Jon Matcho

@Stuart Silvester I apologize -- your original solution works perfectly and is the simplest. I was unaware of being able to remove content moderation after a time/post count. I just implemented that change.
Thank you!

To change the default group for new members you can edit your conf_global.php. Details can be found in the following thread:
You can then create a rule to promote users to the full user group once the required post count is reached. 

The other thing you could do is just move all existing members into the new group and rename the existing one to something like Newbies. (Thats what I did so I did not have to edit any files from default values.)

There's a group setting for this, edit your 'Members' group, go to the 'Content' tab, enable "Require approval before content shows" and configure the limits as required.

Hi,
Is there a way to allow bloggers to delete comments, but not edit them? This would be sensible permission granularity.
Or an app which would achieve this? My searches turned up none which appear potentially helpful.

Hi @Martin A.,
The marketplace is closing. Is it still possible to buy your Community Map app at the same conditions and how?
Thanks a lot for your help 🙂 

I can’t speak for IPS, but it’s still safe to say that this is extremely unlikely.
The people with coding skills don’t need it. They can just open the respective page, inspect the actual HTML and learn everything they need from it. It’s all public and there for everyone to see. 
The people who don’t have these skills, can’t do much with such a tutorial. They would just have to copy code they don’t understand. If they make the slightest mistake, everything breaks and now someone has to give free support for the tutorial. Who is willing to do that? If the user wants just a tiny variation of the template, they would have no idea how to do it. So again, they would ask for free support. Not to mention that such custom Pages templates correspond to Pages database fields and possibly CSS and JS files. If they don’t exist as expected, again, everything breaks. It just doesn’t work. I’ve created an entire online course around learning Pages, but it does not contain teaching people how to create templates from scratch. That’s just not a suitable topic for a tutorial. Either you know how to do it or you can get stock or custom products which deliver the needed functionality. There really is no middle ground. 

What is "the" new one? The Provider Directory or what @Joel R is building? No offense to Joel here, but there can be other marketplaces, some providers may not be part of any 3rd party marketplace, and some will walk away (not sure how many active/semi-active devs are in the marketplace today anyway).
My point is that it will be a chore.

Some of us (many of us?) are not coders, and in this day of Elementor, Wix, etc, do not wish to become one. I don't want to spend my time learning how coding something like that when I could be using it to write content for my sites.

I think some sample Pages databases with different use cases would be nice for V5.

What is "the" new one? The Provider Directory or what @Joel R is building? No offense to Joel here, but there can be other marketplaces, some providers may not be part of any 3rd party marketplace, and some will walk away (not sure how many active/semi-active devs are in the marketplace today anyway).
My point is that it will be a chore.

What is "the" new one? The Provider Directory or what @Joel R is building? No offense to Joel here, but there can be other marketplaces, some providers may not be part of any 3rd party marketplace, and some will walk away (not sure how many active/semi-active devs are in the marketplace today anyway).
My point is that it will be a chore.

Perhaps this would be the perfect time to come back with the "Requests Forums"? @Matt
Honestly, I feel it's too intrusive to have to message each developer. Creating a topic telling about your project and letting a developer be interested in it is more pleasant for both sides.

Thank for the more reasonable reply. I hear you, but also am hesitant to buy into change when the only information available is sparse. There are some awesome communities full of information and interaction, still running terrible looking versions of software. For them, it's about getting and giving information fast and efficiently. This is the opposite of a site like YouTube where it's about dragging people along until you can show another commercial or sponsored segment or the site trying to get you to watch more videos until your eyes dry out. 
Perhaps I'm the only person without patience to weed through a mountain of garbage just to get the nugget of info I need. Much of the internet has become exhausting now days. 
I frequently think of this magazine cover compared to magazines of today and websites where there is so much going on it causes a headache. More isn't automatically better, and neither is less. There's a happy medium, and using technology to meet needs is always good.
 

