Hump Day: A Refresh Has Arrived!

[FZ]

Well colour me confused, or amused, or both. 

I just got one of my IPS license renewal invoices and I see that it is for 6 months and not the ridiculous, almost 3x the price I was expecting after the last email I got from IPS. Huh? So I come here to try and find out what's going on and I see that 6 month licenses have been restored. Great! 

Question: why didn't you send out an email advising your customers of this reversal? 

[PasXal]

On 9/15/2021 at 9:55 AM, PasXal said:

I was shocked to read the email about the increase and it was like a slap in the face!

I can understand a price increase, but the prices here are going up extremely in one fell swoop. Corona has already caused a sharp drop in income and now we are supposed to pay the price increase? I can almost no longer afford that for my hobby forum. 

The price increase is even higher because the e-mail support is no longer available. Community support can be provided for freeware, but not for expensive licensed software!

Thank goodness I recently renewed for 6 months at the old price. I will now definitely look for an alternative and move my forum to another system if they don't reconsider the decision here...

Sorry for quoting myself...
Since there is no real change from my point of view, I have looked around for an alternative and I will now operate my forum with the IP.Board until the end of my licence period and then I will change to another system. 

It's a pity, but I can't and don't want to pay so much for a hobby project per year.

Thanks for the great time!

[Matt]

1 hour ago, PasXal said:

Sorry for quoting myself...
Since there is no real change from my point of view, I have looked around for an alternative and I will now operate my forum with the IP.Board until the end of my licence period and then I will change to another system. 

It's a pity, but I can't and don't want to pay so much for a hobby project per year.

Thanks for the great time!

Thanks for being a customer for all those years, and I hope you've enjoyed the journey we've been on.

Good luck with your community and let me know if you need any help. 🙂 

[MadMaxMangos]

On 10/5/2021 at 8:11 AM, FZ said:

Well colour me confused, or amused, or both. 

I just got one of my IPS license renewal invoices and I see that it is for 6 months and not the ridiculous, almost 3x the price I was expecting after the last email I got from IPS. Huh? So I come here to try and find out what's going on and I see that 6 month licenses have been restored. Great! 

Question: why didn't you send out an email advising your customers of this reversal? 

Agree, a mass email sent out advising all customers of the current change and update of things should be done reflecting @Matt post.

[kims79]

Hello,

It took me a while to reply to the partial retro-pedaling of ipboard and after almost two months, I can say that I am even more dissatisfied than before.

To have left the possibility to the community to pay in two times is a good thing, but personally, what bothered me the most, was the "disappearance" of the support and the increase of the price not announced, and especially for me, not justified since IPB pushes more and more towards its host service.

The charge is going to be violent, but totally justified, as I'm starting to get "fed up" with invision's behavior these last months.

The self-hosted client not being happy with the non support of Zappier, had as excuse at the beginning "we have a very specific configuration in cloud version", ended up being announced on this one.
And as indicated on this topic, this one is simply not NGINX compatible, even though NGINX is now taking the lead over APACHE and is faster than it.

Concerning SEO, I'm still waiting for the announcement of real improvements (webp conversion, javascript code rewriting, mobile improvement) and not a simple robot.txt (even if this one is appreciable and relieves at least this part).

For the new "support", it is for me a disaster, first maj, I had to open a ticket on the forum for a security update that was proposed only through the support option of the admin panel (but why is there no notification as for other updates, we talk about SECURITY ????), as a result, I had time to identify the problem before getting an answer, good for me, you will say.

Second ticket on the forum concerning the authentication via google, I am asked for identifiers to access my forum, the ticket is escalated to support, no more news since.

Third ticket the same day, I buy ip.blog thinking that it is the system used by IPboard for its news system (after all, in the menu, there is well marked "blog") and the description of blog on the site shows these same news!

Needing a system to go under google news, I see the potential to save a little time on development and well no, after purchase, I realize that it has nothing to do, they now use page to present the news and blogs is "abandoned" for some time.

I send a message to @Marc Stridgen to ask for the refund of the module, I am then asked to create a ticket on the forum (we'll go back to privacy), I do it, before receiving this mail:

I immediately challenged it, explaining the ambiguity, and have not heard back since.

Short, I am asked to pay more without announcing it before, I am removed from the support by asking me to post on the forum even though all my requests are legitimate and escalated to the ops team, we are still waiting for real communication on what is currently problematic the referencing...

