Mike Gholson

I'm ready!

Is there an ETA or published release schedule for IPB5 ? I am very interested in this upcoming release.

I think the blog feature is great for sites that want to use it correctly. For instance, this website uses it as an information sharing feature. Staff members will write blogs and articles about something related to the site. It's great when used for this purpose. I think giving everyone access to write their own blogs is likely the cause for this confusion. Maybe we should give specific authors or publishers rights to it, after some proper training. I've been approached by several publishers about doing write-ups or features on our site, which is probably the correct use of the application. The reason I enabled it on my site was to give people a place to write about their cars, restoration projects, etc. However, I see most of the members are simply creating their own 'build thread' in the forums instead.

Awesome, thank you! I thought the removal of Marketplace was depreciating the 3rd party capability. I appreciate the clarification and this is great to see. Hopefully the 3rd party developers can still make enough money to continue updating and supporting the apps.

As a community owner for over two decades, I wanted to give some personal feedback as to what I find very useful (and need) to keep my community alive. Big Tech Competition: The biggest challenge has been competing with other online services like FB, Reddit, Twitter, etc, etc. You guys have hit the sweet spot in generating useful integrations to these services. I would also like one for Linkedin but I'm sure that's on the radar. With any competition like big tech, we can provide a more specialized touch to any community. I hope we can still maintain this presence and I have a feeling IBP5 will give us even more ways to create active sites that give the big boys a run for their money. Monetization: I have a specialized car club and, with Invision, I've been able to monetize our existence and pay our bills. We are hosted on a dedicated server environment so we have our fair-share of bills. I've looked into using a cloud-host but the costs don't justify simply putting a machine into a colo site. We also have other bills like licensing, email services, and annual domain costs. With the integrations to Google Adsense, Infolinks, and the paid subscription model (built into IPB), this has enabled us to pay these bills and continue well into the future. The addition of Subscriptions has also helped us a LOT!!!! 3rd Pary Marketplace: I have appreciated the Invision Community capabilities with 3rd party apps (Marketplace). However, I see these have been depreciated for the upcoming release. Some of these modules really gave us an edge and we were able to stand out. I fear that removing this integration may put us into a general category just like everyone else. So, I hope the team considers opening this up again or at least making it easier for us to customize our sites to provide unique services. Some of the more important apps for us are Member Garage, Member Maps, Classified Ads (big one), Tapatalk, and Member Info blocks (we use member numbers for members to use as discount codes to our partners). Advertising Banners: We have used, and will continue to use banner sponsor placements on our site. The one place we are missing is at the top of the screen. Of course we can always do a pop-up or slide-down style ad. But people tend to hate these and disable them. So, if we can add more customizable locations for these banners, it would be a big hit for our business. Google & SEO: This service is so strange and it seems to change every other quarter. New rules all the time, and I've gone from ~$700/mo in banner income to ~$125/mo. I have no idea why this is, but I did notice that Google doesn't do very well with active community sites (they prefer static pages I guess). So, if you are building something new with the release of IPB5, I would be very interested to see how we can improve our SEO or even Google results. Forum Layout: I *REALLY* like the new look of your forum design in IPB5. I cannot wait to use it. The one thing our members really appreciate are the active notifications and easy way to see how things changed over the last 24/48 hours. The new features coming seem to compliment this very well. Not to mention a lot of people have been asking for the light/dark mode and it will be nice to see this capability built-in rather than having to design our own. Community Experts: I did see something about the addition of community experts. VERY GOOD addition!! In an automotive community like ours, there are always guys hanging around that are considered RL experts as well. I'd love to give them the recognition they deserve and let people know they actually *DO* know what they are talking about. I hope this is an 'approved only' capability as I am sure some people may request this status and don't really deserve it. 😉 Downloads, Knowledgebase, Gallery: These existing capabilities are huge wins for us. Although I would like to see an update to Gallery, the majority of the existing features work very well. I hope these stay and continue to see improvements as the product goes into the next stage. Blogs: For us, the blog module has been a strange experience. Some guys know how to use it, while other people tend to post questions and use it like a forum. If we were to continue using blogs, it might be a great idea to make sure end-users know they are in a "blog module" rather than part of the forums. It's hard to explain on text but honestly I think people get confused as to what a blog is versus a forum. All in all, I am so happy to see that I've invested with a company that is taking this product to the next level. Your team is amazing and it's reassuring to see that private communities are still a necessary part of the Internet. As we continue forward, please understand that I'll stick around as a long term customer. Just don't jack up the rates too high on us. 😉 Mike

