Chris Anderson

It's respectful to use the appropriate pronoun when it's use is called for.  This was difficult enough when it was a choice between using a masculine or feminine pronoun as it is difficult to determine which an individual might be based on their choice of username.  Pronoun choice becomes even more difficult when someone like "Morrigan" identifies as being a "Rainbow Princess Unicorn of the Fourth Order".  If that makes Morrigan happy, who am I to judge <insert unknown pronoun>.  It's a tough social issue to address as people are resistant to change, there are a boatload of value judgements that are likely to come into play and way too many exceptions being offered up to know how to deal with them all.
Unfortunately some individuals are skipping the advocacy phase and went straight into the implementation phase.  This will likely engender even more resistance to change ensuring the effort has no chance of being universally accepted.  It will likely take many years before conditions are right to try a more disciplined advocacy approach.  It will require an extremely gifted team of advocates and access to lots of money to have even the remotest chance of encouraging even the slightest of changes.  

Don't wake me up until 4.6 is stable and all the marketplace apps are updated.

@Jordan Invision Payment processors and social media sites experience periods of downtime or make changes to their APIs or change requirements for access. it would be nice to have a centralized location that customers could drop by to see if there are any upcoming changes they need to prepare for or to see if others are experiencing issues.  Those experiencing issues could click on a report button and the site increments the total upward or downward if the issue resolves itself. This would help determine issues that seem to be of a temporary nature or something that might need to be addressed on an individual or community wide level. If IPS determines that site specific troubleshooting is required they could toggle a switch requesting those effected to submit a trouble ticket.
As many people will forget to stop back and resolve the issue IPS could reset the stats at midnight.  If the problem still exists on subsequent days the customers would need to drop by after midnight and indicate that fact. 
If a software fix is required IPS could toggle another switch indicating a fix will be provided via an upcoming hotfix or next dot release. With this knowledge a site owner could readily determine if a problem is only being seen on a small amount of sites or is wide spread and the necessity of submitting a trouble ticket or having to patch their site to address the issue.  As it stands now there are often problems our sites might be experiencing that we are entirely unware of that could impact our site from collecting all the funds we expect and desperately need or being able to fully interact with the various social media sites. 
Having timely knowledge of problems will allow us to better deal with problems internally as well as being more transparent with our members that certain aspects of our site may not be fully operational and a better understanding when they will be resolved.
If" API access is being limited for particular sites it would be helpful to see such a trend as quickly as it occurs so we can come together as  a community to help those affected and to see if we can collectively come together to figure out ways to minimize such occurrences going forward and maybe winning back access through collective brainstorming of how that might be accomplished.  Working together will help to more effectively deal with the vagaries of dealing with our big business partners.

Its hard to know based on a simple error code.  There might be several reasons:
The error could represent a temporary system glitch.  Try, try again... Your ex-moderator might be making trouble for you with Twitter. Your members might be submitting content that Twitter doesn't like. Twitter might have actually had an employee review your site and they decided to restrict access.   You should submit a support request with Twitter.  I honestly don't expect a timely response or any for that matter but as the saying goes: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."
I would recommend that you do a review of your entire site through the eyes of a Twitter reviewer.  Is your site and the postings promoted to the Twitter site in Twitter's best interest. You and your members might find value with your site's content but there is a possibility that other people might not.
With governments throughout the world in the process of placing more and more restrictions on big websites, this will likely cause them to place more and more restrictions on who they will grant access to their APIs. "If" continued access to these big websites are of "real" value to your website than you will need to match  the "norms" being forced upon the big websites in the short and long-term.
The challenge going forward is there is no telling how transparent these big sites will be with those wishing access to their APIs as to what is or is not going to be cause for losing access to their APIs and underlying account. 
It wouldn't surprise me if all of the big sites embark on a largescale culling of those sites requesting access to their APIs in the future as the overall value of the content promoted will likely be seriously offset by the money required to ensure it continuously meets the "norms" being imposed upon them.

