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The community can even create their own "volunteer team" of trustees to take a "community notes" role upon them, with a "badge" award system, for their contributions to the community notes. This is something completely different from reviews. It can even be public for all. The award and motivation is in the badges. There are so many ideas and fixes for every problem. World Goodwill (not money) is the start for all that becomes beautiful, and for all that lasts. Another tip. Solutions. It's in the community their hands.

To combat those issues. Why don't you try something like twitter has done to combat misinformation, but apply it to bad mods, bad addons, even faulty themes, and more. Add something like "community notes" smartly implemented. (not reviews) Let the people who love the community themselves do the hard work, and ease the burden on your team. The complaints will go to the community notes aswell, so no stress on the dev team either. It will increase the community feel again, the modders, designers and themers have something to do again, but now everyone will be able to play a role in it. Community notes works pretty well it seems. You will have a blooming community again, working together for the common good. The succes of social media does not have to mean bad news or the downfall of community software. Learn and apply their succes in the software package. Just a tip for consideration.

Exactly. They made it very difficult on themselves, by taking responsibility for what their community creates for their product, by reviewing in detail every single release from the community. That obviously leads to burnout on their team. Very rarely does a developer take such responsibility over whatever addons their communities release. They could add a simple disclaimer, that those themes and addons are to be used at own risk, and that they are not affiliated with IPB in any way. vBulletin pulled off something similar, gutting their entire scripting community, by making it very hard for their developer community to make mods. It's very odd to say the least that 'community' packages, who need THE community, would do something so "upside-down". BTW, respect to you, Joel R for being stubborn with your theme and modding business. Many had given up. Nice to see someone that keeps going against the mainstream with his business. And that being said, for most it wasn't even a business, it was just an incredibly fun community hobby and experience. It's such a sad sight to see so many "bland" looking communities out there these days. The creativity on design and modding used to be next level. Even inspiring official companies to improve their products with it. Sadly, they need a "visible" place, where many visit, to inspire. MP was just that. Post 2020 Google really doesn't help finding hidden gems with their war on "misinformation".

Marketplace removal. Community feel removal. Gathering to enterprise strategy. Some feel that community scripts are losing out to social media giants slowly, and thus making a move towards big enterprise companies. Xenforo kinda still remains old school towards the script community, which makes THE difference for a majority. The biggest disappointment after coming back was, that it's even hard to find a simple working shoutbox addon for IPB these days. They have completely lost the scripting community. I am thinking of informing myself on IPB policy in regards to selling licenses. Because in this case, this is an up to date very expensive license in this regard, branding free, all addons, from way back when the community spirit was still in the right place. Valued around 1000 bucks on IPB these days. Without the points above, the license is worth not even 1/4th the money for our use of it. I'd probably sell it for 250, which is a fair price in current policy. Sad for the money.

Here is the concern exactly. The wishes and desires of 1% big and rich enterprise companies, who thought it could be bad publicity or business for them or even if it looked less professional to them if IPS had such a "normal people" marketplace. So I sincerely hope this was not the case here, that IPS bowed down to the wishes of some enterprise company and therefore willing to gut 99% of their customer and passion driven community for that. Other than that, I understand the concerns that Jim M. has expressed. But let's leave big enterprise biss out of the equation when speaking about a loving passion driven theme and development community. Because that's troublesome as the big guys, don't really care about that. I was speaking about the small man. The man on the street. The gamer who wishes to make a clan forum. The artist who wishes to make an artist forum. The musician who wishes to make a community around his work. A normal to middle size company. The normal man. The majority of mankind. Humble people. Humble companies. The humble communities. The start of every humble company and person.

To prove my point. Count the total number of posts of all the forums. Marketplace is THE one, with the most activity and posts. 82.6k posts! The other forums don't even come near that number, from the forums which my account can see. You basically removed the most active community out of your community suite ... for money? Logic tells us, a less active community results in less sales, and even less money. Even tho money should never be a factor in a community. Marketplace was mostly free stuff. I hope to see this decision reverted at some point. This can be better.

Hello, I recently came back as a designer after some years of pauze from theme design. I used to be a theme designer here on IPS, and as most theme designers, the marketplace was THE backbone of the community driven development and designers group. It brought life, passion and energy in an area that would otherwise be plain boring. I hope it's not against the rules to debate this, but I was really surprised, to see that a community software package, has decided to take the 'community' and drive out of their community basically, with the removal of marketplace. The reason for this was that marketplace sales had gone down for 75% for a while, but this also means that 25% was still active. I do believe that in a community, money should never be the factor, to remove a big chunk out of the social aspect out of the community. Specially not when a majority of the market place was free stuff, free mods, free addons, free themes. My question: Is there any chance that we will see something like a community design and marketplace back? We all know that community software, without a solid design and developer community cannot sustain for long-term. As the community itself is the backbone and the foundation, to keep the software itself going, isn it. If money was a factor to remove the backbone out of the community, for a community software package, it seems as if development might shoot itself in the foot with this decision long term. It reminded me of games like world of warcraft, who were once considered Massive Multiplayer Online game, who then decide to make their game mostly a single player experience, by removing many of the social aspect out of their game in the last few years. It is no surprise that since then, their sales and subscribers have gone down. The same goes for games, and their map designers. It's these kind of map designers and mod designers, that keep the game surviving and interesting for a very long time. Consider the community your "map designers". I do not know if the right decision was made with the removal of marketplace. I'm also surprised, that there is so little questions asked by the developer and theme community. Hope this helps provide some feedback from an old-school designer of this once cheerful and bright passion driven community. Kind regards, Sarah