Yamamura

Sorry, but "support" from the community on forums is inherent in free software. When a client pays money, he wants to have a private communication with the support (there can be many reasons for this).

I was shocked to read the email about the increase and it was like a slap in the face!
I can understand a price increase, but the prices here are going up extremely in one fell swoop. Corona has already caused a sharp drop in income and now we are supposed to pay the price increase? I can almost no longer afford that for my hobby forum. 
The price increase is even higher because the e-mail support is no longer available. Community support can be provided for freeware, but not for expensive licensed software!
Thank goodness I recently renewed for 6 months at the old price. I will now definitely look for an alternative and move my forum to another system if they don't reconsider the decision here...

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. 

Hello,
I just got up, read this email and I am absolutely furious.
I am told that I will get a "small" increase of 90$ every 6 months, that is 180$ per year, which is more than a 30% increase, but it is a small increase! 
Also, no more support by ticket, but by the forum, a good way to tell your customers to take care of themselves, but on the other hand, they can pay to open a ticket.
But frankly, are you kidding us? Is this a joke? And you justify this with "We feel that Invision Community offers exceptional value for money with its rich functionality and power at your fingertips." ? No, we use Ipboard out of habit, nowadays there are other solutions.
Moreover, I'm still waiting for a proper integration of Webp with conversation, an update of elasticsearch, a real mobile application, a real mobile optimization (IPB is completely lacking in this area), an evolution of the api, and that for years! 
Oh and I forgot, the ponpon, features that are not present on our self-hosted versions but on your versions that we don't want!
We are users and contributors of mediawiki and they have a real update tracker, yet it is an open-source solution (like Discourse, Phpbb, SMF, etc...) and we almost get a faster response from them than by opening a "ticket".
Frankly, what advantage do you think you have today? I tell you, none, we pay a licence (and other users too I think) for the convenience, but we will clearly review our strategy, especially as we are informed at the last moment.
 
 

I can only imagine these price changes will be reverted soon. Otherwise, whoever is in charge of this should consider retiring soon before it's too late.
Went from $80 every 6 months, to $250 every year. $110 increase AND I no longer get basic support? I don't see the logic in that. Seems the very few who will stick around will just not renew that often anymore. So in the end you aren't really gaining anything, just losing the respect of your entire customer base.

So, we're just going to increase the cost of licenses without notice so no one has the chance to renew before the price hike? That is very scummy, and seems pretty intentional. We're losing features, getting slapped in the face with useful features that's cloud only, and now we're paying MORE for the same thing... What is going on?

These news are nonsense. From what they are to the way they are being communicated.
"It's not bad news" - yeah, that's right. It's not bad news, it's terrible news. You can't call a 50% price increase "modest" while removing e-mail support and pricing it 1250$ annually. 
By doing that you effectively cut hobby sites like mine. Paying 215$ for software that isn't making money in a country where median salary is 400$ is not a good idea at all.
But what's even worse is that you lack honesty in this. Instead of communicating this like "guys, there's a huge change in our business model, we now want medium and large businesses as our clients" you say something about "modest" price increasing and "strong community" that will help with bugs how? Why would I want to pay 215$ annually for not being able to deal with bugs at all? And I've found many before, which I was able to resolve thanks to your now gone support.

I won't be supporting this.

"Don’t worry, it’s not bad news".
Going from $190.- a year to $280 a year is not bad news?
Cutting email support while hiking up the price like this is not bad news?
Cutting email support while having a terribly lacking documentation (since day 1) is not bad news?
Keeping innovations away from those who self host then when that dust settles, hiking up the price is not bad  news?
 
I dread the day you do come with what you consider "bad news".
Going to have think this over. Might going to cut this chord.
 
Looking at your pricing structure I get the feeling you are in the process of driving those who self host away. I can be wrong but it would make sense to just have medium to large businesses as your clients. 
 
