wohali

This is the support thread for the Christmas Lights IPS4 plugin.
 

The Smashable Christmas Lights plugin adds a ridiculous, festive touch to any IPS4 website with a string of breakable, twinkling Christmas Lights.
Features:
A string of HTML5-implemented Christmas Lights which will slowly blink on and off randomly. Mousing over a light breaks the light and plays a glass breaking sound! Reloading the page restores the bulbs to like-new condition so you can have another go at them. Settings provided include: Toggle lights on and off without uninstalling the plugin. Adjustable in size from 32 to 100 pixels. Auto padding is provided to prevent lights from overlapping key IPS navigation elements. This can be toggled off if desired. Volume adjust for glass breaking sound, can be turned off completely Experimental, unsupported support for mobile devices (no sound, may overlap navigation) Enjoy what is perhaps the most useless plugin ever developed for IPS4!
Original BSD-licensed code for xmas lights provided by Scott Schiller (2007).
WARNING: Will slow down browsers considerably. No attempt has been or will be made at optimization. What you see is what you get, take it or leave it. As the JavaScript implementing this functionality is quite old (2007) and slows down even modern browsers considerably, only critical IPS-breaking issues will be fixed.

Hi everyone,
Year-end crunch hit early this year, so my plans to review this plugin and Snow before December 1 got way-laid.
I hope to get to this in the next day or two. Thanks for the continued interest!

Got sick this past week... should have time tomorrow.

Absolutely! In fact, this weekend I am dealing with 4.7 stuff on our dev instance and expect to get through validating this and the Xmas Lights plugins work.

Should get to it this weekend for 4.7.

Absolutely! In fact, this weekend I am dealing with 4.7 stuff on our dev instance and expect to get through validating this and the Xmas Lights plugins work.

File re-uploaded with 4.6 support after checking on our test site for compatibility.

File re-uploaded with 4.6 support after checking on our test site for compatibility.

Our site hasn't gotten up to 4.6, sadly, because some of the plugins we like still haven't been ported. This means I don't have a test bed to work with, but, I'll try re-uploading for 4.6 and see what happens.
Anyone who wants a copy to load directly is welcome to PM me.

Dude...
He said right there that he's working on it. The application is quite complicated; give him time.

Sorry, but I find that very hard to believe. Then again, most of what has been said by IPS staff in this thread is pretty unrealistic. Moral of the story is, this is a tactical push to evolve completely into a SaaS service. Might even save you some time and money just to refund all of the self license purchases and get rid of it entirely.
I'm pretty disappointed you haven't realized this was a huge mistake, and haven't taken steps to accommodate anyone you've blatantly hurt by these, I'll say it, malicious changes.
It's clear this was not a "communication" issue, rather a stunt to prevent anyone from renewing prior to the price hike. It's also clear the changes to self hosting prices had nothing to do with betterment of the software, rather an excuse to push people to cloud hosting. It's also clear the reason for yearly renewals was to prevent customers from selectively renewing only when they actually need to. Not because "it would confuse customers."
Yeah, confuse customers with the same model you've had for the past 10 years... We aren't that gullible. I'll stick around, but I'm not going to renew until there's drastic changes, and I'll avoid using the marketplace from now on and work directly with 3rd party developers to make sure they're being taken care of.
I can't express enough how disappointed I am.

