Lewis P

There are a finite amount of technical support staff and hours in the day.  If a community member happens to drop by the forums and sees a particular topic posting and provides some form of value-add then that will potentially lessen the burden on the support staff.  This might mean a site that is currently down and isn't paying for expedited support gets their site up and running that much sooner.
It's kind of like "paying it forward"...  A few moments of your time here and there just might pay dividends later. 

Long time no post! 👋
Just checking in, going a bit against the grain - absolutely no issues with the price increases or changes to the support structure.

Communication could have been a bit better handled (a bigger warning before things coming into effect), but none of us are perfect.

Long time no post! 👋
Just checking in, going a bit against the grain - absolutely no issues with the price increases or changes to the support structure.

Communication could have been a bit better handled (a bigger warning before things coming into effect), but none of us are perfect.

Long time no post! 👋
Just checking in, going a bit against the grain - absolutely no issues with the price increases or changes to the support structure.

Communication could have been a bit better handled (a bigger warning before things coming into effect), but none of us are perfect.

Hello Invision Power Services staff.
I want praise you.
Your service (support, questions, etc...) is the best I've got ever.
I just send you a ticket and I get an answer two-three minutes later. But it's not just an answer, it's an good answer.
And you've just amazing and members of the support & services staff that always help and answer in a good way.
I just want to say you thanks for your services and I hope and I'm sure it will remain.
Than, THANKS! :cool:
Adi.

From the service I've gotten so far, basically IPB is straining the boundaries for it not being possible for them to improve their customer service. I cannot believe how helpful and knowledgeable they are in all their documentation, support (from tickets, and various forums); and I basically can't be anymore satisfied. I just wanted to share it with you guys. Just all the possibilities they give us and the amazing board to start out with, it astonishes me to no end. Things like iCommerce and auto-pm modifications are just great and I seriously think this is one of, if not the best software, customer support/forum company on the web. ;)

When buying ANYTHING digital, via online especially, you CANNOT get a refund once the files or software are in your possession, this should be for OBVIOUS reasons, but if they aren't obvious enough, I will state them:

- What's stopping you from claming a refund then still using or illegally re-distributing the software? Nothing. It'd be your word against theirs
-You'd still have access to the support forums and the client area.


Next time DON'T rush into purchasing software, research it, and research it EXTENSIVELY. Write this off as a lesson learn't and move on.

Just out of curiousity, what can't you do with IPB? There is an applications/modules/plugins system in place that should be able to take care of about 98% of your needs as far as modifications go. There really shouldn't be any need to edit any of the system's core files for any reason.

Due to the increased interest in our products from vBulletin users over the past few days, I thought it would be convenient to collect pertinent information in one place and give you an overview of who we are and what we do.

About Invision Power Services
We've been creating forum software for over seven years. We work closely with our community and we're very [url=" about our development and we're all very active on this forum. Our customers range from small focused communities through to Skype, Vodafone, EMI, Sony and more. We take pride in our customer service and treat all feedback equally.

Our Products
We offer many community products and services:
IP.Board
IP.Board has come on leaps and bounds since the early days of 1.3 and 2.0. We've invested heavily into development and the result is on your screen now. A feature set overview is available. It has a built in report center, reputation system and warning system. It also extends the classic PM system into personal conversations that enable you to host private topics rather than a simple email-like PM conversation. It is very extensible with its new hooks system and applications framework. Not forgetting it's incredibly easy to write your own single sign on code or log in module to allow single sign on with your existing website or systems. It also ships with log in integration for OpenID, LDAP, Windows Live and Facebook.

IP.Board also has many SEO tools built in. It allows for customizable 'friendly URLs' with proper 301 redirect headers is tampering is attempted. It also offers meta keywords and descriptions automatically populated based on post content. 301 redirects from standard 'old' URLS (showtopic=xxx) and more.

IP.Board is available for $149.99. This entitles you to run the board indefinitely (for life). You get six months access to technical support, services (Spam monitoring) and to download the latest version of the software. Once that six months is up you can optionally renew for another six months for $25.00. You can allow your renewal to lapse without penalty and renew at any time.

Licenses are not tied to versions so, for example, if you purchased IP.Board in 2006 and now want to renew for $25; you'll be able to download IP.Board 3.0.