 

Hello,
I haven't dared go look at my Client Centre yet! The few groats I've earned from the Marketplace are all I've had as income since 2017 since being made redundant due to UK austerity cuts. So it's a scary prospect.
Honestly... Nobody likes change. It's rarely good. Someone always gets the pointy end of the stick. It's usually me or the little guy, but rarely the enterprise corporations who can afford the change.
However I appreciate that prices haven't increased for a decade, and a reasonable increase would be understandable, we know this, it's overdue but it needs to be said these significant changes are sadly once again being poorly implemented and probably compounded by an almost total lack of notice, no dialogue, a lack of communication, causing major headaches and increasing uncertainty.
Yes, of course you don't have to consult or engage, but in my experience, just like change between employers, managers and employees, if you do, you'll often find it makes change a lot more smooth and easier to swallow. Both company and customer may come to appreciate things they were unaware of, and/or offer suggestions or alternatives.
A few points of feedback for what they may be worth...
Re the price changes...
I think there has been an obvious failure to give fair and reasonable notice of the financial changes, in particular to those needing to renew in the real short term (meaning days, weeks) but especially to everyone who needs to renew in the next few months. Hopefully Lindy and Charles will realise this oversight, take ownership of the situation from a customer service perspective and immediately ensure no financial impacting changes until the next 6 month renewal period for all non-enterprise clients has expired. After all IPS says it's all about supporting communities. So do the right thing.  This is a decision that will strike at the heart of IPS communities that were already struggling even before COVID impacted, and those under significant financial pressure. For many, having to find more than double the funds up front for a year in advance, is not an easy sell, but for many is not easy to accommodate either especially with short notice. The lack of a small discount for multiple license holders is disappointing. Don't compound things, please space them out and easier to swallow!  
Re the Support changes:
Removing Support Ticket facility is a seriously poor and frankly ridiculous decision. Increasing the license costs at the same time is pretty terrible and almost ridiculous. IPS Support should make better use of the Support Forums, absolutely, but in addition to Support Tickets, not instead of them. Many I suspect are fed up already with being to create a ticket for most Support Topics they create reporting problems. You tell us it's because you need site access to investigate or fix things, so how will this help? I don't want to name my website communities that be having problems in a public forum, my clients wouldn't appreciate it but also I like many are reluctant to post links and references to specific communities mainly because those topics appear on search results, it's unprofessional and gives a poor impression aside from anything else. Others may not appreciate doing so because of privacy or sensitivity considerations. If you don't use your own ticket system, I can see a time coming when you drop it entirely from Commerce. Maybe even move it to a separate app or module for Commerce. "Our enterprise clients use dedicated solutions like Zendesk, so we're dropping it" sort of thing.

So here's an example.  I put in a ticket (a while ago) and was told the slowness of clicking view more content at the bottom of a stream was a query issue on their part and would be fixed in the current release.  It does not seem to be.  So now, I need to pay 1250 dollars to ask you to fix an issue with your software, that I paid for, and hear again that I need to wait for the next update?
I'm normally a pretty levelheaded person.  I can't understand, or explain, how angry I feel, how tricked and deceived this makes me feel, and how likely I will simply move my sites to another platform just to feel like I won.
I need to cool off for a bit, I am one very unhappy customer 

Jesus Christ
The timing of this is just so uncanny to me. I was already doing the last app/plugin updates for what we have on our community with our current renewal, but we(staff) already silently decided to leave Invision behind going forward and I'd say we made this decision at the perfect time. 
When I joined back in 2017 this community was thriving. Now I come to check and it's quite dead when you take into consideration how many users it has and how many used to be active. I believe the final nail in the coffin for this was when the forum was reorganized and all community content was placed behind a paywall (needing an active license).  It's pretty much a ghost town unless you give someone something to argue about, but I've already given my opinions on this in the past so I won't waste time rehashing.
In the past year alone we have noticed a huge decline in the marketplace with numerous developers leaving and a lot of things becoming abandoned due to low sales and neglect from Invision's part for some of their own apps. I've been worried about this since 2018/19, and my concern just kept growing after each update and policy change. I've slowly realized that this may have not been the best software to use for my type of community, but I knew with the marketplace we could do our best to mold it the way we need it.  That clearly won't be an option for us now when there's only a few developers I trust to buy from and I see them posting about dropping support for apps that we use heavily. (An art site can't exist without a gallery, even though the gallery app is the most atrocious thing and we've spent so much money trying to improve it ourselves.)
I say good luck to those who didn't have plans of leaving before today and also to those who decide to stay due to whatever circumstances. We've put thousands of dollars into this software, but eventually you have to sit down and really think about whether or not taking the loss is worth it in the end if you can do better elsewhere. The lack of transparency while preaching about transparency, the cheesy community manager reply rhetoric, and the subtle gaslighting is just bonkers.

