Dexter_X

Since 4.6 we're experiencing that kind of issues. The most annoying one for us is the "Recently browsing" widget does not work as well as on previous versions :
If you see a user on the main logged users list "reading a topic" then you go to that topic, the user is not displayed as "recently browsing" in the topic's list. For example, now I'm writing this post and in the "Recently Browsing" just below I'm not displayed as being here... 😑
🤷‍♂️

We've got a fix for this issue coming in 4.6.7. You're absolutely correct, it's an issue with generating the email notification to let the member know that they've been awarded a new badge.

so... it is maybe not a good idea to cache such blocks where we expect more "instant update"...

Wow...  spent the last hour or so reading through the 16 page thread so that I would not just post the same thing that has been said a million times already and hopefully bring some constructive feedback.
Communication
Using terms such as "modest" when describing an increase of 48% (if someone licensed all applications) and anywhere from 36-60% on a per product basis struck me in a bad way.  Statements like "It's not bad news" also did not sit well.  In fact, reading the entire message there was nothing at all that came across as "positive".  If you're going to break a bunch of bad news, it might help to drop in some "good" tidbit of something to look forward to.  Bring both the carrot AND the stick.   I understand costs are higher and this is a quality service.  I love the product and I have supported the company for literally decades.  (I've actually met and spent nearly a week with Matt/Charles/Lindy several years back when I was considering working for IPS.)  However instead of simply noting the price change is effective immediately, I would have suggested having it take place after the following renewal.  Whenever your NEXT immediate renewal is, it would renew at the existing rate, however on the SUBSEQUENT renewal, the new price would take effect.  This gives people time to adjust and prepare.  At the end of the day, it won't break the bank for me... however it would have been much more appreciated to have had a bit more heads up.   Support
I generally try to come to the forums and find the answers to my questions first by searching before I've ever opened a ticket.  I also appreciate the fact you're trying to simplify the support process.  One thing I might suggest you consider is having a section within the support forums be configured as "Users can see topics posted by other users?" being set to no. This would allow the forums to be utilized, but also allow individuals to ask questions in a more private fashion.  Information that is helpful and could be of benefit to the community could be exported using a moderation rule to the "public" forum or into whatever KB system you're looking to implement.   What is going to happen to the Support tool within the ACP?  One of the features that I loved was that if I had to create a ticket, at the same time a support login was created.  By needing to visit the community, there is no way to allow the support team to quickly login and check what is going on.  I foresee the following situation playing out: I have a problem and come to the community asking for help.  Given that I would have already searched for an answer before posting, I'll create a thread.   If it's not a general "how do I" question and instead is "something is broken" situation, the IPS support person will need to create a ticket on my behalf and collect information.  They'll also have to ask me to create a support login for them most likely.   This will then put the delay back on me to get this information and reply to support who can then engage to help. If this is a situation where "something is broken", typically it's more urgent than a "how do I" question where minutes can matter.  If my site is offline or if a major feature is working, having a delay of a full round of back and forth can be painful.  Can we come up with a way to reduce this step?  If the support tech IS going to create a ticket on my behalf, he/she should have access to everything they need to engage without feeling like we're starting over.  I'm hoping those tickets that are created by staff are prioritized so that not only do we have to wait for a ticket to be manually created for us, but then also assigned to someone to actually help. Developers
Having the Marketplace and the developer community is a feature I see as being critical to my ability to be successful.  There are certain features that are VERY important to my community that I understand that does not make sense to include in the base product.  So having 3rd parties that can customize your product in a way that makes me successful is super important for me. Matt noted about it being difficult to determine how to support developers in terms of who should be able to get free licenses, etc.  My suggestion on this front is to consider something like Microsoft and some other large software companies do....  offer a tiered developer program.  The base developer account gets you a base set of features and access to the developer forums.  The next tier includes maybe access to a private slack channel, etc.  And the "gold" tier developers might get that a free license as well as maybe something like priority app review.  You can define milestones to reach each tier such as XX in sales or YY number of installs.  I'm most likely not the best one to suggest what those milestones would be, but I think that would be a great conversation to have with your 3rd party developers.  This would make a fair system and reward those that drive the most value within your developer community.  It would also provide incentives/goals for those newer developers to reach those higher standards.  (You're making an effort to gamify communities, maybe this is an opportunity to do the same thing within the developer community here?) I appreciate no one likes getting bad news and that these are hard things to do when they need to happen.  Hopefully some of my notes above can help as you move forward.  Finally I hope my feedback is received as it's intended... as thoughtful constructive suggestions and not a general "b***h fest".   Good luck and here's to the next twenty years.

