Mike G.

I add a custom block to Pages then use the block manager to add that to the top of each of these pages so once you make it to one you can navigate to the others.  
 

Appreciate the very detailed response Matt.
FWIW moving from self hosted to the Invision cloud offering is the best decision we've ever made and our board is over 21 years old!

Thanks Mike. It's never nice when these issues arise but we are responsive to them and work hard to resolve them. 99.9% of the time it's smooth sailing, but these 0.01% events sure are memorable. 😄

I’m currently self-hosted, but plan on switching to the cloud offering in the future. I appreciate everyone sharing their experiences so far, as well as the detailed breakdowns of what’s being done to identify issues and how they’re being addressed.
It’s not ideal for anyone when this kind of stuff happens, but this open communication will result in continuous improvements.
 Thanks everyone. 

I’m currently self-hosted, but plan on switching to the cloud offering in the future. I appreciate everyone sharing their experiences so far, as well as the detailed breakdowns of what’s being done to identify issues and how they’re being addressed.
It’s not ideal for anyone when this kind of stuff happens, but this open communication will result in continuous improvements.
 Thanks everyone. 

Thank you all for your patience, I have approved every single post that was made both good and bad, and will hopefully address some of the points raised and the issues from the past 2-3 days.
It's been a very busy few days but here's a brief run down of events.
We were alerted to short (5-8 minute) bursts of a sharp increase in response times starting on the 21st.

These bursts didn't last long which made it hard to track down. Our Cloud platform is made from several components, each of which could cause latency issues. We have a WAF to filter traffic, a CDN to create short term caches for guest traffic, ElastiCache (in a read/write cluster), MySQL database clusters (multiple read/write) and then the processing layer where PHP lives.
The bursts between 9/21 and 9/23 only affected about 15% of our customers due to how the database clusters are segregated but coincided with an increase update of 4.7.18. One of the main changes in 4.7.18 was to how often the write MySQL servers are used. The write servers are really good at writing (insert/delete/update) but less useful for complex select queries. One downside of user a read/write separation is the replication delay. You can insert a record to the write server, and this has to then copy it across to the read servers. So, when we recount the last post in a topic, and forum, and recount the number of comments, etc we run that select query on the write server so we know it has the latest data. This is fine, but it puts a heavy load on the write servers. So, in .18 we removed the select queries from the write server and added a task to recount again every five minutes or so just incase there are any odd issues from race conditions on busy sites (and we have some super busy sites - one currently has 36,000 active sessions).

After a lot of debugging, we tracked the issue down to the use of ElastiCache to manage the locking flags when recounting. This meant that busy sites couldn't lock fast enough with ElastiCache as there is a very tiny window of replication lag. So instead of the expensive recount query running just once, it would run 3, 5, or 10 times before the lock was created. Multiply this for all sites and it increased load at the database level due to InnoDB locking and unlocking rows.
We tried several interventions which seemed to work, but randomly did not a day later. This is very frustrating for us, and very frustrating for you.
Yesterday, we found a solution via a hotfix deployed to all 4.7.18 sites on our platform to use database locking. It drives up database I/O a little but not enough to cause concern, and we have rewritten this recounting feature already for .19 to use a task which has more robust locking and is proven to avoid race conditions.
Yesterday we did see random latency issues that affected most sites between 10am and 12pm EST on and off, with peaks occurring around 10am and 11:30am. This is in the ElastiCache layer which we're woking in, although we have made changes to the configuration to make that stable.
This has taken a few days to get to the bottom of and has involved multiple members of our engineering team and some long days, so I thank you for your patience. These burst happened so quickly (in relative terms, I know it feels like forever when you experience it on your site) that our external status monitoring doesn't pick it up, but rest assured, our internal monitoring does. It's very loud and impossible to ignore. 😄
I'll address some of the comments:
As mentioned above, these burst are over before our external status monitoring picks it up and often doesn't affect all sites due to the way the MySQL clusters are set up.
Thanks, we had resolved most of the issues last night.
We were running some very short term ElastiCache configuration tests. We were monitoring the response times but needed a few minutes to gather some data. This lasted about 8 minutes total.
Again, thank you for your patience and I know that it can seem like nothing is happening, but we have strong internal monitoring and have been focused on resolving these latency issues. A large complex platform like ours can be quite organic and tough to diagnose as GitLab found out when experiencing similar randomly latency issues.
I can only apologise. The past few days are not indicative of our normal service. I'll reply to your ticket in more detail.

