leonovich_J

Are you bored there or something? 

@InvisionHQ Is it possible ?
 

Hi ! How to replace expiring date by "X minutes ago" in Advert feed and other listings ?
Its not very interesting for members to know an ad will expire in 3 months and 2 days.
Thanks,

Even though price ranges can be created, what is the point of a default filter for ads WITHOUT price?
The opposite is useful to a prospective buyer. Ads WITH prices only, isn't it?
On another note, don't you think that in the item info,Time Left    7 days and 12 hours - January 13, 2022 is an overkill? 
Either of the 2, e.g. time left or the expiring date is sufficient info.
It clogs the interface unnecessarily and distracts the eye from more important info, I think. 
I also think that an option in the settings to enable Quantity by Group (e.g. to those with member stores) would also help clear the clatter in the item description area. Individuals selling used items offer 1 item. Not 2 or many of the same. Only stores do that.

Hi my lords,
Stock Replies In version 4.6.7 is a new feature that was added to the editor.
I would be grateful if you could add Stock Messages to editor as new feature in the next release!
Please find enclosed Image:

 
I would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter.
Best regards
 

The IPB software is not going to convert existing images to WebP for you.  However if you use an offline tool that creates a WebP version of an image for you, you could use something like .htaccess to detect if the device can support the WebP format and serve that version if it exists in the same folder.
Something like:
https://github.com/vincentorback/WebP-images-with-htaccess
This should be pretty safe as it's both backwards compatible with older non-supported devices and if the WebP version does not exist gracefully falls back to the original version.  

I got an important question. here is scenario:
for example I make 3 packages. free, silver and gold.
I create an advert and choose free package.
after its time runs out I want to renew it and I ONLY can renew it as a free package. I CANT UPGRADE the same advert to silver or gold.
This is bad because 1. I would loose all my reviews and comments of the advert. 2. I would need to waste time and post same advert again and choose another package. Why package can't be changed more easily? This seems like a fundamental flaw.
- also can expired classifieds can be reached only with a direct link and not be publically listed?

Thank you @Matt, this will help many smaller communities to survive.
Thank you for your attention to each topic and for listening.
This is a good sign.

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

100% agree with this. It's a two-way street.
None of my concerns have been addressed and I didn't get a response to most of what I said. I may have well just shouted into the wind for all the good it did me to post my views.
"We're sorry" - fine, you're sorry.
"We're sorry, we should have given more notice. We'll apply discounts for any renewals within X months to allow you time to plan." - much better, and means a mistake has been owned.
As it stands, the only thing keeping me from immediately leaving is the tight integration between two cruical apps - forums and commerce. That's a sad state of affairs, because prior to this I would have been staying because I believed in the product and the team. That belief has been shattered.

Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. Then again, most of what has been said by IPS staff in this thread is pretty unrealistic. Moral of the story is, this is a tactical push to evolve completely into a SaaS service. Might even save you some time and money just to refund all of the self license purchases and get rid of it entirely.
I'm pretty disappointed you haven't realized this was a huge mistake, and haven't taken steps to accommodate anyone you've blatantly hurt by these, I'll say it, malicious changes.
It's clear this was not a "communication" issue, rather a stunt to prevent anyone from renewing prior to the price hike. It's also clear the changes to self hosting prices had nothing to do with betterment of the software, rather an excuse to push people to cloud hosting. It's also clear the reason for yearly renewals was to prevent customers from selectively renewing only when they actually need to. Not because "it would confuse customers."
Yeah, confuse customers with the same model you've had for the past 10 years... We aren't that gullible. I'll stick around, but I'm not going to renew until there's drastic changes, and I'll avoid using the marketplace from now on and work directly with 3rd party developers to make sure they're being taken care of.
I can't express enough how disappointed I am.