I would recommend studying all of the legalese that you must agree to follow on eBay and other established marketplaces as a seller and purchaser as well as any requirements your payment processor may require of you setting up and operating an online marketplace.
This should provide a sense of the complexity and legal and financial risks you will take on if you choose to proceed.
You will also need to look at how your business is structured to insulate you both legally and financially from things that might go awry for your business. The business type you choose to operate under will impact what paperwork is required as well as how you file taxes.
There are expenses and lots of paperwork required setting up and operating a non-sole proprietorship business and setting up a bank account.
Not only will you have to engage a law firm, but you also will need advice from a tax accountant as to what applicable local, state, and federal paperwork you need to submit throughout the year and how to figure out how much your tax burden will be based on your anticipated sales volume.
Unless your sales volume is "extremely" robust the expenses of setting up and running a marketplace as described above will cost more than you take in and take lots of your time managing it. 
You might consider setting up a dummy site as a thought experiment and ask your members to submit items for purchase and see what items are bought by your members during a set time using virtual currency.
You will need to figure out how to deal with shipping goods from one member to another and how shipping costs are addressed as well as tracking of packages, damaged goods, or failure to deliver by shipper or failure of seller to ship items "as described".
At the end you could determine what demand there really is for the items posted for sale and any possible profit you might attain after initial and ongoing expenses (don't forget to factor in the cost of failed transactions) determined from your research and consultations with a lawyer and accountant.
Your payment processor should be able to provide you with an approximate failed transaction rate from their other marketplace accounts as well as how many they will tolerate before limiting or closing your account. The amount of failed transactions could increase the cost charged decreasing your potential profit margin. 
There is also the possibility that you might not have immediate access to all the money owed to you or they might hold a certain amount aside to address any transaction abnormalities.  You should setup a sufficiently funded reserve account to cover your ongoing expenses in the event of payment delays.
Implementing a marketplace will initiate a more robust review process of "you" and your business to determine if you have the proper process and procedures in place as well as required written guidelines as well as the overall feel of the site to determine if you are a worthy of credit increases, decreases or outright cancelation of your account. As such it's important to weigh the value of adding additional product offerings against the possibility of losing access to your payment processor entirely or paying much higher fees.
The Fed has recently telegraphed the need for increasing interest rates to stave off inflation and the credit market has been lowering credit limits and making it harder to qualify and/or keep various credit-based products.
Over the course of the next year, I would recommend everyone to be especially mindful of their personal and business credit and take additional steps to minimize "any" adverse problems logged with your payment processor to ensure the longevity and profitability of your site.
Most payment processors place limits on how much they will process in any given period. Those may increase in time but isn't a given. It's good to ask what the criteria is to advance to a dollar amount that will work for your needs. If the requirements are too stringent for your site or will take too long it's best to know upfront.
If you figure you could reach profitability if you submitted 20k a month to the processor and you were limited to 10k than the additional 10k worth of transactions would be denied and your account wouldn't reset until the first of the next month.
How much additional stuff do members have to offer up for sale in the months and years ahead that other members would be willing to purchase? What's the potential profit to you? People have a finite amount of stuff to sell.  Eventually the marketplace offerings will dwindle to next to nothing as everyone will have sold off their good stuff and it will take time before they have something good again to sell or you will have to continuously recruit "lots" of new members with stuff to sell. 
Will these new members with "stuff" be the kind of members that fit in well with your community?  Will switching from being a place to socialize to a place for doing business be in the best interest of your site in the long term?  Tough questions need to be asked of yourself and your community to figure out if this is a good path to explore and something the "community" and not "you" want.
You need to look at how you can extract the transaction data provided utilizing this solution in a format your accountant will require to fill out the obligatory paper trail of running a business and ensure everyone is paid all that is due in a timely fashion.
There is a possibility that you might be missing key data points, or it will need to be structured in an entirely different fashion. This should be addressed sooner rather than later to minimize missteps in your implementation which could cost you countless wasted hours and expense.
 

