NZyan

Avoid it no matter how much your members cry about it. I found it very intrusive and buggy.

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 🙂
 

so... it is maybe not a good idea to cache such blocks where we expect more "instant update"...

I have noticed this too on my forum. It is annoying,

Having the recently browsing and who's online blocks cached makes forums seem like there's no active members, even though the forum has many active members. Recent browsing block is the worsted  On forums with few active members the impact of the blocks really is highlighted. 
Invision forum for example i would always see people browsing but now its a rare to see many topics with people browsing due to caching, . If caching is to prevent performance hits then give the admin the choice to disable or enable the individual blocks. The caching of these blocks is all or nothing or reduce caching times in the present setup.
 

Pre-Marketplace release. For further info and questions please use the supportthread on our site.
FX News Lite 1.0.3.xml

Hi Andreas,
you should switch from submenus to dropdowns. When the submenu bar is empty it's hidden automatically.
And this is how to create dropdowns...


This is what IPS is using, it's all build in.

I am also someone who attempts to search before starting a new topic, but unfortunately the search here is not very good.  It would be immensely helpful if you defaulted to AND'ing search terms, but even then I often have to use google's "site:invisioncommunity.com" feature to find relevant topics here.

My summary after diving into this some hours ago:
Price change: I can live with that as I run my forum commercially successful. But I know a lot of small communities which would switch software oder stop operation when facing such an increase in costs. Annual payment: Again no big deal for me, but psychologically not a smart move – next payment is about 3 times higher than the last. Support via forum: I'll wait and see if you can convince me. Developer support: This is crucial.  When I switched from vBulletin I had a short list of options, IPBoard one of them. The active developer community and some special add-ons where for me the nudge to switch to Invision. Without it (marketplace) and them (developers like DawPI and Adriano) my decision would have been a different one.
Andreas

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Except that there are those of us who rely on this functionality as part of our business structure, and not necessarily standalone blogs or galleries but as part of other modules such as Clubs.

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.

My summary after diving into this some hours ago:
Price change: I can live with that as I run my forum commercially successful. But I know a lot of small communities which would switch software oder stop operation when facing such an increase in costs. Annual payment: Again no big deal for me, but psychologically not a smart move – next payment is about 3 times higher than the last. Support via forum: I'll wait and see if you can convince me. Developer support: This is crucial.  When I switched from vBulletin I had a short list of options, IPBoard one of them. The active developer community and some special add-ons where for me the nudge to switch to Invision. Without it (marketplace) and them (developers like DawPI and Adriano) my decision would have been a different one.
Andreas

My summary after diving into this some hours ago:
Price change: I can live with that as I run my forum commercially successful. But I know a lot of small communities which would switch software oder stop operation when facing such an increase in costs. Annual payment: Again no big deal for me, but psychologically not a smart move – next payment is about 3 times higher than the last. Support via forum: I'll wait and see if you can convince me. Developer support: This is crucial.  When I switched from vBulletin I had a short list of options, IPBoard one of them. The active developer community and some special add-ons where for me the nudge to switch to Invision. Without it (marketplace) and them (developers like DawPI and Adriano) my decision would have been a different one.
Andreas

My summary after diving into this some hours ago:
Price change: I can live with that as I run my forum commercially successful. But I know a lot of small communities which would switch software oder stop operation when facing such an increase in costs. Annual payment: Again no big deal for me, but psychologically not a smart move – next payment is about 3 times higher than the last. Support via forum: I'll wait and see if you can convince me. Developer support: This is crucial.  When I switched from vBulletin I had a short list of options, IPBoard one of them. The active developer community and some special add-ons where for me the nudge to switch to Invision. Without it (marketplace) and them (developers like DawPI and Adriano) my decision would have been a different one.
Andreas

Nope, we haven't taken a dime of investment from anyone, and ownership hasn't changed. 
We are moving to monthly release cycles now. We're less likely to do a large monolithic annual release. We want to deliver new features and bug fixes more regularly.

