Collin1000

I believe that part of the concerns stem from this statement:




To me, that says those who are Perpetual License holders and are +Active Customers qualify for this new service. At least, that's how it comes across to me.


I purchased the Perpetual License as it was the best one available at the time for me. I wouldn't have to worry about staying on top of updates and fees. However, ever since I made my purchase I have opted-in for paying for the $30/year fee for support/etc. Even though I've rarely needed support (three tickets in the three or so years I've had it, two being with IP.Board 3's release) I felt it was the right thing to do by paying the recurring fee. The reason I say this is that it shows I'm an active customer who is continuing to show support for IPS. Sure, paying is optional for support with this license (if you want support) but I also believe it shows appreciation for the products IPS distributes. I believe that if a product is truly of outstanding quality and dependability, then a person should have no issues showing support to the developers financially.

A bit long winded but I hope I'm getting my point across. :P

Come on people let's give it a rest. We have been acknowledged. Let's wait and see what happens.

I can say positively that nulled boards get nothing from us...

Oh! So Matt says it and you listen! I see how it is...

I shall go pout in the corner now. Woe is me, etc.
:(

The $25 ever 6 months for standard, $30 per year for perpetual, and nothing for lifetime isn't just support. It includes access to the resource site which is considered a service. I never said that I wouldn't be willing to pay something as a lifetime license holder. But their current reasoning is not justified. Either give it to all license holders, or don't. It's is simple as that. I hope you can understand now.



Thanks Matt. I await your answer :).

if you re-read the thread there are a number of people including myself who WANT to be charged extra for those "future services" including the spam system.

Our only request is that we not have to terminate our rights as perpetual/lifetime licenseholders.

But as Charles stated. IPS is looking at solutions. So, we'll see what happens.

Calm yourselves :lol:

We are working on options ... just give us a few days :)

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.

We are exploring options as I said earlier in this topic.

One thing we do NOT want to do is keep increasing the prices as we add more services. That's not what we are after :)

Luke, really, read the thread... :P

Charles just said they are trying to work something out and to have some patience... Let's wait and see. :)

I agree there, I twittered that as soon as I read the news. I agree that as long as they are +active they should have it. :/

(then again, im NOT a perpetual user anymore. so who am I to gripe)

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.

Increased it today.

As an active Lifetime License holder.

If I want to add the IP.Blog,IP.Gallery,IP.Downloads systems I pay a yearly fee for them (I have active blog/gallery licenses).

If I want to remove the footer copyright I make a one-off payment (currently considering).

If I want to use the new spam service... my "Lifetime License" is effectively ruled null and void?

I would happily pay a small additional fee (as I do with the other add-ons), but essentially I'm being asked to pay for another full license. Hello, I have one.

Am I missing something or is this a financially motivated drive to force Lifetime License holders into regular payments.

Well, if we did we'd have to make it optional. I don't think that a current perpetual license holder who is used to paying $30 a year for support is going to appreciate a price hike.

Honestly, it was never our intention to make anyone feel 'second-class'. We just introduced a new service to help combat spam. If there's enough demand for a separate pay-for service then we'll be foolish to not consider it. Please understand that we value all our customers and will always take on any feedback that's given.

I agree there, I twittered that as soon as I read the news. I agree that as long as they are +active they should have it. :/

(then again, im NOT a perpetual user anymore. so who am I to gripe)

As another Lifetime license holder, I'm disgusted with this decision but just about understand why you're going down the money grabbing route for any future new "services".

I suppose that it's a question of is spending extra money per year worth it in the time I'm spending catching spammers at the moment? And the answer to that one is no.

Perpetual license holders currently pay $30 for 12 months access to support and downloads whereas standard license holders pay $25 every 6 months. For those perpetual license holders who wish to use the service then converting the license is probably cheaper than paying for the service independently (if we chose to do that). It's only an extra $20 a year or $1.67 a month.

Lifetime license holders continue to get support and downloads for free.

We have no desire to break apart the software and offer a tiered version to different license holders. There is no desire to withhold features from anyone and this is an important distinction as the new spam service is a service, not a feature. We're going to have to maintain several servers, pay for the bandwidth, run and maintain back-ups, deal with IP removal requests, etc, which all incurs cost.

Ultimately, it is not an essential service for some and no compunction to use it. It does show, however, that we are committed to tackling the spam issue that plagues many customers.

May I also add that the IP.Board 3.0.2 download zip will be the same for standard, perpetual and lifetime license holders. We're not removing code for anyone.

It will be listed as a core feature on our web site soon and also will show, quite prominently, in the client area. It's in everyone's best interest to encourage use of course :)

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.

Since in the announcement nothing is mentioned about that I'll it here: is there any way for us forum admins with an active license to ask for the removal of an address/IP from the spam list if a certain data is marked wrongly as spam?

I'm sure there is a way (maybe opening a ticket) but a fast way to report such things is needed when a lot of people will use this system after the release :)



A good idea indeed :thumbsup:

Keep in mind only admins/mods can report someone as spam and it takes more than just one or two manual reports to flag a user as a spam account.

I think the small change that Collins made should be used in future updates :)

Knock yourself out.

http://www.collin1000.com/ipbpolls.txt