My two cents: Invision is in a tough spot. Price hikes probably should have been gradual over the last 10 years. Moving to annual billing at the same time as the price increase, though, re-started our community's long-running discussion about moving off of IPS entirely.
The value of IPS for us has eroded over the 10 years we've had the product, mostly due to changing members' needs. So many other communities have turned to zero-cost solutions (like a sub-Reddit) or have completely abandoned forums for SNSes like Twitter, Facebook, Discord, etc. Those who still want their own private forum increasingly use open source software like Discourse.
Unfortunately, many of the other IPS features (Blog, Gallery, Pages, "calendaring") still feel half-baked when compared with software like NextCloud, WordPress, GApps, etc. Downloads & Commerce, however, are probably priced right for people who earn their living on this platform.
Since it sounds like the price increase is going to fund more development, I went over the list of new features in the past 2 years that Matt shared earlier in the thread with my community, to see if they felt they have been getting their money's worth. The only features they said they value are "Highlight topics in forum view when staff reply" and "Club improvements", both things we used to get from plugins.
As for @Matt's suggestion to go with their managed offering:
I suspect that this message falls on deaf ears for anyone posting in this thread right now. If you already have the knowledge to run (and extend) a solution like IPS yourself, $50/mo gets you a lot, even from the more expensive hosting providers out there. (Of course, IPS's hosted offering is much cheaper than Discourse's.)
For the changeover to forum-based support, I believe the messaging was worse than the decision -- it took reading this entire thread to come to terms with what was actually happening. We've had both great and poor experiences, both in private tickets and public threads. I think the move can be a good one, if the new forum can be well curated, easily searchable, and the process continues to make sense for things that shouldn't be public.
What to do? For now, we've requested a one-time, 6-month payment period reprieve, as offered in this thread, and are waiting for Sales to confirm. Thank you for making this available. We'll be taking the next few months to decide if we stay or jump ship. It's not a straightforward choice, and we share concerns with many of the others already expressed in this thread. We look forward to seeing what the monthly improvements will be, and are hoping for a road map of potential new features to come. In parallel, we'll be costing out what effort it'll take to move to a different solution.

My two cents: Invision is in a tough spot. Price hikes probably should have been gradual over the last 10 years. Moving to annual billing at the same time as the price increase, though, re-started our community's long-running discussion about moving off of IPS entirely.
The value of IPS for us has eroded over the 10 years we've had the product, mostly due to changing members' needs. So many other communities have turned to zero-cost solutions (like a sub-Reddit) or have completely abandoned forums for SNSes like Twitter, Facebook, Discord, etc. Those who still want their own private forum increasingly use open source software like Discourse.
Unfortunately, many of the other IPS features (Blog, Gallery, Pages, "calendaring") still feel half-baked when compared with software like NextCloud, WordPress, GApps, etc. Downloads & Commerce, however, are probably priced right for people who earn their living on this platform.
Since it sounds like the price increase is going to fund more development, I went over the list of new features in the past 2 years that Matt shared earlier in the thread with my community, to see if they felt they have been getting their money's worth. The only features they said they value are "Highlight topics in forum view when staff reply" and "Club improvements", both things we used to get from plugins.
As for @Matt's suggestion to go with their managed offering:
I suspect that this message falls on deaf ears for anyone posting in this thread right now. If you already have the knowledge to run (and extend) a solution like IPS yourself, $50/mo gets you a lot, even from the more expensive hosting providers out there. (Of course, IPS's hosted offering is much cheaper than Discourse's.)
For the changeover to forum-based support, I believe the messaging was worse than the decision -- it took reading this entire thread to come to terms with what was actually happening. We've had both great and poor experiences, both in private tickets and public threads. I think the move can be a good one, if the new forum can be well curated, easily searchable, and the process continues to make sense for things that shouldn't be public.
What to do? For now, we've requested a one-time, 6-month payment period reprieve, as offered in this thread, and are waiting for Sales to confirm. Thank you for making this available. We'll be taking the next few months to decide if we stay or jump ship. It's not a straightforward choice, and we share concerns with many of the others already expressed in this thread. We look forward to seeing what the monthly improvements will be, and are hoping for a road map of potential new features to come. In parallel, we'll be costing out what effort it'll take to move to a different solution.

