SammyS

For January 2018 I expect all of the IPS staff to form an air-rock band and perform Rush's "Natural Science."  That or "Freewill," whichever.
Oh, wait....software?

Great wrap to the end of the year! 
Thanks to all IPS Staffers for your talent and hard work, and our awesome, community/modding heroes.
This year has had a great positive feel within the IPS community, Not just a place for tech support but a fun, helpful community that it's a pleasure to visit every day. I've actually been ill since January 2017, still waiting for an operation, lost my job of 22 years end of September due to UK austerity cuts, and at times this place has really cheered me up throughout all the anxiety and stress.
Honestly, who could forget Joel's humour-soaked coverage during the 4.2 build and release? Brilliant!
Or the way the community got behind the Black Friday initiative? 
So here's wishing you all a well deserved, peaceful Christmas. 
☃️ ⛄️ ? ? ??
 

As mentioned in the article, it ships with the 4.2 core software already. You find it in the front end “block manger” as System → Guest Signup Widget. 

We are a ver affectionate and warm community.
We send & receive kisses

screwdriver
tweezers
pliers
soldering iron
multimeter
With them I can always make money for everything else, incl. smartphone, laptop, car, beer, scotch and condom

Please, put all css and js files in one minimized css and one js file automatically. Nobody in 2017 uses million files. Page load time is very important thing now! Think about SEO!
Good robots.txt from the box is important thing too.

Pls add more payment method gateways in e commerce , and can add this methed 

Let me set some context, before I explain. My site is a 19 year old virtual club for enthusiasts and collectors of a specific brand of antique garden tractors. It includes a significant online library of contributed resources of all types, plus an active Classifieds ads (free) that allows them to buy, sell or trade for free with real folks avoiding Craigslist scammers and hassles ( we have always required users to provide their real name, city, state) or eBay costs. It also supports an aftermarket of reproduction parts. In addition to researching and finding things or asking questions, users can document their collection and their projects in a variety of ways (a custom tractor registry - now using Pages + collections, photo gallery, build log blog, a Show & Tell forum specifically for that, etc.)
We also have a Facebook page and a Facebook group. The page is simply to stake a place and hang a shingle on Facebook - because we are a virtual club, many of the FB tools for a business owner to use on their page simply does not apply - and most imprtantly, because search engines and such penalize me if I don't have one. Consequently that page doesn't see much traffic, and the content is not very dynamic. The Facebook Group is used to "push" key things from my site into Facebook so that users can then share that info with their friends, family, other groups, etc. We share new classified ads, blog updates, new photo gallery items, new registry entries, etc - so that our users who are in Facebook can then share their hobby with their friends, family, etc. My site has over 9000 users, and the FB group has over 1000 members.
We do not actively encourage users to post in that FB group, much less use it for general chit-chat. Similarly, we don't encourage status updates on the club site.  I really don't care what they had for lunch, what their kids/grandkids now look like, or where they went on vacation. But, if they have something significant or meaningful related to their tractor hobby, I want to capture that, catalog/index it, and save it for posterity (rather than it disappear with the latest Photobucket policy change, when MySpace or or other free photo repository fades away, etc.) I want to add that to our knowledge base and repository and make it easily searchable and shareable.
In addition, we have a News and Announcements forum for news about the club, the site, or its software - and we share all topics in it to Facebook. Meanwhile, our moderators also monitor that Facebook group and should someone ask a question there, they respond and if possible provide a link back to the site for more details, resources, etc. 
We try to use Facebook as a means for our users to share info about their hobby with a wider audience, to "market" who we are and what we can provide to a wider audience (especially younger users who live in their phones but may seldom use a computer), and as a way to broadcast news and updates about the site and the club. I don't try to compete head to head with FB, while fully acknowledging that it is a part of many of our users lives, and simply want to facilitate that...
So, things I would like to see are:
1. Ability to Promote to a Group in addition to a Page
2. Ability to auto-promote new content from specific parts of my site, to reduce the workload of moderators manually sharing (or promoting) content, and let them work in a "by exception" mode, similar to how they police the forums.
 3. Ideally, I'd like to see the ability to automatically feed or pull back to my site any Facebook reactions or comments to content that has been shared or promoted there...
 

The main reason to not use Facebook/Twitter/Google+ is to fight against centralization of Internet, which hurts freedom of speech. Privacy issues and data ownership are other extremely important reasons.
I'm really glad that we have IPS as an alternative community building tool. I also hope that IPS will eventually have built-in functionality to interact with Diaspora and Mastodon (decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter).

Funny how so many read “Invision Community 4.3 Coming Soon” as “tell us all your wishes for IPS 4.3 in the comments”. 

I'm here all day.

Progressive web apps would be an awesome addition to 4.3 

Jair, they are not late not waiting "too long". Why to rush? let´s do them their job: releasing a new version full of new features, and reliable enough to run in ours communities.
BTW: 3rd party devs are releasing a lot of excellent and much needed software too, so even this "pause" has this advantage as they can take time to make new stuff for us 
 

Jair, they are not late not waiting "too long". Why to rush? let´s do them their job: releasing a new version full of new features, and reliable enough to run in ours communities.
BTW: 3rd party devs are releasing a lot of excellent and much needed software too, so even this "pause" has this advantage as they can take time to make new stuff for us 
 

Amazing. Im proud to trust this company to run my community

Sweet! 
 

I'm working on a plugin to give more power to the club owner on front-end:

1 - You can add a specific or all members from a group as MEMBERS in the club:

 
2 - You can change the club ownership:

 
3 - Change the club type:

 
@Morrigan, I'll try to add this:
 
Any other suggestion?

Nice improvements, thank you.
Still hoping for an announcement on member rewards, badges and trophies and thought it may be tied in to the Leaderboard improvements news article!
Something built-in and not a mod, with motivating attractive trophie/reward graphics shown in profiles, within the Leaderboard and optionally next to forum posts, like this:-
https://www.lithium.com/products/online-communities/gamification
Come on, please take it to the next level! I have my fingers crossed.
 
 
 

That is what we really need cause we try to build a reward system based on Leaderboard and we definitely don't want admins, moderators appear in the list. To achieve this I have disabled reputation on these groups but this is not quite good cause eveyone asks why they can not like our posts..

HUGE release, very complete, not just engagement as we all thought. 10/10 

It´s GREAT, HUGE, believe me...

I like this, but to take it a step further....I would like to see an option to return members to lower groups if they don't maintain a certain level of activity.
example..
In order to remain in "Group X" you must have 25 posts over the last 12 month, otherwise you go back to "Group Y"
This would keep up forum activity, rather than just having a member do a one time burst of creating topics and replies.

This is a great step.
Now what would really get me excited is if video acted more like they do on Facebook, Twitter etc.... upload and VIEW.....rather than upload and VIEW A LINK to the video file I just uploaded.
just sayin'
......
I can just feel these forums catching up to social media......
Facebook is going down...
How can we buy stock in IPS, inc.?

@Charles do you know have any plans on a way to add fontawsome icons into the colored boxes in the filter per forum? I think that would be a nice visual improvement if possible? Maybe even a way to set a fontawsome icon to a forum? for all views?

Actually that's a real cake that @Stuart Silvester's wife made for us for the release of 4.0.0.