Hi,
Check the following topic:
 

Here in lies a pretty controversial policy.
You make a professional grade product, we choose it over free software like SMF because it's more secure and coded by professional certified developers, but we don't buy it, we never own it, it's still yours and we pay a license to make use of it.
Then the inevitable security flaws are identified and we must ensure we renew our licences to obtain the fix for what are problems that weren't created by us, if only to conform with GDPR and other legislation to keep our members data and personal information secure, never mind the inconvenience of cleaning and recovering from hacked sites.
So really we have no choice, once a self hosted forum community is installed, put aside anti-spam, IP lookups, forget Marketplace niceties, forget new feature temptations and nice to haves, the only 100% real reason is because of this.
Charging for access to security patches is just plain wrong. They should be free for at least 5 years if only as a mark of quality and pride.
Can you imagine if Microsoft charged for ongoing access to Windows security fixes and flaws?
 
UPDATED to add:
"We are looking to increase the speed of releases to a monthly release schedule so everyone gets bug fixes and new features regularly."
This a bad news for theme and app developers. More work. More time consuming localdev updates. Please improve the process of updating localdev installs so they are more robust.

@Feneroin  That's worse its punitive for entities who would rather manage cash flow instead. 
But the base line would have to be flipped and discounts would be applied to longer terms. 
Example: My renewal $310/year
Monthly: $25.83
Quarterly: $77.40 - 3% discount or $75.18
Bi-annual: $155 - 5% discount or $147.25
Annually: $310 - 8% discount or $285.20

Nope, we haven't taken a dime of investment from anyone, and ownership hasn't changed. 
We are moving to monthly release cycles now. We're less likely to do a large monolithic annual release. We want to deliver new features and bug fixes more regularly.

I'm just beginning to wonder if Invision has not been bought by bigger competitor company (social network or something like that) wanting to finish all "little" communities to definitely die for their benefit... 😕

It's not about the fact that prices are rising. In my country it's a constant process, they never stop. It's about:
1. That the gap between old and new prices is 50% which is a lot. I don't see many businesses do this to their loyal clients. We would understand something about 15-20%, not 50%.
2. That you guys try to sell it like "but look at monthly rate! Not a big deal!". You seem to forget that people who are able to spend hundreds of dollars on forum software are adults and wouldn't fall to cheap marketing tricks. I'm a marketer myself, and I know exactly what is happening here.
3. That you didn't inform us before this decision so any hobbyists could pay for their software. The greediness is not good.
4. That you try to sell it like IPS is the best thing ever, some premium software that is nowhere near it's competitors. But would the best software company treat it's customers like this? For real? 
5. That you tried to cover it under website redesign.
6. That you're telling us "pay more but if you have a problem - go ask community"
 
You know, it feels really bad. It's a really bad publicity. How many existing clients will recommend IPS after moves like this, how do you think?
 

Adriano is one of the best developers on the marketplace. Maby The best....
Dont loose him, that's just like kicking out Max Verstappen out of Red Bull F1 racing. These are the people we depend on.

Listen to what he is saying
 

I think for little communities like ours that price rise of nearly 50% (47% in our case) may be a kill factor.
I just have something to say : if you go ask your boss for a 47% rise, how do you think he/she'll react ?

I think for little communities like ours that price rise of nearly 50% (47% in our case) may be a kill factor.
I just have something to say : if you go ask your boss for a 47% rise, how do you think he/she'll react ?

I think for little communities like ours that price rise of nearly 50% (47% in our case) may be a kill factor.
I just have something to say : if you go ask your boss for a 47% rise, how do you think he/she'll react ?

Hmm so my 6 monthly fee of $60 has now gone to an annual fee of $235.  $5 short of doubling in cost. 
I've been here since moving across from Ikon and supported IPS in early days financially, paid for lifetime licences which I've begrudgingly accepted would not help IPS survive further down the line. 
My boss will be on me like a ton of bricks with that increase and with no email support (are you kidding me?) - I am, after 19 years, having to think can we continue.   I've always had first rate support from IPS, coupled with a friendly relationship with Matt who's helped me out plenty of times, but I've also let them use my server to test MSSQL drivers and IIS issues when they hosted/worked with the likes of AMD.  To turn around to that degree is a proper kick in the nuts.
I understand they have to pay the bills, but we all do.
A doubling of my licence fee would be a hard one to take on its own but the removal of email support as well?  That is not just a small issue. 

it's a new regression / known bug. Invision team is already working on it...

It is a shame : that's not good for our communities performances neither because we'll put cache time to 1 minute, that will reduce global performances to face something that was not a problem on previous major versions... And despite reducing global performances, we'll not completely solve the problem... 
Somebody knows how to -manually- patch the code ? there must be some flag to set to false in order to disable caching on those modules ? 

It is a shame : that's not good for our communities performances neither because we'll put cache time to 1 minute, that will reduce global performances to face something that was not a problem on previous major versions... And despite reducing global performances, we'll not completely solve the problem... 
Somebody knows how to -manually- patch the code ? there must be some flag to set to false in order to disable caching on those modules ? 

Just an update. I have sent this up to our tier 2 developers to take a look at this and see whats happening. 

