Davyc

For some reason or other the Online Users widget is not always showing correctly who is online.  For example I just visited my site and although I'm permanently logged in I'm not showing in the Online Users list.  See below:
I'm logged in:

But in the Online User list another member is showing but not me.

Now, if I click the (See full list) link I can see my username and when I go back to the home screen I'm showing in the list.
There is also another issue that has been around for a long while that's never been addressed.  On the rare occasion that the Online User list is working I can see that I'm logged in and there is one guest showing, but that guest is me; how can I be a guest and logged in at the same time?
Looking for help and answers with thanks 🙂
 

@Matt When you break down a large amount into a monthly amount and base it on the lowest denominator, it looks trivial, but we're not talking about a monthly payment.  To just drop this onto everyone without so much as mention is really bad karma. You just need to look at this topic and realise how toxic it is and there is no remorse, just excuses and rubbishy PR talk. Sorry mate, it just doesn't make sense and it doesn't sit well with your clients and that is something you need to address quickly before the floodgates open.  I really don't like have to post these replies and I don't like being forced out of the door after such a long time, but if that is the intent and there is no relenting then out of the door I will go, with great sadness.  The one solace is that there are alternatives out there that are more affordable.

He most likely can but you won't get the positive answer you want.
I've had time to sleep on this and my conclusion is this:
You say you haven't increased prices in a decade. Who's fault is this?  A small annual increase is easier to swallow than a massive increase in one fell swoop.
Such a large increase for your corporate clients will be less than chicken feed and they will most likely offset this against tax. Us hobbyists can't do that and such an increase of these proportions is ridiculous if expect us to buy into it.
In a declining hobbyist market you would be best placed to split your business into two - one catering for corporates who you can charge whatever big bucks they're willing to part with, and one more affordable option for hobbyists; the two are mutually incompatible and you can't expect hobbyists to pay corporate prices.
You need to take a look at what your competition is charging and price yourselves competitively.  You can argue that you have the better product, but when priced way above competitors it doesn't look so attractive from the ground up.
A small number of your clients who are used to being on this (and I say this loosely) community platform have probably voiced the concerns of many and who are now leaving the fold.  How big a number do you have to lose, silently, before you realise you made a huge blunder? A number 'we' will never know.
It's like you have taken a big stick and beaten us with it and then in come the pacifiers with, "well, you know" as though that is some kind of ointment to soothe the pain.
I just bought my second licence this year, that was bought with faith and trust in you as business, which incidentally has grown because of the grassroots support of your hobbyist clients over many years; that has flown the nest with this latest announcement.
So you should be aware that whilst your costs are rising, just the same as ours, your income is about to take a dive.
I am fully aware that prices rise constantly and it's a pain we all have to bear, but imagine if you went into your local grocery store and when you get through the checkout and have to pay the bill, you find that it's 50% more than last year.  How happy would you be with that?
Small increases over a period of time hurt less and it's YOUR fault that you didn't do this over the last decade and now you want us to swallow the sob story - no way.  Am I angry, you bet - I wasted good money buying that second licence and there's no way I'm throwing any more at it. Your loss, my gain.
You may be great at developing software, but you suck as looking after your clients, especially those who have walked this path with you since the beginning.

Which means it's practically useless now as it will always be giving false readings - I understand the performance impact issue, but how much of an issue is it if it wasn't an immediately obvious noticeable impact before it was introduced.  If it's cached then how often is the cache updated and would be an idea to give admins an option as to how often it gets updated and allow them to decide what impact on performance it has 🙂
 

I've done it - removed my payment method and exploring other options. No one likes price rises, but when people are still recovering from the pandemic this is like a sledgehammer blow.  It's also going to affect devs who supply much needed apps in the marketplace; if people start leaving then their revenue is going to slip and then they may leave too.  It's a slippery slope IPS has ventured into and may be something to regret later. I just bought another license this year for another project, now that's on the bonfire until I find another solution.  Talk about being hit between the eyes!

