Chris Anderson

Last Visited should state "Online Now" when a user is still online (the same way the hover card currently displays it). 
The way it works now is a bit odd, as mentioned in the following threads: 

Hi, over the years, I have seen a lot of feature requests and suggestions in this thread, and none gets implemented when politely requested. So now I will not ask. I am demanding this change for IPS v5. Make it happen 🙂.
In IPSv4, when an image is uploaded in the forum and across the suite, except for the Gallery app, the EXIF data, including camera and lens specs, is not stored in the database. This makes it impossible for third-party devs to create add-ons which can display the image's EXIF data in the Forums app, Pages app and other places. This simple feature is vital for many who use the IPS suite for photo\image-driven communities. So, can IPS readjust the image uploading software code so it saves the EXIF data in the database for all images that gets uploaded in the whole IPS suite? The aim is to have selected image EXIF data displayed when the mouse is hovered over an image using a tooltip across the whole IPS suite.
Thanks.
Web-link example Image EXIF data displays on mouse hover over image.
Photo example of EXIF data displays on image.

@Foxtrek_64 Font Awesome 6 Free is used in version 5, hosted locally on your own domain for optimal performance.
There isn’t currently a way to swap this with your own Font Awesome kit, but it’s certainly something we can look into if there’s enough demand for it. 

Subscriptions have been available for some time now and offer a good way to monetize your community. It would be nice if each subscription had the option of multiple offers - time frame/settings. Most sites these days offer a discount for an annual subscription. In IPS, you have to create an entirely new subscription/box rather than something like:

 

Copy the highlighted value below into your cron job:

 

You can also use a third-party web service like cron-job.org which is free.  You just type the value into the url field and choose a 1-minute schedule. Be sure to save the settings in the ACP prior to starting a cron job or use a web service.  Verify that the tasks are running every minute after setting up either type of service.

Everyone at Invision Community is pleased to introduce Community Hive.
We are creating a new free-to-use service to help independent communities reach new audiences and re-engage existing members.
Community Hive delivers updates from your favourite communities and helps you explore new ones by bringing all the communities you follow into a single feed with optional email updates.
The Invision Community September 2023 release will bring Community Hive integration to Invision Community and we're also releasing integrations for XenForo, Squarespace and WordPress. More integrations for popular platforms are planned over the coming months.
 

 
The "Why"
We believe in the power of independent communities. Technology has changed over the two decades we've been building community tools and despite the advances in technology a key problem independent communities still have is re-engaging existing members and finding new audiences. Social media has diminishing returns, and search results continually down-rank user-generated content. Reaching new audiences has never been more challenging.
Community Hive solves that by providing a single platform to showcase your content to new and existing audiences. We don't keep your content; the only way to engage is to visit your site, ensuring you retain complete control and ownership.
Regular updates via email and push notifications reach your existing members wherever they are.
As our attention spans shorten and our online time becomes more cluttered, checking in with each community becomes more of a struggle. Independent and forum based communities fight for attention with social media, and owned platforms like Discord and Slack. Allowing your members to follow your community with Community Hive gives you increased visibility and discoverability and helps level the playing field.
 
The Platform
Community Hive has a familiar feed view with two main areas. "Following" shows a feed of communities you already follow to ensure you see more of what you like. This feed learns over time what content you favour and ensures you see more of what you like.
The "Discover" tab shows you a feed of content from communities outside of your following list, which is a great way to discover new online communities to join. Following is easy; you don't even need to register on the community to add it to your followed list on Community Hive.
Robust account management makes it easy to unfollow communities and set your desired audience classification preferences.
Community Hive is mobile-first with push notifications and is ready to be added to your phone's home screen as an app.
 
Integration
Community Hive will launch with integration for several platforms such as XenForo, Squarespace and WordPress. Invision Community integration has several tools to nudge your members to add your community to Community Hive with buttons in key follow areas.

Following from a community only requests your email address. You can optionally set a password later on Community Hive to enable your feed to be viewed on multiple devices.

Clicking "Follow on Community Hive" from an Invision Community when you have an account with that community.

Clicking "Follow on Community Hive" from an Invision Community when you do not have an account with that community.
Community Hive will be launched in beta alongside Invision Community's September 2023 release, with integrations released for other platforms.
You can visit Community Hive now and join in the discussion on the Community Hive forums. We look forward to seeing you there!

