Matt

The only place we keep the raw file contents in a table is in theme resources, elsewhere it's fine. We chunk uploads and they get sent straight to disk/S3.

Haha, sorry - I've been on planning calls today and I don't think there's time to run through the open PRs, build and test before my end of day. It'll either be a lot later today, or tomorrow morning.

It took a while to figure out, and yeah it was just a few lines of code in the end.

Fixed in the next beta.

Looking now.

Probably tomorrow.

Ok, update your license with your FTP and ACP and we'll have to add some debugging and upload a new version and see what is going on.

I see one broken image, is that normal for when this happens? We'll probably need FTP and ACP. Can you update your client area with those details? Thanks.

Is this broken now? Yeah, we have no idea. @Adriano Faria let us know when its in a broken state again and let us take a look before editing/fixing the broken files.

I think Esther may be onto something locally.

I can't reproduce this either, and I've really tried. Next time it happens, please let us know ASAP (mmecham@invisionpower.com) or DM and I'll take a look at your site before your restore the screenshots to see what may be going on. From what I can gather, the template does have an <img> tag, but the image URL no longer exists, yet all the uploaded images are still attached to the record, so I'm really unsure what is going on.

Thanks Day! Let me know where to send the money. I have two briefcases and the combination on both is 1337. I like the car analogy. I have a Tesla Model Y, and it doesn't have full auto-driving because I didn't pay for it. I don't see that as a missing feature though. I think a lot of that thinking is just down to our legacy of having a single product for all. And don't worry, I love what I do and I'm genuinely thankful that I get to do it. The only constant in life is change, and we've had to change and adapt over the years. Some use it as a stick to beat us with but without adapting we'd have vanished years ago.

There's no need for apologies for this topic. It's better to air concerns and have a discussion than let the fester in the dark. I appreciate your custom and sticking with us. Our primary aim is to safeguard the future of Invision Community, not just for those that work here but for the thousands of communities that rely on us to keep delivering updates and new features to help keep their communities active. It means making tough decisions at times, and these aren't always popular but they really do help secure a future. The most profitable model possible was the one we had 15 years ago when we were selling hundreds of licenses a month at $149.99 a go and our only costs were answering support tickets. Our monthly AWS bill is quite frankly a hate crime.

I think I answered this fairly comprehensively in my post above. Much appreciated. Most customers are fine and topics like these are just concerned customers voicing their thoughts which is fair and reasonable.

I used an artist on Fiverr, I can DM you the link if you'd like.

Ok, we still have plans in that direction, but not everything will get into 5.0.0. I genuinely do not think there is a market for a $1500 self-hosted option outside of enterprise which often have needs way beyond hosting things themselves and the cost to run that size of community means we're probably much more cost-effective just to host it anyway. We have more knowledge and experience with our platform and the resources it needs.

But we risk spending 150 cents to make that dollar by doing that.

Yes, it is technically possible but doesn't fit with our business plan. To do that would mean you'd need to be very rigid with the type of host. We'd also have to completely re-tool those features already written to work with that droplet/docker image. We'd also not really be able to make it profitable given the number of people willing to host things themselves. There are very few self-hosting only community platforms left. There is a reason for this. I don't remember this being discussed as something on our roadmap specifically. There was a notion of doing more to monetise communities around the start of v5. Yes, I addressed that in my post but a shorter version is that discussion around self-hosting licenses and not getting features is toxic and dominates any feedback we get from a small minority. We didn't want to make announcements about that until we were very sure about it. We are still in the early stages of beta testing.