WOW! Definitely NOT impressed with the new pricing structure - this is taking it out of the ballpark for a lot of people.  I was looking forward to the revamped CIC and was considering it, but not now. Even self-hosted is now very pricy and I can see your competitors hoovering up the ones you've scared off.  Not sure this was a wise move, but then it depends on who you want as clients.
The general makeover is OK, nothing that makes me go WOW! (other than your prices lol).
Whoah!  I've just logged into the client area and I see my renewal price has gone from $40 every six months to this:

Is this a mistake?

My thoughts turned into a blogpost instead 🙂
https://jimiwikman.se/articles/professional/the-importance-of-communication-when-trust-dies-horribly-and-organizations-fail-r229/
 

100% agree with this. It's a two-way street.
None of my concerns have been addressed and I didn't get a response to most of what I said. I may have well just shouted into the wind for all the good it did me to post my views.
"We're sorry" - fine, you're sorry.
"We're sorry, we should have given more notice. We'll apply discounts for any renewals within X months to allow you time to plan." - much better, and means a mistake has been owned.
As it stands, the only thing keeping me from immediately leaving is the tight integration between two cruical apps - forums and commerce. That's a sad state of affairs, because prior to this I would have been staying because I believed in the product and the team. That belief has been shattered.

If you really do care @Matt (which I believe you do, but maybe your hands are tied) and the rest of the team @Lindy and @Charles then you should rethink your strategy and listen to your clients who are feeling like they have had their faces pushed into the mud.  What can you say?  Well, perhaps 'we were wrong to do this so we have decided to roll out these price increases incrementally' which will give people some breathing space and allow them to recover from the shock.  I'm sure that the right move now would be to roll back this mad decision and get onboard with your clients to retain their business and ensure that your business continues to flourish, impress and be known for great customer service, which it has been for the most part.  Caring means thoughtfulness, consideration and being supportive towards the people who contribute to your cash pot.  Listen to the cry of anguish that is felt throughout the whole of this topic and do something positive to reassure and re engage with your clients instead of looking for an ointment for every sore that doesn't exist and responding with meaningless soundbites that just do not justify what has occurred.
I really do not want to leave, but I am being forced out (whether you believe that or not) because of this price hike.  Had I known that this was coming I would not have bought a second license.  Heaven knows what some of my ex-clients will be thinking after my recommending your software and they have gone on to buy licenses.
This has been the mother of all cock-ups and it needn't have been that way if there was more warning, more transparency and a softer approach to upping prices with consideration given to whether it was something that your clients could digest more easily without all the horror that this topic has produced.

I have put up expiry notices on both my licenced sites and have already found one alternative at a one-time price of $59 with six months support and I can increase this to 18 months for an extra $20.25.  I'm considering another alternative for my other site which is less expensive but has the same features, again for a price considerably less than the new IPS prices.
I'm no penny pincher, but I am retired and living on a pension, I have rent and utilities to pay for so my hobby money is limited.  I understand about the price increase, just not the way it blitzkrieged its way into our lives with no alternative payment options other than annually (with a not so generous offer of a one-time split bi-annually).
I find some of the comments mildly amusing and often disturbing from IPS:
Short and sweet and couldn't care less - definitely not good customer relations. This is not a 'Hump Day' it's a 'Sad Day'.

