Elbmek Posted December 9, 2015 Posted December 9, 2015 Because you have withdrawn support for upgrades I have now to pay twice, you your $25 and a person I know to do it, who does not do it for nothing!!! I am getting seriously annoyed. I joined you from vBulletin because they were totally crap at what they do, even even worse at support. Your promise of doing upgrades for us was too much to turn down and I have loved your software but over the past 12 months things are slipping, and badly. I am now about to have about the third upgrade in as many weeks, possibly less. Do you actually know what you are doing anymore? Do you have new owners who dont care? I said to you when I signed up that as I am not a techie minded person (I am 66 and retired) I was delighted to be able to have your competent people to do this headache for me. Now, we have yet another damn 'fix' because your lads/lasses dont do their tests properly. I am not happy at all. I left Hostgator and withdrew my sites (15 of them) because they sold out and CS went down the pan. I now have all my web sites with a UK firm that actually care and have been very helpful to a non techie like me.
Ryan H. Posted December 9, 2015 Posted December 9, 2015 In all things business, time is money, and support of any kind takes time.
Elbmek Posted December 9, 2015 Author Posted December 9, 2015 I agree this may be so, but the very reason I came to you is because of the offer you made to us, of hands on support. When you ceased it you still send invoices for the $25 bi yearly money in spite of the FACT that, when I bought the software it was said by your end to be *price in full*. I was delighted to pay you the $25 for support as it meant I did not have to worry, you even have your own log in. I would not even mind paying a bit more 6 monthly, but you didnt even ask!
Management Lindy Posted December 9, 2015 Management Posted December 9, 2015 I'm very sorry for your disappointment and frustration. Upgrades are something we've offered as a courtesy as competitors charge $50 or more to perform them, if at all. With IPS4, the intent was to make upgrades so easy this wouldn't be necessary. The auto-upgrader is of course still evolving but has vastly improved in the past couple of releases. If you can't click the button at this point and get upgraded, please file a ticket and we will be happy to investigate. If you would still prefer that not dealing with it at all beyond submitting a support request, you may wish to consider our turnkey Community in the Cloud solutions; we handle your community's infrastructure from start to finish. Unfortunately, as IPS has grown, providing courtesy upgrades in a self-hosted capacity is not a sustainable practice -- frankly, we can easily eat the entire $25 license renewal just in tech time trying to get access to the community, FTP, etc. to upgrade, let alone the upgrade itself. We instead decided to invest those resources in creating the "magic upgrader." As for the frequency of updates -- IPS4 is a new platform with a lot of changes. We do not see value in holding back releases when we can quite easily get impacting updates out to our clients as quickly as possible. Again, with the auto-upgrader, upgrades should continue to become more seamless as we move forward.
Elbmek Posted December 9, 2015 Author Posted December 9, 2015 Thank you for taking time out to reply. As I stated I am not a techie minded old git. Just an old git. I have not written software since the days of the ZX81 (for my son) and the process, especially nowadays, is totally off the scale as far as I am concerned. I will add a comment in a pm, for your personal appraisal.
CP Posted December 9, 2015 Posted December 9, 2015 Your link is not working. What version do you have installed right now?
Elbmek Posted December 9, 2015 Author Posted December 9, 2015 The latest as of lthe other day, 4.5. ??? Do you mean my home site? Thats not where my forum is. Home site, like all my other sites, has been brought back to UK, from USA.
craigf136 Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 I understand where IPS are coming from and the costs associated to it. Obviously pricing structures change as a result of business decisions and so forth. However, at this precise moment in time I'm on the side of the your client here, introducing a fee to perform the upgrade is fine and I have no problem with that. However, until the delta upgrade is working flawlessly and updates are not occurring all the time, I personally think the fee should be wavered. Lets look at the recent releases as examples. 4.1.2 Upgrade fee $25 4.1.3 Upgrade fee $25 4.1.3.1 to fix 4.1.3 release, upgrade fee $25 4.1.3.2 to fix 4.1.3.1 release, upgrade fee $25 4.1.4 upgrade fee $25 4.1.4.1 to fix 4.1.4 release, upgrade fee $25 4.1.5 Upgrade fee $25 4.1.5.1 to fix 4.1.5 release, upgrade fee $25 That's $200 on upgrade fees @ $25 a time (presuming that's the cost and the cost for .1 & .2 releases), within the space of 5 weeks.