I would recommend studying all of the legalese that you must agree to follow on eBay and other established marketplaces as a seller and purchaser as well as any requirements your payment processor may require of you setting up and operating an online marketplace.
This should provide a sense of the complexity and legal and financial risks you will take on if you choose to proceed.
You will also need to look at how your business is structured to insulate you both legally and financially from things that might go awry for your business. The business type you choose to operate under will impact what paperwork is required as well as how you file taxes.
There are expenses and lots of paperwork required setting up and operating a non-sole proprietorship business and setting up a bank account.
Not only will you have to engage a law firm, but you also will need advice from a tax accountant as to what applicable local, state, and federal paperwork you need to submit throughout the year and how to figure out how much your tax burden will be based on your anticipated sales volume.
Unless your sales volume is "extremely" robust the expenses of setting up and running a marketplace as described above will cost more than you take in and take lots of your time managing it. 
You might consider setting up a dummy site as a thought experiment and ask your members to submit items for purchase and see what items are bought by your members during a set time using virtual currency.
You will need to figure out how to deal with shipping goods from one member to another and how shipping costs are addressed as well as tracking of packages, damaged goods, or failure to deliver by shipper or failure of seller to ship items "as described".
At the end you could determine what demand there really is for the items posted for sale and any possible profit you might attain after initial and ongoing expenses (don't forget to factor in the cost of failed transactions) determined from your research and consultations with a lawyer and accountant.
Your payment processor should be able to provide you with an approximate failed transaction rate from their other marketplace accounts as well as how many they will tolerate before limiting or closing your account. The amount of failed transactions could increase the cost charged decreasing your potential profit margin. 
There is also the possibility that you might not have immediate access to all the money owed to you or they might hold a certain amount aside to address any transaction abnormalities.  You should setup a sufficiently funded reserve account to cover your ongoing expenses in the event of payment delays.
Implementing a marketplace will initiate a more robust review process of "you" and your business to determine if you have the proper process and procedures in place as well as required written guidelines as well as the overall feel of the site to determine if you are a worthy of credit increases, decreases or outright cancelation of your account. As such it's important to weigh the value of adding additional product offerings against the possibility of losing access to your payment processor entirely or paying much higher fees.
The Fed has recently telegraphed the need for increasing interest rates to stave off inflation and the credit market has been lowering credit limits and making it harder to qualify and/or keep various credit-based products.
Over the course of the next year, I would recommend everyone to be especially mindful of their personal and business credit and take additional steps to minimize "any" adverse problems logged with your payment processor to ensure the longevity and profitability of your site.
Most payment processors place limits on how much they will process in any given period. Those may increase in time but isn't a given. It's good to ask what the criteria is to advance to a dollar amount that will work for your needs. If the requirements are too stringent for your site or will take too long it's best to know upfront.
If you figure you could reach profitability if you submitted 20k a month to the processor and you were limited to 10k than the additional 10k worth of transactions would be denied and your account wouldn't reset until the first of the next month.
How much additional stuff do members have to offer up for sale in the months and years ahead that other members would be willing to purchase? What's the potential profit to you? People have a finite amount of stuff to sell.  Eventually the marketplace offerings will dwindle to next to nothing as everyone will have sold off their good stuff and it will take time before they have something good again to sell or you will have to continuously recruit "lots" of new members with stuff to sell. 
Will these new members with "stuff" be the kind of members that fit in well with your community?  Will switching from being a place to socialize to a place for doing business be in the best interest of your site in the long term?  Tough questions need to be asked of yourself and your community to figure out if this is a good path to explore and something the "community" and not "you" want.
You need to look at how you can extract the transaction data provided utilizing this solution in a format your accountant will require to fill out the obligatory paper trail of running a business and ensure everyone is paid all that is due in a timely fashion.
There is a possibility that you might be missing key data points, or it will need to be structured in an entirely different fashion. This should be addressed sooner rather than later to minimize missteps in your implementation which could cost you countless wasted hours and expense.
 