My two cents: Invision is in a tough spot. Price hikes probably should have been gradual over the last 10 years. Moving to annual billing at the same time as the price increase, though, re-started our community's long-running discussion about moving off of IPS entirely.
The value of IPS for us has eroded over the 10 years we've had the product, mostly due to changing members' needs. So many other communities have turned to zero-cost solutions (like a sub-Reddit) or have completely abandoned forums for SNSes like Twitter, Facebook, Discord, etc. Those who still want their own private forum increasingly use open source software like Discourse.
Unfortunately, many of the other IPS features (Blog, Gallery, Pages, "calendaring") still feel half-baked when compared with software like NextCloud, WordPress, GApps, etc. Downloads & Commerce, however, are probably priced right for people who earn their living on this platform.
Since it sounds like the price increase is going to fund more development, I went over the list of new features in the past 2 years that Matt shared earlier in the thread with my community, to see if they felt they have been getting their money's worth. The only features they said they value are "Highlight topics in forum view when staff reply" and "Club improvements", both things we used to get from plugins.
As for @Matt's suggestion to go with their managed offering:
I suspect that this message falls on deaf ears for anyone posting in this thread right now. If you already have the knowledge to run (and extend) a solution like IPS yourself, $50/mo gets you a lot, even from the more expensive hosting providers out there. (Of course, IPS's hosted offering is much cheaper than Discourse's.)
For the changeover to forum-based support, I believe the messaging was worse than the decision -- it took reading this entire thread to come to terms with what was actually happening. We've had both great and poor experiences, both in private tickets and public threads. I think the move can be a good one, if the new forum can be well curated, easily searchable, and the process continues to make sense for things that shouldn't be public.
What to do? For now, we've requested a one-time, 6-month payment period reprieve, as offered in this thread, and are waiting for Sales to confirm. Thank you for making this available. We'll be taking the next few months to decide if we stay or jump ship. It's not a straightforward choice, and we share concerns with many of the others already expressed in this thread. We look forward to seeing what the monthly improvements will be, and are hoping for a road map of potential new features to come. In parallel, we'll be costing out what effort it'll take to move to a different solution.

I have been a big fan of IPB all growing up, I was an admin on many forums using it in the past, and when I was younger and wanted my own sites (without being able to afford enterprise software), I even opted for InvisionFree.  With that being said, when my community moved away from MyBB in 2019, Invision Community was the obvious choice for me; we're entirely ran on donations, but I was willing to save up and pay for the price out of pocket because I was looking forward to an enterprise solution.
I talked up Invision Community on my forums, and while we were a bit bitter over losing BBCode (we're still dealing with posts with formatting issues in my community after all this time), we sucked up and made the migration (which unfortunately didn't go smoothly due to a bug with the MyBB conversion system, but a support ticket pulled through!).
I'm not upset about the price increase, though I think it could have been dealt with better tact (read on), but I'm pretty upset about the loss of opening support tickets.  Most of my tickets that I opened were legitimate bugs that had to be escalated to the devs, and some of them involved bugs that could have been security issues (e.g. seeing topics and posts in feeds under specific circumstances that were meant for only staff).  One of my biggest talking points to the community, and one of the biggest brags that I've done post IC was "The benefit of enterprise level software is enterprise level support!"  I could tell my community when something went wrong "I opened a ticket".  I can't do that now, and raising the price while removing that feels less premium.  Less enterprise level support.
Regarding Devs....  I'm presently terrified that this is going to lose people like @Adriano Faria.  @Matt I hope you're listening, because Andriano Faria is the reason we choose Invision Community.  Due to some specific nature of my community, being able to post between multiple accounts was vital, and without their Linked Accounts plugin, we would not have chosen this platform.  If it breaks, we won't be able to continue using it, as it was one of two mandatory requirements for a community platform (even Youtube allows me to switch between pre-selected linked accounts from a user interface, many people support this out of the box):
 
 I would pay for this 20 times over if it stayed (just not all at once!)
@Matt, earlier you listed a fair bit of features that were pushed in the last couple years; however, there's so many missing features that should be de-facto (and they are in other free solutions, e.g. MyBB, SMF, etc.) but have either been removed or haven't been included and require a plugin and some of these plugins are holding the software up.  People have been asking for night mode since 2019 for the main site (ACP is appreciated but only admins can see that), profile-specific permissions prevent 1-post spambots from joining and putting things in the website field (again, we needed Adriano Faria's plugin), searching reported content is pretty important for larger communities (plugin), bookmarks (plugin...still can't use it in the latest version), post number in thread ( @All Astronauts's Kitchen Sink took up that mantle when Tom Irons' left).  You cannot lose any more of these individuals; hire them to implement these things into the main suite if you have too, because it feels like these common sense features are simply not there when they should be.
As for the marketplace, it has burned me a couple times now, specifically with themes.  After upgrading my site's main third party, purchased, theme (which I only needed because Invision Community doesn't support dark theme natively), I shortly realized that there was a critical bug in it.  The author was prompt in giving me an updated xml with the fix, but since I already had linked the theme to Invision Community, I couldn't just upload the XML, and waiting for the theme to be approved was not immediate; my only choice was to create a brand new theme from that XML, which sucked because the theme in question was heavily customized 😞
The second time is still ongoing, since y'all rejected @Fosters' recent bookmark update (I understand that you're aiming for quality control here, but from what I've heard it can take weeks for the plugin to be in review).
As for as how this all could have been handled, it's unreasonable to never increase the price for existing users, and only introduce it for those coming.  However, it is also unreasonable to drop it on us with no prior report.  I remember when Flickr changed their pricing structure, and while it got some pushback, they not only provided a warning, but also allowed current customers to prepay another 1-3 years at the current rate before they did.  The result?  I bought 3 years worth at the old rate, and I think a lot of people did.
I think a better approach to this would be to give existing customers an additional year of the old pricing (or even just 2 more billing cycles), while bringing new ones in, but in this case even the controversial way that Flickr handled their increase I feel was more graceful than Invision Community's.
As others have said, there's still time to make this right; find a way to remedy this to show the community that you're still acting in good faith.  Let us open tickets if something is broken, but perhaps still allow "how do I do xyz" to be topics.
And please, I don't want to tell my members that we need to switch to yet another platform after arguing for this software for the past 2 years because you pushed away the developers... find a way to lesson the blow to them, or just hire them outright so they can bring these much-needed features to Invision Community (see above).
 
