Matt

The self hosted version ($499) comes with clubs and achievements (as well as forums, gallery, Pages, commerce, downloads, calendar, etc). More information here: https://invisioncommunity.com/buy/self-hosted/

You can renew at any point 24 months after purchase and retain support and access to upgrades. After that 24 month period, assuming that you do not renew you can continue using your Invision Community without any issues. You will however no longer have access to support and updates. If you wish to upgrade in the future you can purchase a new license. Please do keep in mind that we do not tie our licenses to specific versions; it's not abnormal to ask for a new license payment for each major version in the world of licensed software which would mean that you'd have had to pay for v1, v2, v3, etc. We offer regular updates beyond bug fixing and maintenance. We add a lot of functionality to our product In the past 2 years, we've released 22 updates which have added the following: - Improvements to streams - Improvements to SEO - New reporting tools and metrics - New features for achievements - Combined forum stream/fluid view - New spam captcha tools - New alert system - Ability to disable your PM inbox - Easier ways to edit a theme - Trending content feature (cloud only) - Revamped Calendar into a new Events app - Moderator approval queue improvements - Moderating with personal alerts - New Gallery features - GraphQL - Live Topics (cloud only) - Downloads updates - Email bounce management (cloud only) - Courses app (cloud only) - New privacy and PII data features - New statistics engine - More spam prevention features Along with hundreds of bug fixes. As you can see, the software is continually improving making it a very different experience from where it was in October 2021. We had to find a new viable license format for v5 to ensure we can keep offering a self-hosted version for the foreseeable future and we feel this strikes the balance of fairness for both you and us. In the past we've just asked for a renewal for any license, potentially purchased ten years ago and you'll get tens of thousands of hours of development across multiple versions for just $40. We felt moving forwards that this would be detrimental to the costs of maintaining the self hosted version. I also want to point out again that you are welcome to use the version you initially paid for beyond the two year renewal limit. I've seen people suggest that you need to take down the software or DMCAs, etc will be issued which is not true at all. We would hope that serious community owners will keep their renewals up-to-date to ensure they get the latest features, bug fixes and security updates and that $199 a year is a very reasonable cost for this. If you are only thinking about upgrading every 3-5 years then perhaps Invision Community isn't a good fit given our continual releases bring our customers timely bug fixes and new features to help their communities be successful.

That'll be staying.

It is likely that some after market developers will leave, nothing stays static and change is inevitable. One of the main themes coming through v5 is reducing the complexity for things that used to require developers so there will be less opportunity to sell expertise in certain areas. It's why we moved forward with the directory approach. There is a strong future in providing bespoke development services.

It's also worth noting that the removal of JS and CSS removes render blocking items, whereas cover photos are additional bandwidth but do not stop the page from rendering until loaded.

The extra cost would make it the same as a cloud plan.

You're focusing on Classic versus Cloud but it's more granular than that, as Charles explained.

AdminCP theme settings 🤔 Where we're going, we don't need no ACP theme settings. Next week's blog should really help clear up what theming looks like in v5. Spoiler: It'll be very different.

Not a lot off the top of my head, @Daniel F?

Getting some great quotes for the marketing material, thanks!

That quote is going straight into the top of our marketing. Also, may I recommend: Honestly, though during the initial building phases back in early summer we used to have a weekly sync meeting with Ehren as he's in Australia and everyone else is not and he'd take us through concepts, and ideas and we'd all just say 'wow' for about 20 minutes. Now I just send him badly annotated screenshots and broken HTML I mangled at 2am his time while he's sleeping.

A final supported release is unlikely before 2024 just because we are heading into three consecutive months where there are holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year) so releasing a brand new version would increase workload at a time where we want our team to relax and enjoy those holidays. I've patched releases on Christmas Day before and it's not the best time. 🙂 I think we can expect a public preview and some beta releases before then, though.

I'll be doing a dev blog on the significant changes in how you create and edit themes in v5.

In addition, I do want to point out that we have removed a significant amount of JS that is no longer needed including some libraries that acted as shims for older browsers. The entire CSS framework has been rewritten and is more compact, so there are significant savings already.