Yeah, IPB5 will be pretty sweet, from what I can tell. Looking forward to seeing more from the team. I find it extremely satisfying to see how active the developers are making a difference in our communities. Also heavy involvement with us is key and you are hitting that nail on the head too. Much appreciate everything you guys are doing!!

I just had the same problem... it turns out my datastore was full. I deleted a few backup files and all is good.

Hi all, I updated from a few dot releases ago (can't remember the version), but, now my members are complaining they cannot see signatures from other members. There appears to be a setting called "View Signatures" in each member profile and it's disabled now. I tried finding a global setting to enable it for all my users, but appears it has to be done for each user one-by-one. Is there a method to bulk change this for certain usergroups? Thank you. Mike Also, some of my members have enabled it, but the setting does not 'stick' and they have to turn it on every time they visit the site.

Hi all, I have a situation where one of my applications is missing a "renew now" button. It's for an app called Collections by Michael J. According to the Marketplace on my admin panel, i need to pay for a full version again. However, if I go to my purchases area on the IPB site it says I can renew. Not sure what to do and I don't want to be charged twice. This is the only app that has this problem so far. Please let me know if I can fix this. Screenshots: My site under Marketplace: IBP My Purchases area:

It's sort of an interesting situation. I have members who do not like Paypal at all and have decided to cancel their membership until I find another solution -- I've lost 15-20 paying subscribers just because they hate Paypal as a company. I did recently sign up for Stripe and tried the direct credit card method. It works great actually and is contained within IBP. When I posted this message, I assumed that all transactions were going to link my customers to the Stripe website (similar to Paypal). However, this does not happen and Stripe is invisible within the process. I also tried signing up for 2Checkout but their account setup is crap. Stripe was much easier and appears to be working fine. If you were to look at another method, I would encourage you to figure out how to implement some of the ones I listed above. This will give business owners some flexibility. Even if we could pay for an integration directly to our own bank credit card processing services, it would give the site owner some alternatives. Thanks for listening to the idea.. Mike

Can you move this topic over there? Sorry I picked the wrong category... 😉

Thanks Jim. Is this on the roadmap? I don't want to swap over as I already have a lot of people using subscriptions. FYI, we are a car club and the subscription system fits us better than the products feature. The one confusing thing about products is the item for sale is required to be contained within a category. This means the user needs to pick a category (even if there's only one) when entering the products area. It would be easier to just have a root-level set of products

Hi all, I currently use month-to-month pricing for my subscriptions. I would like to provide an option to provide a discount if the user wants to pay for an annual membership. Is there an option for this in the subscription system? It would look something like this: Subscription 1 - $5/mo or $60 $50/year (discounted) Subscription 2 - $10/mo or $120 $100/year (discounted) Trick is, I want to keep these as the same subscription. I realize I could add more subscriptions with the annual rate but I want to keep it simple for users. Mike

Hi all, I've been noticing that we are in need of additional credit card processing options. The current limitation of services isn't enough anymore. I believe the built-in processors are Paypal, Stripe, Braintree, and 2Checkout. Both Braintree and 2Checkout are limited for use with subscriptions. Currently using Paypal but some people are asking for another alternative (besides manual checks). Some of the good alternatives are: Helcim Coign Quickbooks Square Does the team have any intent on adding support for these or other options? I'm a small business and need something with a low or zero monthly fee. Thank you! Mike

I just created a $0 cost free subscription. New members can pick that if they don't want to pay. I especially like it because the process takes them through a process to validate their account. Recently, however I am seeing too many bogus free accounts. I may start a minimal charge requirement to avoid the spammers who seem to be getting smarter by the day. Free accounts sometimes cost YOU time and money. Mike