ptprog

Regarding hosting providers, I have been using Linode for a couple of projects, and I'm happy with their service.
You also have Amazon Lightsail and Vultr with similar prices.
 
If you are going to use a VPS and manage it yourself, you can easily configure Lets Encrypt from command line.  This should take less work than buying a certificate.

And there is the fleshing out of the request: you are referring to the Q&A functionality here.
I will be honest and say that you should implement Google Authenticator instead as your second-step for the ACP, as it isn't static.

I humbly and respectfully would like to pardon my request that the Invision Development Team please give significant consideration in possibly developing a command-line upgrade and import option. It could be most beneficial for large communities whose content ranges in the millions or billions. 
Thank you for your time and consideration. 

As JS continues to modernize and become more usable as a core scripting language, I feel like we'll see jQuery at the very least become superseded by something lighter and more powerful.
But there's never likely a time where we'll move to just raw JS for complex applications. Some type of library will always be needed for the reasons Matt said.
Those libraries will likely become lighter and faster, but they'll still exist.

My terminal supports UTF-8 chars, and I could see emojis on the posts that still had the emojis.  But just in case this was an issue with a specific emoji, I also used the MySQL HEX function to see the hexadecimal representation of the char stored and confirmed it was a plain "?".
 
 
It looks like this bug is known for 4 years: https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-11777 (but there is no mention to it in the function documentation).  Time to consider going back to MySQL...

I usually put a lot of effort on website optimization, and I certainly would like to see IPS paying more attention to performance.
But looking at results from other popular websites such as Youtube, Facebook or Amazon, the values are not that different.  I checked a few other landing pages from Google, with mostly static content, and the results were even worse.  So, I guess IPS is not that bad.

Ok, then we can rule out a backup/restore that didn't factor in utf8mb4, and that this is not something introduced from a backup/restore operation that stripped out emoji characters.
The other possibility is that your community uses native emoji characters instead of the Twitter emojis. If you're doing this, and you're browsing on a device that doesn't have newer emojis available, you will see oddness. You can switch to the Twitter emojis and see if those posts begin displaying correctly for you (assuming the new characters have been adopted by Twitter and not in your native platform's supported fonts).
See: https://blog.emojipedia.org/first-look-217-new-emojis-in-ios-14-5/

Similar to viewing template changes in comparison to default templates, please consider adding a mechanism to highlight the specific portions of content that have been altered from one revision to the next. For examples, consider the way MediaWiki highlights changes between two selected revisions, or how the template "diff" display works now in ACP.
It drives me insane to look at a lengthly piece of content and scroll up and down between the two to sort out what exactly someone decided to revise.
Here's an example using Mergely JS library:

I usually put a lot of effort on website optimization, and I certainly would like to see IPS paying more attention to performance.
But looking at results from other popular websites such as Youtube, Facebook or Amazon, the values are not that different.  I checked a few other landing pages from Google, with mostly static content, and the results were even worse.  So, I guess IPS is not that bad.

This is because there are a lot of opinion based threads here. I don't think "Like" is a good reaction when you want to agree or support what has been said in a thread but currently the only agreeable reaction. 
Like is a broad (and at least for me) a very default way for people to respond/react to something that they simply think was a good read.
In some cases I would like to actually agree with what the member is saying or support it with a +1. To me agreeing versus liking something will give me a better way to show my appreciation to a members post.
An example a cute joke in the middle of an opinion thread would get a like or a 'haha' but something that brings up good points can get my 'agree'.

If you are familiar with cache headers, you can just use Chrome developer tools (in the Network tab, you can see the headers of each, and check the expiration time, e.g. "expires: Sun, 07 Feb 2021 08:27:40 GMT" shows the cache expires in 1 month).
You can also use Google Pagespeed (Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy) or www.webpagetest.org, for exemple, which provides higher-level details (as @Mopar1973Man also suggested).
BTW, I'm wondering if some of those cache "issues" may be caused by Cloudflare, since the cache expiration sometimes of some images varies depending on the tool you use to test.  If this is the case, maybe it's due to some online optimization made by Cloudflare, and you may not be able to fix it.  I would still make sure that when you hit your server directly (bypassing Cloudflare), the resources have cache.