Given the fact that you provide no valuable info on how to configure the server, you should expect that.
Maybe i missed it but i never saw a list of basic Mysql/apache/php key config items for IPS. Providing basic key settings value for typical community sizes would help a lot. Theses settings depend on the code so nobody can guess the best settings for IPS.
By the way, most of the time the hoster says it is a code issue and you say it is a server issue. And this is often right for both as optimization on both sides would probably solve the problem.
 

It's not our fault that IPS chose to be competitive and not raise the prices in line with cost of inflation each year. I'm very grateful they didn't, but that's honestly on them. They just can't come along out of the blue and ramp up the costs for whatever reason is behind this and expect people to embrace it.
Whatever it is that's causing the company to dismiss the feedback of their loyal core community customer base and steadfastly refuse all requests for some reasonable compromise, like retaining 6 month renewals.
It's very difficult justifying the cost of IPS 4.6. Since we're paying over and over again for it, we lose all our investment if we our cancel renewals, but I'm not willing to pay a year up front. I couldn't do it anyway. It's been the most problematic buggy release for quite some time.
Honestly, I've been with you since Ikonboard and I've never felt so disillusioned.
I'm also so tired of the all the patronising 'Fam' and bizarre hump day rubbish, please grow up already especially if you're being so corporate. It's a shame to see what this forum community has become in the last year.

You should know after so many years in this business that people DO NOT search. You will have repeated topics with same matters in same day/week.  People don’t like to waste time checking a huge list of topics.

As a long time user of approaching 20 years who has been a customer since the Ikonboard days and has a first recorded invoice here in 2005 for "Purchase: Invision Power Board Perpetual License".
For what it is worth, here is my feedback on the e-mail I received about the price hike and reduction in support levels.
Six years ago you contacted me as a "lifetime" member to tell me that the lifetime agreement I signed up for, which helped set the the financial foundation of these forums, was to be replaced with an annual fee. It was nice to get a little credit on account by way of apology, however, I bought a lifetime licence and it should have been for lifetime. Offering a lifetime licence is a marketing incentive, and not something that should be reneged on further down the line once a company has reaped the benefits of the marketing drive. Telling customers its one payment for lifetime access, then changing the goal posts to an annual fee is not the type of thing that reflects well.  
Onto the new e-mail....
Forums: was $50, now $80 (increase of $2.50/month) The marketing team really earned their wage this campaign as $2.50 doesn't sound like much, however this represents a 60% price hike from $50 to $80.
A 60% price hike needs to be backed up with some serious upsides.... however...
For most customers, support is simply “how do I do this?” and these questions tend to be quite similar. Rarely, support questions are “this went wrong” Not my experience. My support experience is basically the same every year - my forums go offline with errors every time I do an upgrade. It fills me with dread every year or so, and true enough I need to submit a ticket to try and get the forums back online. To think that that base line support for a quick turnaround on outages is either now reliant on an additional payment for a support plan, or posting in publicly accessible forums is not a sustainable proposition for me.
Creating a strong support community backed by our support technicians will result in a more detailed and richer set of answers For "how to I customise this" or "how does this feature work", the above statement is true. For critical board offline situations, the above sets alarm bells ringing loudly. Critical issues need a formal support ticketing system - which is included in the licence fee. Come to think of it, no other service I use has separate support and licence fees.
For those that wish to retain ticket support longer term, we will be unveiling a premium support option soon. No, just no.
 
I already discontinued my other IPB forums as the cost/benefit ratio slid off the scale.
A 60% price hike means I will now have to look at other options for my final licence, it would be easier if I felt any degree of trust or loyalty to Invision as I would just pony up and pay the money, however - and sadly for such a long time customer, this is far from the case. I cannot trust you as evidenced through the lifetime licence fiasco, and I feel absolutely no loyalty due to this 60% price while reducing access to critical support.
Very disappointed.
What I would like to see?
Cancel premium support plans and retain this as part and parcel of customers licences. Maintain current pricing plans for existing customers and roll out new price structure for new customers.  
 

