CheersnGears

Yes we will be preparing for the inevitability of this in the future sadly. I have been a big fan on Invision dating back our our DJ community forums, when we took over our current community it was VB and we switched to IPB not long after. 
The amount we are going to have to invest in development still does not offset the monthly cost for us to have the features we would want. Our community is only about 14k members.
We have a dedicated server that we use for more than just our community, so paying for another hosted service just does not make sense. Especially since we have full control of our environment.

For now it's only minor changes in features between the self hosting and business/corporate plans.
But i believe the evolution will be for the changes to start to get bigger and bigger between them, until at some point, the self hosted plans will cease to exist. It's not a thing for now, but it will be in the future for sure.

I'm in the process of building a new project and have it started in Wordpress + BuddyPress + bbPress... part of the way through the bbPress setup I was kinda disappointed in the forum features and was thinking to myself "I could do this in a full suite version of IPS self-hosted".
Thanks for removing my doubts of why I went with Wordpress in the first place.  No point starting a new project on software that is destined to get starved of features by the developer in order to push more clients into $549/m plans.

Nice feature but i join all what it was said, is should be a native feature on all plans, cloud or self.
+1 for the feature -1 for the restriction 

I wouldn't call this an innovation, especially when it's gated to 5% of the community lol
This is yet another example of how detached IPS are to their customers. The fact that such a simple feature is excluded from self hosted licenses, but also gated in a $600 per month cloud plan? waaaaaaaAAAAT?

That's not really an opinion. There is no chance a gaming community outside of large orgs are paying for the Business plan.

Include in title that it's only for biggest clients and you are screwing self-hosted clients. Would save me some time - just another thing you do not care about. 
I'm a client for 9 years and I'm getting more and more anoyed with your solutions for self-hosted clients. 

So you can't get this unless you are spending $549 per month? That's a bit rediculous. I'm ok not having this, not a game changer. 

Interesting article but I think there needs to be a better way to call attention WHO a feature is applicable to or perhaps the blogs should be split between self hosting or Cloud or Business & Corporate/Enterprise plans. 
Landed on this page and saw the minimum version 4.7.0 - figured that was me started scrolling and didn't read the first paragraph and get to the part to go to your ACP and nothing... 
Perhaps your Version numbers should include a suffix: 
4.7.0 Corporate/Enterprise 4.7.0 Business 4.7.0 Creator 4.7.0 Creator Pro 4.7.0 Self-Hosted 4.7.0 Platform ( all clients )  It has to be in the headline so we know the target audience. 🙂 

I don't believe any gaming communities outside of developer/publisher/merchandiser forums would actually be able to afford to use given the restriction to business & enterprise cloud plans

Because the algorithms are way to easy to game, especially with money.  Is it really social media if the only way you get to see what you want to see is if the provider is paying to put it in front of your eyes? That's just plain old advertising. 

Because the algorithms are way to easy to game, especially with money.  Is it really social media if the only way you get to see what you want to see is if the provider is paying to put it in front of your eyes? That's just plain old advertising. 

This is very true and may be the biggest thing standing between me and my wish.   While the software today is great, part of me wishes that I had converted to a CMS years ago instead of trying to hammer Content/Pages into doing what I wanted. It would be much more painful to convert now, but I've considered going down that route. 

Community is fine, but I still feel this software suite is still too forum-centric.  It's just the nature of software that started as forum software and then evolved to have other bolt-ons over time.
If I could have one wish in IPS, it would be for Pages to be a better replacement for Wordpress.  The integration between Pages and Forums is fantastic, the Forums are fantastic, but Pages is still not quite there yet as a Wordpress substitute.
Now, before you jump on me about how Pages is "so much more".  I agree it is.  But the primary use case for Pages is going to be some sort of articles/blog/news system because that's the database it ships with.
F word in my case will never go away.  My community is coming up on 18 years old. It will always be thought of as a forum first even though Pages is and has been my primary app for years now.

My dream is that IPS grows enough that it can pay a dedicated developer team for each app. Pages, Commerce, Downloads … they all just get these “sweeps” after 1,5 years with a few improvements here and there. It clearly shows. Those app can’t keep up with standalone solutions by other providers who improve that one app all day every day.  

You can now do this while you're not logged in. I get you point, we might be able to sort this for 4.4.

This is something we want to do. It won't make it for 4.4, but keep watching this space. (Not literally, nothing is going to happen in this specific space).

Right now I allow guests to post.  If I want this new feature to be the default option for guests, do I have to turn guest posing off?

Just rattling the cage a bit to see if there is any potential for a patreon integration.

After looking at it, it would be cool to have it as a way of making an alternate subscription plan on your site. As far as I know there are certain levels of patron's that can benefit from it. 
For example: on a forum a user wants to upgrade, they simply become a patron from their user account and reap all the benefits set by the admin. He/she be able to access areas now granted, and all the awards by the Patreon has to offer. Maybe like discounts to the store, more user privileges.
Basally just a new way of  being a Premium member on ones board.

That would be a fantastic 3rd party add-on 

That would be a fantastic 3rd party add-on 

That would be a fantastic 3rd party add-on 

I just removed Viglink.  I had 30 cents of activity from it in the last 12 months.  I don't know if there are other ways to impliment it, but it clearly wasn't doing anything for me as is.  I don't expect it to beat AdSense, but at least I get a large adsense payment every month, meaning more than the $100 minimum.