Management Charles Posted December 10, 2015 Management Posted December 10, 2015 Version 4 upgrades are very, very easy. The system generates the files for you to upload. From there you just click upgrade.
opentype Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 3 minutes ago, craigf136 said: 4.1.2 Upgrade fee $25 4.1.3 Upgrade fee $25 4.1.3.1 to fix 4.1.3 release, upgrade fee $25 4.1.3.2 to fix 4.1.3.1 release, upgrade fee $25 4.1.4 upgrade fee $25 4.1.4.1 to fix 4.1.4 release, upgrade fee $25 4.1.5 Upgrade fee $25 4.1.5.1 to fix 4.1.5 release, upgrade fee $25 That's $200 on upgrade fees @ $25 a time (presuming that's the cost and the cost for .1 & .2 releases), within the space of 5 weeks. Isn’t that completely fictional? Either the upgrade is just started with a few clicks and then runs completely automatically or you run into a bug, in which case you would file a support ticket and have the staff fix it for you, so the upgrader then runs smoothly. At which point are you required to pay these fees, let alone over and over again.
craigf136 Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 How is it completely fictional? If the client want's the upgrade to 4.1.2 to be processed (for example), he or she will be charged for IPS to carry it out, the same applies for 4.1.3, 4.1.4, 4.1.5 (I'm not sure whether the point release incur a fee, so lets remove them). That's still $100 for IPS to perform upgrades in the space of 5 weeks, I'll repeat that 5 weeks. The whole point of asking IPS to perform the upgrade, is so less technically minded people don't have to put up with a dreaded bug appearing in the upgrade process and then panic about it. Having IPS do this, takes that pressure off them. You just need to look at the amount of point releases, to fix issues within the release to understand why a non techie person would be scared to carry out a delta upgrade.
opentype Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 7 minutes ago, craigf136 said: How is it completely fictional? Because who would ever do that? I don’t hire another person over and over again to hit the “Start upgrade” button for me.
craigf136 Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 The OP obviously did or expected that, try reading the original post.
opentype Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 4 minutes ago, craigf136 said: The OP obviously did or expected that, try reading the original post. I did of course. But what is your point here? The OP probably didn’t know that the upgrade procedure was just changed to a system that runs automatically now and that you therefore do not have to hire someone else to do it.
Management Charles Posted December 10, 2015 Management Posted December 10, 2015 Yes we made the new upgrade system so easy that you don't really need our staff to do it for you. We didn't remove us doing upgrades for you to be mean it just was redundant
craigf136 Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 50 minutes ago, opentype said: I did of course. But what is your point here? The OP probably didn’t know that the upgrade procedure was just changed to a system that runs automatically now and that you therefore do not have to hire someone else to do it. To be clear, I agree with charging for IPS to process the upgrade or for a 3rd party to do it for them. The delta upgrade is easy and a non techy person should be able to point and click, download a few files, unpackage them and then upload them to complete the upgrade. However, what is within the zip file? (example) It's not automatic if manual intervention is still required. How does a non techy person know that they need to be extracted and uploaded to the root or core sub directory? No instructions exist to inform them what to do. 48 minutes ago, Charles said: Yes we made the new upgrade system so easy that you don't really need our staff to do it for you. We didn't remove us doing upgrades for you to be mean it just was redundant I understand that, and I understand why and I think it's the right thing to do, just not the right time to do it. As for it being redundant, it's not really redundant until the entire process is fully automatic with no manual intervention required. A perfect example An automatic process that required a manual query to be run due to a connection issue, which a non techy person might not have a clue what to do.
Management Charles Posted December 10, 2015 Management Posted December 10, 2015 There's never, ever going to be a way to make it 100% automatic. At times things do require manual intervention. We cannot run an ALTER query on a 5 million post table for example as that would time out. In that case you would need to seek assistance if you do not know how to run manual queries. Either from a technical person or your web host. If you choose to self-host then I think it's reasonable for us to expect some ability to self-manage as well. Otherwise, you should consider our cloud hosting service.