That's true, excluding distros like Gentoo and Arch Linux 😉
Even as someone who used Arch Linux as a desktop OS for many years and is intimately familiar with it, I would not use it on a server system where uptime is of any importance, as I know bleeding edge updates, no matter how comfortable you may be with them, can introduce radical breaking changes that result in downtime.
So, it's a mix of using what you're comfortable with and what is the best tool for the job. Debian, CentOS, RHEL are all examples of the right tools to use for server systems. CentOS is more often used in enterprise environments where stability is more important than having access to the latest software. Debian provides what I personally consider the best mix of being stable while still being reasonably up-to-date.
One thing to note is that CentOS doesn't really have a good upgrade path for their release cycles, and the general suggestion is to just make a fresh installation if you want to upgrade. Debian on the other hand provides an easy straightforward upgrade path so you can keep up-to-date with each new release cycle.
That's not saying it's impossible to upgrade CentOS, it's just generally done using unofficial/not well supported means.
This is fine again if your main focus is stability and you don't mind running software that is a bit older for the sake of stability over any potential improvements newer software releases may have (barring any security issues, as security patches are backported on both Debian and CentOS).
Both CentOS and Debian do support third-party repos which let you take advantage of more modern software releases, however. But you have to be careful not to go too overboard relying on these.
---
tl;dr if you're comfortable and happy with CentOS, it's probably best to stick with it on your next server. If you want to try something new that has a shorter release cycle, Debian is also a very solid choice.
Outside of these two, I wouldn't really recommend anything else. RHEL is generally only used in enterprise environments for their support. Ubuntu Server is.. okay I guess, but I rarely ever see it being used outside of temporary docker images and such.

Depending on the community, there may be other reasons for display name changes. Imagine if you registered for a community that dealt with something embarrassing and two months later you realize using your full legal name as your display name may have not been the best life decision. It would be a nice, welcome feature to have the names displayed in quotes and in mentions update with display name changes to help keep continuity over time.
If someone simply refers to the name otherwise (not in a mention or quote), I don't imagine we'd want that to be handled by such an extension of the display name change functionality that presently exists.

I would think it's far easier.  In quotes simply have the editor insert a tag for the member ID that's replaced when viewed. Something like ##MID-2245##.
Since it's tied to the MID which never changes, a quick strrplace would just insert the currently associated member name upon displaying a post (or if none found then just list "Guest").

For my communities, I fixed this issue showing the unique ID of the post. You can see it in action here.

+1 for moving this feature into the core. In our case, we don't need pages app at all. Just one widget is not a good reason to buy something you don't need.

Why isn't there a custom widget block for adding random things to your sidebar like HTML and text?  I was able to add a plugin to do it but I really think this should be a core feature.  I don't have Pages so I am not able to use page builder widgets either.

Can you please add a way to suppress these upgrade notices every time you put out a new version after I've already dismissed it once?  Sure, display it in the ACP, but I don't need to see it at the top of my forum every single time I visit, and if I dismiss it, it comes back the next day. Super annoying, I won't be upgrading to 4.5 anytime soon, and I just want to turn it off until the next version is released. 

I don't mind seeing this notice once when there's a new version, but it's getting tiresome seeing this reappear after I've already dismissed it once for a specific release.  I'm going to permanently suppress these myself, which then defeats the entire purpose of having them in the first place.
Thank you,
 ..Al
PS: The title states "4.5.0 Beta 5", but the text states "4.5.0 Beta 1". 

icomoon has been removed in 4.5 and jQuery has been upgraded to the 3.x series  🎉

I'm disappointed nobody actually used #hastagtical #hashtagsfordays #justiceforhashtags #hashtageverything 
Ya'll need to up your hashtagging skills!  😀

As some asked me in MP :
How to noindex profiles :
go to ACP > site promotion > Search Engine Optimization > Meta tags > add meta tags
Page adress :    profile/*
Page name : leave empty
Button add : robots with property : noindex,follow
 
THEN
 
wait for 1-3 months approx depending on your board size and then check if you have no profile indexed anymore : site:yoursite.com/profile (you have to wait for google to crawl all profile pages and discover the noindex)
then add in your robots.txt the following directive :
 
Disallow: /forums/profile/

 

Hello, maybe you can add small icons instead "x replies" and "x views" like on WordPress 👇🏼

and also maybe you can add a feature with an icon for showing how many times the topic is shared...

Will 4.5 include support for hCaptcha?
CloudFlare just switched to it due to growing privacy concerns with Google.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/

Hello @Adlago, have you tried 
crossorigin = "use-credentials" to avoid another SSL handshake?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58937502/why-my-manifest-json-loading-require-new-ssl-handshake

You really need to think more about real users rather than just online test results.