We offer one installation completely free and we can upgrade the board for you when requested. 30 days telephone support is also included free of charge. You will also get access to our peer-to-peer customer only forums. It's worth noting though that all our feedback from customers is in this public forum. We don't try and hide it, good or bad.

We also offer a "Business License" - the main difference being that phone support is included while your license is active (not just for the first 30 days). The Business License is $349 and renewals are $50 per 6 months. As with the Standard license, it is not tied to a version and you can let it lapse and renew whenever you like.

IP.Board and its applications require PHP 5.1+ (although we recommend 5.2+) and MySQL 4.1+ or MSSQL 2003+ (MSSQL driver available for an additional $60). IP.Board is just as happy on apache as it is in IIS.

IP.Content
IP.Content is our new community content system. We have avoided labeling it as a CMS as this gives certain expectation. IP.Content can do many things inlcuding pulling content from your forum to display on your home page. More information on IP.Content is available [url=" and [url=".

Charles put together two short videos to help illustrate what it can do:






It's worth mentioning those videos were taken during a beta of the first version. The next version adds much more functionality. Information available [url=".

IP.Content is on offer at $49.99 currently and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $30 per year.
Just like with IP.Board, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

IP.Blog
This is our blog application for IP.Board. The best way to see what it does is to have a look at our [url=" blog.
IP.Blog allows your users to create their very own blog within your community, and because it's part of our Community Suite, it's fully integrated and easy to use!
IP.Blog is available for $49.99 and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $20 per year.
Just like with everything else, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

IP.Gallery
This is our full gallery application for IP.Board. We have the gallery installed here.
IP.Gallery is our easy-to-use photo sharing application. Fully integrated with our other Community Suite applications, it allows your users to create albums and share their favorite snaps with others!
IP.Gallery is available for $64.99 and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $30 per year.
Just like with everything else, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

IP.Downloads
This is our full download application for IP.Board. We use the download system here.
If you need to share files with your users, or want them to share amongst themselves, IP.Downloads makes it easy. Documents, updates, utilities, media - whatever you want to share!
IP.Downloads is available for $49.99 and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $20 per year.
Just like with everything else, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

Other Products
We also offer the following:
IP.Converge
IP.Converge is our innovative authentication system that enables separate applications to centrally authenticate users, and optionally share data such as profiles. IP.Converge works with all IPS products, and third-party products such as Wordpress and Joomla. It effectively provides a central log in system that all your applications can use so that your members only need one username and password. It does not need to be on the same server, either so you can link up a dozen IP.Boards from all over the internet if you wished.
IP.Converge is free to all IPS customers.

IP.Subscriptions
This is an application for your IP.Board that allows you to sell subscriptions to your members. It is based on elevating permissions via the member group system. It works with PayPal, Sage and Authorize.net. PayPal allows for recurring payments.
IP.Subscriptions is a free application for all IPS customers.

Spam Service
Even with a good CAPTCHA, communities are seeing a rise in human spammers that can bypass all "anti-bot" systems. There is no real way to automate protection against these spammers other than to learn and block them and that's precisely what this system does.
Each IP.Board has a feature to "Flag a user as a spammer". This will unapprove all their recent posts and flag them as a spammer in the Admin CP. It also sends a ping back to us with their email address and IP address. If enough people report the same details, they are marked as a spammer. You can then set your board to not allow these users, or manually review them before validating the account.
It's an incredibly effective tool and it's caught many dozens of spammers on this site alone.

The spam service is free to all active standard license holders.

IP.Tracker
This is a community developed free application for IP.Board that adds project tracking to your forum. We use it ourselves here.

IP.Shoutbox
This is a community developed free application for IP.Board that adds a shoutbox to your forum.

Modifications and Skins
IP.Board has a very healthy modifications and skinning community. There are many independent skinning and modification websites dedicated to IP.Board. We also maintain a list of resources here. IP.Board 3 is a new product but the modification authors are gaining traction and making use of the new systems to product easy to install modifications. There are modifications for donating via PayPal, arcades and more.

Please list any modifications you have and we'll try and match them up with IP.Board equivalents.

Other Information
Volume Discounts
Please contact sales@invisionpower.com to discuss volume licensing.

Standards of Service
Our average support response time is less than two hours but, depending on the nature of your request, it may take up to two business days for your issue to be addressed. Our technicians will work to keep you updated on your request's progress.