Live community features, and the topic summary feature relies on our own cloud platform. The topic summary is actually pretty clever in that our cloud platform pulls data directly from the database outside of the software and runs the whole thing through a custom algorithm written in python to calculate a score for each post. It then updates the database. This isn't run via tasks or cron it's run via our own queuing system on cloud. Topic assignments is likely to be added to the business tier and all those above. We are no different from others selling services that restrict some features to higher plans. In the past, plans were based around storage GB and bandwidth but that's rarely the case now. Tiers are now based on feature sets. I know it can be uncomfortable to talk about the cold realities of running a business, but the landscape has changed for community platforms. We feel that relaunching self-hosted with the Classic license has allowed self-hosting to remain viable for the life of v5. That doesn't mean it won't be the case for whatever comes after, it just means that no one internally is even thinking about v6, let alone making plans for it. I can't give you a cast iron guarantee of something that may not exist. Who knows where we'll be in five years time. In 2024 to date, cloud represents 86% of our income. Without Cloud, Invision Community would not be here, or at least not as we know it now. By having a profitable model, we can still provide a self-hosted option which just about breaks even or makes a small loss depending on how many bugs us developers add in. We are happy with this. Hopefully you are happy with this. We have committed to this model. But it does mean that there will be a divergence in feature sets. Partly because it's hard to build modern features with just PHP and MySQL and partly a business decision to entice people up the tiers. We could create a docker image with node, etc and be incredibly rigid with hosting environments to the point only a few hosts are supported with droplets, etc. But that would decimate our self-hosting customer base with most not being able to run the required servers, or not having the knowledge to set it up and it would decimate our cloud business by offering the same functionality but elsewhere. That's the business stuff, let's move on to transparency. Part of the discourse around self-hosting versus cloud (even though we never frame it like this) is toxic. There is a small but incredibly vocal minority that refuse to accept that they cannot get every single feature we write and drag every feature release blog down with negativity, angry posting about cloud's existence, and accusations of 'money grabbing' (you are very welcome to pay our AWS bill). This can be hard to handle in a public forum. We have two options; endlessly have the same conversations or hide/block/ban posts and people which then comes across as thin-skinned and unable to take criticism. Ahrefs does not have the problem that we have. Their customers are all 'cloud' customers and they're used to not getting all the features, so to say "yeah we'll test it in beta but you might not get it" will not be met with (much) anger and resentment that we seem to get when we mention "cloud only". This has been ongoing for years and is the reason why we heavily moderate comments on our blog posts. You don't get to see a lot of the rage posting because we never approve it. But it's there. It's always there. With v5, live topics, live community and topic summary were only ever going to be cloud only due to the underlying technology. Two out of three of those already exist on cloud so should come as no surprise that they remain so. The other features we were undecided. From our point of view, everything is a tier. We could bring topic assignments to Classic, but then it would mean that we'd need to bring it to all cloud tiers. Which means that there's little incentive to pay for a higher tier level. We could have said "this feature may be on a higher tier than classic" on the blog announcement but it would only invite more toxicity and more anger from this minority group. We wanted to wait until we had it decided. And part of that decision was based on how it went over during the alpha and beta stages. When we create a feature, we never truly know how it'll shape up, or even if we'll keep it; more true during the early stages. Now we're in the beta stages, we have a firmer idea of its usefulness and future direction and are more able to make those decisions. That's the honest truth. There is no conspiracy. We have customers who run large enterprise communities testing these same features and offering input too. We could have done better for sure. But it's a really tight line we're trying to walk on between informing customers about where possible features may end up without instigating another round of self-hosted versus cloud which is draining quite honestly. Not to mention demoralising for our team who proudly present their work and a good portion of the feedback is on why self-hosted licenses aren't getting it. But moving back to features, if you look at the volume of work that has gone into v5 and all the good stuff that's been added, it really is a very small percentage of features that will not make it to every single product tier we offer. As always, we may not be perfect, but we're here and talking about it.

No features have been removed. You may have been testing a cloud demo site and then self hosting, perhaps.

I’ll do my best to address the points raised. ”I thought the Classic license meant I got everything?” The Classic license no longer allows a “pick and mix” kind of approach to our apps. It now means that there is only one purchase option, and that comes with all apps (Pages, Commerce, etc). In the past, we allowed the purchase of, for example, forum and blogs at a cheaper rate that purchasing all apps together. “Why are you removing features?” I think the key point here, and the source for some confusion is that in the past we’ve sold blocks of features as ‘apps’ and charged more for those apps. Now we’re selling blocks of features as package tiers. With Invision Community 5, we won’t create a new app, but rather introduce new features and consider where they go on the package tier. We do consider the Classic license as part of that tier, and when you consider the cost gap between the Classic license over the course of the year, and the price of the higher tiers, it should be the case that there is a feature disparity between them. We are no different from almost every other vendor. For example, Ahrefs offer a ‘lite’ package at $99/month and an advanced package at $359/month which offers much more. It would be disingenuous to wrap up all the concerns as merely not understanding pricing tiers because the real friction comes from our legacy of being a self-hosted first company and “them versus us” feeling between self-hosted and cloud packages. It’s something we continue to juggle. In terms of transparency, I feel that we are as much as possible. At this point we genuinely do not have a fixed idea of where some of the newer features will sit, but we are talking about a very small percentage of features (topic assignments, topic summaries, etc) when you consider the significant update that v5 is with it’s new theme editor, page editor, updated UI, etc. None of that is being moved to higher product tiers. We’ll get you a full list as soon as we can.

