sofos

I would suggest contacting your hosting company on this issue, as they would be the best to advise you in this case

Usually that there are issues with the site saving data at times. 

Additionally, don't forget to make a full backup of the database before the upgrade. Like that you can always roll back if things don't go as planned.
If you have some free time, you can also do a test run of the upgrade by duplicating your main forum to the test forum and proceed with upgrading that first and see how things will go. 
Doing that you will know what to expect when you upgrade your main forum.

You may wish to investigate what is happening with your community. Attempting to sign in from the ACP, I keep getting redirected around. If you have any custom redirects on the server imposing HTTP to HTTPS or otherwise. I would remove those.

If there are a lower number of followers then it would attempt to send them immediately. So if the SMTP is slow, then indeed it would be what is causing the delay there

Instead of the number of followers, it might just be the SMTP server being slow in its starting reply. Switch temporarily to PHP mail and try again to post something. Does the delay disappear?

Does the topic you're replying to have a lot of followers? Or does it happen also for topics with few or zero followers?

There isnt really anything to check, other than if you have any 3rd party items, ensuring they are compatible of course

The first thing you should do there is to contact your hosting company if your site has suddenly started to slow down. I notice you havent yet upgraded to the latest release, but the reality is, if it was fine before and you havent done anything do it, then it can only really be your hosting company.
Also, I would ask, is this actual slowness, or a number? We often find people chasing numbers on sites such as these, when there are actually no real world problems.

Thank you. I have fixed it. I still have to add a setting and enhance the task; it should be done within the next hour.
Let me know if you have FTP access to upload a fix while waiting for the new version review.

Hi all, id be so grateful to anyone who is in a position to shed some light on the problem I have.
Some threads, I believe ones started after I ran the Jan '23 update, show as having 0 views - despite them having having replies; so clearly something is amiss!
Does anyone else:
Suffer with the same issue? And/or know how to rectify the issue? Kind Regards

Disable all of your third party resources...  then switch to PHP8.  Enable your third party resources one by one till you find the culprit.  

This issue has been resolved in 4.6.12, which has just been release. Please let us know if you still have any issues once you have upgraded to that release.

This is indeed in the April release which is in beta at present

Something in your theme. There a lot of this with other resources. Try to reinstall or theme or recreate a new default one.

I would suggest awaiting the changes made before you report any further, as it may well be related

Similar issue here with some fixes.
 

Ah I see. These are things you can set at a server level, usually using htaccess. We of course cache things at an application level where required. I will move your topic to our community support section for hosting, for further discussion.

Sorry, Im not sure what you mean here. Browsers cache data, yes. 

ImageMagick is used by IPS to handle uploads of images, resizing them, compressing them and creating thumbnails.
Why not give the community admin the option to use ImageMagick to convert uploaded images by users to WebP?
As long as WebP is now accepted by IPS 4.6, I imagine that would be very simple to add this feature to the suite.
I am having a great experience converting the images that I post on my community to WebP. Same quality and much less bytes than JPG or PNG or GIF.

Any updates on this please @Fosters?

Yes, I have a new version for 4.6 in the pipeline. It just needs some further testing because the design got a total overhaul
 

With this he can ...
 

Due to you are granting access to "special" areas (your 2nd point), this would be a permission and I would advise setting up a new member group for this. Then you can either assign it as a primary group (shown publicly) or a secondary group (hidden to users in the core software). 
If you wanted to show secondary member groups, you could use the following add-on (please note that all support for third party add-ons are through the author): https://invisioncommunity.com/files/file/9897-secondary-group-display/
 

Thanks @Jim M in the past I had activated the Clubs but there was little life away from the main parts of the site and users preferred to write in the main forum.
Thanks @Jimi Wikman the main problem is that the user must be able to independently manage his membership in the group.