Daddy

That's not really an opinion. There is no chance a gaming community outside of large orgs are paying for the Business plan.

Interesting article but I think there needs to be a better way to call attention WHO a feature is applicable to or perhaps the blogs should be split between self hosting or Cloud or Business & Corporate/Enterprise plans. 
Landed on this page and saw the minimum version 4.7.0 - figured that was me started scrolling and didn't read the first paragraph and get to the part to go to your ACP and nothing... 
Perhaps your Version numbers should include a suffix: 
4.7.0 Corporate/Enterprise 4.7.0 Business 4.7.0 Creator 4.7.0 Creator Pro 4.7.0 Self-Hosted 4.7.0 Platform ( all clients )  It has to be in the headline so we know the target audience. 🙂 

How is this different than the "Popular Now" block available for Pages?  "Popular Now" merely looks at topic views or replies but not reactions?
It seems like this would be similar, except maybe it has enhanced weighting of various factors (replies, reactions, etc) to gauge what is "Trending".  Not sure why you'd reserve this for the highest level of pricing, conceptually I would think someone could code a custom add-on/widget that applies configurable weights to classify their own definition of "Trending" (site owner defined) relative to topics and likewise embeds that where desired.
Like the idea, just not fan of the restriction, unless there's a lot more going on here that I could be overlooking and is enterprise level complexity.

For now it's only minor changes in features between the self hosting and business/corporate plans.
But i believe the evolution will be for the changes to start to get bigger and bigger between them, until at some point, the self hosted plans will cease to exist. It's not a thing for now, but it will be in the future for sure.

So you can't get this unless you are spending $549 per month? That's a bit rediculous. I'm ok not having this, not a game changer. 

Yes we will be preparing for the inevitability of this in the future sadly. I have been a big fan on Invision dating back our our DJ community forums, when we took over our current community it was VB and we switched to IPB not long after. 
The amount we are going to have to invest in development still does not offset the monthly cost for us to have the features we would want. Our community is only about 14k members.
We have a dedicated server that we use for more than just our community, so paying for another hosted service just does not make sense. Especially since we have full control of our environment.

"Hot garbage" is a vibe.
The blog application is designed for community blogging more than one source blogging as we do in our news blog. As you can see, Pages is more than capable of powering a block with a few custom templates. In terms of the community blog, what would you like to see added?
Appreciate the kind words, thank you!

What would I do differently? I honestly don't know. I'm pretty happy where we ended up and making changes to decision making may have taken us elsewhere. There's some wasted time in pursuing a 'social' element to the software in response to the birth of Facebook that I'd not bother doing again. I'm pretty happy with all the big decisions we made.

In terms of challenges starting out; just keeping the lights on honestly. We barely covered costs and a small wage for ourselves for years. Turns out there's not a lot of money made when you give away software. 😀

As for the photos? Never say never but probably not. 😇

Appreciate you watching and weighing in! Great suggestion. 

Great video! One thing I find odd is how very little the blog software has "adapted" or "evolved" over the years. Are there any plans for it? Let's be honest the blog app is hot garbage that even IPS doesn't bother using. It would be nice to see that get some attention at some point.
Moreover, it kind of blows my mind that even after the major success blogs have gotten over the years, it was never a priority for IPS. Even now blogs are still popular yet we're left with a very interior and out of touch app. I'm very interested to know why?

Do i have my own community... yes 😉 Its still there:
https://www.duken.nl/forums/home/
Just a little background in the past many many years.
2002 till 2004 - HTML code and some free offsite forum software: 

2004 till 2005 Joomla CMS and offsite forum:

2005 till 2006 Joomla CMS and own SMF forum:

2006 till 2007 Joomla CMS and SMF forum:

2007 till 2009 Joomla CMS and SMF forum:

2009 till 2011 Joomla CMS and SMF forum:

2011 tot 2017 Wordpress CMS and finally IPB forum instead of SMF!

And 2017, gone from wordpress and primairy Invision Communitypages with forum.

The updates this year were pretty sweet, but... This article is a bit misleading. The growth in community engagement here was due to shipping support over to the forums and from when the community came together to push back on the IPS team for radical changes with no warning or solid explanation.
So technically engagements are up from new features, but not in a good way 😛 Either way, I love it here. Just wanted to point that out ❤️

The updates this year were pretty sweet, but... This article is a bit misleading. The growth in community engagement here was due to shipping support over to the forums and from when the community came together to push back on the IPS team for radical changes with no warning or solid explanation.
So technically engagements are up from new features, but not in a good way 😛 Either way, I love it here. Just wanted to point that out ❤️

The updates this year were pretty sweet, but... This article is a bit misleading. The growth in community engagement here was due to shipping support over to the forums and from when the community came together to push back on the IPS team for radical changes with no warning or solid explanation.
So technically engagements are up from new features, but not in a good way 😛 Either way, I love it here. Just wanted to point that out ❤️

The updates this year were pretty sweet, but... This article is a bit misleading. The growth in community engagement here was due to shipping support over to the forums and from when the community came together to push back on the IPS team for radical changes with no warning or solid explanation.
So technically engagements are up from new features, but not in a good way 😛 Either way, I love it here. Just wanted to point that out ❤️

The updates this year were pretty sweet, but... This article is a bit misleading. The growth in community engagement here was due to shipping support over to the forums and from when the community came together to push back on the IPS team for radical changes with no warning or solid explanation.
So technically engagements are up from new features, but not in a good way 😛 Either way, I love it here. Just wanted to point that out ❤️

Add option to update pending IPS Downloads or riot

Add option to update pending IPS Downloads or riot

Alright, I'm excited.

Alright, I'm excited.

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol

Why the exclusivity? If you think any of us are going to consider switching to your cloud hosting for these features you're insane. You charge $330 a month for 50 GB of storage. lol