DSystem

The cost of the ipb license is very high so it is absolutely necessary to develop the email system.
It is not possible that to contact users, it is necessary to use third-party servants such as sendgrid (otherwise very bad) which are very expensive!
Having a forum and not being able to contact users is really ridiculous.
It would also be necessary that the email recaptio be tracked to find out who no longer has the active email. This way you can only send emails to those who actually receive them and not send thousands of random emails.

A user could set a limit for example 2 mail for a day from a ips website, and the system count how many mail for the user are "delayed"(stored into system in queue to be sent) and "digest" it into next without bother/importune it. Each mass mail sent from invisioncommunity must be readable via link to web. This is a good solution for permise community administrators to notification users about activity on board.
I hope you guys implement this feature into your framework because community users want help without to lose time reading each mail but focus on community goals (quality over quantity).

An option to work around this problem is to use this application ->  https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/9000-sendmail-advanced/
Of course, if we had a native email system that didn't force forum administrators to use paid services, it would be much better. The SMF with a very simple system manages to limit the emails per day without harming the most important emails such as password change or email confirmation and etc...
But do what? The IPB team is always right.

These lines in my nginx configuration have helped to overcome this:
proxy_connect_timeout 180s; proxy_send_timeout 180s; proxy_read_timeout 180s; fastcgi_send_timeout 180s; fastcgi_read_timeout 180s; I use Plesk and have a special field, where I can put this. It just a hint, that may help.  I am not a server expert, so do not ask me, how to add it to your server. 😊

I have also installed and checked it. But even that doesn't work. It is best to have this option in the software. So that admin can easily mail members. And send the necessary information.

An option to work around this problem is to use this application ->  https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/9000-sendmail-advanced/
Of course, if we had a native email system that didn't force forum administrators to use paid services, it would be much better. The SMF with a very simple system manages to limit the emails per day without harming the most important emails such as password change or email confirmation and etc...
But do what? The IPB team is always right.

Priorities need to be set for email types.
Each hosting has its own limits, there are specific email hosts that allow you to send a few thousand emails without ending up in spam. But certainly no one allows you to send 55,000 emails at the same time.
For example, I migrated the forum from vb to ipb and I would like to send an email to all subscribers to tell them. Even if it takes me 100 days nothing happens, it's not an important email. At least I can send them for free without having to purchase an external email service.
@Daniel Falternatively, what would you do now to contact 55,000 users? Without ending up in spam and without the hoster blocking my plan?

Many hosts have a limit of 200/300 emails per day.
If an admin wants to contact all his subscribers he must be able to decide how many emails to send every hour or every day so as not to block the server or end up in spam.

@Ricsca
I use this application and send to more than 500 thousand emails without the need to subscribe to any email transmission service
Note: I use my own server and I don't send more than a thousand emails a day to avoid being registered in spam services
 
 

You will want to upgrade all third party applications/plugins to their compatible releases. There is an issue with one causing an error in the background tasks.

What happen if you try to run the task manually?
Also the plugin "Featured Content" is currently having an issue with its background task.
 

To be honest, apps and plugins that get abandoned are one prime reason we need a way to sensibly obtain the files to fix issues ourselves if we want. I know many wont have the skills to do that but as someone who has patched abandoned plugins for vbulletin for years I think we as customers of plugins should have some ability to get plugins manually.
We are customers, pirates will always find a way to do what they want and they arent all lost sales but causing issues for customers will lead to lost sales. Always think of those that are prepared to pay over the concerns of those that would never pay.