Here in lies a pretty controversial policy.
You make a professional grade product, we choose it over free software like SMF because it's more secure and coded by professional certified developers, but we don't buy it, we never own it, it's still yours and we pay a license to make use of it.
Then the inevitable security flaws are identified and we must ensure we renew our licences to obtain the fix for what are problems that weren't created by us, if only to conform with GDPR and other legislation to keep our members data and personal information secure, never mind the inconvenience of cleaning and recovering from hacked sites.
So really we have no choice, once a self hosted forum community is installed, put aside anti-spam, IP lookups, forget Marketplace niceties, forget new feature temptations and nice to haves, the only 100% real reason is because of this.
Charging for access to security patches is just plain wrong. They should be free for at least 5 years if only as a mark of quality and pride.
Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for ongoing access to Windows security fixes and flaws?
 
UPDATED to add:
"We are looking to increase the speed of releases to a monthly release schedule so everyone gets bug fixes and new features regularly."
This a bad news for theme and app developers. More work. More time consuming localdev updates. Please improve the process of updating localdev installs so they are more robust.

I have put up expiry notices on both my licenced sites and have already found one alternative at a one-time price of $59 with six months support and I can increase this to 18 months for an extra $20.25.  I'm considering another alternative for my other site which is less expensive but has the same features, again for a price considerably less than the new IPS prices.
I'm no penny pincher, but I am retired and living on a pension, I have rent and utilities to pay for so my hobby money is limited.  I understand about the price increase, just not the way it blitzkrieged its way into our lives with no alternative payment options other than annually (with a not so generous offer of a one-time split bi-annually).
I find some of the comments mildly amusing and often disturbing from IPS:
Short and sweet and couldn't care less - definitely not good customer relations. This is not a 'Hump Day' it's a 'Sad Day'.

Woke up today to find out that we have a 48% rise in the renewal price and no email support, and that is the final straw for us. So, instead of $70 every six months, we will be paying $220 yearly and that starts next January. Sorry, not on guys.
With all the negative changes to the marketplace recently, and now this, means I will be moving away from IPB to one of your competitors instead.

We would certainly accept this pricing policy (at least personally) if and only if our requests were taken into account regarding Ipboard.
Starting with the most important one, the page loading speed and a mobile friendly version.
Compare IPB to any other forum system, you will understand, the pages load much too slowly and this problem has been raised many times.

So, as usual, NO official answer to the paying customers, why did they remove normal post count and why didn't they leave as it is or at least gave as an option?
Are you turning into Apple styled company?
It is so annoying to see on my front page some abbreviation, not a full count of posts.
This is literally one line of code, and you didn't want to leave it as an option.
It shows to me how you appreciate your customers.

I hate the new look.
I bought this to reset it the way it was.  Works perfectly.  Frustrated we have to pay someone else to restore items we had.
 

A large % are mobile users how do they find out?

So, we're just going to increase the cost of licenses without notice so no one has the chance to renew before the price hike? That is very scummy, and seems pretty intentional. We're losing features, getting slapped in the face with useful features that's cloud only, and now we're paying MORE for the same thing... What is going on?