I would recommend studying all of the legalese that you must agree to follow on eBay and other established marketplaces as a seller and purchaser as well as any requirements your payment processor may require of you setting up and operating an online marketplace.
This should provide a sense of the complexity and legal and financial risks you will take on if you choose to proceed.
You will also need to look at how your business is structured to insulate you both legally and financially from things that might go awry for your business. The business type you choose to operate under will impact what paperwork is required as well as how you file taxes.
There are expenses and lots of paperwork required setting up and operating a non-sole proprietorship business and setting up a bank account.
Not only will you have to engage a law firm, but you also will need advice from a tax accountant as to what applicable local, state, and federal paperwork you need to submit throughout the year and how to figure out how much your tax burden will be based on your anticipated sales volume.
Unless your sales volume is "extremely" robust the expenses of setting up and running a marketplace as described above will cost more than you take in and take lots of your time managing it. 
You might consider setting up a dummy site as a thought experiment and ask your members to submit items for purchase and see what items are bought by your members during a set time using virtual currency.
You will need to figure out how to deal with shipping goods from one member to another and how shipping costs are addressed as well as tracking of packages, damaged goods, or failure to deliver by shipper or failure of seller to ship items "as described".
At the end you could determine what demand there really is for the items posted for sale and any possible profit you might attain after initial and ongoing expenses (don't forget to factor in the cost of failed transactions) determined from your research and consultations with a lawyer and accountant.
Your payment processor should be able to provide you with an approximate failed transaction rate from their other marketplace accounts as well as how many they will tolerate before limiting or closing your account. The amount of failed transactions could increase the cost charged decreasing your potential profit margin. 
There is also the possibility that you might not have immediate access to all the money owed to you or they might hold a certain amount aside to address any transaction abnormalities.  You should setup a sufficiently funded reserve account to cover your ongoing expenses in the event of payment delays.
Implementing a marketplace will initiate a more robust review process of "you" and your business to determine if you have the proper process and procedures in place as well as required written guidelines as well as the overall feel of the site to determine if you are a worthy of credit increases, decreases or outright cancelation of your account. As such it's important to weigh the value of adding additional product offerings against the possibility of losing access to your payment processor entirely or paying much higher fees.
The Fed has recently telegraphed the need for increasing interest rates to stave off inflation and the credit market has been lowering credit limits and making it harder to qualify and/or keep various credit-based products.
Over the course of the next year, I would recommend everyone to be especially mindful of their personal and business credit and take additional steps to minimize "any" adverse problems logged with your payment processor to ensure the longevity and profitability of your site.
Most payment processors place limits on how much they will process in any given period. Those may increase in time but isn't a given. It's good to ask what the criteria is to advance to a dollar amount that will work for your needs. If the requirements are too stringent for your site or will take too long it's best to know upfront.
If you figure you could reach profitability if you submitted 20k a month to the processor and you were limited to 10k than the additional 10k worth of transactions would be denied and your account wouldn't reset until the first of the next month.
How much additional stuff do members have to offer up for sale in the months and years ahead that other members would be willing to purchase? What's the potential profit to you? People have a finite amount of stuff to sell.  Eventually the marketplace offerings will dwindle to next to nothing as everyone will have sold off their good stuff and it will take time before they have something good again to sell or you will have to continuously recruit "lots" of new members with stuff to sell. 
Will these new members with "stuff" be the kind of members that fit in well with your community?  Will switching from being a place to socialize to a place for doing business be in the best interest of your site in the long term?  Tough questions need to be asked of yourself and your community to figure out if this is a good path to explore and something the "community" and not "you" want.
You need to look at how you can extract the transaction data provided utilizing this solution in a format your accountant will require to fill out the obligatory paper trail of running a business and ensure everyone is paid all that is due in a timely fashion.
There is a possibility that you might be missing key data points, or it will need to be structured in an entirely different fashion. This should be addressed sooner rather than later to minimize missteps in your implementation which could cost you countless wasted hours and expense.
 

