Charles

The best way to kill a community is to refuse to keep up with new ways that people consume content.

Yes, the design will not only look different but the way you do themes will be very different. We're pretty close to starting our public v5 blogs/teasers.

Luckily we are the experts in seeing usage trends 😉 Trust me. You have no idea how many problematic things we prevented from being published in the Marketplace over the years. PSA: you might want to use multi-quote when doing many replies 🙂

Very helpful making a last-minute theme we needed for a client. Fast response and good work.

I respect your unique viewpoint but I am afraid I do not see that in practice 🙂 We have many enterprise clients on our platform and they specifically do not want anything third-party. They see it as a security risk. When I speak to prospective clients they never ask about such things. In fact, most enterprise clients specifically disallow any outsourcing or external code being added to their community setups in the contracts we have with them. We get people switching to use from Discourse all the time. Again, I can see how you might see it that way in your specific case but, on a broader scale, it is just not what we experience.

You might want to re-read the post 🙂 Your existing Marketplace items will be transferrable to the authors of those items so you can keep using them. The changes have nothing to do with cloud vs self-hosted.

I understand your concern there and I hope that authors will take over their work so you can keep using it.

We cannot just give out the code as it's not our code to give out - it's the author's code - so you would need to transfer your proof of purchase to them. It takes 2 minutes not 6 months to transfer your purchase 🙂

Sounds like something people will enjoy.

Yes, we have many clients doing really interesting things with Downloads+Commerce. I think for developers that are serious about what they are doing, they can really thrive with us out of the way 🙂

Yes, that is a concern. Again, only download from a reputable source or hire a developer to custom-make any needs you have.

Much like when you purchase something online, we would rely on people providing feedback and reviews.

You would want to ensure you are only downloading from a reputable source.

The Marketplace has lost us money for many years especially as people just are not as interested in "mods" like they were decades go.

Marketplace authors have known about this change for a while now and some are looking to create their own Marketplace-like web site. It sounds like a promising project and they are welcome to talk about it here.

Nothing is really changing in that regard. We don't have a backdoor or anything like that to shut your community down 🙂 Of course it would be detrimental to your community success and security to run any software platform that has not had an update in years, but that's up to you in the end.

For sure.

Right. Yes, it gives you a lot of information first.

This topic only applies to those on our cloud services. As we prepare to launch improved spam management, we are also making changes to traffic control. We have many tools in place to stop malicious traffic on our network. These tools stop day to day bad actors and can also handle situations where we get a huge flood of traffic in a denial of service attack. It is always a balancing act to stop bad traffic while allowing good traffic. There have been some situations where real users were getting blocked because they were getting caught up in a suspicious IP range, for example. When you were caught in a block, all you got was a permission denied page and that was it. This is what we want for bad bots or attacks, but for real people that is no help. So today we are launching a new system where you will be presented with a captcha (or similar) challenge to bypass a bot-focused block. This will allow you, and your visitors, to continue browsing your community if you are caught in a block you should not be in. It also lets our firewall and other systems learn and do a better job of blocking bad traffic while allowing people in. Please let us know if you experience any issues, inability to access a community, or you are prompted more than once for the challenge to access. In normal operations, you should really never get the challenge prompt so please also let us know if you see it more frequently.

We plan to give V4 security updates and such for years.

502/504 errors are AWS for "could not get a response from your EC2 in the timeout timeframe." Those "please reduce your rate" are S3 errors. It's hitting S3 very, very fast if you are seeing that. You should look at WAF in front of your setup to mitigate DoS attacks. It's very good with this sort of thing as you can set rules for flood control.

Olivia's definition of a "few" is interesting 😉

Actually, cloud clients have a very low usage of Marketplace. People do on cloud do not tend to "tinker" quite as much and just get on with their community.

We are not open sourcing anything.

No punishment at all! In fact, there is no "catch up" on annual renewals. If you let an annual renewal expire for example for 6 months, you can just pay the normal annual fee 6 months later. There is only a catch up on the monthly because it's kind of like a finance plan for the annual. If that makes sense 🙂