I really feel like there are four issues at play in all of this. 
The price rise
Personally, this is the one which, although I can understand the issues it's causing for some, is in my opinion, the least controversial of all that's gone on over the last few days. Things get more expensive, the product is very different to what it was since the last increase in price, and so personally I have no problem with it. As long it goes hand in hand with a discernible and ongoing improvement in the quality of the product. There's work to be doing, rough edges to smooth and features which need adding. I do see why this may cause people to move away from Invision though - everything has its price and there are (and always have been) cheaper (and even free) alternatives. 
The support change
On the face of it, this looks terrible. But in a way it's all in the telling as it's not really a big change, assuming it works as Invision are saying - eg things that need a ticket will end up in one. For me it's one of those that needs to be given a chance to see if it works as advertised or not - if it ends up being poor then it'll need addressing/reverting to tickets urgently. 
Communication
This leans into everything else really. Had the price rise been communicated in advance, then that may have mitigated a lot of the upset it's caused. If the support changes had been communicated more clearly, that would also have stopped so many people assuming various different versions of what it is that Invision are apparently planning to do. It's an ongoing weak point with Invision in my view. There's no doubt that Invision make us feel less valued as paying customers than anyone else we spend our money with, sadly.
Does Invision care?
This is often about communication and the perception that it gives. I mean how many times can you screw it up so royally that you leave your customers confused or angry or both? With Invision it's frequent, it's frustrating and it's entirely avoidable. If you refuse to learn, refuse to take it seriously and don't change the way you do things after so many years and so many occasions, why should your paying customers keep giving you the benefit of the doubt?
It's not enough to say you care as you're picking up the pieces of another mess, or arriving back onto the scene of another feature left on the shelf for months with zero communication (think mobile app, as one example). You need to show you care, and you need to step up and own the problems that are of your own making by showing some flexibility.  EG - maybe look at a longer period of 6 month invoicing for existing customers who request it, offer a discount code for those with renewals within 3 months or something - just do something, anything to show it's not all pr style fake 'regret' just to play for time until everyone calms down or gives up. It's very little effort on your side in the great scheme of things, but could make a massive difference to the customers you're doing it for.
Oh, and finally (long post, sorry), look after your third party developers - you need them, so show some gratitude and a spirit of partnership by working with them.

I've slept on the email and on the first 14pages of this topic.  WOW!
12 month billing industry standard? Almost all of the services I use are per hour, per month, most offer an annual discount. Those that only have annual, TBH, they have something to fear to lock you in. Even microsoft do monthly 😉  who/what is a standard?  Be better by differentiating and offering your customers what they need.
Silver linings: I'm assuming search will be getting a really good overhaul, elastic 7? If we're to search for issues first. TBH I still just use `site:domain.tld` in google here and on my own sites. 
I can actually stand the price increases. But I'm not impressed at all, at how it's been done. Trust was a word used before, I'll reiterate that and add reputation. Now I don't want to renew on the principal of it, and to support those who had this foisted upon them. 
I understand the support changes too. As a developer of 25+years and engineering manager for many, I see my peers on support, their productivity is far lower. £ for £ I get more from my non-support folk. However, they tear through bugs, keep paying customers happy with super quick response times & prompt fixes. Sure we have the odd customer who is a 'burden' but we see it, if we can make it work for them, then 80% of the others won't bother us. Now if I could offload support to customers... win. #fail If multiple similar questions asked, add it to a knowledgebase, dev or customer led, #win.

Could also get rid of the annoying config/server queries by bumping the price up to a bearable, but mostly prohibitive figure? ...win. #fail Ultimately at $1250, that's an hour work a month I'd expect in return. Or one serious forum offline help me get it back. If I was raising that level of support queries, IPS isn't the best. I'd pay $100 per serious issue escalation or guaranteed resolution, not a sort it yourself as your not cloud hosted...

I didn't have premium support before, didn't feel I needed it, support was great; ok, mostly ok, a little difficult as self hosted, no sftp, 2fa etc for the dozen tickets or so over a decade. Had one bad upgrade, 4.5 to 4.6.6 yesterday ironically.
Community support no sla? That in essence, and at worst is, no support, a suggestion that breaks more than it fixes, an escalation to a ticket at some point/trigger?, or premium support! Well let's try it for a quarter, nowt to lose now.
I'd save a big chunk of my monthly going to your cloud offering, except I'd rather eat my own notebook. I choose to self host, I enjoy it and I can optimise it, tune it, debug it. Ican upgrade when it's not a buggy .0/.1 release.  I pay for an sla with service providers and pay for more with many companies whom I trust... who are open, transparent and fair. Who reward their evangelists and support the 3rd party community. 
not bad news... just wow.