So broadly speaking, a beta will be a true beta whereas in the past with new major versions, it's more alpha-like in that we might add some more functionality, or refactor bits of code on whim which means you get a really lengthy beta testing phase.
With v5, we're being more careful to ensure the quality of the product, and even now it's incredibly stable and very polished and much more beta-like than alpha. That said, we are aware that we may need to revisit some features and tweak them, or potentially re-work bits of code so we're not quite ready for beta status.
We're really hoping for a public beta by September. We're aware that we're running out of year and before long Thanksgiving arrives and signals the start of the holiday season.
We haven't made any firm decisions about release schedules in terms of which Invision Community packages get beta first. My instinct right now is to release both the classic version and the Invision Community but we'll confirm closer to the time. We may stagger the final release, but that would be just to prevent support becoming overwhelmed with upgrades.

But more pressingly, the next steps are:

- [Coming next week] Public alpha: an install of Invision Community v5 for everyone to test, offer feedback and post bugs on.
- Developer alpha: we've gathered a very small group of contributors to test and give feedback on the development tools
- Finalise v4 to v5 upgrade tests
- Public beta

I understand. Fingers crossed! Everything else looks fantastic ❤️

This is not true. Plugins how they exist today will be going away but something like this will be certainly possible still by a third party author.
Back to top also is better suited by the OS. No need to clunk up the UI. iOS and desktop have this built in. I’m unsure if Android offers this but you only have so much space on mobile, I’m against clutter and accidental clicks that change the view. 

Not sure we need that level of service, but always appreciate you guys taking things to the next level! 😅

Well. That was an unfortunate typo. 

There has been no significant changes to the follow system in v5. In terms of ETA, there can be no precise time until we know it's finished. v5 itself is pretty straight forward, but to launch it, we will need updates to our website, documentation, etc which all take time.
Progress is good though, we're up to alpha 7 and hundreds of fixes have already gone in, lots of features changed based on feedback and even a few things added we've yet to blog about.
We're ready for the next step in alpha testing, and we expect to have more news on that next week.

I'd consider 3rd party plugins and themes to be one of the most important areas to look at. I phased out all of mine with the exception of a few article templates and a competition plugin, which the community is aware will end when the upgrade comes).
I expect many of the popular plugins and themes to be upgraded, but I think it's worth preparing to be without them, at least for the start.
Deciding on your mainstays with tags is worth planning on advance as well, primarily the ones that can be used across multiple areas of your community (news, categorization, tags that are used regularly).
A lot of the magic will come through exploring the new pages and editor options, but you can't really prepare for the awesomeness on the way - I think that'll come as you feel your way through the software.
It's just a good time to do some spring cleaning in general and possibly consolidate inactive forums if you have a lot. I come across a lot of forums where the threads in those forums would be better suited as a tag in a more general forum.

We're up to Alpha 4 over in the secret alpha testing club and things are progressing nicely. There's been a lot of improvements to the theme editor, and the text editor. We've made some improvements based on feedback to several areas including advertisements as well as fixed a ridiculous number of bugs.


I think the alpha testers will agree that it's pretty stable now and closer to beta than a raw alpha. We'll be launching Alpha 5 tomorrow and this will be upgradable via the AdminCP.
Internally, we're going to test a clone of this site and upgrade that to see how that goes.
In the mean time, is there anyone else here that wants to join the alpha team? We're ready for more people if you are. Just let me know!
If you're just curious, you can follow the releases and fixes here.

Yes, it removes PMs, profiles, posts, gallery content, files, etc.
It’s like they never existed. 

Thanks for all the thought and innovation put into the new pages functionality.
P.S. Dr. Seuss would be proud of that video.