CP Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 I agree with what everyone has to say here. However, in this case, I think this upgrade (this upgrade only) should be performed for free. Charging $25 for an upgrade sounds OK to me what is not OK is charging $25 for an upgrade then release an updated upgrade (fixing problems with prior upgrade) and charging another $25 for it.
Nathan Explosion Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 Can I ask an honest question? What is this '$25' charge for upgrading that is being mentioned....who is charging that?
Management Charles Posted December 10, 2015 Management Posted December 10, 2015 This video explains why we no longer do upgrades for free for clients. It literally takes you longer to submit the request for an upgrade than to simply do it. It's literally: Download files Uploads files to your server Press upgrade button That's really it Sometimes it does require manual intervention like for a manual SQL query. But, as I said above, if you choose to self-host we have to assume you can also self-manage to a degree and be able to do basic system admin tasks. If you cannot then you can ask your web host or consider not self-hosting.
craigf136 Posted December 10, 2015 Posted December 10, 2015 25 minutes ago, Nathan Explosion said: Can I ask an honest question? What is this '$25' charge for upgrading that is being mentioned....who is charging that? I don't know if it is $25, I was making a presumption.
Elbmek Posted December 11, 2015 Author Posted December 11, 2015 5 hours ago, Nathan Explosion said: Can I ask an honest question? What is this '$25' charge for upgrading that is being mentioned....who is charging that? When I first came over to IV power, I paid for the software in full, for life. I was told that I would be charged a further $25 per 6 months for ALL Upgrades that came along. Great I thought, I am no techie, so having these lads do it for me was a godsend. Then they pulled the plug on this and told us that, from XXXXX version it software would auto upgrade itself - 'at the click of a button'. It didnt work. BUT I am still being invoiced for the $25, rip off dollars. As far as I am aware it still does not work, but I will have to check that. The person who kindly does my upgrades for me now, has his own software company and knows more than I ever will. He said it is a pain in the proverbial. Now we have YET another upgrade, only hours after the last one, which was only hours after the previous obne, which was ........................... get my drift? I am seriously pissed off.
CP Posted December 11, 2015 Posted December 11, 2015 You know, I have to agree with you about upgrades. It does get a bit irritating having upgrades all the time when I would like to focus on other things instead of upgrading. I would rather (for me anyway) have less upgrades but more extensive ones. Even my members, mods, and admins feel that upgrades are not tested and they are not even the ones that take care of the site as for upgrades and such. With all that said though, IPS is giving you upgrades with your renewal fee. They just stopped with upgrading your forums for you and now charge $25 to do so. Your renewal fee includes (IPS correct me if I am wrong) access to upgrades, ticket support, access to client forums, and access to the marketplace. I personally think that alone is worth the renewal fee. I have been on the internet a very long time (especially in the graphic community) and if you feel you can do better with other software & service you're not going too. At least at this time. As with all companies, everything is not going to be to you're liking and you're not always going to be happy. It is just the way things are. IPS all the years I have used them have always pulled threw for me no matter what my problem was. Talk to them, see if you can come up with a solution to your problem.
Izaya Orihara Posted December 11, 2015 Posted December 11, 2015 I am not trying to be rude or disrespectful....but upgrading to IPB(or any software I've used) is relatively simple. When the popup comes up about some queries or whatever.....I can let it do it itself or I can simply do it manually. I let it do it itself and I to this date haven't had any issues. I don't use the autoupgrader, so I cant speak for it. But it is easy to simply upload the files and do the upgrade yourself. Literally takes less than 5 mins usually. That being said 1. Things need to stop breaking with upgrades 2. IPS should not charge a fee for 4.1.5.1 to 4.1.5.2 The fee should cover that particular line 4.1.5.X
CP Posted December 11, 2015 Posted December 11, 2015 24 minutes ago, Izaya Orihara said: 1. Things need to stop breaking with upgrades 2. IPS should not charge a fee for 4.1.5.1 to 4.1.5.2 I agree with this. Things should stop breaking with upgrades and he should not be charged upgrading from 4.1.5.1 to 4.1.5.2 but that is my opinion. Mainly because 4.1.5.2 was a fix for the 4.1.5.1 update.
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