Dll

I was just wondering as I've found the bionic text to be really good previously, but it didn't seem as effective in your post for some reason. It's an interesting prospect for a community but I wonder if those who want to use it will just install the browser extensions, app etc?

@Jordan Miller - can I ask, did you use the bionic reading app to make your post, or was it a DIY job?

Where does that sort of thing begin and end though. Should they not announce updates to the gallery (for instance) because it may annoy those who don't have it? The communication has been a bit off with this, and it seems like lessons have been learned there. So, maybe just accept that there'll be threads on here which aren't of interest to you, and move on?

Ah, well Jordan's original statement feels a bit disingenuous then. Not great, I have to say.

Has this been confirmed - I think @Jordan Miller said it was for 'select' cloud plans?

But, that's their prerogative. Maybe they don't believe it's a reasonable use of their resources to develop a solution for what it's reasonable to assume would be a small handful of self-hosted clients who may be prepared to both create the correct environment on their side and pay Invision for access to the additional functionality.

I think some on here have a weird sense of entitlement, expecting the same features to be developed for them, despite using what is a different product (self-hosted vs hosted), with a different (cheaper) price.

Almost a full house in web dev jargon there. Good work.

@Adriano Faria has made an excellent plug-in which goes some way to creating that.

I think the truth of the situation is that the clients on these forums aren't really the clients that Invision are developing their products for. I suspect it's mostly (perhaps almost solely) the priorities of and feedback from enterprise clients which is driving their development and future planning. I'm sure it's part of the reason why there's a reasonable sub section of those on these forums who clearly feel undervalued right now (along with price hikes, changes to support, long lived bugs, and parts of the software suffering from a lack of attention). It's also the reason why some of the communication from Invision can come across as a bit tone deaf and rile people up at times. I'm not criticising particularly, as far as I'm concerned it's just the way it is. It's just a case of matching expectations to reality in my mind.

Are you bored there or something?

I think you're maybe being a little unfair to Invision here. It seems like most plugins get reviewed much more quickly than that, and without knowing when those 'late' ones were uploaded and whether they have been rejected or not makes it impossible to judge. The bookmarks example is a prime one - the author has said they would upload a new version after their previous one was rejected, but since they haven't confirmed when they did (if they have), or responded in the support thread for a few weeks since, it's maybe unreasonable to pass judgement on the situation and place blame on Invision.

I really feel like there are four issues at play in all of this. The price rise Personally, this is the one which, although I can understand the issues it's causing for some, is in my opinion, the least controversial of all that's gone on over the last few days. Things get more expensive, the product is very different to what it was since the last increase in price, and so personally I have no problem with it. As long it goes hand in hand with a discernible and ongoing improvement in the quality of the product. There's work to be doing, rough edges to smooth and features which need adding. I do see why this may cause people to move away from Invision though - everything has its price and there are (and always have been) cheaper (and even free) alternatives. The support change On the face of it, this looks terrible. But in a way it's all in the telling as it's not really a big change, assuming it works as Invision are saying - eg things that need a ticket will end up in one. For me it's one of those that needs to be given a chance to see if it works as advertised or not - if it ends up being poor then it'll need addressing/reverting to tickets urgently. Communication This leans into everything else really. Had the price rise been communicated in advance, then that may have mitigated a lot of the upset it's caused. If the support changes had been communicated more clearly, that would also have stopped so many people assuming various different versions of what it is that Invision are apparently planning to do. It's an ongoing weak point with Invision in my view. There's no doubt that Invision make us feel less valued as paying customers than anyone else we spend our money with, sadly. Does Invision care? This is often about communication and the perception that it gives. I mean how many times can you screw it up so royally that you leave your customers confused or angry or both? With Invision it's frequent, it's frustrating and it's entirely avoidable. If you refuse to learn, refuse to take it seriously and don't change the way you do things after so many years and so many occasions, why should your paying customers keep giving you the benefit of the doubt? It's not enough to say you care as you're picking up the pieces of another mess, or arriving back onto the scene of another feature left on the shelf for months with zero communication (think mobile app, as one example). You need to show you care, and you need to step up and own the problems that are of your own making by showing some flexibility. EG - maybe look at a longer period of 6 month invoicing for existing customers who request it, offer a discount code for those with renewals within 3 months or something - just do something, anything to show it's not all pr style fake 'regret' just to play for time until everyone calms down or gives up. It's very little effort on your side in the great scheme of things, but could make a massive difference to the customers you're doing it for. Oh, and finally (long post, sorry), look after your third party developers - you need them, so show some gratitude and a spirit of partnership by working with them.

