SeNioR-

..and no.
No, I won't.
Why?
Because search results will now display an image if the content contains an attached image:

"But that's on Cloud only..." I hear you say. Nope, it's not - it's on IPS 4.7.0 onwards.
But what? How?...because the feature that they are referring to is not simply the adding of the image to the search results. It's the further analysis of the image, to look at what the image is (or potentially is, because y'never know...there may be flaws) as per @Matt's content here (see section titled '[BETA] Image processing and moderation'
 
 

Are you being sarcastic?
When IPS 4.0 was released with tons of new features, not 1, not 6, but tons... I don't remember IPS asking more money to pay all those new features.
Is just how things works. 
Are you saying that for us to have just 6 new features in a major upgrade version, we can't have them because they cost money? Doesn't all clients pay to have an active license?
That's a problem of the self hosted clients, not IPS.
If IPS one day says: "Self hosted clients won't have access to IPS 5.0 because its to demanding for the servers of our clients", it seems you would agree with that.
If a self hosted client is able to buy a server and run IPS on it, don't you think he is able to do the rest? The hard part is already done. That's a very weak excuse.
 

From what i've seen, the new relevant features of IPS 4.7 are this ones:
Alerts Real Time Who's Typing Real Time Who's Viewing Search will include images Sentiment analysis data collection Trending Content Then we have some minor changes and bug fixing.
Of all the new relevant features in 4.7, only Alerts have come to the self hosted clients.
I'm following Invision since 2003, almost 20 years ago, and never in my life i've seen a major number upgrade with only one new relevant feature for self hosted clients.
Six new relevant features, and only one comes to the majority of your clients.
My curiosity is eager to know what will come next. Will self hosted clients get IPS 5.0? I have my doubts, if all the best features start to be exclusive to the Cloud Plans, there is no reason for a 5.0 other than the Cloud.

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.

Do you feel providing self hosted clients a "guide" to advanced IPS configuration of these features is too difficult/complex, too much work to document properly, or perhaps compromises IPS's level of IP in some way they simply don't want to expose for competitive reasons?  A lot of clients are capable of configuring their servers IF they know what it is they need to configure and how best to configure it to work with IPS, and likewise a lot of hosts are willing to help and support that effort (mine certainly is).  And many hosts are evolving to modernize their own offerings, i.e. offering NodeJS.
Beyond that, I think the general strategy would be to offer client enabling/disabling of features (even ones with complex setup/configuration) as opposed to outright removing them or reserving them for cloud-only, such that those who are capable of doing the work can and others who can't can simply disable them.  Redis is an example of this.  Granted the performance may not be optimal, but the client has to recognize that and IPS provides an alternate solution with their cloud hosting.

I will leave my two cents here. There is virtually zero way I would be moving to the cloud hosting.
If us the self-hosted guys would be left for dead at IPS 5 - I'd cling to the latest version like to many sites did when vB went kaput. Until a more viable option comes along like converting to something else if said latest IPS version becomes too obsolete after some time. Hope it does not come to this because I truly love IPS and what it brings to the table. But hobbyist niche type of forum owners just can't justify cloud prices at least in my case. It is what is is.
I understand your need to make some things cloud-exclusive but please do not cripple self hosted holders in the long run depriving them of some really cool and necessary features. An idea would be make some features available after a year or something later while cloud users get priority.

We have moved away from monolithic releases every 18 months. We decided to call this release 4.7 solely because we increased the minimum PHP versions and refactored a lot of the cloud platform code. We do not hold back features for these major releases. Some features that came with monthly releases during 4.6 included the new word submission block feature, support for Indexnow, new web hook trigger points, achievement improvements and import/export and more. We could have held those all back for 4.7.0 but chose not to.

We are committed to bringing better stability and efficiency, new features and updates across all platforms almost every single month. Not many community platforms can say that. 😇

Wait, this is also cloud-exclusive?!

$549/m to get your humor/meme topic on the top of the sidebar, yay!
On a more serious note, these ranking signals are rather...basic. There is much more that can be done with modern technologies - weighting of different kind of reactions, analyzing the length and structure of a reply and so much more. Right now this sounds as dumb as it gets, The topics with most replies usually get most reactions and most views, these are not three distinctive metrics, they are so closely tied together that for most communities the popular and trending topics list will be virtually the same. 
Also, topics are kinda lame content container anyway, but thats entirely different discussion. 
Seriously, turn on the classic legacy most popular topics widget together with the new shiny trending one and let us see the difference and content offered by both in practice. I am rather skeptical there will be any meaningful difference, but my mind can be changed. 
 

Good heavens. Who on earth is IPS aiming for? Just corporations or the mega rich?! Some of these decisions fracture a community.
It seems IPS has moved from the hobbyists and put their eggs in the corporate basket. As such, that is who they are trying to attract with some of these decisions. Though I question how well some of these decisions will actually work. 

I get the fact they need to make money. But I'm just stunned by some of the business decisions lately. Be it towards customers or businesses/ Almost none of which encourage forum adoption or use, but instead encourage looking at other sources. 

"So why are people, including businesses and enterprises moving away from forums?"

