Pjo

Matt, i think I'm also not wrong if i say that not many community platforms are cutting down features from the self hosted clients.
I know your official stance is that there are no plans to shutdown the self hosted clients, but the reality is that it seems so.
There is no single reason to make trending content exclusive to the more expensive cloud plans, besides trying to force your clients to move to the cloud. That's the only reason.

Of course if all significant new features are 'cloud only' why pay a license fee at all? Fixing bugs should not incur a fee.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

This new feature sounds great, but IPS are already missing many stuff that message system needed to have.
The system doesn't show or notify you how much is your quota storage or how many is left like it shows for Admin in the ACP for Members.  Members doesn't receive a notification or a warning whenever their inbox is full or almost close to be full. Members doesn't receive a notification whenever someone leaves the conversation. Hopefully you guys listen because what I mentioned must have them in the message system. 

lol - they kill the ones I like and never do the obvious ones I'd love to see internaled.
Ce' la vie and so on and so forth.

I think I like that decision (not sure yet), but I expect people to ask what to do for points. At the moment, when you click on the dropdown menu in the top right corner to go to your profile, settings etc., you see a very prominent bar, which indicates the progress towards the next rank. RIght below that it says "X points until your next rank".
Maybe a site displaying what do to for points isn't the worst idea?
It could be optional (an option to turn it on/off). And/or: Badges could have an additional option to show/hide the point logic on said site. Then the user can decide which rule/badge to reveal.

Some questions:
Will community owners be able to select the default push notification for new members, similar to default notifications?  When users login and are prompted to accept notifications, I'd like to recommend that IPS adds a 'recommended' tag to the default selection.  This will give communities the greatest chance of engagement (or no engagement, whatever floats your boat). 

Any option to bulk send push or it is only tied to notifications?

Looks nice, but I'm completely satisfied with the current ACP theme. 🙂

@Matt On deletion of members: 
Could there be an option to define the name to attribute to on that page directly? So we could input for example "Member 3312" (where 3312 would be their memberId). This will keep the discussion still somewhat reader friendly, so it would still be possible to differentiate different accounts as having written in the discussion, for readers reading old content. 
Alternatively let the Anonymize attribution do a md5 hash on the (memberId+some community specific value that is unlikely to be changed) and grab the first 8 letters or something.