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There have been quite a few developers and theme designers that have left the marketplace or are on the fence as to whether they will continue developing for v4 let alone the v5 platform.
Your team has been working extensively on two different codebases and have become quite intimate with it. 
I would recommend trying to visualize how difficult it would be for a developer new to the platform to setup a development environment and learn how to effectively create programs that meet your marketplace acceptance criteria.
Things to generally think about:
How closely do your programmers adhere to common programming methods for each of the languages you utilize? Is your codebase entirely PHP 8 compliant or are you still utilizing code written for earlier versions?   Are your APIs intuitive to use? Is the cost for entry too high for the first couple of years a developer is learning how to write really good programs and their sales are next to none? Could your error messages be more informative? How does a programmer effectively test their apps?  What lessons learned from your testing team could be useful to a new programmer or to your customers that help beta test two different versions of your suite until such time as v4 is fully deprecated? Would it be beneficial to put a little more structure around public beta testing to minimize the number of additional betas or dot releases after final release. What might you do differently to make becoming a developer more appealing to make recruitment "MUCH" easier and to keep the ones you already have for the long term?

For the Geolocation settings, is there a way of filtering all countries EXCEPT the specified one (i.e., a whitelist instead of a blacklist)? My forum's users are all based in one country, so it would make sense for me to validate all users outside of this country.
Also, does the work for users who register via SSO (e.g. Google Login)?

We could expand this to enable or disable any automatic emails the community sends out.

We did an analysis of all our customers to work out the average renewal cost and buying habits. We made sure that the renewal price point was as close to the average as possible (we actually went under).
We discussed the pricing at length and shared it with a handful of customers in a focus group to get thoughts and feedback, and tweaked accordingly.
We have been as fair as we possibly can throughout this process. Undoubtably some may need to pay a bit more to unlock all that new functionality, but most will pay a bit less. We've found a pricing model that ensures the self-hosting version is viable for years to come.
Invision Community v5 is the start of the next evolution for our community platform bringing in many features to help publish content, monetise the community and more. Just selling a forum app is a market in a serious decline.
But you do not have to do anything. You can stick with your v4 license for as long as you wish. This is not a choice you need to make now, or even this year. Wait until v5 is out and then decide what is right for you. If it's not right for you, then be assured that v4 will remain supported for years to come.

@Matt, would you please consider enabling reactions in private messages, now that hooks are gone?
The argument used by someone else from IPS (don't remember who or where) that a member would not see where the reactions were given doesn't make sense as it already happens since forever: a member can't view the reactions you gave or received in private forums. 🙂
This also helps to reduce the number of emails sent just to show you "read" the messsage.

I almost forgot, hopefully we can get an update to Font Awesome license that would be nice so we can use the newer fonts.

With 8.3 being released at the end of this year do you see any potential problems with the v5 codebase and tools working with that version considering upcoming new features and deprecations?
Is there anything in 8.3 you are at all excited about?

There have been quite a few developers and theme designers that have left the marketplace or are on the fence as to whether they will continue developing for v4 let alone the v5 platform.
Your team has been working extensively on two different codebases and have become quite intimate with it. 
I would recommend trying to visualize how difficult it would be for a developer new to the platform to setup a development environment and learn how to effectively create programs that meet your marketplace acceptance criteria.
Things to generally think about:
How closely do your programmers adhere to common programming methods for each of the languages you utilize? Is your codebase entirely PHP 8 compliant or are you still utilizing code written for earlier versions?   Are your APIs intuitive to use? Is the cost for entry too high for the first couple of years a developer is learning how to write really good programs and their sales are next to none? Could your error messages be more informative? How does a programmer effectively test their apps?  What lessons learned from your testing team could be useful to a new programmer or to your customers that help beta test two different versions of your suite until such time as v4 is fully deprecated? Would it be beneficial to put a little more structure around public beta testing to minimize the number of additional betas or dot releases after final release. What might you do differently to make becoming a developer more appealing to make recruitment "MUCH" easier and to keep the ones you already have for the long term?

IPS has a larger development team and is more familiar with the codebase so they will invariably release a new product or feature that will widely be used by the vast majority of their customers, but occasionally a developer might create a better version that "some" customers may prefer to purchase.  
An open marketplace should encourage innovation by all developers including IPS.
This would also better address continuity of service. 
Products are often supported for finite periods of time by both IPS and marketplace developers and once a product is no longer supported it leaves customers in a precarious position. 
Having the ability to have more than one version of a product in the marketplace gives everyone the option to be able to migrate to a competing product if the need suddenly arrises or a competitor offers a far superior product from other marketplace developers or IPS themselves.
 