To be clear, we have no plans to remove jQuery from 5.0.0. We expect to begin a fairly lengthy migration process over several releases where we'll start rewriting our UI and utility classes to use native. That said, I do not think it is critical to remove jQuery to improve page speed scores. We can probably get away with using jQuery slim, which is about 23kb of data sent once, and then your browser caches it. 23kb isn't insignificant but then a single image added to a page will negate any savings. Removing jQuery now would add further stress onto third party developers and delay v5 by 6-9 months given the huge amount of JS we are using for really little gain. Anything significantly new is using native. Here's the result of running Lighthouse for mobiles on my development install running with IN_DEV on (so no caching, no compiled or minified CSS, hundreds of script tags, etc). I would expect that to hit high 90s when not using IN_DEV mode.

I agree. We server a wide variety of communities, some having quite literally hundreds of forums with robust silos of information but there is a growing need for smaller more bespoke communities with a handful of forums. After spending so long on my development installation of v5, I really crave the feed-like view of v5 on the forum index. I find it quite frustrating to only discover the most recent reply. I do find it quite interesting that most regular members live in the streams of latest posts more than clicking through various forums to see what is new. It goes back to that concept of serving past you, current you and future you. Past you is new to the forum and needs the organisation to find a way into what could be an overwhelming amount of content, current you is still involved but likely hangs out in streams to just read the latest content and move on, and future you visits less so is less familiar but still wants to catch up as quickly as possible.

The sidebar menu gives you more space to organise your navigation. The current system of it being in the header means a lot has to be hidden to make it fit, which isn't the best onboarding experience nor does it help highlight important areas of the community. The thought behind the node menu item was to make it easier to add specific forums (or gallery albums, etc) so you can better design your community. You may want to highlight a few key areas (we might choose to feature Community Insider, Support, Feedback) making those areas easy to reach wherever you are and to help new visitors to your community discover what is important. Likewise, you might wish to enable fluid view and list your individual forums in the sidebar so you have the best of both worlds, a feed view index and then easy access to specific forums. The theme for Invision Community 5 is optimising the minutes you spend on a community to make them more impactful. We are considering the various lifecycles of a topic. The initial burst of energy that crackles with noise and distractions and also in the future where future visitors come to it cold and want to extract key information quickly.

Only when using a smaller screen where it drops into the menu button on mobile view. There's no way to hide it using desktop (unless you choose to use the classic view where there is no sidebar!)

Ehren will be covering the theme editor in more depth very soon. I stole a little of his thunder with that gif but I see a lot of concern about new views and how they fit in with their community, so I wanted to show just how easy it is to toggle between them. It's also worth mentioning that these layout options are per-theme and not global as they used to be, so you can mix and match across your community as you see fit.

It is indeed an option.

No two sites are the same, which is why we've made it very simple to switch between layout types. More on that very soon.

Ehren is a superstar, he's barely scratched the surface on what he's been working on for the past six months. I'm really excited by these new views and the sidebar mode gives a very desktop app like experience, whereas the new mobile view is truly fit for purpose and not just a squished desktop view.

I'm honestly unsure. I think it's two factors, the first being that the downtime was intermittent with degraded performance (1-2 mins down, then 5-6 up) - but pages were being returned and that it only affected about 15% of our client sites. I guess Uptime rounds up or down and it wasn't statistically significant when balanced with the entire network and 24 hour period. If you look at our site which was in the affected 15%, then you can see the short periods of true downtime between slower page loads - but it was a few minutes at a time.

When we are hit by a network attack (which happens daily), our automation launches new instances to meet demand. On some occasions (a few times this year) there may be some degraded performance for between 1 and 5 minutes while scaling launches. Earlier in the year we had an outage with our upstream provider which was incredibly frustrating. No one likes degraded performance or downtime, let alone our team who are woken by automated alarms at 2am to come and deal with it, but it's the nature of the internet. When you compile a list it may look significant, but it's still just tiny blips in an otherwise robust service. We really do our best to minimise disruption and we'll continue to revise our alarms, scaling and database instances.

Looking through David's ticket history, I can see there have been some difficult to track issues that impact his community only and aren't indicative of the greater experience, these seem more around database optimisation for his community or slow outbound connections. It's something our support team are working with David on.