Some thoughts as someone who has had a license for 10+ years to both companies:
1.  Exclude all of the other apps like Gallery, Downloads, Clubs, Blogs, Calendar, Pages, Elastic Search, Commerce, etc from both sets of software since those are irrelevant to you.  Evaluate the merits of the IPS forum on its own with features like: Assigning specialists to certain topics, Topic summaries, Community Experts, Helpful answers, Mark as solved, Schedule topics, Trending content, Fluid view of topics, Editor stock replies, Highlight topics by staff members, Solved content, Forum views.  It goes on and on.  
These are features available and specific to IPS Forums.  Do you need these features?  Do you want these features?  Will these features make you and your community more successful? Do you appreciate the ongoing development of these types of features?  Only you can answer this question, to justify the cost differential.  
For the communities that can leverage these features, these features are worth their weight in gold.  IPS has a clear hypothesis about the future of independent community building and user behavior: helping users identify solutions faster; helping new members and visitors digest information easier; helping staff members and community managers navigate, assign, and respond in the limited time that they have.  There's a forward-looking vision behind the company's development of features in an overarching theme of progress that you don't see in legacy developers.  These features are not just more detailed or more complex; there's a real hypothesis by IPS on how these front-end features in the forums can build better communities.  
In short, not all forums are built the same.   If you think they are, then SMF is still available to download.  It's an oldie but a goodie 🙂  
2. Above, I asked you to ignore all of the other apps and only compare the merits of Forums.  With that said, there is value in the suite of IPS. It's extremely challenging to build a standalone site with only forums; modern independent communities usually need a mix-and-match of a site builder and forums.  Even if you don't need Gallery or Downloads or Blogs or Calendar or Clubs, I've always believed that the true power of IPS is in the Pages application, a powerful multi-function application that allows you to build a site anchored by your Forums and supplemented with knowledge bases, directories, databases, articles, and more. 
3. Finally, I leave this parting thought to you and any other client comparing the two. It's a small data point, but one that I think echoes volumes about the future.  
I recently asked the same question in the Xenforo community and the IPS community: "what advice would you give to a new community owner?"  It was the same question, word for word, with the same exact topic and same exact text.  Same question, two different client communities.  
The responses are a small sample size, but the responses could not be more more wildly different.  There is only one community that is positive, enthused, and believes in the future of community building. 
The other has an existential crisis.
https://xenforo.com/community/threads/what-advice-would-you-give-to-a-new-community-owner.222784/
https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/478848-what-advice-would-you-give-to-a-new-community-owner/

That’s a shame that they’re so negative over there. If you look beyond a “forum script” there’s so much a community can be. 

They used to do this.  However this prevents them from doing some cool things with the software to make it more seamless and powerful.  IPS is moving in a direction of wanting to create powerful features that literally tie everything together.  That becomes almost impossible when you have to build tons of logic around if you have this module but not that module or you only have 3 of the 4 modules, etc.  
 
Affordable is a relative term.  The initial cost is $499 for the first year.  That's literally $1.37 per day.  Subsequent years are $199 a year.  That means it's $0.55 per day after the first year.   Would you work for less than what you feel you are worth?  IPS assigns a value to their products that allows them to pay a LOT of people that are continually adding new features and capabilities.  Just because the price may not match what you want to pay does not mean it's not fair or affordable.  Would you go up to a Ferrari dealership and tell them they should sell you a Portofino for the cost of a Prius because you don't like the price?  

We recently changed our pricing from 'pick what you want' to 'everything' for a few reasons.

First, a forum-only community will not survive in 2024. Secondly, we want to strengthen the relationship between apps and that is impossible to do when an app may be missing.
It sounds like XenForo is a great fit for you, so I wish you all the best!

