CoderX

I know that 9 pages in, nearly everyone else will have covered the points I'm about to make, but I do wish to explain how this has come across to me. I am a perpetual licence holder, which I bought in 2005.

What worries me is that I feel that there is an effort going on to force me out of my perpetual licence. The biggest issue in this is that we are not at all eligible to purchase the service - nor, it appears, any future service.

It concerns me that there will be many other things released in the future which will be classed as a service, as a way of excluding perpetual and lifetime licence holders from useful extras to the software (thereby convincing people to relinquish their licences).

I am also concerned that not being able to buy such services might somehow compromise my board. I know it's an extra to the software, but spam is a very serious issue and I find it worrying that I won't be able to have any sort of access at all to a module that could prevent a significant spam attack.

I will stress that I don't think that IPS are unscrupulous at all, but I imagine some people might also be worrying that if a spam module provides enough robust protection against spam but there is a problem in the standard software and people are getting heavily attacked (like what happened in the later 2.3 series), IPS won't be as swift to respond to patching the software.

I stress, I'm not saying that *will* happen, but you can understand how that might cross people's minds. After all, four years ago, it would've been unthinkable that IPS wouldd be launching extra services in the manner they are now.

Overall, I feel that I'm being forced out of my perpetual licence. If we'd been able to pay an extra cost to obtain the service, then I understand that there might have been complaints but I can understand the difference between lifetime, perpetual and standard and if you wanted to make an offer to standard holders, that's understandable (honestly, I've been waiting for this for months because I could see where you were going with some of your forum posts last year).

But the crux is that we can't get the spam service at all without relinquishing what we currently own and have paid for...and I find that slightly odd. It also concerns me that this won't be the first service released, nor the only effort to make us give up our licences.

I bought the licence that was available to me at the time. I didn't buy a perpetual licence to screw IPS out of money or to upset IPS or to make IPS hate me. I also didn't force IPS to sell perpetual licences - I bought what IPS offered.

I would be happy to pay additional costs for services - if I felt that they would be a benefit to my site - and it seems a shame that they're not available to purchase as add-on modules at all.

I love IPS's software and I always have done, and I don't ever want to have to change from using Invision...but I am being increasingly upset at the way I'm being treated by the company - a company who I've never hassled via the support, who I've only ever said good things about and have always strongly recommended to people.

Lifetime and perpetual owners are still your customers - we run your software (and probably have done for years, so our users are used to your product and we probably don't wish to switch), so we're the best people to try and sell things to because we're a captive market. Excluding us entirely just makes me feel unwanted and it feels like you're trying to trick us out of what we already own. I respect you guys more than that, and it's horrible that that's how it's coming across. You can't mean it to be like this, surely? :(

This is the way I see it:

You should have known full well you were going to piss a lot of people off by telling them that lifetime/perp license holders could not use this service, and that they could one-way convert their licenses to a standard license to use this service. Especially given the nature of the service: A way to stop spam, something that should be a stock feature available to everyone. I'm sure you talked about it for a while, but I can't believe it didn't cross someone's mind before posting the announcement. If you have retracted the statement and are working on it further, an ajustment to the annoucement needs to be made.

As I've said before, a license holder is a license holder. You can't discriminate one from the other, regardless of what the arrangement was. If you are extending the support fee for this, you should do it for the other licenses as well, regardless of who pays what. I also know that by giving it to the standard license holders, you are not increasing your revenue by any margin to cover the costs of the server required for this service. This leads me to believe that it is not about cost, but a way to get people to convert their licenses. If you still wish to honor them, honor them.

If this is about cost, charge for it. And if you do, charge everyone, not just perp and lifetime license holders. How ever you want to do it, I'm sure no one would complain. $10 per year provides an access key for every form license, $5 per year per access key, etc... what ever it is, I'm sure no one would mind. But if you want to have everyone use it, it has to be dirt cheap. You want everyone to use it, but excluding lifetime/perp license holders does not do that. It just pisses them off, and they refuse to use the service.

Be fair accross the board. That's all I ask.

Being forced out of something you've paid for to have an additional benefit directly connected to the product you've paid for is not acceptable. Acting like little kids? Thanks for the insult (ironic considering you're 14). We're not asking to get anything for free. We're PAYING customers. We pay $20 less a year than normal customers. Fine, give us the ability to pay the standard rates WITHOUT giving up licenses we've paid for and I'll shut up.

I won't stop using IPS products as I think they make great products, but if they make us do this then instead of saying "Great products and great company" when someone asks me about them I'll say "Great product but company that doesn't care about its customers".

Simple as that.

It may be unacceptable (and it is) but there's nothing we can do about it. IPS are keeping their promise to legacy customers... and just making them feel second class to newer customers by withholding a new 'service' from us if we don't play along and give up our licenses.

What a total disgrace... and what a shabby way to treat me. I've been a loyal customer and saw a future in IPB so I forked out for the Perpetual. I also continue paying support fees and participate actively in Beta testing... yet I'm still excluded. Explain why you won't make it available for a fee equivalent to the difference in cost (over and above my annual support fee)?

That argument is on pretty shaky ground. You might, in that case, start charging extra for FURLs, AJAX skins, or any other progression in the software... as far as I'm concerned, my license entitles me to use IPB and it's features in all future versions, forever... You're moving the goal posts in order to sheppard legacy customers into your newer pricing bracket...

... and yes, I do pay my annual support fee already.

I don't like that. Yes I'm a little biased since I have a Lifetime license, but I think that the Lifetime license shouldn't be excluded because the terms of it are the same as a standard license except that it's "forever" instead of limited to 6 month windows.

With Perpetual, the license holder should be allowed to get it when they are in +Active status (ie, paid $30/year).

I know that IPS wants to convert those into standard licenses, but I think that's a bit shameful to try to reword or reclassify things just to do it.