After about 15 minutes of scrolling through and peeking at other topics I found it. For anyone else looking:
https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/461760-has-member-title-been-removed/
Marc,
In my other life I am a software PM who also works with clients directly. I say this to communicate that I 100% understand the problems of feature creep; I understand that you can't satisfy everyone all of the time. Compromises have to be made. And I understand how hard it can be to deal with customers who just want what they want, and don't see all the work going on under the hood, or the reasons why certain features can't co-exist.
But there is still a line between making compromises to achieve good releases (which is necessary!) and ignoring customer feedback entirely (which is ultimately counterproductive).
In reading threads here, a few things pop out that concern me, and make it feel (rightly or wrongly! -- but this feedback is about the impression Invision is giving off) that Invision would rather "paint the roses red" than provide good service to its existing customers:
- the fact that issues are marked "resolved" when they are replied to, rather than when the issue has actually been resolved
- the fact that there is a rule banning user plug-ins that replace functionality (however popular) that Invision has removed
- the developer replies...
At best, the developer replies are what you put here - "Thank you for your feedback." This is a good way to respond to unreasonable customers (I guess it feels like my feedback is unreasonable!). More frequently, they are dismissive and defensive. Nobody ever says "I hear you guys, we're going to give this a think." I see devs accusing users of lying or inflating situations they have encountered. This is not a good faith customer relationship! It seems like Invision begins with the presumption that all customer feedback is unreasonable or wrong, and you just have to make us understand why.
Despite all the comments in the other thread explaining how much people and their members were invested in text ranks and custom titles, the existing ways to use them were removed. Using text ranks can now only be done with manual CSS edits -- if somebody made a plug-in for it, it wouldn't even be allowed to be shared here! Custom titles can sort of be retained using a combination of settings, but the display is now tied to other profile fields as well, and frankly, if you enable them using that method, the display is pretty ugly. Again, manual CSS edits are required to preserve the old functionality.
Although I appreciate that you guys at least did preserve existing data in response to the customer feedback... it's insane that feedback was required, for you not to obliterate user data. And all of this feedback was given PRIOR to the rollout... and all the popular functionality was still removed. I know (believe me I know!) that sometimes things are more complicated to implement than they appear, but we're literally talking about a toggle, a conditional statement, and a small patch of (existing) CSS.
Respectfully, I think there may be room for improvement in your user testing process, and maybe your development timelines, given the data obliteration issue you narrowly avoided, and the Invision responds to paying customer feedback. It just doesn't make any sense. And your customers deserve better. There are reasons we choose IPB (and obviously I'm still choosing it or I wouldn't be posting here 🙂 ) but it isn't the only option, and the approach I see on these forums makes me feel a lot more lukewarm about it.
Sincerely, constructively, and in good faith,
-slarrr