I agree with you completely on all points mentioned above. This is won't stop here all MarketPlace developers will raise their prices in order to cover their renewals, and I have already seen it happening.
Form my end I am going to renew my license in 2023. Rising the renewal price %35 is too much.  

It's not our fault that IPS chose to be competitive and not raise the prices in line with cost of inflation each year. I'm very grateful they didn't, but that's honestly on them. They just can't come along out of the blue and ramp up the costs for whatever reason is behind this and expect people to embrace it.
Whatever it is that's causing the company to dismiss the feedback of their loyal core community customer base and steadfastly refuse all requests for some reasonable compromise, like retaining 6 month renewals.
It's very difficult justifying the cost of IPS 4.6. Since we're paying over and over again for it, we lose all our investment if we our cancel renewals, but I'm not willing to pay a year up front. I couldn't do it anyway. It's been the most problematic buggy release for quite some time.
Honestly, I've been with you since Ikonboard and I've never felt so disillusioned.
I'm also so tired of the all the patronising 'Fam' and bizarre hump day rubbish, please grow up already especially if you're being so corporate. It's a shame to see what this forum community has become in the last year.

Oh but you are forcing me out because in one fell swoop you have taken what was affordable to unaffordable.  Instead of making excuses for the rest of the team (who are noticeable by their absence in this discussion) and just admit you all read the potential outcome wrongly and actually do something positive to mitigate the appalling mess that this huge error has caused (possibly damaging the reputation of IPS irreversibly), instead you are attempting to defend the indefensible.   
When I was running my own website development business (for 20 years until I retired last year) I wanted to be the cheapest so I could gain business from potential competitors, but I never lowered standards and had hundreds of highly satisfied clients over that period of time.  When one of them asked me why I was so cheap compared to the rest my reply was two-fold:
1. I wanted their business so I offered them lower prices than my competitors
2. I wanted to be the best that I could be so that they would be happy with my endeavours and recommend me
I also pointed out that 'something is better than nothing' if I wanted to pay my bills and live a comfortable life. Without that philosophy of giving good value for money I would not have survived for the 20 years I did and I gained clients who would otherwise have moved on and not had what they could afford.
Cheap doesn't always equate to being crap, and expensive doesn't always equate to being great, or even the best.
I often use this tactic when I negotiate with utilities and I ask them "would you rather have something, or nothing". When you're dealing with your clients you have to understand the affordability equation and if you price yourself out of a market that has sustained you throughout the early years, then it's understandable that you will lose them.
You really should consider giving your clients some breathing room and not lumber them with a lump sum they had no time to plan for or even decide whether it was affordable or not.  We all realise that prices rise, but your team decided not to implement yearly rises for a decade, and you survived and grew, but now it's all OK to just make sweeping changes without warning and you expect everything to be rosy and everyone will be happy campers.
IPS made a huge blunder by leaving price increases for ten years or more and then just hit everyone out of the blue with patronising PR babble as a defence.  You need to negotiate with your clients, not dictate.
I've waded through the years of complaints railed against IPS for some blunders made in the past, this is not the first toxic topic, but man it has quickly become the one to beat.
 

@Matt When you break down a large amount into a monthly amount and base it on the lowest denominator, it looks trivial, but we're not talking about a monthly payment.  To just drop this onto everyone without so much as mention is really bad karma. You just need to look at this topic and realise how toxic it is and there is no remorse, just excuses and rubbishy PR talk. Sorry mate, it just doesn't make sense and it doesn't sit well with your clients and that is something you need to address quickly before the floodgates open.  I really don't like have to post these replies and I don't like being forced out of the door after such a long time, but if that is the intent and there is no relenting then out of the door I will go, with great sadness.  The one solace is that there are alternatives out there that are more affordable.