Sorry, but "support" from the community on forums is inherent in free software. When a client pays money, he wants to have a private communication with the support (there can be many reasons for this).

Sorry, but "support" from the community on forums is inherent in free software. When a client pays money, he wants to have a private communication with the support (there can be many reasons for this).

Sorry, but "support" from the community on forums is inherent in free software. When a client pays money, he wants to have a private communication with the support (there can be many reasons for this).

Sorry, but "support" from the community on forums is inherent in free software. When a client pays money, he wants to have a private communication with the support (there can be many reasons for this).

I am concerned that you might think that the feedback is "send an e-mail a few hours before changing the look of your web site (and oh-by-the-way-side-note-pricing-models-for-existing-clients-go-into-effect-immediately-with-no-significant-advance-notice)."
The feedback is that you should have provided notice on revised pricing models, inclusive of what those revised prices would be months before implementing those changes so that organizations could make appropriate changes in their expected operational expenses.
Speaking for our organization, there's no issue with the changes other than you didn't give any notice to revise our operational forecasts and planning, and our renewal is also in November. Thankfully, we have the ability to reallocate funds unexpectedly, yet not all of your customers are in that position, and it's rather poor form for what we consider a partner in our organization's ongoing success.
I receive an e-mail from a streaming video service that their monthly price will go up one dollar with more than a month's notice. It's just inexcusable to have tied this all into throwing a new shade of paint on your sales site.

Kinda funny, the only reason why I have chosen Invision is because of Plugins/Apps from Adriano and DawidPi(I probably have like over 15-20+ of their plugins or so).
I'm not saying Invision is a bad Forum system, but out of the box it just lacks certain features that I really need and feel like they should be implemented by IPS themselves.
The fact that developers with a such a high amount of active apps/regular updates etc. have to pay for their licenses is in my eyes really "dumb".
Yes they earn money from it, but now with this price increase it could be a death blow for a lot of the developers ^^, maybe not instantly but definitely gradually...

If Adriano or DawidPl left this site, I could no longer update my forum to the newest version, which would also make me not renew my license and in the long run 100% move to another platform.
I feel like this will end bad, terrible in the long run.

In 2017 I paid 550$ for this:

Now it's increased near 50%, the renewal went from 190$ to 280$ / year.
For me, the price increase is still bearable, as long as my income from the forum does not drop significantly. But for hobby communities, such prices are probably harder to bear. By the way, these hobbyists are free advertising media for Invision, as they promote their product. Ultimately, new forum operators orientate themselves on the platforms in which they themselves are active. If they disappear from the market, this advertising also disappears. Another very important aspect is the existing add-ons of a forum platform provider, these are and always have been a driving force for a successful community, see vBulletin. Some developers have already spoken out about the price increases. If this price increase causes them to turn away from Invision, this will also lead to lower licence sales in the long term. So this new development could lead to a downward spiral.
I don't understand why developers as important as openfont and Adriano have to pay licence fees at all, because without them Invision would certainly not be where it is now. Without developers, without high quality addons, no customers, to put it bluntly. Just because of a few hundred dollars more revenue you risk losing everything you have built up over the years. This is not a wise decision because the developers are the be-all and end-all of any successful forum platform. 
(translated by DeepL)

Jesus, after updating to version 4.6.6 my forum is super fast. Now the pages open instantly. How did you do that? 🤯👍

«To apply the patch, please visit support in your Admin CP and select the "Optional Update" item shown»

Why doesn't showing online users affect performance in other forum engines? Enabling caching is not a "problem" solution.
Let the forum administrators decide for themselves what affects performance and what doesn't. The Who's Online block must have a separate caching setting to be able to completely disable caching. My current caching setting is 1 minute, but I still get constant complaints from users that they don't see themselves in this block. With caching enabled, this block is absolutely useless and inconvenient (like the "Recently Browsing" block in topics, which now does not display anyone at all).

Happy Hump Day, team! 
We just rolled out 4.6.6 today 🔥 Hats off to our developers for smashing this update out of the park!
The update is available for all. We don't expect for you to run into any issues, but please ensure you have working backups. ™️
Sink your teeth into the goodness:
 
- Upgraded CKEditor to 4.16.2.
- Fixed an issue where it was possible to receive multiple subscription free trials.
- Fixed an issue where creating a member moderator with a visible badge could break the view

- Fixed an issue sending a push notification when a new badge is earned.

