Chris Anderson

The number of bad actors on the internet has exponentially increased after Russia invaded the Ukraine.  Attacks could be originating from all over the world and could impact internet routing between your members and your server. 
Sometimes data might flow as expected and sometimes the flow could be dramatically reduced for periods of time. Problems might exist within your very own server farm that they might not be detecting or willing to admit to. 
Something you might consider investigating is how large is your connection from your server to the internet. 
Your server might have a very high-capacity network card installed but the service provider may throttle the connection down to several hundred megabytes to support handling thousands of servers at a reasonable price point for one and all. 
Things you might want to look into:
What kind of connections does your service provider use to connect with the internet? Can they increase their overall bandwidth at a moment's notice and downgrade when the peak subsides? How intelligent are the routers they are using internally and to connect to their internet providers? Do they have employees well versed in network routing to garner every last bit of throughput and reduced latency the hardware can support at the network and server level? The internet providers contracted by your service provider might not have the infrastructure and support staff to consistently offer stellar performance for everyone globally connecting to them.  Internet traffic can travel down multiple paths to go from one country or countries to another and ultimately make it to your server.  A path taken this hour might not be the same path taken hours or days later.   You might consider seeing if there are any local network support forums with experience with your server provider. They may be able to help you better investigate the root causes of your problem (or at least eliminate possible causes) and guide you to a path to address it.
 

It would be nice if you added a page impression count in the ACP so that the self-hosted crowd could gauge which cloud package they would have to purchase if they switched.

The requirements checker has been updated to not prompt users of MariaDB to upgrade.

The issue: when someone let’s a subscription (product subscription or regular subscription) expire, they will later not be able to buy it again, because the invoice on file prevents a new subscription. But the existing subscription also cannot be renewed because the invoice has expired. This can only be solved by intervention from an admin (manually finding and deleting these invoices), but there might be hundreds of those and it would require a constant monitoring of expired invoices. 
The solution: The check that prevents a new subscription with an invoice on file should be removed or adjusted. Someone who doesn’t have a subscription anymore, because subscription and invoice have expired, must be treated like anyone who never had a subscription. Both groups should see exactly the same offers because their status in relation to these subscriptions is the same. 
Why it matters: People run into this problem all the time and it’s not just an inconvenience, it it costing them money, because people who would want to pay cannot pay and probably just give up. Here are just a few examples from the recent days (and I have observed this and commented on it for years): 
Subscription buttons don't show up. (yesterday)
Subscriptions Bug (yesterday)
invoice has expired but member cannot renew (7 days ago)
The development time to fix this is probably much cheaper than having IPS support deal with this issue for years, constantly identifying the issue and guiding people through the process of the possible work-arounds. So it would be a win-win situation to finally fix this. 😉 

You should check out the Members Shop app and the various add-ons and integrations it supports:
You might not be able to duplicate all of the functionality of Reddit, but you might be able to come up with an implementation that offers similar overall value to your community.

You can request a 14-day free trial of the complete suite here:
Try a Demo (invisioncommunity.com)
 

You can request a 14-day free trial of the complete suite here:
Try a Demo (invisioncommunity.com)
 

It would be nice if you added a page impression count in the ACP so that the self-hosted crowd could gauge which cloud package they would have to purchase if they switched.

You should check out the Members Shop app and the various add-ons and integrations it supports:
You might not be able to duplicate all of the functionality of Reddit, but you might be able to come up with an implementation that offers similar overall value to your community.

It's great that you have provided support for Iframely but as they charge by the hit it would be ideal to provide functionality throughout your app that minimizes the need to use their service wherever you can easily do so.
Thanks for continuing to refine the app.

Okay I will grant you the difficulty of utilizing the Message Inbox and put that suggestion aside.
The problem starts here:

One problem is that folks are offered one choice as shown above.  People might be interested in being kept abreast of important site issues but not receive a promotional newsletter, so they opt out entirely. Getting them to opt in at a later date is difficult.
If a site admin sends out an important site update email, they will violate the spirit of the agreement if a new member did not select the option.  Splitting out "and updates" to be another trackable option would likely increase participation.  As part of important site update emails, you could soft sell the value of opting into the newsletter as well. 
By changing notification settings as shown below you could more readily encourage more folks to opt into your newsletter, receive important site updates or ideally both.

Wording and formatting are for illustrative purposes only.  

@Daniel F can you revert this for me please? My break is over, my beer fund needs a top-up.

