Chris Anderson

IPS has implemented a variety of different integrations with third-party sites that are better funded and employ folks well-versed in solving particular pain points.  There are so many pain points IPS can address internally based on their development budget, talent and time.  Being transparent up front when encountering such pain points better addressed by others will go along way in engendering customer loyalty. 
With the announcement of a swag store it would have been nice to have a blog posting highlighting all the pain points you would have encountered in implementing such a turnkey solution in-house and the steps you took to address it via an external third-party. 
It's quite possible that "some" of your customers would like to offer a similar solution themselves. Why didn't you think to provide a step-by-step tutorial on how we could implement such functionality ourselves? That would have provided a nice value add for those that could benefit from your experience.
 
 

Social media companies are constantly adding value and creating better user experiences for "free" for their users to partake of.
How will any upcoming features (or improvements to existing features) being planned for release in the next year "really" tip the balance in our favor for current or future users to pay us for what they can readily get free elsewhere? 
"Your" heart might be in the right place, but the lack of clarity from IPS makes it difficult to plan, grow and monetize a site that will be around for years to come with just a vague hint here or there of what might be upcoming in the months to come.
As it stands today, there is no way to plan for the long term, how can one do that based on vague hints here or there? 
The only real chance of being a successful site is to plan for the future so that one can implement a new feature in such a way as to minimize disruption to the existing community and to maximize its overall value, and maybe, just maybe figure out how one might monetize it.
Having new features sprung on us on a monthly basis with little to no forewarning that they are on the way prevents their introduction to the community in a planned fashion.  Often times a new feature or refinement of an existing feature has an impact on the community forcing users and admins to be in constant reaction mode.  Many folks like platforms with a modicum of stability and notices of upcoming changes, unfortunately with you as our software platform provide, we can't offer that to them. 
Maybe IPS could create a new user group for those that would like to be kept a little more in the loop.  Anyone that opts into such a group would be kept more apprised of your long-term development plans and changes you might make to said plans or upcoming deprecation of features. Inclusion to this group would come with the promise to not mention anything discussed with those not a member of the group without express permission from IPS management.
This group wouldn't necessarily be tasked with providing input in favor or disagreement of any upcoming feature. That should be left to the customer base as a whole and should happen more often than you currently do. IPS management and developers have pretty good instincts but could benefit from other pair of eyes on occasion.
I'm particularly vocal of late as I've had to start and stop a large project as you have deprecated certain features or added or changed features that completely altered various planned implementations.  I think that I've hit upon a platform that would work but I have zero expectations that by the time I set up the platform suite and third-party apps that it will still play well with each other in the months to come.  I don't expect 100% clarity on the part of IPS (at least overnight), but a significant improvement would certainly be welcomed by the community I'm sure.

Social media companies are constantly adding value and creating better user experiences for "free" for their users to partake of.
How will any upcoming features (or improvements to existing features) being planned for release in the next year "really" tip the balance in our favor for current or future users to pay us for what they can readily get free elsewhere? 
"Your" heart might be in the right place, but the lack of clarity from IPS makes it difficult to plan, grow and monetize a site that will be around for years to come with just a vague hint here or there of what might be upcoming in the months to come.
As it stands today, there is no way to plan for the long term, how can one do that based on vague hints here or there? 
The only real chance of being a successful site is to plan for the future so that one can implement a new feature in such a way as to minimize disruption to the existing community and to maximize its overall value, and maybe, just maybe figure out how one might monetize it.
Having new features sprung on us on a monthly basis with little to no forewarning that they are on the way prevents their introduction to the community in a planned fashion.  Often times a new feature or refinement of an existing feature has an impact on the community forcing users and admins to be in constant reaction mode.  Many folks like platforms with a modicum of stability and notices of upcoming changes, unfortunately with you as our software platform provide, we can't offer that to them. 
Maybe IPS could create a new user group for those that would like to be kept a little more in the loop.  Anyone that opts into such a group would be kept more apprised of your long-term development plans and changes you might make to said plans or upcoming deprecation of features. Inclusion to this group would come with the promise to not mention anything discussed with those not a member of the group without express permission from IPS management.
This group wouldn't necessarily be tasked with providing input in favor or disagreement of any upcoming feature. That should be left to the customer base as a whole and should happen more often than you currently do. IPS management and developers have pretty good instincts but could benefit from other pair of eyes on occasion.
I'm particularly vocal of late as I've had to start and stop a large project as you have deprecated certain features or added or changed features that completely altered various planned implementations.  I think that I've hit upon a platform that would work but I have zero expectations that by the time I set up the platform suite and third-party apps that it will still play well with each other in the months to come.  I don't expect 100% clarity on the part of IPS (at least overnight), but a significant improvement would certainly be welcomed by the community I'm sure.

IPS has implemented a variety of different integrations with third-party sites that are better funded and employ folks well-versed in solving particular pain points.  There are so many pain points IPS can address internally based on their development budget, talent and time.  Being transparent up front when encountering such pain points better addressed by others will go along way in engendering customer loyalty. 
With the announcement of a swag store it would have been nice to have a blog posting highlighting all the pain points you would have encountered in implementing such a turnkey solution in-house and the steps you took to address it via an external third-party. 
It's quite possible that "some" of your customers would like to offer a similar solution themselves. Why didn't you think to provide a step-by-step tutorial on how we could implement such functionality ourselves? That would have provided a nice value add for those that could benefit from your experience.
 