And now, I am sold a product that does not conform at all to the description on the site (since the blog menu redirects to a system that uses IP.page without changing the description of the product presentation!) and that even seems to be totally abandoned, and they have the nerve to ask me to write my problem on the forum (to try to make me believe that IPB cares about its customers?) only to tell me "no" by e-mail without responding to my challenge after a week.

What is the next step? We will have to pay to post a message on the official forum and pay at each monthly update the same price as the current subscription?

Wake up and respect your customers!!!

[FZ]

24 minutes ago, kims79 said:

Wake up and respect your customers!!!

This lesson is only learned when there are no more customers to respect. 

I have lost my respect for all software companies. They seem to think that there is a never ending supply of money to support their increasingly dodgy (and seldom reliable) creations. 

[WP V0RT3X]

3 hours ago, kims79 said:

thinking that it is the system used by IPboard for its news system

 

[kims79]

2 hours ago, Darth Vortex said:

 

This is a post on a forum that I had seen late, I was guided by the presentation page of Blog and it is rather explicit:

I only found this information afterwards, hence my anger on this subject, the menu and presentation of IPB blog being ambiguous and the presentation strongly resembling it.

Concerning the google problem, Marc contacted me, it seems that I let pass a mail from the report (or that it got lost on gmail), we'll see what it gives 🙂

[Matt]

The screenshots there are from our Blog app.

[kims79]

52 minutes ago, Matt said:

The screenshots there are from our Blog app.

Yes indeed, this is exactly what misled me, the images (and blog) strongly resemble your news system and this one is even called "blog" in the menu, which made me make the link between blog and this system, without thinking of page that we already use 🙂

P.S.: Google problem solved very quickly by Jim, thanks!

Edited November 4, 2021 by kims79

[Sebbo78]

I have used your cloud service last 6 years. I currently have Ultra 100 -plan and I pay $ 70 monthly. My site get around 900 000 page views per month. Starting from December my plan will change to Growth with price tag $ 142? Nice.. you will double my monthly payment? Of Course that won't happen if I manage to find $ 1 548 somewhere. Then my new monthly fee would be only $ 129?

Is that right?

 

I will save below copy-paste and comeback to post it when you run out of business:

 

"Yes, the hobby market is declining for sure. Social media and other free apps have pulled a lot of business away from community platforms like ours. It's just change, and life is full of change." 

Edited November 7, 2021 by Sebbo78

[Matt]

On 11/7/2021 at 8:53 PM, Sebbo78 said:

I have used your cloud service last 6 years. I currently have Ultra 100 -plan and I pay $ 70 monthly. My site get around 900 000 page views per month. Starting from December my plan will change to Growth with price tag $ 142? Nice.. you will double my monthly payment? Of Course that won't happen if I manage to find $ 1 548 somewhere. Then my new monthly fee would be only $ 129?

Is that right?

 

I will save below copy-paste and comeback to post it when you run out of business:

 

"Yes, the hobby market is declining for sure. Social media and other free apps have pulled a lot of business away from community platforms like ours. It's just change, and life is full of change." 

We won't be forcing you to switch from December. The new packages will benefit from new features like Smart Community in 2022. If you are happy on your current plan then that's fine. If you wanted to consider Smart Community, then you can pick a new plan that suits you. 

[Sebbo78]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

We won't be forcing you to switch from December. The new packages will benefit from new features like Smart Community in 2022. If you are happy on your current plan then that's fine. If you wanted to consider Smart Community, then you can pick a new plan that suits you. 

Hi @Matt that would be great. How long I can choose to be on my current plan? Even if I go over my limits I can downgrade back to my current plan? Did I miss blog post or email where it was stated that I can stay on my current plan as long as I want? 

[Charles]

1 hour ago, Sebbo78 said:

Hi @Matt that would be great. How long I can choose to be on my current plan? Even if I go over my limits I can downgrade back to my current plan? Did I miss blog post or email where it was stated that I can stay on my current plan as long as I want? 

We did not post anything as there was nothing to say since nothing changes for you 🙂 

[Markus Jung]

On 11/10/2021 at 4:31 PM, Matt said:

Smart Community

What is the Smart Community feature?

[Sebbo78]

On 11/10/2021 at 8:46 PM, Charles said:

We did not post anything as there was nothing to say since nothing changes for you 🙂 

So everything continues as it is. It´s hard to believe that CiC customers don't have to pay same price increase as self-hosted. I wouldn't be surprised to see price increase during next year. But thanks for warning 👍