Markus Jung

I know this is a vanity stat. Some of it is to generate buzz \ get in the heads of our competitors. Maybe once a year we would tweet: Wow 1,200 Jets fans in the forums right now talking about ______. It helped generate some buzz.
We have 100% fill rate with all of our display ads and that company has our GA, so it doesn't impact revenue there at all. The advertisement that it could impact is package deals, advertisers that gets sponsored social media posts, sponsored forum threads, that kind of thing. They don't get our traffic #s when they see 700 people in the forums, they are more likely to work with us.
So this isn't about it bothering me, it is just a thread trying to figure out what changed and if I could do anything about it.
Thanks.

Yes as I stated this is a vanity stat. But it is important advertisers check things like that.

It is an issue. Competitors look too, and it is nice to get in their heads a bit.

That was patched a few weeks ago - check for patches on your Support page in the ACP. If you have none available then it may be a reoccurrence of the issue.

Yes, this is pretty bad for us. Looks like our forum is old and dying which isn't the case.
 

Now that's at 4am when everyone is sleeping but still, it looks bad.

That's the exact thought I have. I know the real numbers not worried about that at all.
Others, even competitors, check the who's online and it looks like we lost 70% of our traffic.

Is there no way to show the real number of guests online? It could also be helpful/important to sell advertising etc. 

Yes, I do have an analytics system in place. But still, the guest count is the first number that is seen publicly. 

Yes, I do have an analytics system in place. But still, the guest count is the first number that is seen publicly. 

It's because of the caching on the cloud - only the first guest every 10-15 minutes is counted, the rest hit the cache. 

Thanks for the reply :).
It would be nice if the opt-in list has priority. This point is unfortunately also a very important feature.

It does indeed

There is much more to a SaaS platform than just servers and services. There are micro-services that tie these services together. We believe it was a micro service that we have used for over four years that failed. Our investigation is ongoing with AWS.

As Lindy mentioned, please get in touch if you want to lodge a formal complaint and we will do our best to resolve it.
I want to underline again that we are proud of our platform stability, with 99.99% uptime over several years. Incidents like this are rare but we do not take them lightly and have implemented an audit of alert systems, uptime monitoring, service statuses, etc to ensure we do not have a repeat of this event again.

We share your frustration and I assure you that although this is the first major outage event in years and we have a solid 99%+ record, we are taking this very seriously and have already taken both internal and vendor related steps to minimize the risk of this happening again. We have also made improvements to our status and communications system so you remain better informed throughout these unlikely events. 
I'm deeply sorry for the inconvenience this event has caused. Cloud clients with further concerns are welcome to send a support email and we will be happy to discuss. 
Thank you!

Thanks Randy,
We're taking this very seriously. More information will follow.

And by the way...  my site was down as well from 11:01PM onwards.  I'm not exactly happy about the situation either.  However I'm going to let IPS work with AWS to determine the root cause of the problem.  My plan is to follow up in a few days to learn more because this type of outage warrants the investigation.  
Like anything online, things can and do break.  The question is what you learn about each instance and how you improve from it going forward.  A true root cause analysis not just looks at what went wrong and why, but also looks at what can be done to prevent it from occurring again.  And I think these guys know that and will work through that process.  

I am signed up but didn't get an email of any kind until 5:19am EST this morning. The sites had been down most of the night...

Yes, the behavior may be logical, but it is just not what people are used to and expect from a search bar (myself included, I experience the same as described by @David N.).

I love the new search bar however I find myself constantly searching for something and getting zero results only to find out that I was searching the current topic when I wanted to search the entire site. 
What happens constantly: I'm reading a question about XYZ. I want to search the forum for XYZ to see if there are existing topics on that subject to help that member, and I get results only from the current topic. I know I should click and choose "Everywhere" each time, but I always forget, and it takes a bit of time to change it. 
I wish there was a way to make it default to "Everywhere". 

Just a quick update to let you know that this issue was resolved in the recent 4.7.8 release of our platform. Please upgrade your site to resolve this issue. If you are still seeing any issues after upgrading to this version, please let us know.

We will soon be announcing some statistics and reporting improvements that will be available to both Cloud Platform and Classic self-hosted editions of Invision Community. Look out for a blog entry on that soon!
I did want to talk about one addition to reporting and statistics that will not be available on Classic and do a quick preview: per-item reports.
You will be able to see a view of the popularity of a section (specific forum, gallery album, download category, etc.) or item (forum topic, gallery image, file, etc.) over a time period. For example, you could see a graph showing which hour/day/week/month had the most views in an individual topic. Right now, stats only show total views and has no count for by hour or otherwise when that view was made.
Cloud's backend systems handle the tracking, counting, and logging of views. This data is stored centrally outside of your master database so if you ever wish to go from Cloud to Classic, this data would not convey. Report data can include possibly millions of data points so, for performance, some larger reports may be queued. This means that Cloud will calculate the report and deliver it to you in a few minutes. This ensure that intensive data reporting does not cause timeouts for you.
This is the first step in several other reporting and statistics improvements we have planned. We are also working to tie statistics into actions in the future. Think things like: stats discovers a previously dormant member has become active again and initiates a process to welcome them back. Or maybe stats discovers a member who previously only posted in Product A forum is now looking at Product B forum so stats tells your CRM to flag a possible sales lead.
We are excited to be able to offer these enhanced services by leveraging the backend power of the Cloud platform!

For those of you on Creator Pro and up: you can move your community to our EU region at no cost. Just contact support if you want to move.

For those of you with communities in our EU region:
We deployed an upgrade today that will see about 20% increase in data query performance.

If it's difficult for the developers, what chance do the clients stand? I made one, can confirm it was a real ball ache.
it's nice to hear it's something you will "consider", would be even better if you would commit to it including a dark mode in the next major revamp.
It is 2023 now, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Discord, YouTube....need I go on, all these you can sneak on in the middle of the night without blinding yourself and waking the Mrs.

It's difficult right now given the AdminCP interface for editing colours. We'd need to duplicate that to offer a dark option, then update all the CSS which would be a lot. When we build a new interface, it's something we'll consider.