 
 
 
 
 

There have been quite a few developers and theme designers that have left the marketplace or are on the fence as to whether they will continue developing for v4 let alone the v5 platform.
Your team has been working extensively on two different codebases and have become quite intimate with it. 
I would recommend trying to visualize how difficult it would be for a developer new to the platform to setup a development environment and learn how to effectively create programs that meet your marketplace acceptance criteria.
Things to generally think about:
How closely do your programmers adhere to common programming methods for each of the languages you utilize? Is your codebase entirely PHP 8 compliant or are you still utilizing code written for earlier versions?   Are your APIs intuitive to use? Is the cost for entry too high for the first couple of years a developer is learning how to write really good programs and their sales are next to none? Could your error messages be more informative? How does a programmer effectively test their apps?  What lessons learned from your testing team could be useful to a new programmer or to your customers that help beta test two different versions of your suite until such time as v4 is fully deprecated? Would it be beneficial to put a little more structure around public beta testing to minimize the number of additional betas or dot releases after final release. What might you do differently to make becoming a developer more appealing to make recruitment "MUCH" easier and to keep the ones you already have for the long term?

IPS has a larger development team and is more familiar with the codebase so they will invariably release a new product or feature that will widely be used by the vast majority of their customers, but occasionally a developer might create a better version that "some" customers may prefer to purchase.  
An open marketplace should encourage innovation by all developers including IPS.
This would also better address continuity of service. 
Products are often supported for finite periods of time by both IPS and marketplace developers and once a product is no longer supported it leaves customers in a precarious position. 
Having the ability to have more than one version of a product in the marketplace gives everyone the option to be able to migrate to a competing product if the need suddenly arrises or a competitor offers a far superior product from other marketplace developers or IPS themselves.
 
 
 
 
 
 

There have been quite a few developers and theme designers that have left the marketplace or are on the fence as to whether they will continue developing for v4 let alone the v5 platform.
Your team has been working extensively on two different codebases and have become quite intimate with it. 
I would recommend trying to visualize how difficult it would be for a developer new to the platform to setup a development environment and learn how to effectively create programs that meet your marketplace acceptance criteria.
Things to generally think about:
How closely do your programmers adhere to common programming methods for each of the languages you utilize? Is your codebase entirely PHP 8 compliant or are you still utilizing code written for earlier versions?   Are your APIs intuitive to use? Is the cost for entry too high for the first couple of years a developer is learning how to write really good programs and their sales are next to none? Could your error messages be more informative? How does a programmer effectively test their apps?  What lessons learned from your testing team could be useful to a new programmer or to your customers that help beta test two different versions of your suite until such time as v4 is fully deprecated? Would it be beneficial to put a little more structure around public beta testing to minimize the number of additional betas or dot releases after final release. What might you do differently to make becoming a developer more appealing to make recruitment "MUCH" easier and to keep the ones you already have for the long term?

constant adoption of new php features and faster bumps in the min. required PHP. PHP is releasing newer versions faster than ever before and killing off the older versions just as fast. the biggest problem i had with IPS 4.x, was that it never really evolved. sure it changed, but it never really embraced features even found in php 5.4, let alone features added thru out 7's life.  Adoption of PSR for your code standards. gonna be honest here, i find your "coding standard" (the formatting of your code) to be the visual equivalent of an angry monkey biting down on a vibrator.  it is a serious amount of unpleasantness to view your code. i think the adoption of PSR, would be more welcoming to third party who has worked out in the wild on other things that use the PSR standard (which most frameworks/libs do now days and by nature a lot of apps have just adopted it from them).  this is a minor one, the embracing of imports+aliases when needed over FQN. FQN can make code look ugly,messy and add a fair amount of bulk. using imports, i can just look at the top of the file and see instantly what it is using. full adoption of semantic versioning. a lot of the problems that you have with 3rd party is cause you guys never stuck with a standard. you would throw in backward breaking changes in patch versions. it is pretty insane that a professional level software company wouldn't use a standard like semantic at the very least. Events Manager. i like the hook system just as much as the next guy, but i think polling of all the apps in the market place to see what is being hooked and how often, and then prioritize event triggers for those, you could probably ease a lot of your woes.  a better form class. i've said it plenty of times over the last several years, i really dislike the form building in 4. i think it was a step in the right direction, but i honestly think it could've been done better. i think it produces an extremely ugly code that could've easily been abstracted better. better use of traits/interfaces/abstract.  there are a lot of times where traits/interfaces/abstract classes should be used in 4.x, and they are simply not. a good example of this is extensions. there have been times where you have updated an extension, where you have removed methods or added in new ones and i had no idea. this is a good place where each extension gets an abstract class, where you can add/remove these methods, so if we don't implement them, they wont blow up.  search. have the search actually use the objects. you currently have things like "titleFromIndexData" and "urlFromIndexData", amongst other methods that attempt (and poorly i might add) to usurp the object class you have given us to do these very things. there are a few of my apps, who do not use the cookie cutter nature you've assigned here, so these methods require addition work from me and at times, impossible to do anything with the provided data, so i have to load the object anyway.  clubs. clubs are sort of a nightmare to implement. cause they are implemented on the item class, but god forbid you use a container/sub container class. then it becomes a huge annoyance to properly implement. clubs should be seriously revisited and much better implemented. i'm sure i have more, but i get the feeling as it is, its already too late in the development of 5.x to serious take into consideration anything i would like to see changed. too bad you guys didn't ask this at more of the start of the development, we might've been able to create something wonderful together :). 