You can always view your existing tickets to see the progress of your request or what department your ticket has been assigned to. After a ticket has existed for 48 hours, you may use the management escalation feature to tag your ticket for management review if the issue is not being resolved properly. Billing, customer service, and special requests will only be answered during normal business hours.

Our full standards of service page is here.

A copy of our software license is attached below:
license.txt

Example Sites
Here is a list of some sites that make use of our software:
Skype - http://forums.skype.com/
Vodafone - http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/index.php?act=idx
O'Reilly - http://forums.oreilly.com/
nVidia - http://forums.nvidia.com/
Roxio - http://forums.support.roxio.com/
NBC - http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/index.php
Television Without Pity - http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com/
Atlanta Falcons - http://life.atlantafalcons.com/index
American Idol Forums - http://idolforums.com/
Neowin - http://www.neowin.net/forum/

Conversions

We can convert your data from vBulletin, including converting vB Blog to IP.Blog, and the albums feature in vBulletin to IP.Gallery. If you use the popular Photopost gallery, we can convert that as well.
Almost every piece of data can be converted - and members will be able to log in with the same username and password they did on vBulletin.



You needn't worry about broken links after you convert either, we have some redirection scripts that will take users from your old vBulletin URLs to the new URLs on IP.Board - so if members follow links from search engines, they'll still be shown the right content on your community.

There are two ways to convert: firstly, you can download the free converter scripts on the conversions page and use them yourself, or you can purchase our conversion service and one of our technicians will handle everything for you.
The conversion service costs $120.
It's important to note that the free converters will only work with vBulletin version 3.8 - if you're not using 3.8 you should either first upgrade your vBulletin installation before converting, or if you purchase the conversion service we'll handle everything for you.

If you have any special requirements such as merging multiple forums - please contact sales@invisionpower.com and we'll do our best to accommodate.




Please feel free to reply. I'll maintain this post to add more information if required.

Providing you have an active license, you can view the project forum here: http://forums.invisionpower.com/forum/430-community-skin-projects/

:)

I see it this way:
-- Standard/Business holders are current license holders, and get it for free. ($50 a year total payment with Spam service)
-- Perpetual holders are still paying IPS for service, so get it discounted. ($50 a year total payment with Spam service)
-- Lifetime holders are not paying IPS anything, so have to pay the full amount. ($50 a year total payment with Spam service)


All comes out fair when you look at it. ;)

I see it this way:
-- Standard/Business holders are current license holders, and get it for free. ($50 a year total payment with Spam service)
-- Perpetual holders are still paying IPS for service, so get it discounted. ($50 a year total payment with Spam service)
-- Lifetime holders are not paying IPS anything, so have to pay the full amount. ($50 a year total payment with Spam service)


All comes out fair when you look at it. ;)

PHPDoc would do me nicely. ;)

I can't seem to get it to create at all. :(

We have heard you and are going to look into our options on this matter :)

I am going to close this topic as the same points are being made over and over plus new readers to this topic are becoming greatly confused.

We obviously never meant for something like an anti-spam service to turn into a bad thing for some clients :)

Give us a bit and we will figure something out that works for most people.

I think Charles is on something today... He's lying to himself a lot. ;)

As I'm totally reliant on organic search engine traffic, I've been keen to get my hands on the new IPB 3 and have been closely watching the development of it over the last year or so... and after some hiccups, IPS have put together a functional set of SEO measures. I initially had a few reservations when I got my hands on the Release Candidate and went live with it on my live board, such as the huge negative indents in the CSS... however, after observing the effects on my installation and my search ranking over the last couple of months, I only have positive things to say.

I tweaked my furlTemplate.php a little to change the name of/remove a couple of directories. I also removed a superfluous repetition of the board name in the h1 tag. I also had to add a few more instances in the robots.txt file to cover some dupe content issues. I'm still having to add code to generate a 404 header for error pages/deleted topics... but other than that, IPB's out of the box SEO is really quite good... and the skins are far easier to work with than they were in previous versions, and now seem to have pretty good semantic mark up.

Is there a possible view to integrate this with Converge in the future? I could see that also being a good idea

Is there a possible view to integrate this with Converge in the future? I could see that also being a good idea

Yes we will have support for things like that as it gets going :)

Will probably require that requests for removal are only from active customers who have been a customer for greater than X days. That way you don't get spammers stealing a credit card, buying an IPB, and requesting removal.