Which means it's practically useless now as it will always be giving false readings - I understand the performance impact issue, but how much of an issue is it if it wasn't an immediately obvious noticeable impact before it was introduced.  If it's cached then how often is the cache updated and would be an idea to give admins an option as to how often it gets updated and allow them to decide what impact on performance it has 🙂
 

I would say go with Pages over IP Blog and Pages is a better product than Wordpress in my opinion, but it depends on your need.
The biggest advantage for going with Pages is that a) you have one database for the users so you actually can make a seamless experience and b) you will have the capability to create pages and additional databases with ease using Pages.
I spent 10+ years working with Wordpress and I always felt that the biggest issue with Wordpress was that it has no real community features. I tried them all over the years and they all felt bad compared to Invision that is built from the other side and started with community 🙂
With Pages you can create a blog in less than 5 minutes and you can design it anyway you like by adding fields, or linking to other databases with cross-references.

So pros and cons for Wordpress:
Pro - Amazing documentation and huge community to get help from Pro - tons of plugins to expand the functionality Pro - Stable product with pages and blog in one product. Pro - If you want to add E-commerce you have a great product in Woo Commerce. Con - As the worlds largest CMS it is the worlds largest target for hackers Con - You pretty much must have plugins for Wordpress to be useful Con - Have few community applications and the ones that exist sucks. Pros and cons for Pages
Pro - Great functionality that is pretty much unlimited out of the box. Build as many databases as you like with any fields... Pro - Easy to work with (if you know what to do - see con below). Pro - The community have some amazing people that spend a lot of time helping you figure out how to make magic. Con - Documentation is not great and it can be frustrating to get started. Con - If you want to add E-commerce, then it's not much to cheer for. Con - Few plugins, but good ones with active and passionate developers.  
So my vote is on Pages 🙂

Hi,
In USA everybody knows the VAT is to be added to what you buy, even in public stores so the shop logics are based on a "without VAT" price where the VAT is added at checkout... The Commerce module logic uses the same principle.
Here in Europe we display prices "all taxes included", so the final price with the total amount of what you will have to pay, including VAT. 
My "problem" is that if I enable VAT management in commerce it is only a percent of the product value that is added to the "basic" (without VAT) price. It is the normal way VAT works, I agree, but it is not very useful. For europeans like me, it is a bit complex to got the exact total price you want to sell your products (displayed in the shop) by that way : the price needs to be computed regarding VAT, and to get the exact amount you want including VAT you need to set prices with a 1/10000 currency precision , or 1/100 cent precision (4 digits after the dot)... but... the commerce module does not accept prices more precise than at a cent (so 1/100 currency or two digits after the dot)... So it is nearly impossible for us to use VAT and have the right price displayed... It is very visible when we want a "round" price, like 40€, by activating the VAT (here it is 7.7%) we need to set a price of 40/(1+0.077)=37.14€ , then wen the final price is displayed in the shop, we've something like 40.01€ or 39.99€... 😑
So it will be better if the VAT could be computed from the "selling all taxes included" price rather than added to a base price... At least for us in Europe where we only need to show customers the VAT they've paid. So, in other words, we set a selling price of 40€, and the customer gots a bill where it is displayed they've paid 2,86€ VAT included in that total price.
If you compare with CMS managing online shops like prestashop or Magento : this is something you can do without any problem and without a dedicated plug-in...

Yeah, I asked about this as well years ago. Two modes (add or subtract tax) would be nice to have. Probably not enough demand to make such a substantial change, because it affects every spot that prices are calculated. 

Hi,
In USA everybody knows the VAT is to be added to what you buy, even in public stores so the shop logics are based on a "without VAT" price where the VAT is added at checkout... The Commerce module logic uses the same principle.
Here in Europe we display prices "all taxes included", so the final price with the total amount of what you will have to pay, including VAT. 
My "problem" is that if I enable VAT management in commerce it is only a percent of the product value that is added to the "basic" (without VAT) price. It is the normal way VAT works, I agree, but it is not very useful. For europeans like me, it is a bit complex to got the exact total price you want to sell your products (displayed in the shop) by that way : the price needs to be computed regarding VAT, and to get the exact amount you want including VAT you need to set prices with a 1/10000 currency precision , or 1/100 cent precision (4 digits after the dot)... but... the commerce module does not accept prices more precise than at a cent (so 1/100 currency or two digits after the dot)... So it is nearly impossible for us to use VAT and have the right price displayed... It is very visible when we want a "round" price, like 40€, by activating the VAT (here it is 7.7%) we need to set a price of 40/(1+0.077)=37.14€ , then wen the final price is displayed in the shop, we've something like 40.01€ or 39.99€... 😑
So it will be better if the VAT could be computed from the "selling all taxes included" price rather than added to a base price... At least for us in Europe where we only need to show customers the VAT they've paid. So, in other words, we set a selling price of 40€, and the customer gots a bill where it is displayed they've paid 2,86€ VAT included in that total price.
If you compare with CMS managing online shops like prestashop or Magento : this is something you can do without any problem and without a dedicated plug-in...