The IPS Suite allows me to create nested forums as shown below:

Your app allows you to create a forums only:

Is there any way of creating nested forums within a club?  If it isn't something currently available can such functionality be added?  I would be willing to sponsor such functionality if it could be done.

As much as I hate to admit it to myself, I too am older now and getting more so by the second... ⏲️
IPS seems content with Clubs "as is" and hasn't communicated to the community (to my knowledge) that subforums or any other additional features are in the pipeline. They seem content on letting third-party developers step in and further develop it instead of doing it themselves. ☹️ 
At this point in time @InvisionHQ seems to be the only developer willing to take on the challenge of adding additional club enhancements outside of the functionality that the Members Shop provides.
 
 
 

yes, is one of the first things I will add.
 

Hello all,
I am looking for a solution to integrate my podcast into my site.  I have ideas on how I want it to look and how users will access and comment on episodes. I am not smart enough to know if this is a full blown application or something that can be built in Pages. Either way, I am willing to pay for the development. Based on other feedback I have read, I suspect there are others who would be interested.
Please message me if you are interested.
Thank you!!!

Could IPS implement a notification on the front end to remind users of any expiring memberships either through commerce or subscriptions?
Notification saying user has X amount of days remaining (possibly with a direct link to renewal). Notification alerting user that their subscription has now lapsed. Notification of user changing user groups (user reverting to the original group).
  Example:

I'm aware of users getting an email invoice, but if they're anything like me and don't check email all that often it can be missed/overlooked.
Thanks 🙂

Hi, here is a feature request.

For personal sticky notes – how about having a "read" receipt?

That will be very handy for administrators who are trying to contact individuals but without going back to the admin CP, it's not possible to see whether or not the sticky has been read.

A little read receipt would be very helpful

This is a product support board, not an emotional support board.  Enough with all the touchy feely emojis, gifs and any other means of expressing emotions, whether positive or negative.  All communications should be done in a completely neutral fashion.
To ensure neutral communications going forward, please remove all reactions and the emojis and gif buttons as well from the editor in these forums as a few people can't seem to help themselves from being emotionally expressive.  The old saying goes, a few bad apples always ruins it for the rest...

Better if they keep things in one place only. There are now 2 topics and one entry about the same matter. We have to dig in 3 places. 

I launched my first BBS in 1988 using the Wildcat BBS software. So I've actually been around forums for 33 years.  

@Jordan InvisionI imagine you were feeling a bit sad at the thought of leaving us one day... Well the feeling is mutual. 
Instead of expressing that "sadness" you didn't write words, you resorted to a single emoji as there wasn't an appropriate reaction to capture what you were feeling.  Why did you not write something out like you advocated for above?  Don't you deserve that little extra attention?
How many different interpretations of a single emoji are there likely to be from everyone that skims through this thread? Did I read your emoji accurately?  Maybe, maybe not.  Alas, forum communication can become quite nuanced and what might seem obvious to the writer might not be so to the intended reader or the rest of the community.