There are portions of the codebase that doesn't get utilized by the average site owner. There could be certain settings that get enabled that utilize a section of code that might not play well with new PHP releases. It's in the realm of possibility that one site might not encounter any compatibility issues. 
One site claiming that all is well in the world doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's world will be peachy.  It's quite possible that there might be problems yet to be discovered.
Although some folks step us to beta test each build its pretty much a free for all. People will randomly test things likely leaving portions of the suite untested.  
With "some" structure thrown around client beta testing a larger amount of the code could be tested minimizing the amount of follow up releases needed to be fully compatible with each new PHP release. 
Helping marketplace developers better address future PHP releases would be a worthy conversation to have between IPS and the community.
 
 
 
 
 

Check out the following guide:
You can add the following to your constants.php file:
Constant - CP_DIRECTORY
Use - Name of your admin CP directory when changed from the default of 'admin'
Example value - 'newcpdirectory'
 

@Marc Stridgen
Governmental agencies throughout the world are battling with how to protect their citizenry from bad actors near and far.  Some of the protections implemented will be well thought out and some will be unmitigated disasters.  Sites with minimal technical expertise and or sufficient funds to hire that expertise out will unfortunately find they won't be able to be compliant with various legal requirements.  These sites will be forced to close which will begin to impact your bottom line.
As much as your customer base would like IPS to dedicate your entire programming staff to adding ever cooler features there may be value in dedicating more of your staff's time figuring out what legal requirements we will likely find ourselves having to address and see if they can be programmatically dealt with.
There may be a time in the not-too-distant future where this platform won't be able to be used in certain locales as it simply won't be economically viable to alter it by IPS or a third-party developer to be in continuous legal compliance.  Can we as a community come together in partnership with IPS to minimize such occurrences. 
Every site that closes will diminish the overall value proposition of the internet so it's in our collective best interest to minimize these occurrences.

@Bethanyrayne
You might think that I was attempting to spin a negative into a positive and you would be completely wrong. I was simply relaying some points of view that “some” developers adhere to. 
Please don’t assume comments are meant to be either positive or negative in nature.  Occasionally they can be neutral and meant to be helpful. With that in mind your comment to me could have been framed in a more positive fashion.  

@Bethanyrayne
You might think that I was attempting to spin a negative into a positive and you would be completely wrong. I was simply relaying some points of view that “some” developers adhere to. 
Please don’t assume comments are meant to be either positive or negative in nature.  Occasionally they can be neutral and meant to be helpful. With that in mind your comment to me could have been framed in a more positive fashion.  

@MattI did check the sales page and help guides for mentions of branding. If I had seen something I would have provided a link. Some companies provide for personalized branding some don't, some charge and some don't.  As such, you might consider letting potential customers know your policy and pricing before purchase.
Customers:
Some third-party developers charge an extra fee to remove their branding some don't brand their apps at all.  To replicate the functionality of the IPS suite and third-party add-ons it would take a dedicated development team and a very, very large budget.  Paying to remove branding can give the appearance of a custom site while only having to pay pennies on the dollar.  The reality is few members will be fooled that you designed and built the site from scratch.
Increased sales for IPS and third-party apps via branding links insures they continue to have the development budget to continue releasing new and useful updates. They need every win they can to continue to develop.  
Instead of looking at personalized branding simply as another fee, think of it as an investment in your community.
I would recommend reaching out to the sales team for any company you wish to do business with to find out what is or isn't included and pricing for various add-ons prior to making any purchases.

Color won't happen. Tried but didn't work as expected. I have no idea what the fix was... just a CSS thing. Will make it again an update asap.

IT's hard to know the overall value of any particular thread.  Just because it has lots of comments and some posts have some likes it's hard to gauge its overall value.
Having a visual que that a topic has an overall positive value would be helpful (like a Rotten Tomatoes score for movies), this might be thought of as a sentiment score.  Does each new contribution increase the sentiment score or not?  This might be attained by helping to keep the conversation on point and bringing useful insights and knowledge into play
Instead of "liking" a post you might instead acknowledge the value that post brings to the conversation and community as a whole.  Maybe this type of "liking" wouldn't' be publicly viewable but is tracked to determine an overall sentiment score. 
Is it worth my time to read through the comments and participate further or should I ignore it and skip onto the next forum topic?  It's really hard to know for sure. Sometimes a topic for discussion will have multiple instances being commented upon at the same time.  Which one do you participate in, well if one has a higher sentiment score that might be the better one to participate in.
Tracking member likes has value, but there might be even more value in tracking their contributions to topic sentiment scores.  The more they contribute and get acknowledged for their contributions the higher their score becomes.
The score could reset on a yearly basis. This would encourage people to keep returning on a continuous basis so that they can continuedly be seen as a valuable contributor to the site.
 
