Matt

We recently changed our pricing from 'pick what you want' to 'everything' for a few reasons. First, a forum-only community will not survive in 2024. Secondly, we want to strengthen the relationship between apps and that is impossible to do when an app may be missing. It sounds like XenForo is a great fit for you, so I wish you all the best!

No, we're running alpha testing via a focused group using our cloud platform while we work on our new build systems.

Hi AtomiCAST, I appreciate your question. Value is very subjective, but I can run through a few things in terms of what I think offers a lot of value. The first thing I want to address is that we do not see XenForo as a competitor. They are a legacy forum-only system that is looking very dated with a slow development process that took over three years to bring a new version to the market that largely catches up to where we were years ago. If you purchase a license with XenForo then you will get a forum system and that is that. You do not get a commerce store, a powerful CMS and database system, nor a gallery or community blogging tool. We are different. We do not base all our decisions around code and development, but rather our conversations with professional community management teams running large complex communities. We focus on bringing tools to the platform that people need. You only have to look through our news blogs to see our forward thinking with regards to managing communities. We have: Redefined what a community product should look like with a brand new interface. Built a brand new theme editing experience designed to reduce complexity and enable everyone to theme their community. Added a way to erase frustration and find answers quickly. Added a new way to identify and follow community experts and leaders for a better onboarding experience. Added a simple badge builder to empower all community owners to create custom badges and reactions. Added a way to assign individual topics to moderators and teams to help organise your forum and provide better service for members. A brand new lightweight and fast editor that actually works. Rebuilt tagging to bring content from all over the community into one place. Added a drag and drop WYSIWYG page builder tool with dozens of pre-built widgets and layouts. As you can see, these features are not based around technology, but based around people and community. When you look at XenForo's 2.3 feature list, it's things like OAuth, Stripe integration, developer tools, web hooks, etc. These are all much-needed (and we've had them for years) but how do these help you grow a community and help your community get the best from their time on the forum? I believe their next release is 3.0 and will just be a new theme and unlikely to launch in 2024, so when will you get new features? 2025, 2026, 2027? Or you can have an alpha release of Invision Community 5 right now with a full release later this year. The basic question being asked is "why aren't you as cheap as XenForo" and the question is simply that we do not want to be "cheap", we want to be good. We want to help your community succeed with forward thinking features, regular releases and daily communication. We will not abandon the software for years leaving your communities struggling and stagnating against newer more modern community platforms. We are constantly thinking about how to allow your members to get the most from your forum in the small pockets of time people have. Invision Community 5 being a mobile first product allows your members to check-in (or be pulled back with notifications) while in a line at that the store, or waiting in the car while your kids are at sports clubs. This is how people use your forum now. So in terms of value, and what we offer for the price is simple: We offer you a strong future and will work hard to support your community. If you want a cheap forum, and are happy with the stop-start-stop development of XenForo then that is totally fine too.

I've just tried a few tests on my iPhone on our site here. - Copying the link in the address bar and pasting into the editor: This works ✅ - Copying a link on link on the page, pasting into the editor: This works ✅ - Copying the link via the Share menu > copy: This does not work ❌ But this may be because the share menu offers multiple formats.

Only on cloud at the moment so we have a single stable hosting environment for the early rounds of testing. We also have access to databases, files and can easily mass deploy updates.

Exciting news! Alpha 2 has now been released, and it's now using our build system which means these installations are upgradable (hopefully 😬) and these are 'real' Invision Community 5 installations. I've sent out a bunch more alpha invites now that the initial round of testing has completed. 🎉

Changed Release Date to 06/27/2024

Changed Beta Release to Yes

👀 From the first commit (mostly v4 at that point) to the first real alpha: 2059 commits in just over a year.

ETA 2 minutes...

Who wants another blog entry today? 😮

This would be OK for smaller groups, but if you had 500,000 members in the same group and tagged them, it would be a lot of notifications to send out (a good number being email too). It's more of a technical reason for it not being possible right now.

Little update: bugs are being squashed slightly faster than they are being reported, which is a good sign. We've got two blogs queued up, one for tomorrow and one for next week. I've just seen the video Ehren has put together and it's his best yet. It's fitting that he opened the v5 video blogs, and has created the last. That should be out next week. We will have a bunch of other blogs after, but this is the last major feature reveal. As for alpha testing v5, don't worry because... (After we've got things a little more stable or the bug report forum will be like Harry Potter's living room but instead of trying to stop Harry opening an invitation to Hogwarts, I'll be trying to stop our devs from having a breakdown).

Around 45 bugs fixed so far, with another 39 in the queue.

How's your Thursday going?

It is no longer flawless.

Well, it appears that after 4 minutes, it's entirely flawless so we may as well just release final?

I've invited about 25 people in for the first few days. This is just to control the flow of reports in the early days. We expect there to be a lot, from the new demo system through to the product. Once things are a bit more stable, we'll invite everyone else in that has requested to test. Thanks all!

Only 2? That's amazing as you built the deployment system. It means it only broke once?

Who is ready for an alpha site to play with?

No, but it might be worth considering a one-off script/tool that does this pre-upgrade.

Update: The alpha system has been built, and all the initial teething problems using Invision Community v5 without IN_DEV have been fixed. As mentioned above, currently all JS/themes and CSS is built on demand, and rebuilt on demand (often quite a lot). In v5 it's built once per version and stored in a new location, so there were some teething issues with that. We'll test this new system internally today and if all goes well, we can start getting people in tomorrow.

I mean, that's a work of beauty. I recently did something similar by collecting all the cables, small electronics (USB hubs, etc) and put them in a single plastic crate. Now I know where to go when I need something, and if it's not there, I can buy a new one. 😆 @Esther E. has been busy listening to your feedback, and she's implemented two changes (I'll update the blog shortly). The first, is that we're going to convert all your open tags over on upgrade, be that 10 or 10,000. You can then decide if you want to delete any from the AdminCP post conversion. The second is a bulk tag add/remove tool via multi-moderation.

The AI we use in v5 isn't what many think of. A lot of people think of ChatGPT and that weird formally informal homogenised output it gives. We are using AI in v5, but in terms of algorithms and models (spam analysis, topic summaries, trending content, etc). We'll talk more on that as we move towards release.