The Old Man

I've been with you since the days of Ikonboard, so you I love you. However, I'm starting to grow concerned after reading that IPS have made a specific, conscious decision to start restricting features (albeit with the first) to cloud-hosted SAAS customers. It's perhaps akin the to the controversial Marketplace changes. As a multi-license customer, I'm saddened that there is a visible "It's our way, or the highway" style approach that seems to be increasing these days.
This statement feels like it could be the start of a paradigm shift, and if so, one that I'm concerned is edging gradually towards a pretty slippery slope. I'm concerned that a moment of realisation will inevitably follow such a shift, where more of the latest, long awaited or most requested features could no longer be available to self-hosted clients.
I realise with SAAS you have more or even total overall control of the environment which is good from a support perspective, and it's been stated that if you could have a do-over with today's tech, SAAS would be the way to go from the outset.
SAAS certainly has its benefits, to both sides of the provider/customer fence, don't get me wrong, but I still find the cloud-hosted IPS on offer here (which as your main showcase, it should be super slick, speedier than The Flash using a bathroom and instantly responsive), to be more sluggish and generally slower than many self-hosted sites I come across; even though I'm using a 40Mbps fibre connection (thanks rip off, overselling BT, I'm still paying for that 80Mbps Infinity 2 connection, you know... yeah, that's right, you hear me!).
And then there's this risk, it does happen...

On the way to the point where more features are restricted, how many restricted features will it take before self-hosted clients begin to feel like they are getting the light version or feel less valued. The software is expensive (aside from a couple of the recurring add-ons which a fairly priced), self-hosted clients money is of course just as good as that of SAAS clients, and after all, wasn't it the self-hosted user base that helped get IPS to where it is today? So I would ask IPS to at least consider this approach and also, if you propose removing lesser used large features from products (like Commerce) that's fine but please don't forget to reduce the price accordingly.
Thanks for listening.

I thinks @Adriano Faria's plugin can get this done for you really easily, we're using it and it works like a charm.
 
 
 
Hey @Jordan Invision I think we're kind of missing the mark here... So I'll address snippets of what you said. Hopefully that'll make my point easier.
No one isn't respecting it. Just to understand the reasoning behind it.
So, it's business decision? 
Because of technical reasons?
That's kind of like saying gray isn't light black, it's dark white. that's the same thing.
 
Ok, so it is a business decision?
 
What are the reasons for you saying that? are they technical.
 
You're right, it doesn't.
 
No, they don't. I don't even know what "a Zapier" is. "They" just want to not be left out in the cold, and if they are going to be, they want to be talked to like adult business owners, and just hear the actual reasons for that decision and not just beating around the bush.
I'm sure everybody here would have taken it better if you were to say "we know it's annoying, but it's such a pain to implement and maintain, and it's so full of bugs and needs so much attention, that doing that for a 100-200$ a year plan just isn't worth it to us."

I've been with you since the days of Ikonboard, so you I love you. However, I'm starting to grow concerned after reading that IPS have made a specific, conscious decision to start restricting features (albeit with the first) to cloud-hosted SAAS customers. It's perhaps akin the to the controversial Marketplace changes. As a multi-license customer, I'm saddened that there is a visible "It's our way, or the highway" style approach that seems to be increasing these days.
This statement feels like it could be the start of a paradigm shift, and if so, one that I'm concerned is edging gradually towards a pretty slippery slope. I'm concerned that a moment of realisation will inevitably follow such a shift, where more of the latest, long awaited or most requested features could no longer be available to self-hosted clients.
I realise with SAAS you have more or even total overall control of the environment which is good from a support perspective, and it's been stated that if you could have a do-over with today's tech, SAAS would be the way to go from the outset.
SAAS certainly has its benefits, to both sides of the provider/customer fence, don't get me wrong, but I still find the cloud-hosted IPS on offer here (which as your main showcase, it should be super slick, speedier than The Flash using a bathroom and instantly responsive), to be more sluggish and generally slower than many self-hosted sites I come across; even though I'm using a 40Mbps fibre connection (thanks rip off, overselling BT, I'm still paying for that 80Mbps Infinity 2 connection, you know... yeah, that's right, you hear me!).
And then there's this risk, it does happen...