If you really do care @Matt (which I believe you do, but maybe your hands are tied) and the rest of the team @Lindy and @Charles then you should rethink your strategy and listen to your clients who are feeling like they have had their faces pushed into the mud.  What can you say?  Well, perhaps 'we were wrong to do this so we have decided to roll out these price increases incrementally' which will give people some breathing space and allow them to recover from the shock.  I'm sure that the right move now would be to roll back this mad decision and get onboard with your clients to retain their business and ensure that your business continues to flourish, impress and be known for great customer service, which it has been for the most part.  Caring means thoughtfulness, consideration and being supportive towards the people who contribute to your cash pot.  Listen to the cry of anguish that is felt throughout the whole of this topic and do something positive to reassure and re engage with your clients instead of looking for an ointment for every sore that doesn't exist and responding with meaningless soundbites that just do not justify what has occurred.
I really do not want to leave, but I am being forced out (whether you believe that or not) because of this price hike.  Had I known that this was coming I would not have bought a second license.  Heaven knows what some of my ex-clients will be thinking after my recommending your software and they have gone on to buy licenses.
This has been the mother of all cock-ups and it needn't have been that way if there was more warning, more transparency and a softer approach to upping prices with consideration given to whether it was something that your clients could digest more easily without all the horror that this topic has produced.

I have put up expiry notices on both my licenced sites and have already found one alternative at a one-time price of $59 with six months support and I can increase this to 18 months for an extra $20.25.  I'm considering another alternative for my other site which is less expensive but has the same features, again for a price considerably less than the new IPS prices.
I'm no penny pincher, but I am retired and living on a pension, I have rent and utilities to pay for so my hobby money is limited.  I understand about the price increase, just not the way it blitzkrieged its way into our lives with no alternative payment options other than annually (with a not so generous offer of a one-time split bi-annually).
I find some of the comments mildly amusing and often disturbing from IPS:
Short and sweet and couldn't care less - definitely not good customer relations. This is not a 'Hump Day' it's a 'Sad Day'.

I would be more concerned about the clients who are keeping quiet than the ones making a noise.  My mom was a fountain of wisdom right up until her demise at the grand old age of 89 years.  She used to drum this into me:
"It's OK to make mistakes, but always be sure to admit to them, take ownership and make sure that your mistakes never have a negative impact on others and if they do, then do something positive to make amends."
There's also a saying that everyone will be familiar with "Act in haste, repent at leisure"  Hindsight can be an awakening moment, but often it is too late when realisation hits home.
It's not too late to do something positive and resolve this horrible situation, but you need to act now to enforce damage control - I can see your competitors rubbing their hands in glee just waiting for the torrent of new clients heading their way. I cannot get my head around the rationalisation of this move - it really does beggar belief.

I have put up expiry notices on both my licenced sites and have already found one alternative at a one-time price of $59 with six months support and I can increase this to 18 months for an extra $20.25.  I'm considering another alternative for my other site which is less expensive but has the same features, again for a price considerably less than the new IPS prices.
I'm no penny pincher, but I am retired and living on a pension, I have rent and utilities to pay for so my hobby money is limited.  I understand about the price increase, just not the way it blitzkrieged its way into our lives with no alternative payment options other than annually (with a not so generous offer of a one-time split bi-annually).
I find some of the comments mildly amusing and often disturbing from IPS:
Short and sweet and couldn't care less - definitely not good customer relations. This is not a 'Hump Day' it's a 'Sad Day'.