@AtomiCAST
If this helps you understand why IC is what it has become today, we purchased our license on 01/12/2006, here is my feedback.
At the time the cloud did not exist. The only solution offered was self-hosting. Prices and services developed as technology advanced. The license was already "expensive" in my opinion but I was a high school student and had no income. Then paying a small sum every 6 months to benefit from updates, patches, support (always available, responsive and patient) was not very restrictive. And yet all of this was well within the reach of anyone with a modest income. 
Over time, we even acquired licenses for other products that completed the Suite. 
We tried to offer personalized clothing and t-shirts through the Commerce application and it worked very well. The only "problem" is that once the license for a functionality was acquired, we could no longer escape the renewal of the license concerning it. 
The support service, answers to questions, troubleshooting is not far from the best I have had to deal with. I've been struggling with this for 20 years and believe me the bar is high.
This proximity with their customers gives rise to exchanges of points of view, interesting discussions on technology, user experience, the need to keep, captivate, involve. All of this has allowed IC to shape a tool that best meets the majority of the needs of any community.
The Page tool allows you to deploy a truly robust, efficient, professional, static or dynamic site while being supported by a lung that can be an IC forum.
Clubs are just groups and their use can be adapted to many different scenarios.
You can't grasp the incredible potential that these guys offer through their tool that they have been developing for a number of years, until you have used it and it will probably take you a few years before you succeed. to calibrate it to your community. We have been managing a French-speaking community of football club supporters for almost 20 years, as many years based on a single tool. This one. 
If you are only looking for one forum and only one forum, I can understand the fact that they now offer a single price for all the features is actually a little hard to accept. 
But one thing is certain in any case, it is the best forum/member management tool that exists today.

The TL;DR version:
We actually provide the service you pay for through constant updates and communication. You don’t see people on our community wondering why we do not communicate or release an update in years.
While there are countless differences in goals and vision, we cost more because we do more.
Ask yourself: do you want ye olde forum script that you see people begging for updates on or a living company behind an evolving product?

Hi AtomiCAST,
I appreciate your question. Value is very subjective, but I can run through a few things in terms of what I think offers a lot of value.
The first thing I want to address is that we do not see XenForo as a competitor. They are a legacy forum-only system that is looking very dated with a slow development process that took over three years to bring a new version to the market that largely catches up to where we were years ago. If you purchase a license with XenForo then you will get a forum system and that is that. You do not get a commerce store, a powerful CMS and database system, nor a gallery or community blogging tool.
We are different. We do not base all our decisions around code and development, but rather our conversations with professional community management teams running large complex communities. We focus on bringing tools to the platform that people need. You only have to look through our news blogs to see our forward thinking with regards to managing communities. 
We have:
Redefined what a community product should look like with a brand new interface. Built a brand new theme editing experience designed to reduce complexity and enable everyone to theme their community. Added a way to erase frustration and find answers quickly. Added a new way to identify and follow community experts and leaders for a better onboarding experience. Added a simple badge builder to empower all community owners to create custom badges and reactions. Added a way to assign individual topics to moderators and teams to help organise your forum and provide better service for members. A brand new lightweight and fast editor that actually works. Rebuilt tagging to bring content from all over the community into one place. Added a drag and drop WYSIWYG page builder tool with dozens of pre-built widgets and layouts. As you can see, these features are not based around technology, but based around people and community. When you look at XenForo's 2.3 feature list, it's things like OAuth, Stripe integration, developer tools, web hooks, etc. These are all much-needed (and we've had them for years) but how do these help you grow a community and help your community get the best from their time on the forum? I believe their next release is 3.0 and will just be a new theme and unlikely to launch in 2024, so when will you get new features? 2025, 2026, 2027? Or you can have an alpha release of Invision Community 5 right now with a full release later this year.
The basic question being asked is "why aren't you as cheap as XenForo" and the question is simply that we do not want to be "cheap", we want to be good. We want to help your community succeed with forward thinking features, regular releases and daily communication. We will not abandon the software for years leaving your communities struggling and stagnating against newer more modern community platforms. We are constantly thinking about how to allow your members to get the most from your forum in the small pockets of time people have. Invision Community 5 being a mobile first product allows your members to check-in (or be pulled back with notifications) while in a line at that the store, or waiting in the car while your kids are at sports clubs. This is how people use your forum now.

So in terms of value, and what we offer for the price is simple:
We offer you a strong future and will work hard to support your community.
If you want a cheap forum, and are happy with the stop-start-stop development of XenForo then that is totally fine too.

Widget Designs are still being rolled out and will be available for many widgets once I’m done. They are not finished in Alpha 2.