Adriano is one of the best developers on the marketplace. Maby The best....
Dont loose him, that's just like kicking out Max Verstappen out of Red Bull F1 racing. These are the people we depend on.

Listen to what he is saying
 

Of course it should be a fair system, I agree with you. But that can't be so difficult, I think. Surely we also agree that good add-ons are a powerful draw for your company? At least it was a reason for me to choose you over your competitors. For developers who offer countless add-ons or whose add-ons are very popular, I would personally even pay a little extra to keep them happy. It is already the case that many good add-ons have disappeared because the developers have left. I don't want to have to explain to my customers on a regular basis why one feature or another is no longer there.

Three of the most active third party devs have been active on this very discussion. At least two of them clearly stating this would impact their future projects.
Honestly, how many active devs is there ? what would-it cost to give free licenses to developper having more than xx downloads/intalls of their apps/themes/plugins ?

You should really make politics, we pay our hosting 42€ per month with a plesk license that allows us to change your PHP in one click and that hosts other sites with medium traffic without difficulty.
We would have no interest in switching to a proprietary cloud hosting at 129$ without any access to the machine and its configuration and without the possibility to install anything else from ipboard.

BTW, regarding hobby project vs a business can swallow the costs easily:
My most expensive Invision license now has a renew price of $310 per year.
I have a few dozen websites that we intended to convert to Invision (some Xenforo, some Wordpress). If you multiply say 20 sites by $310 thats a maximum of $6.200 per year. Even if we dont need every component and try to minimize the costs, for a small business thats a considerable amount of money.
Technically, Invision is superior over other solutions like Xenforo, that was the reason for our project, but now has come the time to reevaluate if the few tech benefits outweigh the money and how we should deal with the lowered trust we now have.

In all seriousness Matt. If you / the rest of the management at invision think that sort of timescale is acceptable when communicating such a big jump in price, then I really do recommend you hire someone with more knowledge and skills in communication and customer care. You needed to be weeks ahead of this, to give people reasonable notice. 

I have to say i did not read this topic at first because i thought the changes were only on the web site.
Now i have 3 comments here :
- Switching to yearly renewals is definitely a very good idea, most clients are here for a while and having to go through the order and payment process every 6 month is a pain.
- To my view IPS was and still is quite affordable given its features, but still the increase is around 50% for most clients and this might be issue for some of us who having small sites just for fun without income. Now you can assume that these clients are not your target.
- Removing ticket support is very hard to understand for thouse of us who are frequently on the community forum : for the 2 years i have been here (i think), i would say 90% of issues i saw reported by clients on the forum have been answering by "open a ticket". And now you say we won't be able to open tickets... you have to undestand this is not a good feeling.
To conclude, you absolutely have to give free licenses to apps and plugins developpers, ther definetely are vital to the ecosystem and if guys such as @Nathan Explosion and @Adriano Faria were to loose interest in IPS this would be huge loss for your products.
 
 

100% not, no. You have until January 1st 2022 to keep using email ticket support. After that, simply drop your support needs in our support forum where our staffed team will triage them. We understand that some support issues are complex and require us logging into check data, etc. so tickets will still be very much in use for this.

Hmm so my 6 monthly fee of $60 has now gone to an annual fee of $235.  $5 short of doubling in cost. 
I've been here since moving across from Ikon and supported IPS in early days financially, paid for lifetime licences which I've begrudgingly accepted would not help IPS survive further down the line. 
My boss will be on me like a ton of bricks with that increase and with no email support (are you kidding me?) - I am, after 19 years, having to think can we continue.   I've always had first rate support from IPS, coupled with a friendly relationship with Matt who's helped me out plenty of times, but I've also let them use my server to test MSSQL drivers and IIS issues when they hosted/worked with the likes of AMD.  To turn around to that degree is a proper kick in the nuts.
I understand they have to pay the bills, but we all do.
A doubling of my licence fee would be a hard one to take on its own but the removal of email support as well?  That is not just a small issue.