- Fixed an issue where `created_externally` flagged accounts may be deleted when awaiting validation, where it may be desirable to keep them.
- Fixed an issue with the AdminCP menu manager not displaying dropdowns in some situations.
- Changed new PayPal subscriptions to not collect previous period charge on next cycle if the previous cycle failed.
- Fixed an issue where the widget data weren't updated while application upgrades.
- Improved online member widgets to show the viewing user when they are not anonymous when the block is cached.
 
Normally I have more to share, but right now myself and the team are hard at work on putting the finishing touches on our website refresh. The update will blow your socks off! 
And hey, while I've got you, check out our new blog post about an update to Clubs and Activity Streams. Stay tuned!
 
 

September 1, 2021
 
Happy Hump Day, team! 
I'm going to keep it brief this week because... we have a new blog post on the way!
This blog post, out Friday, will formally announce a new feature we developed for Activity Streams and a separate one for Clubs. 🤫  
That's all I can say... for now 😏 
In the interim, please check out a list of updates and fixes the developers worked hard on since last week's HD post:
- Fixed the group wait time setting not showing the correct value.
- Changed lost password reset links to be valid for 1 hour.
- Fixed an issue where the new rank mobile notification throws an error
- Fixed an issue where upgrading to a package with a longer initial term would not extend the expiry date.
- Fixed an issue where category edit permissions would override the moderator edit permission.
- Changed lost password reset links to be valid for 1 hour.
- Added support for Argon2id encryption which was added to vB 5.6.2.
- Fixed an issue where content controllers wouldn't find comments that are archived and stored in a separate archive database.
- Fixed an issue where the new rank mobile notification throws an error.
- Removed few occurrences from the 4.6 removed notification sounds setting.
- Fixed an issue re-activating a purchased file if the original invoice or currency does not exist.
- Fixed an issue in the Achievements Rebuild Routine which would result in an exception while the rebuild.
- Fixed an issue where the 'solutions' table on a members profile would not paginate.
- Upgraded CKEditor to 4.16.2.
- Fixed an issue where it was possible to receive multiple subscription free trials.

Speaking of Clubs... if you haven't already, please join our new Health Club. It's a great way to connect with our team and other Invision Community clients in an effort to become better. 
 


See you on Friday when the new blog post goes live! 🎉 
Questions? Comments? Drop us a line in the comments. Happy September!

Why doesn't showing online users affect performance in other forum engines? Enabling caching is not a "problem" solution.
Let the forum administrators decide for themselves what affects performance and what doesn't. The Who's Online block must have a separate caching setting to be able to completely disable caching. My current caching setting is 1 minute, but I still get constant complaints from users that they don't see themselves in this block. With caching enabled, this block is absolutely useless and inconvenient (like the "Recently Browsing" block in topics, which now does not display anyone at all).

With around 2000+ user contributed articles now in Pages this would really help us.
 
➡️ SEO Titles
SEO needs a real look at, the fact that we create categories there should be a way to manage the SEO Title and structure within each category. Right now there's a lot of pointless words being added to the Record Title so it comes up in the Page Title for SEO results.
IE: [Record Title] [Custom Field A-Z] [Category SEO Title] [Database SEO Title]
The ability to customise SEO Titles for a whole database, with the ability to include Custom Fields in to the Title would be brilliant.  We use a lot of pre-defined select lists which would be useful to have those words in to the SEO title.
 
➡️ Table of Contents
Similar to the way Atlassian Confluence achieves this, just an insertable Table of Contents either within writing the article via a Tag or pre-defined through pages.  Either way, we have some long entries that would really benefit from a Table of Contents.
 
➡️ Dependent Custom Fields
Lack of a better way to describe this, however this really is a bit if a pain in some way so the best example I can give is Mobile Phones for example:
Select Box: User Chooses their Manufacturer (ie: Apple)
This brings up a Second Select Box: User chooses their Model: (ie: 12 Pro)
This brings up a Third Select Box: User chooses their Size: (ie: Standard or Max)
This brings up a Fourth Select Box: User chooses their Capacity: (ie: 256GB)
The benefit of having all these select boxes pre-defined and dependent on each other is to be able to achieve the same in the Sort Filters and gradually filter the results from the frontend.