Working with All Astronauts / Terms and Conditions

Accessibility

Email. Slack. Mattermost (exists but I think I might just stick with Slack and eat the 90 days retention of content on the free plan since I can just throw orgs and people into their own private rooms). Skype available. No Discord if I can help it. Longer term clients can txt. Central Wisconsin, USA located (Central Time). 

Your Site

1) Needs to be licensed.

Just have one; lapsed or not, its fine. And you obviously need to be associated with it somehow. 

2) Needs to not be horrible.

What defines that? The usual illegal stuff. Porn is fine (already have worked with) just keep it legal. Militia and affiliated mobs keep walking. Observant users who go through the motions of becoming verified here will spot why.

3) Internal corporate/non-internet accessible sites are fine too.

Just talk to me and you'll have to do that to get verified anyways.

Payments

For File licenses, PayPal or Stripe - balance or credit cards.

For developer work PayPal, bank transfer, crypto on-ask-first-basis (big-name coins only). No I do not want your NFTs.  Anything else ask first.

If your company works through an online payroll/payments processor that is fine as well as long as I can get set up on it (USA only)

Note that I cannot and will not accept payments from Russia, Belarus, etc. due to the current financial sanctions in place. Any other places that fall under such purview as well. I'd rather not get notes from the feds please. Tough spot for some who are not on board with <gestures broadly>, I get it, but that's the reality right now.

Also, if you absolutely insist on work-tracking payment things such as Upwork you will be required to pay an increased hourly rate for my services to cover that external-party's fees upon me. I will not eat them. BTW, the overall projected hourly rates you see on these dev-for-hire services reflect the fact that a good bulk of them are non-USA located (or are pass-thru devs - appearing USA-based but actual located over-seas or farmed work to over-seas). Just FYI.

Please view the other terms and conditions documents for specifics regarding file sharing, charge-backs, skeezy financials, and all that. They apply to my custom dev work as well.

Custom Application Development

At the end of the day I only really require a two things: realism and patience. If you can give me both of those, most of the time things will work out. Beyond that though, yes, there are things that are needed in order to smooth the way for those two things to take root and grow.

1) Know what you want and be real about it.

An application framework with nodes and basics takes little time. Adding the basic content items takes maybe twice as much on top of that. After that's done? The work actually begins, formatting templates for the look and feel you want, friendly urls, adding in all the mod powers, your special content item requirements, APIs, Google tag work, and on and on and on. Oh, and the Javascript specialness people ask for afterwards. The foundation is relatively inexpensive, and framing the house and putting up doors and windows? No problems there. Electric, heating, plumbing is where things slow down but still essential. If you stick to a plan and get that stuff done, you can worry about the appliances, drywall, and painting later.

2) This stuff is not going to be a couple of hours, done and paid for. 

Expect a week of full-time development* to get a thing going. But after that then what? Just because I deliver an application to you and it is yours (and it is yours; you paid for it), that does not entitle you to full-time free support for that app. You will want changes, your users will want changes, the INVCOM software will evolve and the application will require work to keep it compatible. Know what you are getting into. Maintenance is not free no matter who is doing it - me or someone else.

3) That asterisk above? Best not assume I have a completely unfettered full week of time available on any given week.

Other people and sites are working with me as well. Scheduling works wonders but support demands, site crashes, and all the usual "this just happened" things occur.

4) Mobile apps have been tried many times. 

Twice by IPS themselves. The sooner you train your users to add your INVCOM website as a webapp to their phone/tablet home-screen the better. Outside of that, its possible, but given the cost of development ($$$$, and probably $$$$$ as well) and the hoops for ongoing maintenance (Android and Apple are two different apps...) I cannot realistically recommend it. 

Theme Development and Ringer Work

I often get called in to patch themes and that's fine - standard work, no muss, no fuss.

If you are wanting a custom theme from scratch, again, not hard, but I must have at least some idea from you what you want: I cannot read your mind. Look at other sites, any sites, and see what you like and do not like. Screenshots: yes please. Links as well. I've worked off of mock-ups too. It's all good as long as I have something to work off of. If not, that's just time you are paying me to explore my muse - which - great! - but maybe not financially for you (is for me though...) and you may not like my muse. 

Existing branding is a plus but I also do logo/brand work as well.

Server Support

• Root or SUDO account (or SSH key if you are locked down that way)
• Who your server provider is; possibly account access there
• Your server specs
• Your server software (operating system namely)

If you want me to help you, I'm going to need most of that. Hard to work on a car without the keys, and access to the car. Obviously not applicable to INVCOM Cloud customers.

Invision Community Support

Admin account - unfettered. Really. All of us 3rd-party devs have seen EVERYTHING and feel free to let your mind wander on that topic. We are not interested in stealing your MySQL databases, or harvesting your member lists, blackmail, or any other bad thing you can think of. We are interested in crawling about the ACP quickly to find what's wrong and closing off sections of the ACP willy-nilly to us just gets in the way. You can disable admin accounts after we leave. FYI, one of the first things I do when asked to troubleshoot INVCOM problems is to bring up the system logs and then look at what applications and plugins are installed. Yes, I've had those areas closed off to me before and instead of solving the problem I'm stuck in an email chain while other people argue about what I should be allowed access to. Just because you do not think it is related to the problem you are having does not mean it is not. I also consider it good practice to let you know what if anything is throwing errors on your site regardless if it related to your specific troubleshooting ask.

Support/Dev Retainers

These retainers gain you priority access for help desk, server, dev support. Generally speaking these are reserved for larger (read: funded) organizations. If you want regular eyes on your servers and sites, a support contact for your staff working with the INVCOM software who want answers at Slack-speeds, this is where it is at. Plans may include immediate on-call support for x-amount of hours a month, just simple access to Slack support desk where I lurk while working on the usual things, or for higher amount plans daily monitoring of community and discounted dev/support rates after the monthly retainer amounts are used. All standard stuff, though I do sleep from time to time and occasionally have to buy food.

For those of you with smaller community sites the concept of these retainers may be rather alien to you but for larger organizations, or sites with great revenue streams, support retainers are a rounding error or petty cash compared to putting someone internally on it half or full time.