There have been quite a few developers and theme designers that have left the marketplace or are on the fence as to whether they will continue developing for v4 let alone the v5 platform.
Your team has been working extensively on two different codebases and have become quite intimate with it. 
I would recommend trying to visualize how difficult it would be for a developer new to the platform to setup a development environment and learn how to effectively create programs that meet your marketplace acceptance criteria.
Things to generally think about:
How closely do your programmers adhere to common programming methods for each of the languages you utilize? Is your codebase entirely PHP 8 compliant or are you still utilizing code written for earlier versions?   Are your APIs intuitive to use? Is the cost for entry too high for the first couple of years a developer is learning how to write really good programs and their sales are next to none? Could your error messages be more informative? How does a programmer effectively test their apps?  What lessons learned from your testing team could be useful to a new programmer or to your customers that help beta test two different versions of your suite until such time as v4 is fully deprecated? Would it be beneficial to put a little more structure around public beta testing to minimize the number of additional betas or dot releases after final release. What might you do differently to make becoming a developer more appealing to make recruitment "MUCH" easier and to keep the ones you already have for the long term?

There have been quite a few developers and theme designers that have left the marketplace or are on the fence as to whether they will continue developing for v4 let alone the v5 platform.
Your team has been working extensively on two different codebases and have become quite intimate with it. 
I would recommend trying to visualize how difficult it would be for a developer new to the platform to setup a development environment and learn how to effectively create programs that meet your marketplace acceptance criteria.
Things to generally think about:
How closely do your programmers adhere to common programming methods for each of the languages you utilize? Is your codebase entirely PHP 8 compliant or are you still utilizing code written for earlier versions?   Are your APIs intuitive to use? Is the cost for entry too high for the first couple of years a developer is learning how to write really good programs and their sales are next to none? Could your error messages be more informative? How does a programmer effectively test their apps?  What lessons learned from your testing team could be useful to a new programmer or to your customers that help beta test two different versions of your suite until such time as v4 is fully deprecated? Would it be beneficial to put a little more structure around public beta testing to minimize the number of additional betas or dot releases after final release. What might you do differently to make becoming a developer more appealing to make recruitment "MUCH" easier and to keep the ones you already have for the long term?

There have been quite a few developers and theme designers that have left the marketplace or are on the fence as to whether they will continue developing for v4 let alone the v5 platform.
Your team has been working extensively on two different codebases and have become quite intimate with it. 
I would recommend trying to visualize how difficult it would be for a developer new to the platform to setup a development environment and learn how to effectively create programs that meet your marketplace acceptance criteria.
Things to generally think about:
How closely do your programmers adhere to common programming methods for each of the languages you utilize? Is your codebase entirely PHP 8 compliant or are you still utilizing code written for earlier versions?   Are your APIs intuitive to use? Is the cost for entry too high for the first couple of years a developer is learning how to write really good programs and their sales are next to none? Could your error messages be more informative? How does a programmer effectively test their apps?  What lessons learned from your testing team could be useful to a new programmer or to your customers that help beta test two different versions of your suite until such time as v4 is fully deprecated? Would it be beneficial to put a little more structure around public beta testing to minimize the number of additional betas or dot releases after final release. What might you do differently to make becoming a developer more appealing to make recruitment "MUCH" easier and to keep the ones you already have for the long term?

Hi all,
Next week we plan on releasing a few blogs outlining what development looks like for Invision Community v5.
I was curious as to what changes you'd like to see, and what changes do you think are coming?

That's it: a tool for automatically pruning old reports from the database, similarly to the tool we have to automatically prune private messages.
Cheers.

Given the instability of Twitter recently and some crankiness of Facebook in the past, I thought it would be a good suggestion to have a way to filter the member list by login method.  This way if we were to plan to disable a login method, we would be able to reach out to those members to ask them to pick another login method.