Miss_B

We did that three years ago in a genuine attempt to increase sales and viability. It helped for a short while but the trend didn’t hold. 

I hear you 100% but we are not the arbiters of human habits, we just respond to them.
There are loads of old forums still busy but the bulk of those members and that content was generated a decade ago and they are kept alive by an older member base and probably good authority with Google bringing people in for short transactional exchanges.
We have a responsibility to you and our other customers to keep driving forward, it is pretty relentless. The worst thing we could do is just continue doing the same things and we lose marketshare and your community stagnates and goes into a slow decline.
Communities are more complex than a basic forum and very few have the patience to click loads of links in the hopes of having good content to read.
v5 will help with transactional content (I need an answer to this problem) and more social content (Lets discuss Thing) as well as content discovery.

Very well said. Another reason imo to always keep up to date with the latest versions of whatever scripts one is running on their server, is formost security and bug fixes. 

v5 is a significant step forward for UI, discovery, noise versus signal and brand matching. Change is hard but it is kind of inevitable.
If nothing changed, then we'd still be using this:

And while you could absolutely run a successful community on that product even now, the chances of attracting new members would be low given the expectations modern audiences have for UI and ease of use.

☀️ Welcome to this week's Invision Community Insight! ☀️
Thank you for checking out our weekly, round up post. I hope you have had a wonderful week. Below are a few announcements to bring to your attention. 
 
Current Happenings
For our Cloud customers, I did want to draw your attention to our post: Changes to traffic control. Please ask any questions that you have there. 
 
Our Marketplace Closure announcement was posted this week. We will follow up with more information.
 
On Deck
We have postponed our next release a bit which now makes it our September Release. Spam Improvements and bug fixes are to be expected. You can check out our Spam Improvements Blog for more information. 
Changelog
With that said, changes for version 4 are limited for now but for those that like to see what we are up to line by line, here is the changelog for the week for version 4. 
 
 

Yes, the design will not only look different but the way you do themes will be very different. We're pretty close to starting our public v5 blogs/teasers.

I feel you may want to re-read the above. There are no claims anyone has done such as thing that I have read in this topic. Someone has asked about what security precautions they can use on their site when using items that are developed by someone other than Invision.  I'm sure as a developer yourself, you appreciate the importance of someone thinking about the security of their site?

Done, thanks.
 

That is something that will require custom coding/manual file edits as it can't be done with the builtd in options a.f.a.i.k.

No. Just because a feature request is popular, it doesn't mean that it's right for the product, will enhance the community experience for community members and move the product forward.

It is also unfair to have the product guided by a small number of customers that visit the forums and take time to comment on feature requests. The forum does not record the hundreds of conversations we have with other clients over email, regular meetings and so on.

We try and account for most things but more often than not what is suggested in feedback is generally minor tinkering around the edges when more bold action is often needed. That is not to say that we do not read every topic and discuss most of them. Quite often a popular request that we hear over and over makes its way into the software but perhaps not in the way that the topic author described.
I completely understand this feeling. The last six months or so have been a pretty dark timeline of mostly negative news, especially for self-hosted customers. The introduction of cloud exclusive features, talks of falling profitability for self hosted license sales, a long list of deprecated features people use, v5 dev tools overhaul, the marketplace closing - it's been a lot and we recognise that.
Now that the bad stuff is out of the way, we can start talking about v5 and there is a lot of fun stuff to get into. Invision Community 5 is a new chapter for the product and us as a company. A more streamlined and focused operation fit for the next decade of community building.

Your best option would be to reach out to a 3rd party who provides services for upgrading these kinds of sites. If you take a look here, there are quite a few providing this
https://invisioncommunity.com/third-party/providers-directory/

Somehow I had missed this post. Are you still interested in funding the developement of the aforementioned extra options?

Luckily we are the experts in seeing usage trends 😉
Trust me. You have no idea how many problematic things we prevented from being published in the Marketplace over the years.
PSA: you might want to use multi-quote when doing many replies 🙂 

@Miss_B: I'm willing to help develop this further. Maybe you could increase the price for new purchases to make it mutually beneficial.
I only want to use the benefits of this if they are available for all customers, both existing and future ones. I don't want a version that is exclusive to me. If you're willing to discuss this, I will outline the suggestions below, and we can potentially take this further from there.
Ability to edit sessions Option to make the session reoccur daily Ability to fine tune the time in which the member visits, so being able to set the time(s) per weekly days. Compatibility with who was online in the last 24 hours.  Hopefully this, in turn, would improve the application for all and generate a positive reaction. I get that you need to make a living, and that every dev is different. This is why I am hoping to work out a solution which works for you, me and that benefits the 33 other purchases. What do you think?

I suspect you are also on PHP 7 there, so its very unlikely you are going to be able to run from the adminCP. As mentioned, you would need to upgrade manually. Essentially you would be doing the following from your current version
Backup everything. 
  Check your 3rd party items are compatible with the latest release. If they are not, you would need to update or remove
  Ensure you site is running PHP 8 (that will render your site broken, as your current version isnt compatible. Dont worry it will be back online once you have upgraded)
  Upload a fresh set of files from your client area
  Run the upgrader from /admin/upgrade

All good 🙂 Always best to ask and be incorrect, than not to ask and get caught out. Will close this for you

There is no such option build in the software a.f.a.i.k. This will require a custom application.