I'm generally pretty excited about this, it's always good too see change. 
I do have one concern though, and that's that the filtering option on the current 'Providers Directory' isn't really too helpful in terms of what the creators provide. 
It would be far more useful to have perhaps examples of their work on that page rather than being re-directed to a whole external site for me to sit and sift through to find what I potentially might be looking for - it almost feels like im going to be endlessly searching for a developer who suits my needs.
 
Like I said though, excited to see the change and whats to come of this. Thanks, Invision! ❤️ 

If I was a new developer trying to gain trust, I'd spend some time in the community being helpful and getting to know people. You can quite quickly gain trust this way and then start to offer your services and products.

I understand where you're coming from; it was indeed a tough decision. There is also, however, the side of the Marketplace that we've kept largely to ourselves and that is the costs associated with operating it. Many assume this has been an additional revenue stream for IPS, but the reality is, it has never even broken even. To explain why and in the spirit of transparency, let's use the example of a basic $5 plugin purchase; with our 10% commission, minus transaction fees, etc. we net virtually nothing, but we assume all the risk. This means, if someone decides they're unhappy with a resource (even though we have an all sales final policy), or uses a fraudulent payment method and a chargeback is performed resulting in us losing that dispute, we pay a $15-20 fee--the author is not charged this fee and usually retains the proceeds from the original sale. It takes dozens and dozens of sales of that single resource to break even on that one transaction. Multiply that by countless chargebacks and incidents of fraud in addition to the immense development time required to review resources, the administrative time to handle customer vs developer disputes, support overhead, payout fees, etc. the Marketplace actually costs us a significant amount to provide and maintain.
The costs have actually exponentially increased as the use of the Marketplace has decreased. Previously, there were more good sales to help lessen the blow of the bad sales, however, with a 75% decline in usage over recent years, the volume is simply no longer there, so the losses are subsequently no longer sustainable, even if we were to triple our commission rates, which would only hurt us and the resource authors. On a scale of full app stores such as Apple, Google, Steam, etc. you have enough volume to chase the bad with good and the numbers add up. We are, of course, not Apple. 
As has been said, the vast majority of our customers today appear to either prefer their installation to be "stock" or to have custom development performed by third party providers. The top three Marketplace resources are currently installed on only 2% of communities (that report statistics to us, to be clear). I know how easy we've made it for those who like lots of tweaks and resources and we hope you will continue to enjoy these resources, but unfortunately, we can no longer prop up and absorb the losses of a declining ecosystem. I fully meant what I said in the original announcement - we are excited to be able to redirecting the resources expended in supporting the Marketplace towards improving the platform on the whole and creating new opportunities for motivated third party developers to connect with interested customers for custom development, integrations, services and yes, premade resources. 
For those that are active in third party resource utilization, I'm very encouraged by and grateful to @Joel R for his interest and commitment to bringing our loyal third party contributor community together again in a way that provides them more freedom and opportunities.

Yes, I will corral all of the Marketplace devs together so we come to consensus on this project. I've been fortunate to have worked with many of them over my 10 years with the community.  They all know me (for better or for worse, ha 😆). 
My goal for this new Marketplace Directory  is simple: provide an independent directory using Downloads.  It will link you to the providers' own website for support. 
 
More broadly, to anyone who is hesitant about these changes, there are some pros and cons: 
- More independence, more variation, and total flexibility for developers and themers.   They can build their own core, their own gallery, their own package of plugins.  You can't do any of that in the current Marketplace.  I expect to see some truly experimental and innovative approaches to how developers and themers work with IPS 5. 
- More independence, more variation, and total flexibility in how they charge.  Providers can charge crypto, they can offer a bundled set, they can offer discounts, they can set their own policies for chargebacks and refunds. 
- Trust will be deeper, not wider. The IPS Marketplace gave a broad stamp of trust to all providers for meeting standard IPS coding. But for clients, this is an opportunity to deepen ties to one or two trusted developers and take our most important apps private and control our own development pipeline.  I do believe the biggest developers will still offer - and can make healthy income - off a broad portfolio of single purpose mods, but those by itself aren't going to dramatically fulfill your community's specific needs.  