My take so far reading through all of this...
Don't lose your marketplace developers.  They're a key to your success and help build your suite of products.  It's a win for customers in getting more robust features, it's a win for developers in earning revenue, it's a win for your company/product suite in both revenue and features that can be adopted.  It's a tough balance to be had, but I can certainly see a credit system whereas developers are credited back license costs once they contribute X (whatever X is deemed to be).  This incentivizes them, and should be coupled to a quality metric to ensure they aren't just throwing something out on marketplace to get the credit but that their offering provides verifiable value to the consumers. There is a huge gap in affordability between hobby sites and business sites.  To have the same pricing model apply to both only serves to make it unaffordable for hobby sites entirely.  If IPS has an interest in being the forefront of online forums/CMS and gain correlating exposure, this approach is leaving hobby sites out of the equation and that is a net loss for IPS in gaining visibility which translates to future sales/adoption by new hobby/business sites (penny wise, dollar foolish).  Not to mention the immediate loss and future visibility from hobby sites that migrate to another solution and popularize it will negatively impact future IPS sales/adoption.  IPS needs to find a way to balance the affordability based on the target customer, but not at a reduction of features (as that inhibits marketplace incentive and adoption if that feature set can be found elsewhere) Support.  You need to address the turnaround SLA for support and customers need an appropriate path to solving site critical issues within a reasonable SLA without it costing $1250 or waiting 3+ days for a resolution to take effect (note, not 3 days to respond, but 3 days to resolve it and have the site properly operational). Unquestionably, the PR around this specific case needs (and is getting) review.  Moving forward IPS needs to do a far better job in broadcasting the roadmap of these changes and provide their customers the opportunity to assess them, which avoids customers being cornered ala "big bang" like we've seen here. I can see MANY are quite upset by these changes for a variety of reasons, but I also see opportunities for IPS to revise their approach for their benefit and for their customers' benefit.  It's a complex situation, and there are fair arguments on both sides, however there is a big void in the balance in the current solution and it WILL unquestionably adversely affect BOTH IPS and its customers.
- "cannot see the forest for the trees"

As a long time user of approaching 20 years who has been a customer since the Ikonboard days and has a first recorded invoice here in 2005 for "Purchase: Invision Power Board Perpetual License".
For what it is worth, here is my feedback on the e-mail I received about the price hike and reduction in support levels.
Six years ago you contacted me as a "lifetime" member to tell me that the lifetime agreement I signed up for, which helped set the the financial foundation of these forums, was to be replaced with an annual fee. It was nice to get a little credit on account by way of apology, however, I bought a lifetime licence and it should have been for lifetime. Offering a lifetime licence is a marketing incentive, and not something that should be reneged on further down the line once a company has reaped the benefits of the marketing drive. Telling customers its one payment for lifetime access, then changing the goal posts to an annual fee is not the type of thing that reflects well.  
Onto the new e-mail....
Forums: was $50, now $80 (increase of $2.50/month) The marketing team really earned their wage this campaign as $2.50 doesn't sound like much, however this represents a 60% price hike from $50 to $80.
A 60% price hike needs to be backed up with some serious upsides.... however...
For most customers, support is simply “how do I do this?” and these questions tend to be quite similar. Rarely, support questions are “this went wrong” Not my experience. My support experience is basically the same every year - my forums go offline with errors every time I do an upgrade. It fills me with dread every year or so, and true enough I need to submit a ticket to try and get the forums back online. To think that that base line support for a quick turnaround on outages is either now reliant on an additional payment for a support plan, or posting in publicly accessible forums is not a sustainable proposition for me.
Creating a strong support community backed by our support technicians will result in a more detailed and richer set of answers For "how to I customise this" or "how does this feature work", the above statement is true. For critical board offline situations, the above sets alarm bells ringing loudly. Critical issues need a formal support ticketing system - which is included in the licence fee. Come to think of it, no other service I use has separate support and licence fees.
For those that wish to retain ticket support longer term, we will be unveiling a premium support option soon. No, just no.
 
I already discontinued my other IPB forums as the cost/benefit ratio slid off the scale.
A 60% price hike means I will now have to look at other options for my final licence, it would be easier if I felt any degree of trust or loyalty to Invision as I would just pony up and pay the money, however - and sadly for such a long time customer, this is far from the case. I cannot trust you as evidenced through the lifetime licence fiasco, and I feel absolutely no loyalty due to this 60% price while reducing access to critical support.
Very disappointed.
What I would like to see?
Cancel premium support plans and retain this as part and parcel of customers licences. Maintain current pricing plans for existing customers and roll out new price structure for new customers.  
 