There's a lot for your members to love with Invision Community 5, and we recently covered five of the best features. Today, I want to discuss five features your team will love. One of the main concepts for Invision Community 5 was to reduce the complexity of power-user tools like theming and page building. These functions had been built around those with deep technical and coding knowledge, locking out many community teams. We also wanted to build new tools to help busy community teams organise, moderate and identify trusted members. Did we achieve that? Let's look at five new features we think your team will love in Invision Community 5. The new theme editor I can't describe how much I love the new theme editor. It is everything we wanted for Invision Community 5 and more. Now, anyone can manage their theme without needing to be knowledgeable in HTML and CSS. There's so much to discuss, so it's best to head over to the news article we put together. From an easier way to select colours and drag-and-drop header arrangements to simpler ways to upload logos and preview your community on tablets and mobiles, the theme editor puts all the power and complexity of managing themes into the hands of your community team. The editor, combined with the new views, such as the feed view for forums, article-like featured first post in topics, and the new sidebar view, Invision Community 5, really does take things to the next level. The new page editor We've taken the concepts of drag-and-drop widgets to a higher level with Invision Community 5. You no longer need to create custom blocks using HTML and CSS to produce fantastic custom pages. With the new page editor, you can access a library of pre-built widgets with multiple view options, such as grids, rows, and carousels. Coupled with the power of Pages databases, you can quickly build custom pages to showcase the best content from your community. Jimi, a valued customer, recently created a walkthrough video showcasing the new theme and page editors. It is a must-watch to experience the system's power. Assign topics Getting the right help to your members at the right time can take time and effort. Pairing a community question with the expertise of specific team members can require some manual overhead with external systems. It can also be difficult to hold your team accountable, ensure they are answering questions in good time, and get an overview of their assignments. These issues are fixed in Invision Community 5 with the topic assignments feature. You can assign a topic to a specific member of your team or a group of members. You also have complete oversight on the volume and time required to reply to your entire team. It's a great feature that helps keep your community running smoothly. Badge creator and icon picker This feature is a dark horse. At first glance, it looks like a nice feature, but perhaps it is something that you may not use. However, I believe this is a feature your team will love. There are many areas where you may need custom graphics. We have rank badges, one-off celebration badges, custom reactions and more. In the past, you'd have been required to do this with apps like Illustrator or Photoshop and import them back in. As part of our vision to bring power tools to everyone, we built a badge creator that allows you to combine over 1,700 icons and hundreds of emojis with badge backgrounds to quickly create custom badges and reaction icons. It really only takes a few minutes to create all the custom graphics your community needs. In addition, there are now many areas, such as menu items, where you can use icons and emoji to enrich your user experience. Who doesn't love the ability to create badges without needing a designer? Community Experts Community experts are vital to the well-being of any community. The Pareto principle holds true in your community. Twenty percent of your members create eighty percent of the interactions across your community, but featuring those members to newer users can be difficult. In the past, we've relied on metrics such as the date they joined and the number of posts they've made, but these celebrate longevity but not expertise. Invision Community 5 uses a bespoke algorithm to identify and feature experts based on the speed, accuracy and helpfulness of their responses. This not only celebrates those members with an exclusive badge and notification, but it also helps other users identify those community leaders who are more likely to help them and guide them through their journey with you. We think your team will love that Invision Community 5 identifies these members for you and allows them to help lead your community. I could have easily written about ten features your team will love, but these are my top five. Do you agree? Which features are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments. View full blog entry

We are working on a branch with some changes to the toolbar which should help.