Charles

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 🙂

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

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: Took feedback from a private group of clients for month to refine the new terms Lowered the initial purchase price. Include all the apps with the new terms. Gave people the option to stay on old terms if they want. 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.

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.

Yes

Yes, you will get all the apps.

@Dreadknux and @Miss_B If you click the "switch" button in the client area on your license, it will show you a lot of information on your options. It does not actually switch you over until you approve it.

We’re not sure yet 😀 This is just rolling out to new purchases which is why we haven’t done any formal announcements for existing clients.

If you choose to change to the new pricing, it depends in you go with monthly or annual renewals. If annual is your choice and you don’t renew, you can pick up your annual renewal later. If monthly is your choice and you don’t renew, you can either switch to annual or catch up your missed monthly payments.

Glad you see the benefit 🙂

Actually, several clients were invited to a private feedback group and have been giving us feedback for the past several months on how best to re-approach Invision Community Classic. Our goal was to make self-hosting viable for the future.

Oh it's not that literal 🙂 it's about total time combined with total paid. If you lapse here and there it won't have any impact.

We do not have any plans at the moment to force the new license term changes on existing clients so nothing would change for you.

Yes, and you will also get a free extension on your next renewal date. That's about right 🙂 And if you were paying that regularly that long, it should factor that in on your free renewal date extension.

Yes there are a whole lot of terms and explanations.