Here in lies a pretty controversial policy.
You make a professional grade product, we choose it over free software like SMF because it's more secure and coded by professional certified developers, but we don't buy it, we never own it, it's still yours and we pay a license to make use of it.
Then the inevitable security flaws are identified and we must ensure we renew our licences to obtain the fix for what are problems that weren't created by us, if only to conform with GDPR and other legislation to keep our members data and personal information secure, never mind the inconvenience of cleaning and recovering from hacked sites.
So really we have no choice, once a self hosted forum community is installed, put aside anti-spam, IP lookups, forget Marketplace niceties, forget new feature temptations and nice to haves, the only 100% real reason is because of this.
Charging for access to security patches is just plain wrong. They should be free for at least 5 years if only as a mark of quality and pride.
Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for ongoing access to Windows security fixes and flaws?
 
UPDATED to add:
"We are looking to increase the speed of releases to a monthly release schedule so everyone gets bug fixes and new features regularly."
This a bad news for theme and app developers. More work. More time consuming localdev updates. Please improve the process of updating localdev installs so they are more robust.

I would like to offer a story in hopes that it is heard.
It's tangentially related to IPS.
I develop database solutions for customers using Claris FileMaker which is an Apple Company my forum site is a technical community born at a time when Claris was tone deaf with regards listening to their developers and partners. They removed a vital communication - email list serve. Thus my forum was launched, and gained a steady following, and now after 20 years been thriving on the Invision Platform for the past 12 years.
Several years ago Claris made some decisions which including introducing their own community which was running on Jive for a long time, it was not with out its quirks but tolerable. A few years back they switch to some Salesforce abomination and which is what is running today. My observations and discussions with others in my community spotlight it was a corporate culture problem, these decisions had reaching tentacles in too many other interactions with developers. Where there was lip service paid and they were simply not listening to the feedback from developers in the trenches - many vowing to jump ship and find alternatives platforms.
In the past year and half there has been some very positive change from this stagnate corporate culture - including being much more resolved to be more transparent by inviting feedback from trusted partners with open exchanges of ideas and plans well before they are set in stone and communicated before they are made public. They have switched to an agile release cycle but they are also using the agile methodologies in all departments of the company.
at your leisure watch the keynote address from last month. If you're at all interested I've started it at a good point in this video. Feel free scrub back and forth and listen to entire messaging and commitments. It's refreshing and moves us past misgivings of the past.
Reading thru this thread I see similarities with this community and the ecosystem that it creates.  Not the time now to alienate your trusted developers and content creators. You must focus on what you do best and allow your community to thrive by encouraging investing, focusing lowering the bar to entry for them to provide much needed talent. It's a symbolic relationship and we all can win. 
I was very pleased when @Jordan Miller came on the seen and started communicating conversing with us; intensions and direction of IPS. This was a much welcomed change akin to that of what other communities have come to realize is the glue that binds us together. 
 
 

I would be more concerned about the clients who are keeping quiet than the ones making a noise.  My mom was a fountain of wisdom right up until her demise at the grand old age of 89 years.  She used to drum this into me:
"It's OK to make mistakes, but always be sure to admit to them, take ownership and make sure that your mistakes never have a negative impact on others and if they do, then do something positive to make amends."
There's also a saying that everyone will be familiar with "Act in haste, repent at leisure"  Hindsight can be an awakening moment, but often it is too late when realisation hits home.
It's not too late to do something positive and resolve this horrible situation, but you need to act now to enforce damage control - I can see your competitors rubbing their hands in glee just waiting for the torrent of new clients heading their way. I cannot get my head around the rationalisation of this move - it really does beggar belief.