Scott

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.

All work including downloadable applications, plugins, and themes, should be considered as work-for-hire, under the licensable terms as presented on the file page. In broad terms: when you purchase a license for a file, you are purchasing my work to use on your single site, and any development sites (online or localhost), for the term presented. You may continue to use that version on those sites for as long as you like. For the active term of the license you are granted bug fixes, general support for that work, and the ability to download newer versions of the file if available. When your license expires you will need to pay for a license renewal fee which will allow you to download newer versions and receive the aforementioned support again. All sales of file licenses are final once payment has been processed and the file has been downloaded. Do not share the files. Not with other site owners, not with warez sites, newsgroups, etc. 3rd-party devs do not make bank on our offerings. Do not make it worse. See below for the consequences of doing so. Sales of file licenses are only made to licensed owners of Invision Community software. Active licenses or lapsed, as long as your site possesses a license. Confirmation of your site license, and your relationship to the site, will be verified before you are allowed access to paid files. Chargebacks will result in immediate cancellation of ALL FILE LICENSES you possess from this site, and any subscriptions or other financial arrangements with All Astronauts will be terminated as well. Your account on allastronauts.com will be terminated. In addition, your name and site will be shared with the broader INVCOM developer community. As such you can expect many other INVCOM developers to close their doors to you. The consequences of using falsified (fake, fraudulent, etc.) financial payments should be apparent. If not, see above, as those, and possibly more, will apply.

Preview/Alpha/Betas Slated for late 2023. Final Late Spring / Summer 2024. Probably. Do I, All Astronauts, have any real insight as to when the preview/alpha/beta/final is actually being released? Absolutely none. How much is the 5x line changed from 4x? Without seeing any preview releases we in the dev community have to work off of public postings and any private communications with IPS developers for insights. Those developers and any outside-individuals with "access" are under non-disclosure agreements and to my knowledge have not leaked anything to anyone outside of the broadest overviews which more or less match previous public postings by IPS staff. Most people enjoy financial security, nominal control over their first-born, roofs over their heads, so you should never expect any of them to break an NDA. The leap from the 3x line to 4x. was an entire re-write of everything; a massive undertaking. Moving from 4x to 5x is generally considered half, and likely less than half, that level of work. Overall changes include: The underlying code is being brought up to PHP8 standards (and targeting 8.1 for minimal out the gate). Much of the core code in the 4x line was early PHP7 or earlier in structure and IPS focused more on new features and application enhancements rather than constantly upgrading core components. 5x is being used to clear this stuff out. Structural changes from hooks to listeners for developer interfacing with the system. The overhauling of the JavaScript structure: swapping out things browsers can do native now, minimizing jQuery, and moving to native JS, although this will be an ongoing project throughout the life of 5x. A complete overhaul of the theme system, although the outward appearance of the default IPS theme will remain, on viewing, mostly the same. This includes no template editing of the default templates. We will not know how bad this will be until we get hands-on. A general removal of things they no longer believe are needed. What those are mostly remain unknown until we all get hands on with the new stuff. Updating some external libraries and integrations. Newer CKEditor! Font Awesome 6! And so on... What does this mean for the 4x Applications and Plugins I use? For one thing, plugins are not a part of the 5x line. Plugins were merely simplified applications so the decision was made to remove that weight from the system and have everyone use applications going forward. Not a big deal. However... the above change, plus the moving to listeners (from hooks), and the overall PHP8 changes, and adjusting the theme structures, and other things, means every application and plugin will need to be re-written to work with 5x. Just because they need to be re-written does not mean all the work done for those apps and plugins needs to be pitched. The underlying models, controllers, and all that, will remain substantially the same; we just need to move, re-create, account for, and all that, with a new application. So - guessing here - a good measure of copypasta, and then the rest of the work however long that takes. Do not forget that applications often have their own templates and those too will need to be re-coded. So if I rely on custom applications or 3rd-party applications and plugins... You will have to wait for your devs to upgrade all that for 5x before you can upgrade. And my custom theme/s? You will have to wait for new themes to be created for 5x; your custom ones and any 3rd-party ones you have. But I want it now! 3rd-party devs like me not only have to learn the new system, we have all our public offerings to rewrite - that's applications, plugins-to-applications, themes, and we also have our own clients with PRIVATE applications and plugins and themes - stuff the general public is not typically aware of, and then on top of that we have the same stuff for our OWN SITES: not something like this All Astronauts joint, but our very own community/s just like yours. This is going to be