*Reads IPS blog and looks at their prices with the nickel and diming and small feature additions that try to get passed as ground breaking or new.*

"Oh yeah, that's one reason why." 

While IPS has a better product than VBulletin, even though IPS has never had a higher ranking than #2 in the forum community, they clearly see themselves as #1 and price themselves as such for everyone. 
I fear these short term decisions will have long term negative consequences and could eventually push IPS towards VB territory in various ways. Reminds me of when VB did the same sort of things before their fall. 
It's an old feature that's been tweaked and repackaged. I wouldn't call it innovation when this is really nothing all that new. Be it through mod or an existing feature that was tweaked. This isn't innovative. This is trying to catch up.

It's part of the IPS marketing strategy, created to disappoint their self hosting customers.
 
 

Nice feature but i join all what it was said, is should be a native feature on all plans, cloud or self.
+1 for the feature -1 for the restriction 

I'm in the process of building a new project and have it started in Wordpress + BuddyPress + bbPress... part of the way through the bbPress setup I was kinda disappointed in the forum features and was thinking to myself "I could do this in a full suite version of IPS self-hosted".
Thanks for removing my doubts of why I went with Wordpress in the first place.  No point starting a new project on software that is destined to get starved of features by the developer in order to push more clients into $549/m plans.

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

I wouldn't call this an innovation, especially when it's gated to 5% of the community lol
This is yet another example of how detached IPS are to their customers. The fact that such a simple feature is excluded from self hosted licenses, but also gated in a $600 per month cloud plan? waaaaaaaAAAAT?

If this trend continuous, need to find options to migrate to Xenforo or other forum applications.
Forcing self hosted clients, so that we can use trending block is just crazy in my book. Apologies saying as I see it. It's ok to make profit but their is border line between profitable business vs RIP off business and I am feeling, it's later for being Self Hosted licenses if this trend continuous. 
As many others said above, not paying 549$/month  for trend block. 

Include in title that it's only for biggest clients and you are screwing self-hosted clients. Would save me some time - just another thing you do not care about. 
I'm a client for 9 years and I'm getting more and more anoyed with your solutions for self-hosted clients. 

I will chime in. I don't think that the trending feature should be something to try to bring you to the big cloud packages. First off, if anything, it's an add-on. There is no reason that it cannot be built into the default core. When I was on Xenforo there was an add-on made by ThemeHouse called 'Trending'.
Trending XenForo 2 Add-on — ThemeHouse
This was nothing more than an addon, that takes in different algorithms based off your choosing in your Admin area, and you could have it displayed by most views withing the hour etc.
We are going to see increasingly little features like Invision's 'Trending' go towards their Cloud packages to try to entice users to switch over. I am sad to see it personally each time. Since I have been back over here, I see so many users here frustrated with the way the future is going for Invision. It's not my business, so they can run it how they want, but we all feel like we are invested into a company that looks at self-hosted clients as a nuisance and would rather deal straight with the cloud customers only. I don't want to see this post turn into another bashing Invision post though there have been plenty of those in the last 6 months. But I think you will continue to see increasingly these types of features of each release be cloud based only. In time we as self-hosted clients may only get bug fixes and security patches only, and no new features. Who knows? 🤷‍♂️ 

Not to derail this, but I agree with your sentiments @ufshane.  IPS must be aware of the impact to their self hosting clients and the viability/affordability aspect will become the litmus test for their chosen approach, and client attrition will be the proof of it.  The math is the math when it comes to cost and if clients are priced out, suddenly IPS becomes non-competitive compared to other products.  To effectively force cloud hosting pigeonholes clients who may have needs beyond what IPS offers in cloud hosting.  I'd imagine they have awareness around that, otherwise they'd be sabotaging their own business, which is why I can't get my head around this assumed path of eliminating self hosting.  Just seems like a terrible business decision, but IPS has access to data I don't (in terms of their customer base, profit margins, support overhead of self hosting vs ROI on self hosting support within the product, etc).  In that regard, if they somehow identify an opportunity whereas they'd make more money from cloud hosting by eliminating self hosting, then that's simply a strategic business decision on their part that improves their bottom line.  But they also can't be penny wise and dollar foolish, having MORE of IPS out there (ala self hosting) is free advertising and exposure for them to acquire more clients.  A similar analogy is Amazon eating shipping costs for loss on smaller products to gain in the bigger business of getting eyes on higher priced items and selling those too.  Even if the math shows you're losing money in one area, that loss may be gaining you more in another facet of your business.  Exposing that between cloud vs self hosting is a difficult connection for them, but again the "common sense" (opinion) side of me believes simply ending self hosting would be a terrible decision and just push your existing self hosting clients to your competition and then propagate your competitions products to the forefront of the market's visibility.  Guess only time will tell, but just as IPS offers conversion services, so do their competitors and their competitors will see the trend and ensure they offer conversion paths (even for those clients who have a lot of customization).

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.

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. 

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. 🙂 

I don't believe any gaming communities outside of developer/publisher/merchandiser forums would actually be able to afford to use given the restriction to business & enterprise cloud plans

It would appear that all CSS files, (except custom.css) don't show at all, even when using the advanced editing option.