CheersnGears

Not Charles, but your site is not suppose to be frozen in time.   If the template designer went AWOL, look for a new template by a new designer... keeping in mind that going to V5 will completely change the template system and you'll need to update again.
These are just the costs of running a website.

Actually, several clients were invited to a private feedback group and have been giving us feedback for the past several months on how best to re-approach Invision Community Classic. Our goal was to make self-hosting viable for the future.

Honestly I like this. I do appreciate the self hosted option and I think IPS deserves to be compensated for continuing to provide the classic version. 
 
This provides a creative solution to an ongoing problem and allows a path forward for the self hosted version. 
 
This should allow both classic and cloud versions to co-exist for years to come! 
 
Kudos to whomever developed this solution! Thank you for not giving up on the self hosted version!!! 

But this is also a chance to grow your site with pages, gallery, and commerce. 

But this is also a chance to grow your site with pages, gallery, and commerce. 

I highly recommend the @CleanTalk plug-in.

Too bored to call the Legal Department too, apparently.
Microsoft owns the trademark for X for anything software or game related.
Facebook-Meta owns the trademark for X for anything Social Media related.
This logo, 𝕏 , has been a part of Unicode since 2001 and in math textbooks since the 1970s.
So, good luck to Elon with the USPTO. But given his lack of diligence in even just getting a permit for the building sign change, it's probably not going to go well.

Too bored to call the Legal Department too, apparently.
Microsoft owns the trademark for X for anything software or game related.
Facebook-Meta owns the trademark for X for anything Social Media related.
This logo, 𝕏 , has been a part of Unicode since 2001 and in math textbooks since the 1970s.
So, good luck to Elon with the USPTO. But given his lack of diligence in even just getting a permit for the building sign change, it's probably not going to go well.

Too bored to call the Legal Department too, apparently.
Microsoft owns the trademark for X for anything software or game related.
Facebook-Meta owns the trademark for X for anything Social Media related.
This logo, 𝕏 , has been a part of Unicode since 2001 and in math textbooks since the 1970s.
So, good luck to Elon with the USPTO. But given his lack of diligence in even just getting a permit for the building sign change, it's probably not going to go well.

So, rather than banning them, move them to a new group called "Inactive", and strip out the rights to do much of anything on your site. You can then make a block in Pages or a notice that only shows to that group that their membership has expired.  If you're using Commerce, you can have your membership packages in there and direct them to it for payment, and Commerce will automagically bump them back to the membership level you specify. 
Using Commerce, this whole process can be automatic. When they expire, it will bump them down to Inactive and when they pay, it will bump them back up.  You can manually process this too for your old memberships that you're carrying over.

It's not visually clear that it's there. Some sort of Share icon right after the date would be helpful to end users.

The title for the next unread topic was the one with the performance issue

We don't want to be stuck in the past too.

I installed this plugin in the timeline shown above when we were getting absolutely slammed, and almost immediately our registrations and visits dropped to 0. These are my stats for the 7-day free trial and just purchased the 2-year subscription with 6 months free so about USD$22 for 2.5 years. (...And another 6 months for writing an honest review!) 

Unfortunately elements of Twitter API appear to be being switched on and off more often than my kettle on a particularly tired morning

If you haven't already, in your CleanTalk account, set a block on countries that are unlikely to be visiting your site, plus Russia and China.  Of those that remain, you'll start to see a pattern of blocks in CleanTalk from other countries as well and you can zap those too.

another dozen registrations overnight. all had either not responded to validation email or needed admin validation. flagged them all. 
Installed the plugin from @CleanTalk and set it up, registered for free trial and within 5 minutes it blocked its first registration attempt. Will see how it helps me during free trial. At $12 per year it seems value for money if it does what it says on the tin.  

An additional item added to v1.6.0
NEW
"MFA login filters on Members table"

I highly recommend the @CleanTalk plug-in.

Give this a go - adds a filter for each enabled external login method.
 

Ah well - it looks like their language string doesn't match up to the ways the others work then.
I might look into it if I loop this into Box of Tricks.

I have that option for years through a third-party solution. Get ready to be insulted. 😉 People who leave a community in anger (e.g. after moderator actions) will love the opportunity vent their anger one last time, blaming and insulting you. I can’t remember a single time a text-based option to give reasons to delete an account was actually useful. If anything, I would suggest a checkbox list with admin-defined options. 

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.

So in recent weeks my forum has had a wave of spammers who have been able to freely post blatantly obvious spam on the site. Word filtering is absolutely ineffective to preempt them, and in the most recent case, isn't stopping them at all despite the terms being added to the post filter. In the support thread I filed, it was made clear your current anti-spam system only deals with user accounts, NOT with the content of the things they're posting. I'd say that's proven to be more or less useless. What IPS needs is preemptive/proactive spam defense, not reactive flagging and content deletion.
To that end, I'd like to very strongly suggest that IPB set up a partnership with the Akismet anti-spam service that's widely used by Wordpress blogs and a number of other sites and applications. Their system works by analyzing the actual content being posted and will return a yes/no type of response as to whether they think it's spam or not. From my own experience, they're rarely wrong about that. I'm using it on a bug tracking site I wrote myself, along with an obsolete forum package I still keep online for an old MUD.
A properly implemented Akismet setup will flag spam and store it in a temporary place for moderator review. From there, the content can be checked. If it's not spam, the moderators can click a button to indicate this, and a false positive is sent to Akismet for the system to learn from it. If it is spam, you can either delete it on the spot or let it sit in the pool until a specified expiry time (on my other 2 sites, I use the suggested 30 days). If a post actually does manage to hit the forum, the moderators can click a button there to have it reported as spam and their system learns from that as well. So it's very adaptable. What's even cooler, is the content scanning is done in real time so there's no having things sitting in some queue for days before it's evaluated by their servers.
There's a great deal more useful information to be found at https://akismet.com/ such as developer support and API documentation etc. I'm sure they could explain the gory details a lot better than I can. In the end though, this would be a wildly more effective way of dealing with spam than what we currently have.