The Heff

I've been doing this for roughly the same time, and stand by my point of view. I have never had the problems you described, so that is either a personal experience or purely conjecture. One approach will doubtless be suitable for every community, and what I've adopted has worked quite well, both with older and younger demographics.

It's what IPS recommended years ago, and it is a great approach. 👍🏻

I agree with nearly everything, but this: In my experience any published rules and guidelines that attempt to set such clear boundaries will only bite you in the longer ter. Rules will inevitably be written in such a way that somebody could and will misinterpret them, whether intentionally or not, and then argue that the rules have not been breached or that they mean something entirely different. I've opted for a lighter touch using an approach IPS previously suggested: It is very hard to argue with an opinion. I then provide some explicit examples, but again nothing so explicit that it creates loopholes, and empower my moderators: And finally: In many years of using this approach I've yet to have an argument over the rules. Members being penalised may argue that they believe they've done nothing wrong, but we simply respond that, in our opinion, they have. It works very well.

You can reset it via email.

I wanted the sign in buttons but not the text, so no.

Re #2 - I hide the text using CSS. It takes up so much real estate on mobile view that it's a detractor and stops visitors seeing valuable content unless they scroll past it. I saw a small decrease in bounce rate after making this change.

That's got to be one of the most level-headed breakdowns of such a proposal that I've read. Bravo. 👏 The internet needs more of this, rather than the constant "but my privacy" objections with few other substantiated concerns.

Does that require an app to work? If so, I see a fundamental flaw in that approach.

The 2700x is no slouch. You could forever wait for the next better processor, but then you'd always be waiting. As it stands now, you're not benefitting from the best processor you have available. I'd sit with the 2700x for two or three years, until it really is obsolete.

A good place to start is here:

Also vouching for @ehren. - top notch support.

As I recall, subscriptions passed through a number of developers and support became problematic. (I recall the support burden being significant.) IPS pulling it back into Commerce solved a lot of problems. I know it's not what you want to hear, but that's just not the way it works. I paid for a Windows XP licence, but it is no longer available. I paid for a forum software called MegaBBS, but it is no longer available. I paid for 32-bit compatible software that now only supports 64-bit. Things change, the offer changes, and we as customers must choose to accept them or look for alternatives. I can't see IPS splitting Subscriptions out from Commerce given that the payment gateways are managed through Commerce.

There are plenty of long-term developers for IPS who have dark themes available and who have provided long-term support. I can name @ehren. as one such example. I've been running communities for at least 15 years and have been an IPS customer for about 10 of those. I've only ever really been let down when I failed to do my research.

I try to de-risk "getting stuck" as much as possible and always think ahead to the next update. In anticipation of 4.4 I'm looking at the limited number of third party addons I use and assessing whether they'll be updated in a timely fashion, and will seek alternatives if it appears they may hold back an update by an unreasonable amount of time. I also planned ahead by migrating from CentOS 6.10 to CentOS 7.6 in the last week, allowing me to enable HTTP/2 and ALPN, and have PHP 7.3 ready to go. Bring on the cutting edge. 😀

I didn't know Star Wars had witches in it! 😎 You're right though, it's funny how often I can't find my way to community forums.