Charles

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.

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

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.

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

We were going to post our list but we want to contact the authors first. Don't want to make people look bad for a simple little bug :)

We were going to post our list but we want to contact the authors first. Don't want to make people look bad for a simple little bug :)

Yes, we renamed CCS to IP.Content as even we kept typing CCS/CSS at times :)

I am not sure what you expect us to do. By your own statement the account is not in your name it's in the name of the Scott you mentioned. Scott is the client of record. He could certainly login and change that information but that is up to him - we will certainly not go changing client login information just because someone claims to have purchased the license from a third-party site. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?

(Side note: don't put much stock in the BBB. Most complaints sent to the BBB are not to do with IPS but rather people send complaints to us about IPBs out there thinking we run them. Plus I could go on a huge rant about the BBB but that's a different topic.)

As with most businesses 99% of clients are happy but it's the 1% who are not happy who you hear from :)

Most of our complaints come from client-confusion. The last few posted here were people thinking we had somehow removed their license when they were just logging in under the wrong email address, for example. We also get a lot of "timezone" complaints. Like someone in Europe will post a ticket and wonder why it's taking "so long" for a reply forgetting it's 3:00 am here. Sure we have staff in tickets from Europe too but some stuff requires certain staff to take care of.

We also get complaints from what I call "abnormal expectations" like: client has IPB installed on a host using ultra-secure PHP setup with almost everything disabled and is mad because things don't work. Another one would be languages issues. We are continuing to work on language issues but when your whole staff only speaks English it's hard to debug language issues and some people become angry thinking we don't care when really it's just an ongoing process as it is so hard for us to debug.

Of course we sometimes miss a response timeframe for a ticket, give a client wrong information, and mess up. That's understandable. When we do mess up we never defend ourselves we acknowledge it and try to fix it. We do get defensive though when someone posts a rant on the forums and misrepresents the facts. That really drives me nuts :)

Awe he found our master plan for keeping bugs in the product :(

(Side note: don't put much stock in the BBB. Most complaints sent to the BBB are not to do with IPS but rather people send complaints to us about IPBs out there thinking we run them. Plus I could go on a huge rant about the BBB but that's a different topic.)

As with most businesses 99% of clients are happy but it's the 1% who are not happy who you hear from :)

Most of our complaints come from client-confusion. The last few posted here were people thinking we had somehow removed their license when they were just logging in under the wrong email address, for example. We also get a lot of "timezone" complaints. Like someone in Europe will post a ticket and wonder why it's taking "so long" for a reply forgetting it's 3:00 am here. Sure we have staff in tickets from Europe too but some stuff requires certain staff to take care of.

We also get complaints from what I call "abnormal expectations" like: client has IPB installed on a host using ultra-secure PHP setup with almost everything disabled and is mad because things don't work. Another one would be languages issues. We are continuing to work on language issues but when your whole staff only speaks English it's hard to debug language issues and some people become angry thinking we don't care when really it's just an ongoing process as it is so hard for us to debug.

Of course we sometimes miss a response timeframe for a ticket, give a client wrong information, and mess up. That's understandable. When we do mess up we never defend ourselves we acknowledge it and try to fix it. We do get defensive though when someone posts a rant on the forums and misrepresents the facts. That really drives me nuts :)

I sure hope he can. I hear he's a nice guy.

I sure hope he can. I hear he's a nice guy.

It's probably easier to just have password enforcement options the admin can set than getting into user-level options. We can look into this for a future version.

It's probably easier to just have password enforcement options the admin can set than getting into user-level options. We can look into this for a future version.

It's probably easier to just have password enforcement options the admin can set than getting into user-level options. We can look into this for a future version.

It's probably easier to just have password enforcement options the admin can set than getting into user-level options. We can look into this for a future version.

I am not sure what you expect us to do. By your own statement the account is not in your name it's in the name of the Scott you mentioned. Scott is the client of record. He could certainly login and change that information but that is up to him - we will certainly not go changing client login information just because someone claims to have purchased the license from a third-party site. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?

Understand that from our perspective you are not our customer - the account owner is. We have no way of knowing if/who/when you bought that license from. All we know is the data that is in our client system and if it has the other person's name and email then that is who we must speak to.

I am not sure what you expect us to do. By your own statement the account is not in your name it's in the name of the Scott you mentioned. Scott is the client of record. He could certainly login and change that information but that is up to him - we will certainly not go changing client login information just because someone claims to have purchased the license from a third-party site. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?

Understand that from our perspective you are not our customer - the account owner is. We have no way of knowing if/who/when you bought that license from. All we know is the data that is in our client system and if it has the other person's name and email then that is who we must speak to.

I am not sure what you expect us to do. By your own statement the account is not in your name it's in the name of the Scott you mentioned. Scott is the client of record. He could certainly login and change that information but that is up to him - we will certainly not go changing client login information just because someone claims to have purchased the license from a third-party site. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?

I am not sure what you expect us to do. By your own statement the account is not in your name it's in the name of the Scott you mentioned. Scott is the client of record. He could certainly login and change that information but that is up to him - we will certainly not go changing client login information just because someone claims to have purchased the license from a third-party site. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?

Understand that from our perspective you are not our customer - the account owner is. We have no way of knowing if/who/when you bought that license from. All we know is the data that is in our client system and if it has the other person's name and email then that is who we must speak to.

Understand that from our perspective you are not our customer - the account owner is. We have no way of knowing if/who/when you bought that license from. All we know is the data that is in our client system and if it has the other person's name and email then that is who we must speak to.