I would have hoped for a 6 month notice period to be honest not 2 1/2 months.
Considering we cant download addons any more other than through admincp we cant even back up for a wayward plugin dev who is sick or unable to handle the change in 2 months.
Please at least let us download what we own to self install for now.

Not at all; both apps are very popular outside of our own use. 

I have settled on a new API provider to replace MapQuest - Geoapify. 
Geoapify have a free tier with far more requests per day than MapQuest had. I have been in contact with them today, and there are no limitations to how we use the API, as long as you stay under their daily limit. That limit is 3000 requests per day, which should be more than enough for most of you. This is not a hard limit, but should you constantly go over the quota they will send you an email asking you to upgrade your account. 
See more about that here: https://www.geoapify.com/pricing
 
I have converted all API calls over to Geoapify today. Just needs some more testing before I can give you an update.
Too bad the marketplace doesn't offer a way to do beta versions, or even have private testers... Can't really do a public beta version either, as the approval time for new versions can be up to a week.

Glad you got it solved 🙂
 
Regarding the API issues; I received news last night that MapQuest have (rather silently) decided to close all their "open" APIs, which sadly included the API used by Community Map. While there might have been possible to use other API endpoints provided by MapQuest, I will not do so because of how they've handled this and their lack of communication. I assume none of you got any news about this, even though they should be able to see that you are actively using an API that's about to be shut down.
As of the next update Community Map will not use MapQuest. I am currently exploring the possibilities to host this on my own, as there is a pre-compiled database available that doesn't have the same requirements as previously mentioned. I'm gonna check this out some more over the weekend, and I will hopefully have a solution within reasonable time.

Question: My Board is 20 years old. After the last major IPB Update, the last 15 years of my Boards Topics were automatically Archived, which rendered them Locked and Unsearchable. This left just 5 years worth of live Topics that could be found in a Search. I understand the need to streamline in order to save data and space but this automatic Archive was egregious.
If I was to go into my AdminCP and change that 5 years to say 10 years or even 15 years would the Topics within that time frame that are Archived be Unarchived and then Searchable?

If yes, how long would it take? (I only have..gulp..7mbps speed)
Should I take my Board Offline during this process? I ask because unarchiving a single Topic seems to tax the software and takes time. I don’t want to crash my Board.
Should I do the Unarchiving in small 1 or 2 year batches?

Question: I’ve had occasion in the past to delete Memberships for a variety of reasons. Generally I chose to keep the Members Content with the author to appear as “Guest”. Always worked and the Member showed up as Guest on all past Content. I recently deleted a Membership for let’s call him “Jim Jim”. I chose Options shown below. *But instead of “Guest” on all his past Topics and a Posts it shows “Guest Jim Jim” as author. Is this a glitch? Can I somehow remove the Members name?
What should happen to the member's content after the member is deleted?
Delete
Hide
Leave (I chose this)
Attribution
Continue to attribute to Jim Jim
Anonymize attribution (I chose this)
This will show content attributed to Guest and remove any stored IP addresses. Recommended when local privacy laws such as GDPR apply.
 
 
 

Support confirmed forced archival is a new "feature" for cloud hosted sites with no options on what areas to archive.  Apparently this is undocumented and set to 3 years (1to5 is range).  Claim it is being looked at.  Not having advance notice of this change is in pretty poor form.
For sites with reference type forums (food, wine, books, travel, technical advice) this is pretty fatal as content over 5 years is no longer searched, and pretty useless.  We have low density forums with over 10 years of history and the content there is not time sensitive.

That is correct. I have thought about making this a paid app many times before, both for the 4.4 and 4.3 version. And the price I'm placing on this now is the same I planned to put on it back then. (It is also the same price Michael (InvisionModding) had on his Tutorials app 10 years ago in the 3.x series, so I would say it's about time the overall prices increase in this market)
Having this generate a bit of income will of course increase the motivation of keeping this updated and adding new features a great lot. The first version of this will not come with many new features, mainly just the IPS 4.5 compatibility. 

It was a bug in the code, not in the files you supplied. 
I don't want to post a release date. It'll be when it's ready, and either before or shortly after 4.5 final is released.