P.S. Also please don't make this software become another Discourse-like platform, another reason I love IPB is because it's always had the forums feel; I don't want to lose the bulletin board look.

As Ballmer would say:

It is one of the reason several of your competitors were not options for us, they are so so valuable to a platform even if a customer doesnt buy an addon, its the perception that they can and there is a diverse ecosystem of addons as options.
Nearly all big platforms over the last decade have been powered by very strong developers adding value. iOS, Android, forum competitors all have got where they are because of developers. Windows Phone died because of the lack of developers. Keeping them onboard and happy is a huge deal, it wont necessarily affect huge enterprise customers but it has a big effect on your long tail customers.

I don't get it. Those of us who are self hosted are self hosted for a reason. We don't need you to "manage the internals." We want to host in our own, secured environment, that we have 100% total control of. Not create an external point of failure subject to downtime and potential for compromises.
Sure, all of the shortcomings of cloud hosting could happen to self hosting, but I'd rather go out in my own terms. 😉
You're advertising to the wrong crowd. If we wanted cloud hosting, we wouldn't have chose IPS.

Have you tried right-clicking on the editor while pressing Ctrl? You can get the context menu for the editor to display that way. It's a workaround, but at least it works.
I'm trying to figure out how to uninstall a plugin from the editor once it's broken it...

@wohali, I think @Lindy is misunderstanding your question. This is exactly how we download updates--we step through the installer, download them locally when given the option, and then put the files into our production server using our deployment mechanisms. We do not have sftp open to the world, and we manage code changes via git. We step through the updater, provide IPS credentials, and then click the link (look carefully for it) that says something like "I'll upload these changes myself."
You will then get a zip file with delta changes in your browser (only the files that have changes to them), and can use whatever your process is to deploy those files.
Alternatively, log into the Client Area and download the suite. This will include all files (not just those changed between the release you've deployed and the latest).

I've submitted the new version of this, with 4.5 support tagged, today. Given the US holiday I expect this to be available next week.
If anyone needs it sooner, please PM me.

I've submitted the new version of this, with 4.5 support tagged, today. Given the US holiday I expect this to be available next week.
If anyone needs it sooner, please PM me.

I've submitted the new version of this, with 4.5 support tagged, today. Given the US holiday I expect this to be available next week.
If anyone needs it sooner, please PM me.

Yes, it is planned, prior to December 1.

Lindy I just tried to message you privately. Doesn't seem to be possible. I'll post my PM here with my site redacted (I'd love to send it to you though so you can see why I am talking about):
"Hi Lindy. I replied on the forums but self hosting is pretty critical to my business. Both because I can control upgrades/changes and because we make the forums an integral part of a larger website (and try to make it seemless).  We have tons of custom parts of our site that work with the forums but are not IPB based.  If it's just a cost structure change for self hosting I'd be cool with that, but losing the ability to self host would be earth shattering.
Here is my business, so you can see what I mean: www.****.com. We are a sizable site/business with around 50k users a day.
 
We cross posted. Thanks for the quick reply. I'll sleep better :-).

That would be the day we'd immediately begin transitioning to another platform.