an excrement-ton of work - perhaps not on the individual item level, but take the full scope of what we have to actually do. Rotating tires on a car is not particularly time-consuming but if it is just you rotating the tires for an entire fleet of 18-wheelers... If you expect all of our public offerings to be 5x ready out of the gate for the 5x final initial release you are probably going to be disappointed. Things will change throughout the beta cycle and although we'll try to keep up as we undertake all the rewrites, the general nature of the thing probably means we won't have all that work done. On top of that, what will we be prioritizing? Our own sites? Our private clients? Our public applications and themes? No answers there, for myself, or other devs. So when should I upgrade? When you have all your MUST-HAVE 3rd-party things (applications/themes) available for 5x and if you have custom applications, when those are flagged ready by your dev. That's minimum. Beyond that ask yourself: is 5x ready for you? Some people jump onboard the moment the newness arrives. Others tend to wait out a point version or two. I don't think I punched my sites over to 4x until 4.2 or 4.3. The conditions back then were different than what we are about to have now. That 4x launch, as stated before, was an entire re-write. Most of us on the dev-side considered the 4.0.0 final as still a beta. They had to push it out the door sometime and it was good enough; but there was still work to be done (as seen with moving the editor out from iframe and the file storage changes enacted with 4.1.0). I think we (collectively) saw 4.2.0 as the real final, production-ready release, and we mostly stopped bitching about god-knows-what after 4.4.x came around. This time? It's not a total re-write. The base is already solid as hell so the main hold-up is likely going to be getting applications and themes set up for deployment on 5.x and I imagine a lot of upgrades will occur once 5.1.x rolls out. That's the way I see it going but maybe, just maybe, if the 5x betas are pretty alright and the upgrade work is not as hellish as it appears we all start pushing through not too long after 5x goes final. Time will tell; and remember: 4x is going to be supported throughout 2024, and probably into 2025 for a time. Read more here: https://invisioncommunity.com/news/invision-community/

We've said this for years. And years. And yes, even more years. Invision Community developers. Invision Community server providers. Folks just giving a hand where needed with server work. All of them, all of us: Using shared hosting to serve your Invision Community site is a bad idea. I'll grant you a point in shared hosting's favor if you are actually considering this: shared hosting is probably, almost certainly, better than it was back in the 00's. But it is still shared hosting. Very much shared, with server configurations you will not have control over, and sites stacked alongside your site, and of a number far larger than you probably realize. The best analogy around this, used many times, is housing: A dense apartment complex is shared hosting. Townhouses are Virtual Private Servers (VPS) hosting your site. Single family homes are dedicated servers doing the same. With shared hosting you have no idea how many other sites are on the same machine. All these sites are not just using, but directly competing with your site, for the same bulk resources on this single machine. Maybe you are on a server with just a few low-traffic static blogs? Maybe you are not... 10 sites? 50 sites? More? You won't know. Some shared hosting providers can be slow to allow newer versions of PHP on their servers and that can conflict with updated Invision Community requirements (and this can also cut both ways where you may wish to remain on an older version of the IPS software but your host is forcing an incompatible upgrade). IPS requires the primary CRON process run every minute but some shared hosting providers limit you to two minutes, or even five minutes for your processes. Do they have all the extensions you require? Will they keep thing up to date? Remember this is broad-based hosting! They set a common target and whatever you are doing has to fit in to those requirements. The price is cheap but the limitations will cost you and when something is off and not performing well at all support responses from the hoster will be "the server is working fine it must be something on your end" and INVCOM developer responses are going to be along the lines of "why are you on shared hosting?". Better Option: VPS VPS (virtual private server) resources are mostly allocated in contrast to shared. You will be "guaranteed" x-amount of RAM, CPU, and storage space on a machine without the heavier costs of a dedicated machine. There are still some sharp elbows amongst the limited number of tenants on the underlying machine but bad actors are usually shuffled away rather quickly and computational work not compatible with this model of server providing - namely mining crypto and transcoding raw video/audio - is prevented outright. Those sharp elbows are usually only encountered when you begin pushing the limits of your allocation - or someone else on the server is. Expect to be able to use half of what is allotted to you for CPU and Memory (storage should be the entire allotment). If you routinely max-out to your specified CPU and memory limits they will either move you to another instance to handle the load or politely tell you to upgrade to a higher configuration. The big advantage is having full control over the configuration of the server. Everything. The resources of a dedicated server are partitioned off into set-packages and those resources are yours to do with, and configure, as you please. Your choice of LINUX. Apache or Nginx - your choice. MariaDB or stock MySQL. All yours to decide. And the answer is yes - you CAN host more than one instance of Invision Community