I am not sure where to start with all this. I cant believe you guys did all this along with a site redesign at the same time and no notice period, I am speechless!
I cant believe I will be losing email support while you increase the price at the same time. I paid for priority support and now that's an insane price per year for what is email support. It takes serious cahoonas to both increase the price and cripple email support at the same time. Email support pricing should be far far more reasonable, I honestly thought $1250 was a mistake when I saw the screenshot above, I could understand having an email support pricing tier and then a $1250 priority support tier but also renewals shouldnt be going up while we lose proper email support.
Then if we dont pay for support we cant use the market place and cant even save our prior purchases so if we need to reinstall an addon we are out of luck.
We are lucky, we can afford the support increase price wise but one of the HUGE reasons I liked IPB was the email support, it can be very curt at times but I valued it and if you had only increased the price and not removed email support I would have dealt with it as it has been a decade.
I am strongly considering renewing our Xenforo license to have a play and test viability after this.
Initial feedback:
Build the knowledge base publicly first before removing support
I understand the desire to have self support with a knowledge base, its a good thing for everyone if it gets populated but you should have been doing this months ago building the knowledge base publicly before doing any changes, that way you can point to the option and say its there and useful. Get a common ticket theme in, create a KB article then have the subject field for support request do a search as you type pointing you to articles that sounds similar before submitting the email request.
We need a reported/acknowledged bugs area
This needs to be along with the knowledge base really, a bug tracker would have cut your support requests because people would be able to see if it has been reported before, I know the support forum kinda does that but its not a bug tracker and its not clear if its an active bug with a fix pending or release or even workaround.
When I hit an issue on other software I always check to see if it has been reported first on bug trackers but because of the strange mantra of open a ticket you guys have we are blind to upcoming fixes usually until release, Jordon has at least been mentioning them but its still not a proper solution.
Both things above should have been done before these policy changes with support
That way your customers would have become familiar with them and you could have iterated through any issues with them before removing email support and you could actually see if this type of support works well before causing big issues for your customers, it seems so rushed.
You guys made the whole "tickets are similar" problem yourselves with the submit a ticket mantra that is here, you should have been correcting that before making sweeping changes to support. You have entered self support mantra with none of the real tools used by others to help aid people do this. You may have plans for these tools but you literally have not shown them to us which is crazy if they exist. Right now we have a sole forum for support, I have no idea why you have rushed this through.
I have more to say but I thought I would shoot out first.
Please get the knowledge base live and a bug tracker live asap to at least help and to be honest delay the email support changes past the renewal/January deadline until this mess is sorted and people are comfortable, this should be a much much slower transition.
 
Also contributors/devs need a discount/special license to prevent the massive bleed that will happen.
Its crazy you dont have a way of reducing their burden and its a major issue to the viability of the market place and IPB. Their are fewer addons here than other competitors and it will only get worse with dev's having to pay large amounts to renew AND customers of devs having to pay to even buy their addons or even install them. This is crazy crazy crazy and so hostile to developers. Its one of the main reasons no one wants a certain v5 of software out there, regularly people complain about the lack of addons.
You could get them to apply with the proviso the license isnt used to sell addons not on the marketplace and not run a full site on. Aka they can have a public site showcasing with the options etc and even getting support there but it cant be a way for a serious site that has nothing to do with the developer to get a cheap license. Hell they could apply after they have published an addon and the large discount applies to the renewals side of it.
I am really disappointed some of the best developers here are now looking at possibly removing addons to reduce their burden rather than developing for those addons and being able to test on those addons, its so opposite and harmful because of the increased costs.
 
And there was me thinking things had improved a lot when @Jordan Miller with communications and community activity, I actually could see things improving a lot with better engagement with end customers then this whole chaos happens.

Thank you for coming back on those points.
Please could you revert to points 1 and 2 on my posts and let me know ? : 
 
Also regarding your response to  Point 3 of my post. No, the advert was not already pending a deal when it took me to that error page, it was the first time I set that advert as pending, I was then given the error page I mentioned. I have recorded a demo video of the issue and will send it to you via PM.
.................................................................................................
**EDIT** More queries
Also I note that on the comments section for adverts that users cannot edit their comments, I have checked the user groups who have access to the Classified section and have confirmed they all have edit access across the site, so it is not this. 
For example, below is a screenshot of my comments section in classifieds, as you will see there is no 3 dot menu access. 

As an example of another comments section I have on the site, users have access to the 3 dot menu, as per the below image. 

Is this a missing permissions thing from the Classifieds Plugin ? This test was done via the same user, so while they have edit ability across the site, the classifieds section they do not which is odd.
Thanks very much.