Lindy. I appreciate you taking the time to respond as well. I agree that this change is useful as it will help novice and less technical users with preventing breakages. However, I do hope that the team will find time to offer the alternative of manual downloads that we have been very much used to, especially for us who like to set up third-party applications before launching our communities or those of us who run intranet-only sites. To me, it seems that with every major release, there are always about three features removed or new restrictions put in place that limit the control of our own communities. From what I've seen from all my years here, it is very rare that a feature is brought back or a restriction is lifted. And, I'm not sure if this is true, but I heard there was even a rule forbidding mod developers from reintroducing removed features. Furthermore, changes like this make me miss the days of third-party marketplaces such as Invisionize where I could select the version of applications I wanted all without having to worry about keeping my license current or the application being delisted simply because it wasn't updated for the latest version. There are apps that I've even paid for here that are just removed at the staff's discretion. It just seems that IPS is becoming a controlling monopoly in regards to marketplace applications.
I like that there's at least this positive aspect. I was also a bit worried that there would be alot of hassle in this situation. Although, I do find it a bit overreaching to revoke someone's license because they broke a third-party software's license terms.

Hi guys. I'm sorry for any confusion and frustration. This is something I personally insisted upon and it was done for a multitude of reasons. 
First and foremost, we want to really promote more harmony within third party applications. 4.4, because of its looser standards that did not require authors to use versioning/update notifications, ultimately allowed a hodge podge of current and outdated resources that would collide with one another (and the core) leading to unnecessary issues, customer frustration and support overhead. With everything managed within the AdminCP, you have easy access to updates - the same as the core software. 
Requiring Marketplace apps be installed through the AdminCP also helps ensure that what you're installing is the latest the author has uploaded, it was been reviewed by IPS (our process for this has changed and improved with 4.5 and we also screen upgrades now.) If we were to permit downloads and manual installation, you would get the warning that it is an untested resource (there are no provisions in the file itself that indicate it came from the marketplace), it would be installed outside of the Marketplace management/upgrade system and things like the support tool would warn you every time you use it that you're using an untested third party application. 
I understand the use case for 'localhost' development and testing. I would consider that a niche case at this point, but later down the line, we would be happy to, if demand dictates, explore potential ways to allow manually saving a file in a manner that ensures the file and account are validated and the file operates within the Marketplace framework.  We have no immediate plans to consider that development expenditure at this time, however. 
You could reach out to the author as well with these rare circumstances, but to be honest, this change also helps them from a piracy standpoint, so they may not be willing to give up files to customers so easily and again, if they do, it would not be installed within the new Marketplace framework. 
I'm sorry again for the frustration and @Dean_ you're not being a nuisance at all. I completely understand your position. Again, should circumstances change in the future, we can re-evaluate. At this point, just slapping up the file again would defeat the entire purpose of the 4.5 Marketplace, so that's unfortunately not under consideration at this moment. 
@Paul E. I'm sorry that happened to you and we've found similar. Because of that, there are new development guidelines in place that authors must adhere to and we have become very stringent in what we will approve. 
@ibaker XF, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't even have an App Store/marketplace and they don't review any third party resource. That's respectfully an apples and oranges comparison. As a point of clarification, although you find things from Invision Community creeping into XF, we on the other hand have no interest in competing with XF. If I were to simplify the comparison in this case, they adopt more of an Android approach and we prefer the Apple approach. You can hack your Android up to pieces if that's your thing, but the beauty of an Apple device lies in its balance between power, simplicity and stability. Our core demographic has demonstrated time and again, they prefer and expect the Apple-esque approach from us. Respectfully, if Android is your thing, please don't make yourself angry and miserable by shoehorning your expectations into an Apple device and/or trying to turn Apple into Android. 🙂 
Thanks for your understanding!

I figured there would have been a way to manually grab and install marketplace files post 4.5 as I like to archive old versions and track changes but I wont be able to do that any more?
I love the marketplace integration and it makes sense for a lot of users but a manual fallback should still be in place as well.

I'm hopeful this is an oversight that will be promptly addressed prior to release.

