IP4 Upgrade - Our Experience After Going Live

[Greenman]

We have just upgraded our live forum from IP3 and it's gone extremely well.

Here is a quick summary of the positives and negatives based on the 'real-time' feedback since deployment.

Positives

IP4 is a huge improvement over IP3. We have transitioned over completely bug free (except for a few issues of our own making!) and it's gone down very well both internally and for our community. I would recommend anyone to make the upgrade if it ticks all the right boxes for you. Responsively, it's excellent, admin is a joy to use and the whole system seems to have been very well thought through. Fantastic job and a big congratulations to the IP team - it's a very strong product and in our opinion, the best forum software on the market.

Negatives

We expected it, but there has been a huge backlash over the 'missing friends' function that was so liked in IP3 (for us anyway). Forums are all about communities, and communities are all about friends. A lot has been written about friends and followers that completely misses the point. They are both necessary and serve very different purposes. Followers is public, friends is private. They should not be confused and it's certainly not a case of having one or the other. We desperately hope that it finds it's way back into IP4 soon.

The only other feedback is the gallery module which is very poor. It needs a complete UX overhaul. It wasn't good in IP3, but it's very very hard to use, not logical and the community have really struggled to adapt. The logical order is to 'create an album' and put an image into it rather than the other way round. It also needs to be way more clearly marked within a users profile nav.

They are the only 2 drawbacks, other than that - fabulous product.

Si

[Lindy]

Thanks for the feedback! We do have plans for improved social functionality -- while the friends feature really served no substantial purpose in IP.Board, we understand some miss it, if even on a symbolic level and we hope to have a solution you'll appreciate in a future release. 

Gallery improvements, including a more logical workflow is amongst our next-up priorities... the order will be addressed within the next month or so.

Thanks again.  

[Greenman]

No problem. Like I said, the product is excellent and we are very happy.

The friends issue wouldn't so much of a problem but for us our community wants to share their gallery albums with their 'friends only'. Manually entering in individual members doesn't really work on a practical level and if you have more than one album, it really doesn't work. Plus, no one knows anyones display name which makes it even harder.

There are so many useful features off the back of a 'friends list' such as group chat, album sharing, events etc, that it seems like it should be a fundamental component to any forum community.

[CheersnGears]

No problem. Like I said, the product is excellent and we are very happy.

The friends issue wouldn't so much of a problem but for us our community wants to share their gallery albums with their 'friends only'. Manually entering in individual members doesn't really work on a practical level and if you have more than one album, it really doesn't work. Plus, no one knows anyones display name which makes it even harder.

There are so many useful features off the back of a 'friends list' such as group chat, album sharing, events etc, that it seems like it should be a fundamental component to any forum community.

This.