Charles

We will actually be posting some blog updates this week regarding the next versions of some of our products :)

Yes you can renew anytime if you choose to let the 6-month renewal expire.

Community Suite is Board/Blog/Gallery with a discount of up front price AND the renewals - we can't make it much cheaper ;)

Our pre-sales forum is full of converts and our sales email box is quite full so we are very much aware of the unhappiness of existing clients of vB.

We currently have a package deal for our entire product line. You can read about it here:

We will certainly look into other options early this week :)

Just shut it off for the evening actually :) will be online again tomorrow for a while.

We are investigating the possibility of offering a chat service for IPB directly from IPS.

This chat service would run inside of your IPB install much like Gallery or Blog however the actual exchange of chat messages would be handled by IPS servers. The high volume of transactions needed for a chat room would probably get you banned from most web hosting providers and, even if you have high-end hosting, it requires a specially tuned server to perform well. You can forget that headache and let us handle the transactions. Chat room statistics and access to log archives will of course be available for owners.

Testing

For the time being, we will only have the chat room open here on our company forums when an IPS staff member opens it. We are looking to test both the interface you use for chatting and the back-end server performance so we need online staff to monitor both sides of the exchange. So keep an eye for the chat link to appear in the top navigation or a "who's chatting" area to show up on the home page under statistics. When you see this then you know the room is available for testing :)

Please post bugs in the bug tracker under the IP.Chat category. You can post feedback here in the feedback forum or just reply to this topic. Please keep in mind this would be a version 1.0.0 so, although we can add all sorts of cool stuff over time, we are focusing on a nice, stable chat room right now. Things like private conversations, multiple rooms, and more are on our list but we must perfect the base chat room before adding on all the extras.

Please note that this is the first test of many users in the chat room so there will probably be issues. We will also be doing server-level testing so you might get kicked out now and again or the service may abruptly close so don't take it personally ;). Your feedback on all areas of the chat from features through usability down to speed of chat responses is appreciated.

Pricing

The pricing of the chat service is yet to be announced and will be based on how many people you have in your chat room at one time. Details of the package levels and pricing will be made available at a later date. The good news is that the first chat package level will be free for active IPB license holders. We hope you enjoy that extra benefit to being a license holder.

Well... you're getting into fuzzy territory here :)

It usually depends on where you're hosted/company is registered. We don't go policing content on our client sites of course.

I don't have a firm answer for you on that one.

Yes that actually just changed this evening :)

For those asking about IP.Content on another domain, keep in mind that www.invisionpower.com is powered by IP.Content

With canned replies, I mean standard reply texts, that you can insert into posts, PM, etc.

Regarding wiki; I currently use a native wiki system: i.e. wiki articles in posts. Its an important part of my site.

You can sort of do canned replied with multi-moderation.

If your Community Suite goes on sale, I'll probably jump off the vb ship. ;)

Check announcements forum :)

I think it's because the little sidebar is a hook Matt made as a demo one day that people liked so much we included it :) Not to say we can't do that as some point of course...

http://forums.televisionwithoutpity.com has like 10 million posts (or something like that) and is owned by NBC

http://life.atlantafalcons.com/index Atlanta Falcons has 2 million

For big boards specifically for search we suggest Sphinx wherever possible. It's supported as standard in IPB3.

For templating you could always get one of our demos and have a click around :)

is there anything in your terms and conditions that guarantees that the 6 monthly support renewal will be offered for lifetime licenses?

Of course who knows in the distant future but it would be very hard for us to change the way we structure our renewals. The 6 month renewal allows us to not only offer support and upgrades but also addon services like spam monitor (and some future ones we're planning) at no extra cost.

We don't have that specific permission level in your example however there are others that we do have.

The permissions you mentioned are for forum-level permissions. There are also individual settings in each forum settings (outside permissions setup) and at the user group level.

Personally, I don't buy "in the next week or two" promises. I've learned my lessons from experiences. :o I am more like "I will believe it when I see it" kind of person.

Well then be sure to read our blog tomorrow and hang around here for the next few weeks ;)

Mark here at IPS (handles most conversions) would be the best person to answer your question. I am sure he will see this topic tomorrow or you can email sales and ask and we can get you a proper answer.

I still have an active license of a Vb and I have to say that it's really chaotic in licensed customer forum right now at Vb. There is no way that I am going to renew my vb license in current status. I am not paying a dime to those backstabbing bastards at Vb.

And so-called manager has vanished ever since the new pricing has been announced and left few support staffs to deal with the mess. What a day.

FYI, I had two active Vb licenses. I moved one of my Vb license to IPB in May 2008 and still retain one active Vb license.

There are huge differences in Vb3 and IPB3. But, to be bluntly honest, I never rely on mods because they are always unreliable. But if you do use lots of mods, I will say that Vb will be better for you.

Though some of really important and much-needed Vb mod features are built right in IPB as official features.

Oh, and IPB has an official CMS, Gallery, Downloads, and Blog (Which I am not so fond of.) as add-on.

As for mods we are working on things to encourage more mods but, keep in mind, we have lots of features standard in IPB (like certain SEO functions and such) that require a mod for vB. So one could say you need fewer mods in IPB depending on what you're after.

New versions of Gallery/Downloads/Blog/etc. are in the works. We will be posting blog updates about it in the next week or two :)

Just a reminder: we appreciate the feedback (both positive on how we can improve) on our products but let's not become vB trolls. They have enough problems right now and if IPS were to ever have trouble we would expect a similar professional courtesy from them.

Done :)

If we run a promotion it would be for anyone - not just vB converts. There are plenty of other products out there :)

We are happy to keep a topic like this open if it does not turn into a bashing thread. We are out to offer a great community solution here and we appreciate our customers being quite happy with our products but don't want things to turn dark in the process :)


As for alternatives to addons perhaps you can post a list of which ones you are looking for alternatives? I am sure the community can give you pointers.

We are seriously considering a sale either in the license or the conversion services. In the last 24 hours between posts on the forums and in our sales email people are clamoring for something of the sort.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to lock tickets that have had no activity for over 5 days. Honestly no one has ever complained or even really noticed before :) Everyone just starts a new ticket if needed.

It's not like we are denying support to anyone - just trying to keep things tidy. We added it because people would reopen tickets sometimes months old by replying to an old email or something and it would get confusing.

Your instance is rare I would think. Most clients would not take more than 5 days to reply. If they do not reply it's almost always because ticket is resolved so the system automatically marks that status.

Tickets only auto-locked (resolved) if, after one of our staff replies, you do not make a new reply in 5 days.

It keeps people from reopening ancient tickets.

Can you provide a ticket number where you waited that long during business hours?

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