Afrodude

I have to agree with this. Just too expensive with no discounts for multiple cloud licenses. As a self hosted user with 8 licenses, I have not added a new IPS license in a while because of this direction or lack of any major price changes, only increases. It’s much more beneficial for me to run my own server for all my licenses. They all share resources on my platform. Doing the math, if self hosted goes away, I’ll be forced to leave and switch platforms. No question about it.

Their was flip side … i.e. adobe charging upfront cost.. and then later, no ground breaking changes, till major versions, so folks holding on old release. Lower initial cost helped them to get going. 
Imagine 10$/month - You get both lightroom and photoshop from Photography perspective. Microsoft still sells stand alone licenses for Office vs Office 365. I pay yearly cost family license of 40-50$/year which is nothing but avg. 10$/annual. 
Now a lot of folks making leaving out of Adobe products.. but how many does on forum side? For us it's a hobby and if hobby will cost me 100$/month or more, I will find alternative hobby OR platform. 
FB, Discord, etc. can be effectively used together - you don't need to worry for DDoS, spam, SSO, outages, technology, upgrade, etc. 
When you are only major application in the area, you can charge whatever you like as long as customers are willing to pay. I don't think IPS is only application in forum side and more they push for higher cost, folks will start finding alternative solutions.

There’s also going to be a new Zapier trigger which gets fired when a reply gets marked as solution. 

I've been a client of IPS for about 17 years, and I am disappointed of the direction they are going in now. They are creating new features for their cloud clients even though they have several bugs that have gone unfixed for months. I haven't renewed my license because I feel like an idiot for paying for something that, after 17 years, I might not be allowed to use.

Deja Vu.
Come into blog entry, see this in the comments:

Leave again.
 

I've been a client of IPS for about 17 years, and I am disappointed of the direction they are going in now. They are creating new features for their cloud clients even though they have several bugs that have gone unfixed for months. I haven't renewed my license because I feel like an idiot for paying for something that, after 17 years, I might not be allowed to use.

I've been a client of IPS for about 17 years, and I am disappointed of the direction they are going in now. They are creating new features for their cloud clients even though they have several bugs that have gone unfixed for months. I haven't renewed my license because I feel like an idiot for paying for something that, after 17 years, I might not be allowed to use.

Huh?  Why would I leave IPS because a competitor has a feature that isn't of high value to me and would introduce unnecessary costs/overhead?  I'm happy with IPS, I'm not happy with the direction IPS is headed with "cloud only" options.  That's the trend I'm pushing to change because it will inevitably cause attrition once competitors do offer enough value to offset IPS.  Makes sense no?
Who said a competitor was better?  I merely highlighted server side solutions are possible and cost effective and performant.  I also noted any solution that is cloud only or cloud coupled (i.e. AWS only/specific) is IMHO not an optimal solution for a wide variety of reasons.  It's not to say the premise of their solution's use case isn't good, but the implementation choice and limitations are.  Again, makes sense no?
You're missing the point and benefits of being cloud agnostic.  It has nothing to do with self hosting, literally zero and again, obviously so.  However there is an even bigger benefit and value and revenue projection for software that is both cloud and self-hosting compatible.  As I've mentioned in other topics around this very subject, perhaps IPS has done the ROI and "Cloud Only" features somehow worked out mathematically in their favor.  IMHO, I don't see how that's the case unless they are majority corporate based on the cloud and their finances reflect self hosting being marginally viable or simply low value in comparison.  Beyond that, having options, flexibility, and portability are the cornerstones of software marketability.  Why open the door to your competitors by doing anything other than meeting and maximizing those goals?  Unless of course your market analysis and client base have strong indicators otherwise, maybe theirs does and maybe they're ok with losing clients outright to a continual loss/lack of features who would otherwise stay with them and perhaps even pay a little more to support the development compatibility required for self hosting solutions.
I will say you are right, I don't understand their solution.  How do you?  Do you have access to their CF/TF scripts, infrastructure setup and cloud application code to determine what and how they are using it?  How are competitor add-ons doing all this AI magic on self hosted clients without having the power of AWS AI products?  My guess is they aren't.  If we are talking about the "Live" features related to this very topic, it's a polling and notification implementation.  If there's AI involved in it, I wouldn't understand why it would be.  There's no AI required to determine who is typing or who is actively looking at a topic.
Again, we aren't talking about IPS providing Cloud installation and setup documentation.  They own that portion of it as a service benefit at an elevated cost.  There's no value to anyone to go and setup a replication of their Cloud infrastructure unless IPS had some insane markup to their pricing.  I don't think that's the case, I think their pricing likely aligns with the inherent AWS costs incurred as well as the development and DEV/OPS support required to run things there.
I agree these features aren't make or break for a community site.  However, they are nice to haves, as you said, and they do offer other subtle benefits that do translate to increased activity which further translates to revenue.  IPS is in a great place with their offerings, I think those of us who are self hosted simply don't want to see it take a turn for the worse and get forced onto the cloud if that's not where we want to be.

