Matt

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.

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.

We don't want to say too much for obvious reasons, but we use a mixture of sources to determine spam accounts and disposable email addresses.

To be clear, we are not closing down third party development, in fact we are developing new tools for v5 to make some areas easier to add functionality to. This announcement is that we are no longer listing items and facilitating sales directly on our site.

Cheers, moved to our issue tracker.

Ryan and the team have done a fantastic job with these new tools and I'm really keen to see how they help in the current spam wave we're all experiencing.

If I was a new developer trying to gain trust, I'd spend some time in the community being helpful and getting to know people. You can quite quickly gain trust this way and then start to offer your services and products.

Most cloud packages can already use external uploads outside of marketplace. We'll remove the limitation for the others.

Yes, we have that functionality already built in and it can still be used assuming the developers have entered the correct URL and have the ability to check for updates. That's correct, you'll go through to the developer's own site. It's likely that you have more than just one modification from a single developer, so it may be less. Some of the developers are talking about forming a new site with a listing, so it may be somewhat centralised if they go ahead.

UI Extensions part 3 of 3 and AMA (sort of!)

It's mostly focused around post-registration content detection.

UI Extensions part 2 of 3:

Definitely. The CSS framework has been rebuilt, and light/dark mode is at the core - it's not an afterthought.

In @Ehren we trust.

As always, keep calm and talk to us if it’s unclear. We are here every day.

Happily, this isn't the case, and marketplace sales have declined by 75% over the past few years showing that sales are not on the strength of after-market add-ons.

Most of those successful companies have taken millions in VC funding so they can pay people until some point in the future they start making a profit.

Considered and decided against it faster than a quantum computer could have managed it.

Esther is probably the most trusted name in that space, so we do indeed have that covered.

Already in v5. I think the sensible thing to do is wait for all the news of v5 to come out and then make an informed decision on your future. Trying to extrapolate v5 from a few dev blogs may lead to rash decisions. I'd love to keep you as a customer, but if you do wish to move to xF then on the plus side you won't need to worry about new versions and there being significant changes in your future. 😄

That is correct, you can add, but you cannot remove or modify existing data. We do have a limited template front-end hook system (yet to be blogged) but that again does not have a replace option.

What do you need to do that custom profile fields can't do?

What other forms do you want extended? We did discuss internally the registration form where custom profile fields aren't powerful enough (in that there requires some PHP/SQL processing of input data).

Oops, it was still set to hidden. Fixed! When downloading Invision Community?