The Old Man

I've got nothing against the cloud offering, personally its not for me due to the other reasons already mentioned, cost, sluggish speed, other uses etc. We self-hosters have just got a nice Gallery update as well, it wasn't restricted to Cloud. Just saying though, that if I sold apples for 10 years and then introduced a second product line oranges, ten years later I would expect to see sales of apples decline and sale of oranges grow. PS. Don't forget the devtools for 4.7.7 please!

Congratulations Jordan and wishing you every success at AWS! Don't forget to return the keys to the IPS corporate jet.

I totally missed this, so belated good luck and thanks for all your hard work on IPS over the years!

Thanks for that, I was wondering why they had stopped responding to bug reports there. I used to use the Support forum to report them but switched to the dev forum as it made more sense, then they got abandoned! Thanks for the updates Matt!

Thank you @Matt @Charles @Lindy @Jordan Miller for stepping up, owning this and finding a compromise, especially one that is able to support and help protect struggling small fan communities and not for profits. It is hugely appreciated. For what it's worth, I'll be re-adding my card details back and intend on renewing all my licenses that are due in the next 3 months.

@Matt, please could you move these 2 topics I created into the correct forum? One is an issue about non-edited default theme templates being blank after importing a theme which may be a bug... the other is for advice on the best way to export a theme, from Designers's Mode or not... Thank you!

Ah, thanks, I didn't realise.

Hi Matt, Please could advise on the status of the Theme Customisation forum? There are unanswered questions in there going back to July. I thought it was a sub-area of the development forum but looking at it just now, there are no blue team badges displayed unlike the dev forum itself. Is it just peer to peer support? If so, should I repost my questions from to the Support Forum? Many thanks.

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

I think the main reason is that the search facility is crap. When they dropped specific forums per app, it made finding solutions to say Pages very difficult. This is another reason I've said for years there should be a FAQ and Knowledgebase. Lately I've been using and learning about the REST API lately to import Invision Gallery into Wordpress Media Library and the documentation examples are almost nonexistent. I got it working by a mix of consulting Stackoverflow and the Wordpress docs, where users post some handy tips and code snippets. PS. Kudos to Matt for weathering the storm blowback today. He must need a cold beer this evening. And whatever happened to that Lindy chap?

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

The quick fix here for all is for IPS to halt the switch to annual renewals up front. I get that some people might like to switch to annual renewal but at least give us a choice, please. Looking at my Client Centre earlier, I'm shocked. Next month October 1st, I have about 2 weeks to find $155 then another $30. Then November, I now have to find another $185. Then the final kick in the nuts, a week before Christmas, I have to find $310. $680 in the next 3 months without any notice. Great, thanks IPS.

I'm reminded of the old adage... Don't pee down my neck and tell me it's raining.

Hello, I haven't dared go look at my Client Centre yet! The few groats I've earned from the Marketplace are all I've had as income since 2017 since being made redundant due to UK austerity cuts. So it's a scary prospect. Honestly... Nobody likes change. It's rarely good. Someone always gets the pointy end of the stick. It's usually me or the little guy, but rarely the enterprise corporations who can afford the change. However I appreciate that prices haven't increased for a decade, and a reasonable increase would be understandable, we know this, it's overdue but it needs to be said these significant changes are sadly once again being poorly implemented and probably compounded by an almost total lack of notice, no dialogue, a lack of communication, causing major headaches and increasing uncertainty. Yes, of course you don't have to consult or engage, but in my experience, just like change between employers, managers and employees, if you do, you'll often find it makes change a lot more smooth and easier to swallow. Both company and customer may come to appreciate things they were unaware of, and/or offer suggestions or alternatives. A few points of feedback for what they may be worth... Re the price changes... I think there has been an obvious failure to give fair and reasonable notice of the financial changes, in particular to those needing to renew in the real short term (meaning days, weeks) but especially to everyone who needs to renew in the next few months. Hopefully Lindy and Charles will realise this oversight, take ownership of the situation from a customer service perspective and immediately ensure no financial impacting changes until the next 6 month renewal period for all non-enterprise clients has expired. After all IPS says it's all about supporting communities. So do the right thing. This is a decision that will strike at the heart of IPS communities that were already struggling even before COVID impacted, and those under significant financial pressure. For many, having to find more than double the funds up front for a year in advance, is not an easy sell, but for many is not easy to accommodate either especially with short notice. The lack of a small discount for multiple license holders is disappointing. Don't compound things, please space them out and easier to swallow! Re the Support changes: Removing Support Ticket facility is a seriously poor and frankly ridiculous decision. Increasing the license costs at the same time is pretty terrible and almost ridiculous. IPS Support should make better use of the Support Forums, absolutely, but in addition to Support Tickets, not instead of them. Many I suspect are fed up already with being to create a ticket for most Support Topics they create reporting problems. You tell us it's because you need site access to investigate or fix things, so how will this help? I don't want to name my website communities that be having problems in a public forum, my clients wouldn't appreciate it but also I like many are reluctant to post links and references to specific communities mainly because those topics appear on search results, it's unprofessional and gives a poor impression aside from anything else. Others may not appreciate doing so because of privacy or sensitivity considerations. If you don't use your own ticket system, I can see a time coming when you drop it entirely from Commerce. Maybe even move it to a separate app or module for Commerce. "Our enterprise clients use dedicated solutions like Zendesk, so we're dropping it" sort of thing.

Hi Chris, yes still some tweaking needed by the looks of it, to this one and the followers badge, reported in the tracker. Like someone else mentioned, my members will also miss the custom member title, it's a special thing they like. Will these reputation levels (below) also be going in 4.6? I like them (the actual labels) but they don't show in the post it area, so I was thinking of making a plugin to do that, but if they are going the way of the dinosaur and whales, I think I might try to find a way to implement them as custom fields or again a plugin.

Can you increase the size of the badges on this page? Easier to read the text and show them off in all their glory!

Aha, I just saw a notification that I had earned a Dedicated badge in April this month, so I get it now. The summary page displays the date earned in relation to the first time you received a badge, not when you last earned it.

The new 'trophy cabinet' style page on our profiles is a nice addition. Interestingly, according to that summary I haven't earns a badge since 2015, so I'm wondering if that's accurate or perhaps not? It may also be nice to be able to set the default profile page to a featured admin or per user choice, About Me, Achievements, Recent Content etc? Will there be any integration or display of achievements within the Leaderboard? An option to display this in the postbit area would be great! Keep up the great work on Achievements!