On the way to the point where more features are restricted, how many restricted features will it take before self-hosted clients begin to feel like they are getting the light version or feel less valued. The software is expensive (aside from a couple of the recurring add-ons which a fairly priced), self-hosted clients money is of course just as good as that of SAAS clients, and after all, wasn't it the self-hosted user base that helped get IPS to where it is today? So I would ask IPS to at least consider this approach and also, if you propose removing lesser used large features from products (like Commerce) that's fine but please don't forget to reduce the price accordingly.
Thanks for listening.

Thanks for these useful updates to Spam Management. These are always welcome.
In all honesty I was a bit disappointed to see no mention of improved anti-spam measures relating to the Contact Form though. I know all communities have varying spam problems, but this is where I get the majority if not most of spam from, not from by people registering on the forums thanks to the existing Spam Defence measures, which in recent years have been much more effective for spam posts.
Fortunately we have @Nathan Explosion's free Contact Form plugin that provides a quick check for previously banned email addresses to prevent spammers and banned members from using the Contact Form. Although there's no stats integration that I'm aware of, it's a free plugin with a quick hook into the banned email addresses, it helps in a big way. You you can tell it's working because email from repeat spammers just suddenly ceases arriving in your inbox, and the funny bonus thing is that the sender is oblivious and thinks the spam is still getting through, wasting their time, and not yours.
Also, I noticed no mention of supporting the latest versions of Google Recapcha, which seems an obvious starting point for anti-spam improvements. 
Sorry to be a bit negative, these latest updates are really welcome and much appreciated, just pointing out there seems to be a few missed opportunities. With my pointy stick.
 

An improvement I want to make to that plugin is to check if the email address is used by a known spammer too, so that would be an obvious improvement if included in core anyway.
None of that in there - I would have to turn this to an application to accommodate that, which I can look into at a later point but it will increases the complexity and support requirements which doesn't lend itself to a free resource really. We'll see, after I have all my outstanding paid items out of the way and....gasps....confirmed that 4.6 still would need it.

Thanks for these useful updates to Spam Management. These are always welcome.
In all honesty I was a bit disappointed to see no mention of improved anti-spam measures relating to the Contact Form though. I know all communities have varying spam problems, but this is where I get the majority if not most of spam from, not from by people registering on the forums thanks to the existing Spam Defence measures, which in recent years have been much more effective for spam posts.
Fortunately we have @Nathan Explosion's free Contact Form plugin that provides a quick check for previously banned email addresses to prevent spammers and banned members from using the Contact Form. Although there's no stats integration that I'm aware of, it's a free plugin with a quick hook into the banned email addresses, it helps in a big way. You you can tell it's working because email from repeat spammers just suddenly ceases arriving in your inbox, and the funny bonus thing is that the sender is oblivious and thinks the spam is still getting through, wasting their time, and not yours.
Also, I noticed no mention of supporting the latest versions of Google Recapcha, which seems an obvious starting point for anti-spam improvements. 
Sorry to be a bit negative, these latest updates are really welcome and much appreciated, just pointing out there seems to be a few missed opportunities. With my pointy stick.
 

I don't like spam, especially the one below

😁

will there be a badget overview page that list all of them as well as way to achieve

Here's an example of me manually giving a badge and/or points.


Here's the dialog the moderators can use:


One other thing we haven't spoken about is that you can allow your moderators to deduct points from a user when they are warned.

 

Yes, the badges you see here will be included by default in Invision Community 4.6.
There are many pages in the ACP. On the front end, viewing a member's profile shows you which badges they've earned.
I'm not sure if we are going to do a "here's all the possible badges you can earn". I'm not sure of its value. We don't want to turn the community into a game. It's designed to reward good contributions and not encourage pure engagement for engagements sake to win points and badges.
Yes, it does work across all apps. The profile link is also in this screenshot 😄
Not yet, but we already have this down as a future expansion idea.
You can rebuild points and ranks at any time including post upgrade. It's what we did here. We had 21 million data points to look at, and it took about 5-6 hours.
Reputation and points are still separate. One thing to keep in mind is that we don't want to turn a community into a game. An early rule I put in place was that we were not going to show point logic and show people how to specifically earn points, and which actions earned the most points because that will start to erode the purpose and people may decide, if you said that you earn 5 points for a post and 10 points for a gallery image, to reduce posting and start uploading random pictures just to earn points and rank up.

We do not want this. The achievements system is meant to be a reward for great contributions, and not the purpose of the community.

To this end, we will not be showing how you can earn points, and the rank thresholds.