Thanks. I will give that a try and revert. Much much appreciated!!

In that case it means that your database doesn't have a defined prefix.
For forums it is called: forums_forums,  and for members:  core_members. Hope it helps.

I think that it will benefit you greatly. Seeing your recent topics here where you have to deal with several issues, if you move to the cloud those problems will be a thing of the past.
 
The biggesest adavantage for you will be that you will not have to deal with the tech side of things anymore, but concentrate on building and managing your community. Not to mention the security and the reliability. In short you will have piece of mind.
Regarding disadvantages I don't see any at all. 

I think that it will benefit you greatly. Seeing your recent topics here where you have to deal with several issues, if you move to the cloud those problems will be a thing of the past.
 
The biggesest adavantage for you will be that you will not have to deal with the tech side of things anymore, but concentrate on building and managing your community. Not to mention the security and the reliability. In short you will have piece of mind.
Regarding disadvantages I don't see any at all. 

My goal is to provide a listing directory to make it easy for developers to list their apps.
A directory will provide visibility, scale, and ease for everyone to visit.  
Developers will handle payments and support on their own.  

Glad to see that your site is back online. 
With the above, I would advise the first thing you do is to check each to ensure they are up to date, before you start enabling them. Having so many, its very likely you will hit an issue at some point. If you do and cant get back to the ACP you can use recovery mode to get back to the ACP at any point
https://invisioncommunity.com/4guides/welcome/getting-support-r292/
 
Its worth also reviewing what you did to get to this point, just to save you having the same problems again in the future, as I do understand it can be very frustrating
Ensure you are up to date as releases come out. This will prevent these kinds of issues from occurring as much. In this instance, an app scanner was added in earlier versions where switch to PHP 8 was nessesary, and this version was compatible with both PHP 7 and PHP 8. So it would have told you there was an issue prior to upgrading. Unfortunately, because you had never upgraded, you never got the app scanner before it was too late.
  Ensure your 3rd party items are up to date at all times. This is just as important if you are going to use them, as it is keeping the main applications up to date. Many are likely to have released versions compatible with PHP 8 since the versions you have
  Use 3rd party items sparingly - If you have 50 3rd party applications, I would really go through those and see if you need them. 50 is a lot for any site
  The support area of your admin CP, will more than often be correct. It stated there that your files were out of date. You resolved this by uploading the files again and running the upgrader. 
  If you have uploaded files, you would always need to have run the upgrader.  
Not a dig in any way. Just trying to help you to understand where you have gone wrong, so you can prevent yourself the frustration in the future 🙂 
 
 

I understand where you're coming from; it was indeed a tough decision. There is also, however, the side of the Marketplace that we've kept largely to ourselves and that is the costs associated with operating it. Many assume this has been an additional revenue stream for IPS, but the reality is, it has never even broken even. To explain why and in the spirit of transparency, let's use the example of a basic $5 plugin purchase; with our 10% commission, minus transaction fees, etc. we net virtually nothing, but we assume all the risk. This means, if someone decides they're unhappy with a resource (even though we have an all sales final policy), or uses a fraudulent payment method and a chargeback is performed resulting in us losing that dispute, we pay a $15-20 fee--the author is not charged this fee and usually retains the proceeds from the original sale. It takes dozens and dozens of sales of that single resource to break even on that one transaction. Multiply that by countless chargebacks and incidents of fraud in addition to the immense development time required to review resources, the administrative time to handle customer vs developer disputes, support overhead, payout fees, etc. the Marketplace actually costs us a significant amount to provide and maintain.
The costs have actually exponentially increased as the use of the Marketplace has decreased. Previously, there were more good sales to help lessen the blow of the bad sales, however, with a 75% decline in usage over recent years, the volume is simply no longer there, so the losses are subsequently no longer sustainable, even if we were to triple our commission rates, which would only hurt us and the resource authors. On a scale of full app stores such as Apple, Google, Steam, etc. you have enough volume to chase the bad with good and the numbers add up. We are, of course, not Apple. 
As has been said, the vast majority of our customers today appear to either prefer their installation to be "stock" or to have custom development performed by third party providers. The top three Marketplace resources are currently installed on only 2% of communities (that report statistics to us, to be clear). I know how easy we've made it for those who like lots of tweaks and resources and we hope you will continue to enjoy these resources, but unfortunately, we can no longer prop up and absorb the losses of a declining ecosystem. I fully meant what I said in the original announcement - we are excited to be able to redirecting the resources expended in supporting the Marketplace towards improving the platform on the whole and creating new opportunities for motivated third party developers to connect with interested customers for custom development, integrations, services and yes, premade resources. 
For those that are active in third party resource utilization, I'm very encouraged by and grateful to @Joel R for his interest and commitment to bringing our loyal third party contributor community together again in a way that provides them more freedom and opportunities.

So I just looked at the Provider Directory and visited their links. Some of them only do custom work. Some of them have some work to do on their sites. But your regular marketplace contributors like @opentype @Adriano Faria @Miss_B all have very well developed Marketplaces of their own on their respective sites. 
I could care less if I am getting a 3rd party app/plugin or theme from outside the marketplace, but it was nice to have a one stop shop to search for what's available.
I was thinking of the exact same thing but you beat me to it. 😉