Charles

On 8/16/2023 at 1:30 AM, CodePixel said:

My question is regarding V5

Will the design change as much as it did when v4 came out?

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.

39 minutes ago, LiquidFractal said:

Really?  I'm no expert but I find the last part of this sentence hard to believe given that there are many gaps in IPB functionality which necessitated the Marketplace community in the first place.

Luckily we are the experts in seeing usage trends 😉

34 minutes ago, LiquidFractal said:

I'm not sure what you mean here.  As far as I know IPS never "validated" the "safety" of any third-party app; they only checked to make sure that devs weren't using existing code contra IPS rules.  The "safety" of 3rd-party apps has never been Invision's responsibility (and for good reason!).

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 🙂 

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.

2 minutes ago, D-Trox said:

Does this mean that this feature will be completely withdrawn for owners?

If I like the market place on my site, will I still be able to use it? 

And will the "Providers Directory" feature be available to us (cloud and not cloud host)?

Thank you

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.

Just now, sudo said:

Yeah I know what you are saying. My biggest concern is wayward authors who cant deal with setting up their own system or cant meet the 2 month deadline. We (customers) lose and we lost before when we lost the ability to back up and download directly before.

I dont want to sound like I am just trying to beat you down, I am just very concerned and can see a lot of issues especially with the short timeline.

Will we still be able to get keys/method of transferring you speak of after October but not download in suite?

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

1 minute ago, sudo said:

So basically if the author doesnt put another way for us to get it up we lose our purchases.

 

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 🙂 

6 minutes ago, Joel R said:

To Marketplace developers and the Invision community as a whole, I will be happy to host an independent and collaborative Marketplace directory.  It's already in the works.

I fully support a thriving ecosystem of developers and clients: to extend, to inspire, and to push the boundaries of our platform. Technology is an important differentiator more than ever in the modern web, and working with developers (either privately or through their public mods) can help fine-tune your platform. 

 

More information and invitations will be sent out to active Marketplace devs.  You are also welcome to send me a direct PM.  

Follow this topic for any future updates.  

Sounds like something people will enjoy.

Yes, we have many clients doing really interesting things with Downloads+Commerce.

48 minutes ago, IPCommerceFan said:

This sounds like a net positive for developers.   Two primary issues (based on observation) have always been how long it takes for IPS to approve an app, and the fact IPS takes a cut.   This knocks them both out, so it seems like a win to me.

I think for developers that are serious about what they are doing, they can really thrive with us out of the way 🙂 

3 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

The problem is, without the current IPS scan/approval process of apps/plugins, any new development is a risk.  We also don't know how many iterations of scan/approval a given version of a given app had to go through to get final IPS approval, nor what those rulesets/barriers were for good practice per IPS standards.  We just know the end product from the Marketplace dev.  Now clients are subject to the intermediate iterations and any issues they expose.  This is particularly concerning when we get into PII and any level of security risk to our sites (which we had a confidence level IPS was protecting us from with their scan/approval process).

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

Just now, Dll said:

Will Invision be vetting those listed in the directory to ensure they are reputable?

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

5 minutes ago, Clover13 said:

One potentially large gap is the validation and approval process done by IPS to guarantee the Marketplace developer's app/plugin aligned with IPS standards before it was approved for client download.  How will this be managed moving forward?

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

Just now, AlexJ said:

How it impacts IPS team?

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.

3 hours ago, DawPi said:

I'm pretty sure I've seen the answer to this question, but I'd like to make sure. Customers who do not change the license mode to the new one stay on v4 and license renewals work as before? That there is no obligation to renew for a year and after two years of not paying for renewal, the license will still be on the client's account?

Right. 

2 hours ago, PatrickRQ said:

A question, if I click that button:

Will I get offered first of how my payment will look like and what is the updated EULA?

I ask as I do not want to get upgraded right after clicking the button 😛

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.

1 hour ago, Ricsca said:

@Joel R But if I only need the forum why do I have to pay more?
If I don't want to accept the new terms, I'll stay with v4 but will this be updated at least for security?
If it won't be updated anymore, I'm basically forced to accept....

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 😉 

4 minutes ago, Dean_ said:

But, please don't punish us too harshly for gaps with yearly renewals.

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 🙂 

Just now, DawPi said:

I assume you can't tell us who are these mysterious private clients? 🙂

It's up to them if they want to reveal themselves 🙂 

Just now, Miss_B said:

I couldn't like this post enough and I completely agree 100% with the above.

Personally, I truly appreciate the way that Ips management keeps their customers in the loop, listens to us and interacts with us. 

You don't see this at other community platforms, where there is only silence from the management, and indeed, bad and barely support. 

Ips is and will remain the best and leading community platform in the market.

Thanks for your reply! I know some people get all worked up if costs go up even a tiny bit but we really tried to balance this.

All with the eye toward making Classic, self-hosted viable for the future, we:

1. Took feedback from a private group of clients for month to refine the new terms
2. Lowered the initial purchase price.
3. Include all the apps with the new terms.
4. Gave people the option to stay on old terms if they want.
5. Give you several months of free time when you switch.

I am actually very proud of our ability to keep Classic around in a world where people just do not use self-hosted as much anymore. And, again, I thank our private client feedback group for helping us shape this in a way that is beneficial to most clients.

1 hour ago, Driven 2 Services said:

This "then getting 3 years worth of new software" is a non-sequitur. They weren't using and the benefitting from the new features during those three years, so no "abuse" exists except in the management team's minds. 

Imagine someone someone who left their car uninsured for 3 years, and decided to re-insure being told they must pay the 3 years back insurance because new policies have additional features. Or Microsoft making everyone upgrading to a newer Windows version pay the upgrade fees for all the versions between.

Retroactive update charging frankly, comes across as petty. It is one of the most restrictive licensing terms I've run across in 30+ years of working in the software world.

I hope this post doesn't disappear as other critical posts about the new licensing model have.

I can see how you might look at it that way in terms of saving money. But we spent a lot of time, resources, and money in development of those 3 years of features and other clients have an expectation from us.

The only way to make self-hosted viable for the future is to ensure people are paying for the effort put into developing it. Otherwise we really should just get rid of it. If you are not willing to do that, there are cheap or low cost alternatives out there but you don't get the owners of the company replying to you and you most certainly do not get monthly updates and constant improvements. Look at literally any other community platform and you will see many are at worst dead and at best barely supported.

It is also very, very common. I'm not sure where you have been living in 30+ years of the software world. It's very normal for software to require a subscription fee or to require a re-purchase at major versions. I get emails all the time from software I own that says "new version pay up!"

We are not requiring people to re-purchase for v5 as other platforms would. The "catch up" renewals only apply to the monthly option as it is basically a finance version of the annual fee. You may wish to review the new terms in the client area as you seem incorrect here.

We are growing and, if you are actually serious about your community, a few more dollars a year to get a platform that is actually alive must be worth it. If having something that is actively developed is not worth it to you, then your community will probably suffer with another platform.

But, as has been said a lot already in this topic, you don't have to do anything. You can stick right where you are on your current terms.

TL;DR: We are committed to our clients using Classic, self-hosted who are committed to their communities being a success. It is a joint venture.

And to your examples:

1. Insurance companies actually do charge you more if you have a huge gap in coverage. They see you as a greater risk. Same idea here.

2. Microsoft does not do upgrade fees they just make you buy the new version outright. If you would prefer that, I would be HAPPY to do that as it would make our software cost way more.

32 minutes ago, Joel R said:

Are clubs included in Classic? 

Yes