 
 
 

I'm not advocating that you keep us apprised of features like:  "A friendly reminder before posting" that you announced yesterday ahead of time.  This feature is entirely opt-in.  Those sites that want to take advantage of the new feature are free to do so on their schedule.
If an upcoming feature will require a fair amount of social engineering and configuration to use it to its fullest, more of a heads up would be helpful.  A feature that would fit this scenario well would be “Member Achievements”.
The various languages and third-party integrations you utilize are constantly being updated to stay compliant with new standards or to markedly improve their utility.
At various points in time, you may have to rewrite portions of the suite to extend the product's lifespan. Some things might remain unchanged, and some things might require a complete reset such as subscription renewals.  (Just using this for illustrative purposes).
That could be “consequential” for sites with little to no cash reserves to tide them over until all the subscription renewals could be reenabled for all the effected members get around to restarting their subscription.
I am advocating that you keep your customer base apprised of such occurrences with as much head's up time as you can.
If for example you must fundamentally rearchitect themes, we will be forced to use your provided default theme until such time as the theme creators revamp their offerings.
If the changes are too radical and time consuming many if not all the existing providers might exit the marketplace. 
It could take time to recruit replacements and a variety of compliant themes get released due to a high learning curve.
Some sites could readily adapt to the default theme, and some might not as their members are extremely attached to the look and feel of the site and various community value adds that are integrated into the theme.
You may have a multitude of different projects on your radar. I’m in no way advocating you to keep us apprised of all of them just, the “consequential” ones we will have to address in the next rolling six to twelve months. 

Privacy laws will likely evolve over the coming years so it's best to keep abreast of their requirements as well. 
Payment processors may also review your site guidelines and privacy policy and if it doesn't meet their internal requirements you might have your account placed on hold or closed.
One privacy policy trend is to include a brief set of explanations for each section highlighting the overall gist of it. 
You need to ensure you address you and your customer's interests and all the legal and payment processor requirements you may be bound to in both a simplistic and legally binding manner which often times requires lots and lots of words as way of explanation and to minimize legal exposure. 
Doing your privacy policy entirely on your own provides about a dollars worth of protection.  If your exposure is greater than that then you should seek out someone with privacy expertise to assist you in creating a comprehensive site guidelines and privacy policy.  

You might consider reading some of the privacy policies from some of the Enterprise customers using this software to see how they address the data they collect. They should be able to allow you to figure out what things you should address in your site's privacy policy which should put you in a better position of being approved by Facebook.  
You will also have to audit every app and plugin you install to determine if it collects any personally identifiable data points and include them as well.  
If you delete a user there is a possibility that an app or plugin they used might not delete or anyomize the data it collected during use.  This may impact on whether or not you choose to use it or not. 
 
 
 

If you had a magic wand to create a new feature or functionality within Invision Community, what would it be?



I'm especially interested in your thoughts for features or improvements to the discussion engine (aka forums), workflows around that such as moderation, reporting content and members, issuing warnings, etc.
 
Here's a list of updates and fixes from our developers made in the last 7 days:

I'm not advocating that you keep us apprised of features like:  "A friendly reminder before posting" that you announced yesterday ahead of time.  This feature is entirely opt-in.  Those sites that want to take advantage of the new feature are free to do so on their schedule.
If an upcoming feature will require a fair amount of social engineering and configuration to use it to its fullest, more of a heads up would be helpful.  A feature that would fit this scenario well would be “Member Achievements”.
The various languages and third-party integrations you utilize are constantly being updated to stay compliant with new standards or to markedly improve their utility.
At various points in time, you may have to rewrite portions of the suite to extend the product's lifespan. Some things might remain unchanged, and some things might require a complete reset such as subscription renewals.  (Just using this for illustrative purposes).
That could be “consequential” for sites with little to no cash reserves to tide them over until all the subscription renewals could be reenabled for all the effected members get around to restarting their subscription.
I am advocating that you keep your customer base apprised of such occurrences with as much head's up time as you can.
If for example you must fundamentally rearchitect themes, we will be forced to use your provided default theme until such time as the theme creators revamp their offerings.
If the changes are too radical and time consuming many if not all the existing providers might exit the marketplace. 
It could take time to recruit replacements and a variety of compliant themes get released due to a high learning curve.
Some sites could readily adapt to the default theme, and some might not as their members are extremely attached to the look and feel of the site and various community value adds that are integrated into the theme.
You may have a multitude of different projects on your radar. I’m in no way advocating you to keep us apprised of all of them just, the “consequential” ones we will have to address in the next rolling six to twelve months.