 

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. 
 
 
 

I think more than ever sites are looking at any means they can to help monetize their sites as expenses to run their sites keep increasing.  <Here's looking at you IPS>
Are any "new features" in the pipeline this year likely to appreciably help us to further monetize our sites?  We can't effectively compete against Social Media companies by "trying" to replicate their feature set so why are we chasing down that path?
A conversation we should be having is what unique features could we collectively come up with to entice people to spend their precious time on our sites and cover our expenses more readily and maybe make a few dollars for ourselves. 💰
 
 

I think more than ever sites are looking at any means they can to help monetize their sites as expenses to run their sites keep increasing.  <Here's looking at you IPS>
Are any "new features" in the pipeline this year likely to appreciably help us to further monetize our sites?  We can't effectively compete against Social Media companies by "trying" to replicate their feature set so why are we chasing down that path?
A conversation we should be having is what unique features could we collectively come up with to entice people to spend their precious time on our sites and cover our expenses more readily and maybe make a few dollars for ourselves. 💰
 
 

I agree with the commentors that this wouldn't be welcomed by admins or users to replace traditional forums. The inclusion of audio might be a welcome addition if it was truly an value-add to certain segments of a community and their use was kept to an absolute bare minimum. An audio "here", an audio "there", but NOT an audio "everywhere".
If this kind of functionality were added by IPS or a marketplace developer, I imagine it would be permission based, disabled by default and upload size limits in place to help manage storage space and minimize the impact on the server's CPU.
 
 
 
 

I would be interested as well.

@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.

@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.

I will probably do this until retirement, so we've got at least 20 years to go. 🙂 
Or unless I marry rich. Seems unlikely. And even then I'd probably work or I'd go crazy.

Applications-System-Contact Us (Deselect Guest)
Applications-System-Content Discovery (Deselect Guest) 2 Instances need to be changed. This removes "All Activity" directly to the right of the two instances of home as shown in the screenshot above. 
You may have deselected Guest access for  "All Activity" in the menu but the value may still be cached so it still shows.  You may consider running the "Clear System Cache" in the Get Support page and possibly your browser cache.  If it still shows you may want to verify all deselections of Guest stuck.

You can utilize the menu in the acp to limit access to menu items and sub menu items by deselecting guests.  Once a person registers and logs into the site the menu choices are viewable.
You can also deselect guest access to various components in applications, such as search. Click on the lock icon to set permissions.
I am using the marketplace Landing Page App and mark it as the default app and assign guest access to it.  I then can create a welcome page.  With the default menu items non viewable to guests they don't know what the site looks like or it's offerings until they become members.

Logging into the front end did the trick of resetting the time zone for the admin account.  Once logged back into the ACP the times showed correctly.
Thanks for tracking this down for me.  It's behavior I had never seen before after many, many installs so it seemed like something was amiss considering it wasn't consistent.

Add the ability to charge for calendar events

I want to use the clubs feature on my upcoming site, but the amount of work needed to get it looking like I want is seriously time consuming;  changing the layout via template changes and adding extra CSS to get the look I want is challenging, but not impossible.  For example - the name of the club should not be overlaid on the image, but below; that horrible transparent background is ugly to say the least.  The image itself is way too small. 
So, some extra thought into how the actual club card looks should be addressed, with some template changes and CSS added that can be applied via options.  The concept is excellent, the implementation is lacking.  Once I get the clubs up and running I will come back with both a link and what I had to do to get the look I wanted 🙂
 

Ok, I've added an issue in our tracker to restrict the JS to just Nexus.

Hi! Achievements system is a great one and it can boost activity. But in it's current state there's just too many of them and their value is decreasing the more achievements users earn. Say, we have achievements for 10, 50, 100 and 500 posts. So when user will reach 500 posts they will have all 4 of them which is not great. And it's only one system. When we add another achievements to it it becomes a mess because achievements page is full of ranks of the same achievements.
I propose a simple solution. Instead of changing the system from scratch you can provide two variants - for those who are happy with so many achiements and for people who don't like how they work. In rules you'd need to add another condition like this:
then: assign a new achievents (exactly like it is now)
replace achievement (if exists) [dropdown list of achievements] with assigned one.
 
This will make this system much more usable.
 

The tutorial above does not show you can select a third-party app as the default application, but you can if so desired. 
 

It's still happening to me as well.

I agree with the commentors that this wouldn't be welcomed by admins or users to replace traditional forums. The inclusion of audio might be a welcome addition if it was truly an value-add to certain segments of a community and their use was kept to an absolute bare minimum. An audio "here", an audio "there", but NOT an audio "everywhere".
If this kind of functionality were added by IPS or a marketplace developer, I imagine it would be permission based, disabled by default and upload size limits in place to help manage storage space and minimize the impact on the server's CPU.
 
 
 
 

I agree with the commentors that this wouldn't be welcomed by admins or users to replace traditional forums. The inclusion of audio might be a welcome addition if it was truly an value-add to certain segments of a community and their use was kept to an absolute bare minimum. An audio "here", an audio "there", but NOT an audio "everywhere".
If this kind of functionality were added by IPS or a marketplace developer, I imagine it would be permission based, disabled by default and upload size limits in place to help manage storage space and minimize the impact on the server's CPU.