Matt

I hear you 100% but we are not the arbiters of human habits, we just respond to them. There are loads of old forums still busy but the bulk of those members and that content was generated a decade ago and they are kept alive by an older member base and probably good authority with Google bringing people in for short transactional exchanges. We have a responsibility to you and our other customers to keep driving forward, it is pretty relentless. The worst thing we could do is just continue doing the same things and we lose marketshare and your community stagnates and goes into a slow decline. Communities are more complex than a basic forum and very few have the patience to click loads of links in the hopes of having good content to read. v5 will help with transactional content (I need an answer to this problem) and more social content (Lets discuss Thing) as well as content discovery.

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.

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.

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

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).

For now.. dum dum duuuuuuuuum. We have no plans to remove it.

Great modification, and that will still be possible in v5.

I'm not really sure what is driving customer habits beyond what we're seeing as trends in the industry. The community market has become more professional and hobbyist communities which used to keep the marketplace alive by spending $5 to $50 on something they felt they needed for their members are being consumed by social media or other hosted apps like Discord. My hope is that after market developers focus on few projects but more impactful ones. Wordpress has WooCommerce and Yoast which are incredibly popular and generate a lot of revenue. Proxy classes/code-hooks just couldn't continue. Our code base was years overdue a clean up but it would have caused massive support overhead and massive after market development headaches were most of the marketplace needed updating. What modifications do you have?

I agree. It wasn’t to suggest mods aren’t popular just that statistically more people choose to run “vanilla” installations. There has been a shift downwards in new applications for sure. I think that is just a byproduct of the forum market maturing and changing.

I’m unsure what the question is there. 🙂

I'll repeat what I said in my first blog: We are being very intentional in restricting what can be changed with regards to our functionality and UI. None of this is by accident or an unintended consequence. We are providing tools to create features that side alongside our functionality, and less opportunities to replace our functionality. We will have a better suite of development tools to enable this. The third party developers are very important to us, but most customers choose to not use add-ons or modifications. Based on statistics we collect, the most popular plug-in on the marketplace has less than 250 current installations, and the most popular application has less than 600 installations.

I'd be surprised if only 20% of currently available plugins and applications were possible with v5. There may need to be some refactoring, some adjustment of the feature set but it's too early to say "well, we're going to lose 80% of the marketplace".