We do have on our list a way to give you a weekly update about how many points you earned, so you may get an email with "You earned 205 points last week, that's 20 more than the week before" for example to keep you updated on your progress.
You can opt in to notifications to get a push notification / inline notification / email when you rank up or earn a new badge.
You are seeing the entire system from the perspective of a user. There is a "recognise" system that allows you to manually award points and/or badges for content.
Yes you can manually give points and/or badges.
Yes, you can add a "location" "and" clause to specify just forums, or whatever app and set up points per thing differently.

Can these points be used to cash in a prize or rewards from the Ecommerce? If the user had racked up 200 points then they can redeem a thing from the product page for free. 

Age of account and birthday rules for points would be very welcome as well as an option to give long time members some bonus for being active.

Can there please, please, please be a page like the leader board that can show of who has the most points (user and groups) and be highlighted. Can you please, please, please also set time limits! To be able to reset the points once a year, or monthly, etc. I love this whole concept and you’re on to a winner!

Earning points is cool, but the only thing a member can earn is "Badges"?

Members Shop is the perfect gamification plugin, because it offers 'abilities' to the members, ways to spend their points. 

-Pin a Topic (For set amount of days)
-Change Member Title
-"Purchase" an item in the Downloads section with points
- So much more.


In my Downloads, I have made custom desktop and mobile wallpapers that can be purchased with points. I also offer custom made profile photos, cover photos and signature banners. I plan on offering more soon.

This has been working out great on my forum. People love earning enough points to collect them all. Thank god that @Adriano Faria has taken over Members Shop. Hopefully it will continue to grow. If there was a way to use the Points earned from the IPS Achievements, but then use them with the features Members Shop has to offer, this would be a great method of utilizing both systems. 

 

A nap is always welcome.

Man, I’m still lunching. I have no idea! TOO SOON to even think about it. Go sleep! 😆

Before the question comes up..
Rules are handled via extensions, so 3rd party apps will be able to implement own rules in their apps :)

I've been with you since the days of Ikonboard, so you I love you. However, I'm starting to grow concerned after reading that IPS have made a specific, conscious decision to start restricting features (albeit with the first) to cloud-hosted SAAS customers. It's perhaps akin the to the controversial Marketplace changes. As a multi-license customer, I'm saddened that there is a visible "It's our way, or the highway" style approach that seems to be increasing these days.
This statement feels like it could be the start of a paradigm shift, and if so, one that I'm concerned is edging gradually towards a pretty slippery slope. I'm concerned that a moment of realisation will inevitably follow such a shift, where more of the latest, long awaited or most requested features could no longer be available to self-hosted clients.
I realise with SAAS you have more or even total overall control of the environment which is good from a support perspective, and it's been stated that if you could have a do-over with today's tech, SAAS would be the way to go from the outset.
SAAS certainly has its benefits, to both sides of the provider/customer fence, don't get me wrong, but I still find the cloud-hosted IPS on offer here (which as your main showcase, it should be super slick, speedier than The Flash using a bathroom and instantly responsive), to be more sluggish and generally slower than many self-hosted sites I come across; even though I'm using a 40Mbps fibre connection (thanks rip off, overselling BT, I'm still paying for that 80Mbps Infinity 2 connection, you know... yeah, that's right, you hear me!).
And then there's this risk, it does happen...

On the way to the point where more features are restricted, how many restricted features will it take before self-hosted clients begin to feel like they are getting the light version or feel less valued. The software is expensive (aside from a couple of the recurring add-ons which a fairly priced), self-hosted clients money is of course just as good as that of SAAS clients, and after all, wasn't it the self-hosted user base that helped get IPS to where it is today? So I would ask IPS to at least consider this approach and also, if you propose removing lesser used large features from products (like Commerce) that's fine but please don't forget to reduce the price accordingly.
Thanks for listening.

This not a good sign... Especially when forums overall are in a state they are in now (in the rear view mirror of SM). I imagine people taking it more lightly 10 years ago but not today.

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol

"Zapier is the first smart community enhancement available for Cloud and Enterprise Community customers exclusively."
Not liking this direction...