Is there a possible view to integrate this with Converge in the future? I could see that also being a good idea

When we are developing an app and we are getting to the point where we are ready to build all of the XML files in order to package the app for redistribution, there are several pages we have to visit to create these files. In addition, on each page we visit, typically the option we have to click to build that particular file will build a lot more than what we actually want.

Consider this scenario: I am working on an application that has language strings (both admin and public), modules, CSS, skin templates, settings, and bbcodes. Each of these items has its own XML file. In order to create that file, I turn on IN_DEV and go to a different page in the ACP to find what I need to do. For example, to create the XML of the language strings, I go to the Manage Languages page and use a form at the bottom to export the XML file for my app. Doing that not only creates the XML for my app, but for ALL apps. Next, if I want to create the XML for my modules, I go to the Applications & Modules page, click on my app, and then click the Export button there. That one, oddly enough, asks me to save the XML file on my computer instead of putting it into the application directory. To export my settings I go to the Settings page and click the Export All link there, again exporting stuff for every app instead of just the one I want to package.

What I'd like to see is a place on the Applications page where I have a single link where I can click to export all of the XML data for that app, and for just that app. There's too much running around that's needed to create all of these XMLs at this point.

As I have said many times before (I was not one who submitted a ticket, btw), the way the view new content is now, is the way it should always have been. Why do I want to see a topic that I have just read in the NEW content page? I don't: Simple. Now, it only shows topics that I have not read, like the name suggests.

I will say though, that perhaps there should be a cut-off point/date/time for the number of results, as, it can get a bit full if you haven't visited for a long time. Maybe add some form of ACP setting to limit the number of days the results display to? Will also reduce server load. ;)

My prediction: This thread will close soon (if this keeps up). :whistle:


Aside from that... I think perhaps the word "majority" was misused. A majority of those submitting tickets about it may have been from confusion on the feature. Still though, if enough people assert a dislike for a feature or confusion or annoyance over how something is done, and it's something that can be changed, then change tends to happen. I think this demonstrates that change in action.

If you ever do any form of customer service, you'll notice how people complain more about the things they don't like, can't understand or have some other problem with, instead of complaining about what works, the fact that it makes them happy, etc. The squeak wheel syndrome is in effect. People complained and gave IPS cause to make a change, now that the change is made, others are complaining about that change.

However, let's keep in mind that the IPS people are... people. No need to get mean or rude. State your point of view and if you wish to debate it, do so in a respectful manner. Calling something BS or anything else doesn't help promote the change desired nor does it set a good tone for the rest of the thread to follow. Why not have it both ways, where a person clicks on which style they want to use? Perhaps that could be added in a near future release (or in 3.1.x)?

I personally pick and choose where I'm going to read. I don't use the "View New/Old/Midlife Posts/Content/etc" feature myself so it doesn't bother me really. It allows me to pick the 'mood' or 'subject' of what I'll be diving into more, instead of it being chosen for me.

To summarize, keep it nice. There are things that I thought might be in IPB3 and weren't, but I don't go fussing up a storm about it. As a customer, I pay the company money so its employees are my employees (figuratively speaking) and I dislike seeing my employees getting mistreated for trying to make changes they think will make things better. So how about showing some respect okay? Thank you.

Yes, we added that in. I wrote a function called IPSLib::wait( $seconds ). We felt that life was moving too fast and wanted to slow it down a bit. We think that huge delays in serving up webpages will be a popular feature. Even Google will do the same one day. Just imagine, having to wait for 5 seconds for your search results. I know, it's a crazy concept but I think many will appreciate it.

We suggest you think about a loved one or task to do in that 5 seconds. Maybe take a peek out of the nearest window. Your choice, really. We're giving you the gift of time, it's up to you how you spend it.

Unfortunately, guys, despite the laborious and time-consuming testing we do locally, it's just not the same as testing on a box with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of users online and millions of posts. Basically, this is a real world situation. We need to do real world testing at times.

We'd rather do it here, on our own site, and get IPB3 working as good as we possibly can, than release IPB to you guys with slow functions and so forth. Just look at it this way - we're doing the testing here, where we can control, debug, monitor and fix it, to save you trouble down the road. :)

You mean these?