That's not allowed, Randy, due to the marketplace rules (item 1.4 and confirmed here by Matt).

To be obvious, I'm clearly not advocating removing features.  I'm pointing out solutions are chosen to be hosting agnostic and compatible.  Even cloud solutions can be built in a manner that doesn't require cloud specific technologies.  In fact, I'd say building anything to be AWS specific is a bad choice (yet IPS has chosen to do precisely that, for example with the S3 externalized storage).  Would you want to be an AWS coupled company or would you want to be a cloud agnostic and compatible company?  Or better yet would you want to be environment agnostic and flexible to maximize your market?
I'll also add, and I'm assuming IPS has done deeper research to this effect, that competitors of theirs have add-ons to provide this exact functionality on the server side (starting as far back as 4-5 years ago now).  Performance is commensurate with server specifications from what I've researched (and admittedly have not tested personally) but I'd be quite confident a server sided solution and hosting and support for it (once the configuration required is well known and understood) would be cheaper than AWS cloud hosting.  AWS has one of the most complex pricing models I've ever seen in technology, and by design it is meant to get you entrenched and committed for LOW cost, only to leverage that commitment by coupling a fee to every imaginable action performed.
P.S. How much do you think a million requests of anything running on AWS costs?  Wonder why IPS Cloud hosting is high...there you have it.

It is sad... How easy to forget us (I have been with IPB over 23 years, we supported IPB every possible way, we gave up on our lifetime licenses without question just a few) ... Anyway, very sad...

I've been a client of IPS for about 17 years, and I am disappointed of the direction they are going in now. They are creating new features for their cloud clients even though they have several bugs that have gone unfixed for months. I haven't renewed my license because I feel like an idiot for paying for something that, after 17 years, I might not be allowed to use.

I've been a client of IPS for about 17 years, and I am disappointed of the direction they are going in now. They are creating new features for their cloud clients even though they have several bugs that have gone unfixed for months. I haven't renewed my license because I feel like an idiot for paying for something that, after 17 years, I might not be allowed to use.

I've been a client of IPS for about 17 years, and I am disappointed of the direction they are going in now. They are creating new features for their cloud clients even though they have several bugs that have gone unfixed for months. I haven't renewed my license because I feel like an idiot for paying for something that, after 17 years, I might not be allowed to use.

I don't believe any gaming communities outside of developer/publisher/merchandiser forums would actually be able to afford to use given the restriction to business & enterprise cloud plans

This new feature sounds great, but IPS are already missing many stuff that message system needed to have.
The system doesn't show or notify you how much is your quota storage or how many is left like it shows for Admin in the ACP for Members.  Members doesn't receive a notification or a warning whenever their inbox is full or almost close to be full. Members doesn't receive a notification whenever someone leaves the conversation. Hopefully you guys listen because what I mentioned must have them in the message system. 

100% in agreement. 

This new feature sounds great, but IPS are already missing many stuff that message system needed to have.
The system doesn't show or notify you how much is your quota storage or how many is left like it shows for Admin in the ACP for Members.  Members doesn't receive a notification or a warning whenever their inbox is full or almost close to be full. Members doesn't receive a notification whenever someone leaves the conversation. Hopefully you guys listen because what I mentioned must have them in the message system. 

Yet nothing about Elasticsearch latest version. 

You can use Redis latest version. I have been using it, and everything works fine. 

Yet nothing about Elasticsearch latest version. 

You can use Redis latest version. I have been using it, and everything works fine. 

Yet nothing about Elasticsearch latest version. 

You can use Redis latest version. I have been using it, and everything works fine.