Apologies, I did misread your reply, so my reply makes no sense.

Edit: Was talking rubbish.

Wow. I didn't know that. I thought the switch to community support was all about offering better support and a 'live knowledge base'. So, if it's a better way to go, why limit it to self-hosted customers? Those poor cic customers will be missing out, surely?

Maybe it's time to get cracking and get something in place then? I mean, what's the alternative here? You make a big deal of the marketplace in your marketing piece, you take a commission from sales from it and you're reliant on third party developers for its success. So, maybe don't take them for granted and work more in partnership with them? And, if you want an idea on how to implement a system for discounting or making the renewal free. Base it on volume of sales/downloads. It's maybe not the perfect solution but it's simple, and gives newer devs something to push for, particularly if you offer a sliding scale of discount dependent on those volumes. I'm sure there are other ways of doing it, but the one thing you really shouldn't be doing is nothing, and overthinking by looking for the ideal answer often leads to stasis. There's already been a drop in the number of devs working on marketplace items, you really ought not to be waiting for that trend to continue or accelerate.

Yes, to be honest, you are. The constraint in any hosting plan will be the resources available to it (cpu, memory etc). Whether that's shared amongst other sites on a shared server, on a standalone vps or whatever else. So, even if the pricing for hosting doesn't mention page views, you can be sure that it'll be constrained by that - a $10 hosting plan is not likely to include the resources to cope with many millions of page views, whereas a $100 one is more likely to.

Maths! With a roughly 30% price increase, Invision are still better off even if 30% of their customers don't renew because they're also saving on support costs by offloading at least some of it onto the community.

This line from yesterday stood out - I mean who'd have thought that Invision re-made their entire website to coincide with the sudden/zero notice price rise just to show their customers that it was worth it. That is dedication for you.

In all seriousness Matt. If you / the rest of the management at invision think that sort of timescale is acceptable when communicating such a big jump in price, then I really do recommend you hire someone with more knowledge and skills in communication and customer care. You needed to be weeks ahead of this, to give people reasonable notice.

I'm imagining a parallel universe, where rather than a condescending, pr spun, rushed out email had been sent after the event, instead a clear, honest, professional and concise one was, ahead of time. If only. I'd like to assume that Invision's ability to shoot themselves in the foot with bad/lacking communication is due to their focus being on other things within the business. But one part of me starts to wonder if it's just a case of not being bothered enough about their customers. Time will tell, as at some point these lessons are going to have to be learned.

No no no. Come on. You weren't minutes late, you're weeks late. You have clients who have renewals at the new price due in days (maybe hours), which due to the change to annual pricing and the increase will mean an outlay of more than double what they were expecting. Can you not see how giving a reasonable amount of notice is the least you should have done?

And between you all, none of you thought that communicating the changes in advance may be the way forward?

1. You chose to update your website and the price that your existing customers pay before emailing them. It's not really about what is posted on here. And you make it sound like emailing 'thousands' of clients is a difficult or time consuming process. Which of course it isn't, beyond writing the email, which could have been done weeks ago, unless you made the prices up on the spot this morning. 2. You're probably going to have to drop the 'barely any clients use this forum' line to justify the lack of reasonable communication on offer, now you're only offering support through it to the majority of your clients. I'm broadly supportive of the price rise, but can you not just admit that the way it's been communicated has been poor and stop spinning it. It would be so much easier to believe the 'we want to be transparent' pr type guff then.