I presume like many many others, I have a test/development copy installed on my local PC using xampp. Here I do all my testing and development of any changes to suit my live site first. I have this development/test environment for unit, system etc testing, I have a pre-production test environment on my live dedicated server for integration etc testing and then I have my live production environment. Nothing, I mean NO ADDONS, NO TEMPLATE CHANGES etc gets to a pre-prod environment until it is completely tested on my local PC first...this is the way I am sure even IPS do it. So why in hell can't I download and test addons etc in my development/test environment on my local PC...why has IPS stopped this with v4.5 especially when everyone is developing and testing v4.5:

It seems like as IPS progresses further it becomes even more frustrating to use...it seems along with other licensing things IPS is trying their hardest to drive people away from IPS and straight over to Xenforo who make it easy to create what you need and manage your installs.

This is correct, but now having been told that I cannot login via a localhost (obviously, my mistake), I went to download or EVEN redownload some apps to test, but I cannot... I don't want another live test install on my server. I now prefer to do it in a localhost.

I do not have a live test of 4.5, so how am I meant to install files now that I cannot access them... I really don't think it's such a big ask to allow us to download files directly in the marketplace.
So now you have two issues, 1 people can't inspect files, and 2 you cannot download locally.

I don't think it's the issue that you can't point to the marketplace. It's the issue that you can't download and inspect the packages directly from IPS any more. There's now a requirement that the test install have internet access and that you install things before inspecting them, and for localhost installs, you can't install and test applications and plugins published by the community (without a roundabout process of installing in test and then extracting the resource).
For many communities, plug and play is probably just fine. But it's not serving the needs of those clients that have more stringent policies or requirements that they follow in the development lifecycle. Now, there's an extra step of using a test install to acquire files rather than being able to download and inspect them as before (or put them in a virtual localhost environment).
The IPS marketplace should have a download button for 4.5 resources, and have its current integration as well. Go install from your ACP, or download here. That would be ideal.
Just to add for context, we've purchased, downloaded, and installed a few applications and plugins from IPS Marketplace that, when tested in our local environments, we quickly identified conflicts, issues, and breaking changes that would degrade our member experience and/or simply not work at the scale of a community the size of ours. We identified issues that would have otherwise taken down our production copy and/or production installs due to things like altering the core_members table rather than having an application/plugin specific table. Whatever checks of things (if any--I'm not sure) happening at IPS, they're insufficient for our needs, and we have a duty to our stakeholders to test things and ensure they're ready for our environment and configuration.
This change is an obstacle to that process. We have a workaround, yet it's needlessly causing us to install things in test and have to revert that environment after the fact when our workflow of installing in a local dev first and doing comparisons was much preferred.

Absolutely a necessity to support multiple localhost development environments and to support the download of application/plugins directly from the IPS marketplace as existed in 4.4 and earlier. The inability to download files directly from the marketplace limits severely limits those that have installations that are not accessible from the outside internet, whether that be an internal corporate install or various development / virtualized environments.
It also prevents administrators and security folks from being able to audit applications and plugins prior to installation in any environment. At present, one must install an application/plugin prior to being able to review. In the past, we've purchased plugins/applications that upon inspection of the downloaded file, we found that there were breaking changes that did not follow IPS development guidelines and that would have resulted in a degradation of service in our production environment. Without inspecting those files in advance, we would have not been able to identify these issues.

I see that it was removed from marketplace, but no clue why. This was one of the best apps if not the best for Invision Power.
 
Zaper wouldn't replace it at all, plus they charge per rules.

As recommended, I'm creating this topic to reinstate the option to download files manually from the Marketplace.
It's bad enough you don't allow the download of apps we purchased when our licence has expired. But, to completely change the way file downloads are handle is a little much.

Please don't get me wrong, I love the idea that we can now do it all with ACP, but you shouldn't disable/change the way that a lot of us download files for localhost setups to test our sites before going live.

Please, please, please allow the option to download files manually like we've done for so many years!
 
(Edit: Happy 600 posts to me, woo!)

@ Gabriel Torres  This app does not work well with large communities. I had problems installing and once installed it locks the tasks. I gave up...

I'll poke this tomorrow.

Where is the 50% discount? ? ?