Matt

It's nothing to worry about, it's just Cloudflare, however we will make sure that URL is excluded by the default robots.txt in the next release.

We're going to restore that functionality in 5.0.4.

No, we're not on a mission to remove Ajax, we use it a lot. Removing the polling from topic view was because in most cases it never fired correctly, was inefficient and in most cases people don't tend to stay on a topic page for long enough to see it.

It's all good, I just didn't want disappointment that we've not added anything major. We have lots of thoughts about what to add though, so keep on telling us what you need.

Just to set expectations, 5.0.4 is very much a maintenance release. The reason for the extended time is just to merge in and test some larger code changes that we've put aside previously.

I think we've lost a bit of sight on what constitutes value, and it is not tied to the number of features. Features themselves are just bits of functionality, and random functionality won't help a community grow. The value is derived from the whole; how it all goes together and the opportunities the platform can offer. We've added a lot of new value with Invision Community 5 in terms of putting the power in your hands with the theme editor, page editor and so on. These are not trivial changes and have transformed how you build content around a community.

We do care about our customers, but we also understand we're not going to take everyone with us on the direction we're headed. And to be clear, we've not thrown a dart into a map, we've made decisions based on our knowledge of the market, and how communities work. The truth is that there is no future for a business selling just a forum. There are plenty of successful forum-only websites, but those are in the minority and shrinking and not enough to sustain a business without accepting that it will get smaller and smaller until it winks out. There is a good future for independent and brand communities but you need to leverage articles, databases, possibly galleries and more to build something up and to keep people coming back. I know you said that you don't need those apps, but I wonder if you really tested them and thought about your community design if they would actually come in useful for you and help you grow your community. We're not forcing people to trade in their family saloon for a Lear Jet, the change isn't that significant. In terms of renewals, those with all apps currently save money and those who don't will see a price increase but the $17 a month isn't an unreasonable price to pay for all the functionality you get. Of course, it's not for me to lecture you on where your breaking point is on payments and I understand that going from $7 a month to $17 is a jump but within that jump are opportunities. Finally, no one is going to force you to switch to v5. At some point v4 will be deprecated and will no longer be updated and it will become harder and harder to host it on a maximum of PHP 8.1 so that is when you either move to v5 or choose one of the many other options available. That statement doesn't mean I don't care, it just means I'm realistic. I can't offer you a product that we don't have anymore. I certainly hope you check out v5 and have a good evaluation of all the features. I'm always here for advice or feedback, as is the rest of the team.

I'll take a look tomorrow.

I've thought about this a bit and although it sounds simple enough to add another box to accept a 'human name', it's quite complex in terms of adjusting the UI, and for most people most of the time they wouldn't really need to add anything as the software has a good go at figuring it out. I ended up with this, which is an easy way to quickly edit the names of the downloads and doesn't require a lot of reworking. CleanShot 2025-02-27 at 17.18.32.mp4

Tagging @Ehren for his consideration.

I spent ages debugging locally and could see the notification was accepted by the Chrome endpoint and then someone in Slack said "check your OS notification settings" and it was toggled off. We're going to add a little "Not getting browser notifications?" with a link to a page on this site explaining how to check OS permissions too as it's not always obvious.

I've done a lot of debugging locally, and they are now working for me on Chrome and MacOS. The issue for was that while I had Chrome set up to accept notifications, I had them off at OS level. Toggling this on did the trick. If they're not working for you, and notifications in MacOS are already on, then I would probably do a hard reload to ensure you've got the latest version of the service worker installed in your browser.

If we did it for v5, then we could back port it to v5 but it would mean rewriting templates, CSS and some JS to adjust for the different frameworks, then it will need beta testing and then maintaining. Committing resources to that would mean taking away from other work elsewhere.

They do work for me, it's worth ensuring you have't silenced notifications from this site, either via the browser or your OS.

It'll be v5 only. It's unlikely we'll bring many more major features to v4. We want to focus all our efforts on v5.