@The Old ManYour original posting could have benefited from further elaboration.  After many comments its becoming quite clear that the issue you brought up is a lot more complicated and nuanced than it appears at first glance. I gave your pizza comment a "like".  Speaking of pizza, its great 24 hours a day hot or cold.
Everyone:
A community can add value to a conversation via commenting or reactions and sometimes both. "If" reactions are to be added to the mix then they should offer a wide variety of ways to express support or lack thereof for a particular comment or exhibit various emotions.
As humans express a multitude of good and bad emotions there should be means of expressing them in ways that convey an emotion without the weight behind it that might stir an overly averse reaction from receiving it.  If a reaction choice is a tad on the negative side it should convey a value of 1 out of 10 scale.  Using such a reaction should be meant to make a subtle point not as a means of moderation.  That's a job that should be reserved for the forum administrators if someone shows a propensity of straying outside of community norms.
In those cases where a reader is feeling less than positive about a topic or situation being described there should be a way of expressing that via a reaction.  Doing so shouldn't mean they feel less than positive about the commenter overall. We can agree to disagree on occasion and still get along if we are to be a successful community, whether here or your place.
If you limit the reactions too much you limit their overall usefulness.  If you click on the reaction button there should be an option for every conceivable "useful" use case. Their usage should be of value to the recipient as well as the rest of the community. Limiting reactions is akin to asking a wordsmith to limit themselves to only using 1000 random words to convey every conceivable thought or emotion.  It's simply too limiting.
If a reaction appears to be under utilized it might not mean its a poor choice for inclusion in the grand scheme of things, it simply might mean there were few instances where that reaction was appropriate. The choice of reactions should be readily identifiable by the whole community and shouldn't be tied too closely with any particular administrator as they come and go. 
If someone reads an old comment and sees a bunch of reactions from a prior community admin they might not understand the significance of a "cat" reaction for instance, or some other favored reaction from the past.  That's not to say reactions can't be fun and whimsical, I'm simply saying they "might" have a short life span of usefulness or understood by the whole community, especially if it has an international membership.
Reactions should not be implemented exclusively from the top or by a group of power users. That's why I've refrained from making specific suggestions on changes, additions or deletions of the reactions here.
The entire community should be included in the conversation as "they" are going to be the ones to use them or not if they don't meet their collective needs.
Maps have keys to convey the various icons used. There might be value in providing a page (or pages if you have different reactions throughout your site) that shows each reaction along with their appropriate usage. This should help set community-wide expectations on their usage.
 

You had me at pizza but the other expression is almost as good. In fact, thinking about it, I may start a new dialogue (I promise not to) about why Jordan didn't add a pizza reaction instead of a cat. I mean it cures everything, right? Negativity, sadness, leprosy, people who still say Message Board, senior men's problems, people who still call it IPB and so the list goes on.
🍕

I launched my first BBS in 1988 using the Wildcat BBS software. So I've actually been around forums for 33 years.  

Too true, but if you have a small group of members that lack emotional intelligence (the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathically - Oxford Dictionary) then things can go astray.  
I suspect that there are some folks here that don't want to be a part of a "community" they simply want to post a question or suggestion and receive an answer or response as quickly as possible.  They have no interest in getting to know the IPS Staff or other members or engage in various forms of levity. 
While others do want to get to know the IPS staff and members and drop by to engage with them and help out when they can. 
Every time a member logs on they will be in a particular "mood".  Sometimes they will appreciate and engage in various forms of levity and sometimes they won't. 
Reactions, emoji, and gifs and emotions and feelings can add real value to a site or detract from it.  Being too negative or too expressive will lead to troubles as it will alienate some segment of a site's membership at one point in time or another. 
I respect your desire for positivity, but sometimes a comment warrants a less than positive response.  There should be some quick and easy way to express: "I respectfully disagree" or "Please for the love of pizza, no!" (or some other way of expressing lack of agreement or support) for a particular comment or feature suggestion.
Bringing the entire membership into the "know" about your desire for positivity and various steps you will be taking in the short and long term will help a long way towards building a true "community".  All the more important as your role is meant to be a bridge between "us" and IPS management.
Be of good cheer one and all in these trying times...

Sounds like a great blog topic for @Jordan Invisionto cover.

Thanks everyone for their responses and thoughts either way. 😊

Sorry, posting videos is forbidden in the no-fun zone.

We can't be for everyone, and we accept that. We try and keep things light and fun because life can be pretty awful, and given there's a raging pandemic out there (points to window) these online spaces are an escape from that.

Appreciate the honest dialog.

This is a product support board, not an emotional support board.  Enough with all the touchy feely emojis, gifs and any other means of expressing emotions, whether positive or negative.  All communications should be done in a completely neutral fashion.
To ensure neutral communications going forward, please remove all reactions and the emojis and gif buttons as well from the editor in these forums as a few people can't seem to help themselves from being emotionally expressive.  The old saying goes, a few bad apples always ruins it for the rest...