superaven

This makes sense to me, appreciate you explaining that. That being said, I assume a public beta is essentially a final round that may or may night include documentation and likely has some undiscovered bugs that get revealed from a wider and more diverse testing environment. That being said, possible to share your opinion on when we might see a public beta? I understand that it'll likely be made available to Cloud customers first and that it'll be an individual choice as to whether those that opt in, chose to implement on a production install. Documentation is nice, as is being as stable as possible, but hoping to get my foot through that proverbial door as soon as possible. Another nod of appreciation of the hard work that goes into all this.

I suppose I can probably rig this to work. The idea is to have two premium accounts. One that its a modest monthly subscription and the other essentially being the same thing, but billed annually at once. Those that sign up for the annual version would then receive a custom community t-shirt. I suppose it's likely a matter of a custom field to gather shipping details or if that's not possible to add some language into the transactional email with instructions. Would be a lot easier if it was all integrated as it used to be, but I'll make do. Anyhow, I wanted to voice my opinion so you guys were aware of the interest. Shopify is a great solution to a quick, full featured shop, but it's also quite expensive. I already have a Shopify shop, but am currently researching / testing Woocommerce since have the features I want are paid plugins for Shopify that also seem to be developed for WC. I suppose at the end of the day, the $105 or so I pay monthly for Shopify is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, but every little bit helps in this particular situation, a full website with content is almost as important to me as the transactional e-com side of it. Seems to me that, WC is a better solution to that end, but neither are tied into Invision or our community, so it's still a sort of hacked together solution that I can see being prone to mistakes as we copy / paste customer info back and forth. At least there's some solid looking solutions for the help desk feature when it comes to WordPress, though they seem to cost almost as much as most of the dedicated platforms out there.

Sorry... guess I was confused since I was really interested in the physical product and help desk side, both of which were removed. Really wish, they'd bring both those back. Subscriptions is great and obviously ad sales is a no brainer, but I have no use for digital products personally.

Have to say I was super bummed when you guys decided to get rid of the commerce plugin. Stating that in case anyone on your side is second guessing that decision, but yeah. Though there was a major flaw with the help desk (unable to mass select replies beyond single pages, so getting rid of 20k+ spam messages was a nightmare), I did greatly appreciate the help desk feature since it avoided me having to stay on top of an entirely separate platform. Further, I'd been planning to sort of create a strike out version of my online store. Basically a plus to put clearance items and small batch inventory that I felt just sort of cluttered our main online store. Lastly, I was also planning to do a physical product (t-shirt and sticker pack) that was exclusive to our forum as a way to support. So in addition to having a sort of VIP section and subscription to go with it, the idea was to sell an exclusive tee that when purchased, kicked off a subscription. Anyhow, would love to see you guys bring that back, but I think I get why it was phased out. That said, I've largely phased out all plugins already, so that's good. The couple that are left are more for aesthetics than function and not a big deal. I am running a custom theme, but from what I've seen of the new theme and editor, I'm excited to drop that as well. Cool, looking forward to it. I'm on Invision Cloud, so fortunately, not much I need to do as far as technical requirements. 😃

Appreciate the reply, thank you. Other than follow along and engage on the forum, are there any suggestions on what to we could do to potentially ready ourselves? Unsure if there’s ever been a sort of hit list developed both pre upgrade and post upgrade, which might be a good idea if not already done. Suppose it’s a good time to think about content structure and organization, but anything else you might suggest as far as front running some stuff to help community owners get prepared as we wait?

Great question and great answer on the last two posts. Just curious since I can't keep from holding my breath and speculating further... @Matt what is the standard timeline once things hit Beta? I know it likely is no accurate indication of the timeline on this particular project, but in the past, on full point releases... How long and complicated is the Beta segment of the development cycle on average? Would you mind explaining / outlining what that process is like for you guys?

I probably check into this thread 3x a day, most days as well as the news section... Anyhow, just popping my head up to say hello and mention the obvious about everyone being super freakin excited and waiting with bated breath. Can't wait to play with this new version nd very, very much looking forward to being able to run it.

Wondering if the staff has any issues with those that are running the alpha to share links to their test boards? Obviously the selection of those selected to is limited, but is there a reason to exclude the rest of us from being able to poke around on the test boards of those selected for the program? Would seem to me that it would benefit everyone to have a second tier of testers where members of the community jump on some of these boards, play and report into those that were selected so that they can in turn distill feedback and activity to report back to Invision?

Wasn't going to raise my hand with testing since I was the guy that rarely got picked for team sports or am the type to win sweepstakes or contests, but I'd love to test. In fact, I'd be happy to help someone else who gets picked test if that's an option. I'm just eager to take it for a spin and understand the new system and features and get a feel for how I might be able to make the most of it all. That said, we are now on a cloud subscription and was planning to upgrade to the next tear shortly after upgrading. I've also been running a forum since 1999, with most of the years being on Invision if that helps anyone qualify the decision to pick us to test. Just sayin'... Either way, I can't wait until we can relaunch with the new version and anything I can do to help with that - sign me up.

Don't think it really has any ethical or legal consequence. To your point, @Jim M, we aren't charging them anything. We're just migrating them over to a new group at no cost so we aren't running a legacy premium group and a new premium group built via subscriptions. I have no payment details for any of those users, so there would be no way for me to take payment, even down the road if the subscription expires. Anyhow, there's probably a few hundred I'd need to manually add. Pain, but not a huge deal to add them one by one. I am sort of surprised that this isn't somehow included as function of mass managing users and groups though. I know it's something that is supposed to be set and forget, but I've found myself adjusting and fine tuning privileges, groups and forum permissions often enough that having flexible tools to do them in bulk is a huge help.

Perhaps something to consider in the future? Assume I can manually enter them one by one, so will try that way. In any case, thanks for the info!

Hey, so perhaps a dumb question, but I'm setting up Subscriptions on my forum and it's been a super long while. Wanted to get clarification before I bork something and create issues. I have a user group, called "premium" to allow access to a private section of our forum, as well as unlimited uploads. Over the years, we just gave those to people that contributed consistently, but now I'd like to create a paid subscription for it. I have several hundred members that either have this as a primary user group, as well as a bunch that have this as a secondary group. My question is how do I go about searching all my members (appx 183k) and anyone that has a primary or secondary group = "premium" gets reset as a normal member and then added to premium through subscriptions. I created a premium monthly subscription and a premium annual subscription. My goal is that they are all reset so that primary user group is "premium" and they are added to the "premium annual" subscription plan. Anyhow, I searched the docs but am not quite clear on the solution. Thanks in advance.

Wondering if maybe there's light at the end of the tunnel yet? Unsure how development cycles like this work, but guessing if development and testing on v5 isn't winding down, we might not see it in May either. Anyhow, holding my breath for some news, if not a release announcement soon. 🙏

Originally I had heard March as a tentative release date and as that drew to a close, I read April. Would be awesome to get more regular updates, but I can understands if it gets frustrating for the staff when dates slip and people respond poorly to that delay. Hoping to see some updates soon!

@Matt @Matt Finger accurate?