Charles

Which is why we have theming 😄 

No, it's been awhile.  Someone is going to tell you to upgrade, I don't want to be that person.

THAT MADE ME LOL?!

THAT MADE ME LOL?!

THAT MADE ME LOL?!

THAT MADE ME LOL?!

Your caps lock is also broken 😉

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

I personally do not like dark mode. I actually find it harder to read.

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

What your "expert" misses is that our platform is designed for conversation. Social media is designed for you to post some thought, someone leaves a comment, and never looks at it again. Look at this very topic: it was posted in 2018 and now you are bringing it back to life. That does not happen on social media.
That is fine for social media as that is the point. It's not the point of a platform like we make and the fact that we are not trying to do that is a huge selling point to our clients.

I personally do not like dark mode. I actually find it harder to read.

I personally do not like dark mode. I actually find it harder to read.

I personally do not like dark mode. I actually find it harder to read.

I am just curious: since the editor is WYSIWYG what is your use case for preview? It's something I never did "get" personally 🙂

I am just curious: since the editor is WYSIWYG what is your use case for preview? It's something I never did "get" personally 🙂

I am just curious: since the editor is WYSIWYG what is your use case for preview? It's something I never did "get" personally 🙂

I am just curious: since the editor is WYSIWYG what is your use case for preview? It's something I never did "get" personally 🙂

When you have Elasticsearch enabled we do not maintain the local MySQL search index to save on overhead.

Ok, so it's worth rounding up what Invision Community DOES do in terms of SEO.
Auto generated meta tags for description Custom meta tag editor for finer control in a single area Uses appropriate header codes 200 for OK, 301 for redirects, 303 for 'the page is actually here', 404 for not founds, 403s for permission errors, etc Uses appropriate HTML markup to highlight important content (h1, h2, etc) Uses rewritten URLs for a cleaner structure packed with keywords Creates and submits a sitemap to show Google which URLS are important to your community Uses nofollow where appropriate to stop pages like 'Contact Us' from being crawled Uses JSON-LD micro data markup to tell Google about what data they are seeing and how it should be used Allows easy integration with Google Search Console for tracking Uses https Has a responsive theme which gets the "Mobile Friendly" badge Here's what is coming in 4.3
Meta description expanded to 300 characters Ability to rebuild your entire sitemap quickly Lastmod tag added to sitemap files Not to mention other retention tools like
Bulk emailing tool available Emailed notifications Promote to social media Share to social media There seems to be a level of worry in this topic, and while I'm happy to field any questions you have, Google is a bit mysterious and prone to changing things overnight.
We adhere to good standards and do all the right things as you can see from this list.
We are not adverse to change and adding new features, but we never do it in a panic or with a knee-jerk until we get some hard evidence which supports the reason for change.
We have been monitoring our own Google Search Console and clicks/impressions are up, indexes are down slightly, but Google has seen them and flagged them as 'discovered'. These tend to be profiles from people who have never posted (and we have about 200k of those alone).
I do not believe we are facing any crisis, or that anything is substantially wrong.
We can always do better, and we're listening. We just need a little more than a few charts to go on before we make drastic change.

As noted in your ticket: 
 
I can appreciate you've done some research on this, but you are referencing deprecated extensions in MySQL. Invision Community utilizes mysqli and the process (ssl_set()) is different than simply appending a flag. In addition to changes to the database handler, you would need to generate a certificate, bind that certificate to your installation, etc. It's certainly not as simple as setting a flag and while Azure may provide a mechanism to somewhat simplify this by generating a certificate (though it doesn't work with mysqli without additional setup), it's unfortunately not something we presently support on an application level or have roadmapped to support in a self-hosted capacity. 
The proper method, with SSL DB or not, is to secure transmission between your web nodes and the database on a network level. There should never be an opportunity to "sniff" a connection from other nodes on a network to database, because only your web nodes should be able to access the DB. A virtual network, vlan, virtual private cloud and appropriate security rules should be utilized so that only web nodes are able to communicate with your database. In the case of off-premise access to the database, network rules to only allow specific IPs should be created and enforced. 
I apologize for any frustration and inconvenience. This is rather environment specific and not generally an out-of-the-box offering. 
I'm sorry I couldn't be of more assistance, but we appreciate the feedback.