Sound off in the replies below! 🥳
PS - here's a short-list of some of the 4.6 fixes we worked on in the last week:
 
- Added a confirmation pop-up when mass approving account withdrawals.
- Added an option to limit Withdrawal requests to one per currency at any time. 
- Fixed an issue where the AdminCP livesearch results link to categories instead of blogs.
- Removed Aggregate rating from JSON-LD structured data
- Worked around a bug in MySQL when viewing statistics in the AdminCP.
 
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