on your VPS. The difference here is you are in control of what is happening. If you put two high-traffic Invision Community sites on the same VPS and you under-provision the specs of the VPS to handle it expect the worse. Costs can vary for VPS rollouts, and "overselling" or over-provisioning is still a thing here, just on a much more limited basis. Check for reviews and recommendations (mindful of the usual bad experience reviews vastly outweighing people bothered to write nice things). Typically you can expect to come through anywhere from $10/month (manage your expectations...) to $30/month and be in a really good place. The more your community receives consistent, and higher traffic, just like with any hosting, your actual needs will be exposed and you'll adjust as needed. Be sure to roll with a provider that takes daily backup snapshots of your VPS as this mostly abrogates the need to worry about this yourself. Better Option: VDS The terminology around all this can get confusing at times. VPS stands for virtual private server and we've discussed those above, but there is also a variant casually known as VDS where the supplier is absolutely specific that you are getting exactly what is advertised with no over-selling of the underlying resources. VDS stands for virtual dedicated servers. All the same benefits of a VPS but with more certainty that what you are paying for is what you are getting 24/7. Pricing is more in-line with dedicated server costs, only sliced up into what portion of the server you are paying for. Better Option: Dedicated Server Hosting your Invision Community on dedicated hardware means you are owning or renting a single machine outright, with the server room costs being folded into the cost of rental, or in the case of owning outright, borne by yourself. No limits here, all the control and power, but also no limits on costs. Deeper pockets can buy a server outright and just pay for server room costs and bandwidth. Backups are on YOU so keep that in mind as well. If you are at this level of need, you probably have staff on hand and an IT department at the ready. On the very-low-end, an unmanaged dedicated server might set you back $75 a month (this can be much lower but temper your expectations, including uptime), and $100 to $200 is more typical. Once you've out-grown VPS hosting you'll really need to examine needs/costs/benefits of managing your own servers vs. IPS Community in the Cloud. However, if you have special needs that IPS Community in the Cloud hosting cannot provide (and there may be certain requirements with your 3rd party custom apps/databases/features that conflict here) this is your only option outside of creating your own clouded-instance. Provider: SSD Nodes VPS The sales never end. Let's just start there. And that countdown timer is a joke as well. Ignore it. The NVMe SSD speeds are legit. The storage amounts are real. Your memory amounts are (probably) a hard 6GB (or so) with shared flex to your specified amount as needed, when needed. Your CPU? Yes, but in reality the performance is likely to be a bit slower on machines fully loaded with clients. The pricing though will not be beaten by anyone anywhere anytime soon. A related entity called Strasmore provides the same offerings but priced higher and likely(?) VDS based (so actually dedicated slices of resources instead of shared slices). I'm using them for three sites. This one, a private one, and a relic gaming site. None of them receive heavy traffic. Two of them are on the same server. I've bought servers from them since 2018 or so. Uptime? As of August 2023 it will be a solid uninterrupted two years. It would be longer if that wasn't when I created my last batch of servers. No you do not get a cPanel control panel (or any other) and yes if you want the best pricing you buy in one or three year terms. Feel free to use the one year pricing to test the waters. You can always bail out after a year or if things are going well, push on to a three year plan early and they will apply any balance left on your one year plan to the new term. You get a lot for little and unless your site is really cooking, these guys are a fantastic option for starting out or managing costs for small to medium sized communities. Three year plans (paid in full) with amazing specs (note limitations mentioned above) come in around $10 to $15 a month for NVMe storage. Less for standard SSDs. Yearly billing expect $15 to $20 a month. Server hardware is Intel Gold/Silver e-class; no AMD as of yet. Check out SSD Nodes Provider: VULTR, Linode, DigitalOcean, Others Larger, more well-known players. The nomenclature may be different but whether it is a VPS or Cloud Compute or whatever you'll still be getting a CPU with a few cores, some storage (not as large as SSD Nodes), and adequate bandwidth outbound. You'll have better consistent performance across your purchased specifications but pricing is in the range of $20 to $60 a month. No you do not get control panels, at least not cPanel. OVH, Hetzner, LiquidWeb and countless large, well known, players exist. I can also recommend Cloudfanatic and HostHatch. Feel free to look around. You'll do fine. DigitalOcean Linode Vultr Directories: LowEndBox/LowEndTalk If you want to play there are hundreds if not thousands of folks making a buck with VPS, VDS, and dedicated server offerings. Server providers have to start somewhere. Poke around, have fun, but buyer beware! LowEndBox LowEndTalk Bottom Line A VPS needs to be the minimum to ensure your site has the base resources to perform at all times. With IPS new-pricing for self-hosting at $200/year for the whole suite, add in VPS costs and couple bucks for yearly domain renewal and you can have it all for $25 to $50 a month all together. If you can handle a minimum of server commands manually I don't think this can be beat. This article is a BROAD OVERVIEW, nothing more. I'll post more in the coming months as this site fills out.