Yeah, I was very enthusiastic about this until I read that self-hosted clients like myself were left twisting in the wind on this. 😞
I, too, am concerned about a possible paradigm shift that would leave self-hosted clients more and more out in the cold.  Not that I distrust the cloud (for the most part), but I lease a VPS and I love having a VPS; I can run Invision, I can create test/developmental sites, I have root access and can experiment with other apps and platforms for resource management and other things.  I wouldn't have it any other way...and, to be quite honest (and no offense), with all of this taken into consideration it's currently cheaper than your services.
Now, I've been with Invision for 10+ years (since 2009) and there's a reason why I'm still here - I love the crew and the platform and have built my business (as well as my academic research) on it.  And while I have no plans to go anywhere, and I also remember Lindy saying somewhere that Invision has no plans to alter their availability to self-hosted customers, things like this do make me antsy.  At a time when I'm still building and soliciting clients, the thought of having to pack up and find somewhere else (even far into the future) almost makes me nauseous (you don't even wanna know the trials and tribulations I went through to finally arrive at a good VPS provider!!).
I understand that things evolve and change, but something as big as this in terms of trigger/action functionality for an Invision CMS?  Well, I don't get how you could simply leave us out and do truly hope that the "beta" release means at some point there will be some integration.  (NOTE: I can search the adminCP on my self-hosted install for "Zapier" and get one hit for [System] Community Enhancements, and when I follow that link there's nothing 🙃).  I'll be opinionated here and say that through my experience I believe that there are some things that simply shouldn't be left to third-party developers.  This is one of them.  So although I despise catchphrases and dogwhistle words with every fibre of my being, I'd love some "inclusivity" here.  There...look what you made me do! 😉

https://invisioncommunity.com/news/product-updates/45-zapier-brings-integration-with-over-2000-web-apps-r1194/?do=findComment&comment=219019
... which is funny because all I hear (from CiC people when I have to support them) is that their hosting is painfully slow and very limited. 

The writing has been on the wall for quite a while, so nothing surprising here. IPS could have definitely handled this more gracefully, but it is what it is. What I find disappointing are two main things:
- The cloud pricing is extremely crude, based only on online users, which in itself is poorly defined metric. Can we block bad bots in the cloud? can we reduce the crawling rate for the good bots? Why no more flexible options instead of one monthly peak bumping your pricing for the entire month? Ability to stop the community instead of going automatically on a higher plan? Why not being able to remove apps to lower pricing instead of getting full package even for users who do not need it? And so on...
- The performance of IPS community here is definitely nothing to write home about. My self hosted community feels snappier, even if I am using heavier theme, more apps and I am not super optimized and speed obsessed either. As an advertising for improved cloud performance, this community here does not do very good job. Right now it sounds like "Pay more to get less".
Maybe IPS and @Jordan Invision can initiate a broader discussion regarding the cloud, so we do not hijack the Zapier thread. 

I've been with you since the days of Ikonboard, so you I love you. However, I'm starting to grow concerned after reading that IPS have made a specific, conscious decision to start restricting features (albeit with the first) to cloud-hosted SAAS customers. It's perhaps akin the to the controversial Marketplace changes. As a multi-license customer, I'm saddened that there is a visible "It's our way, or the highway" style approach that seems to be increasing these days.
This statement feels like it could be the start of a paradigm shift, and if so, one that I'm concerned is edging gradually towards a pretty slippery slope. I'm concerned that a moment of realisation will inevitably follow such a shift, where more of the latest, long awaited or most requested features could no longer be available to self-hosted clients.
I realise with SAAS you have more or even total overall control of the environment which is good from a support perspective, and it's been stated that if you could have a do-over with today's tech, SAAS would be the way to go from the outset.
SAAS certainly has its benefits, to both sides of the provider/customer fence, don't get me wrong, but I still find the cloud-hosted IPS on offer here (which as your main showcase, it should be super slick, speedier than The Flash using a bathroom and instantly responsive), to be more sluggish and generally slower than many self-hosted sites I come across; even though I'm using a 40Mbps fibre connection (thanks rip off, overselling BT, I'm still paying for that 80Mbps Infinity 2 connection, you know... yeah, that's right, you hear me!).
And then there's this risk, it does happen...

On the way to the point where more features are restricted, how many restricted features will it take before self-hosted clients begin to feel like they are getting the light version or feel less valued. The software is expensive (aside from a couple of the recurring add-ons which a fairly priced), self-hosted clients money is of course just as good as that of SAAS clients, and after all, wasn't it the self-hosted user base that helped get IPS to where it is today? So I would ask IPS to at least consider this approach and also, if you propose removing lesser used large features from products (like Commerce) that's fine but please don't forget to reduce the price accordingly.
Thanks for listening.