Matt

David - sorry about the mod informarion. I'll take a look after the weekend. WTG - good posts!

Well, we're far off into the land of theoretical situations now. :) I don't think I can write a cast iron statement that will cover all eventualities. If we did bring out a more attractive license then we probably would offer some way of switching. We've done it in the past.

Happy to help. :)

Unfortunately we don't have a downloadable demo to offer. Yes, we did extend the demo to 24 hours recently. We have some developer's documents here, though: http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/official.html?category=37

You can't. :D I'll agree though that Charles' post was a little ambiguous. What he meant was that you can run IP.Content in "www.domain.com" even if your forum is at "www.domain.com/forums/". I'll do my best to see what I can do for you today.

As mentioned previously, if we do change things then we always honour the existing licenses in circulation. We still honour the terms of the lifetime and perpetual licenses and we'd do the same with the standard license. If we sell you a license that says that as long as you keep on top of renewals then you can get access to upgrades at no extra cost then that's what we mean. Even if we did bring out a super new license, the license you have is still valid. We wouldn't be foolish to "pull an IB" and pull the rug from under you. I know you're looking for a little something to give you confidence that switching is going to protect you from all the hassle you're having now. All I can do is say that we're straight up, in it for the long haul and won't be careless with your trust.

Good catch, I've updated my original post.

Ah. Yes, I mean 2005. I think it does work on 2000 but 2005 is much better.

We have always 'grandfathered' our licenses when we've introduced new ones. For example, we previously offered lifetime licenses (lifetime usage and access to downloads) which we still uphold today and the same with our old perpetual licenses. That said, we've not changed our current license for years and the six monthly renewal is a good model for us.

Good point, FAQ updated.

Updated with information on our IP.Subscriptions application, license information and more.

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.

We were so pleased with that site at the time. Seems such a long time ago, now!

I would also suggest you try out our demo. It's free for 8 hours and we can extend it if you need more time: http://www.invisionpower.com/products/demo.php Please keep in mind that it's a hosted demo with many demo accounts on a single server. If it's busy, it may appear to be a little slower but that doesn't reflect the speed you can expect on your own server or on our hosting network. Also, file uploads are disabled in PHP so you may get the odd PHP warning when attempting to upload. That aside, it's a fully loaded IP.Board including Blog, Gallery, Downloads and IP.Content.

Hello, It's worth quickly noting that this forum is a pre-sales forum so only staff can approve posts in it and make direct replies. If you would like, I can move this into our feedback area which will receive more attention from the community. In a nutshell, IP.Board is PHP 5 OOP utilizing a front controller system with an underlying registry to service database connections, incoming variables, viewing member data and caches. The controller files are responsible for collecting content and then pushing it to the display later where HTML logic and special tags format the data. The display controller is abstracted so you can write your own handler for different formats. IP.Board ships with a handler for HTML and XML but you can just as easily write a layer that handles WAP or anything else you need. As for coding advantages, well, that's a very good question. IP.Board 3 is a brand new framework written from the ground up. And it is important to note that it is a framework that you can use. The forums are effectively just an application inside the framework. As is the Blog, Gallery and Calendar, etc. What this means is that you can utilize this power when writing your own applications. There is almost no need to make hacks or edit code. There are integration points in almost every area; searching, sessions, member sync, etc. it's all there for your use. We have good and solid database abstraction, good real re-useable classes for common tasks (managing XML, importing skins, etc). We have several static classes for text wrangling and member management. I could go on. There is also a hook system that allows you to insert code in almost every IF and FOREACH block within the default templates. You can also override the basic controller classes very easily. Put short, IP.Board is not a procedural mess of code that requires open heart surgery to apply basic modifications. $newMember = IPSMember::create( $data ); IPSMember::load( $memberID, 'all' ); $member = IPSMember::buildDisplayData( $member ); $photo = IPSMember::buildProfilePhoto( $member ); IPSMember::save( $memberId, $memberData );

Yeah. As always, feel free to report bugs and feedback but we really are tied to MySQL full text searching. I would presume that MySQL would see "lo-fi" as "lo" and "fi" and each word is less than 4 characters and therefore not stored in the index.

I did a fair amount of optimizing in 3.0.4. A lot was SQL side. I removed a lot of temporary tables / filesort operations in fairly common areas (profile, stats, etc). It's the kind of thing a board running well inside its resource footprint would never notice, but a board with a lot of traffic would. For busy boards, the additional I/O and delay caused by MySQL writing temporary files could lock up MySQL which will knock on to all subsequent requests for access. With regards to third party mods and hooks; as mentioned previously we have been compiling a list and I will email the authors at some point. In most cases, the problem is a slow MySQL query. I can think of one hook off the top of my head that adds a large GROUP by query on the post table on the board index (highly trafficked area). This query is complex and slow causing 1 temporary table and 1 file sort. There are additional tools in 3.0.4 to help capture slow and 'bad' queries which I'll detail in a resources article.

Indeed. Skins you create for 3.0.0 will work in 3.0.4 but you may have to tweak them with the very latest bug fixes. This is why we publish a skin diff so you know exactly what we changed and you can see if it impacts you or not. Of course, in an ideal world, IP.Board would be able to automatically detect what has changed and fix it manually but no such tool could be written due to all the different possible combinations of HTML code. As a trivial example, if an original template as: <strong><a href='http://google.com'>Google</a></strong> And you changed that to: <div style='font-weight:bold'><a href='http://google.com'>Google</a></div> Then it would be impossible to automatically apply changes based on: <em><a href='http://google.com'>Google</a></em> Even SVN (code versioning system) can't do that. The best it can do is tell you that the changes cannot be applied and it will have to be resolved manually.

We are at the mercy of MySQL, there's very little we can do. MySQL set up the boolean syntax so really you're better off asking them for improvements. Unless we were to create a 'really advanced' form that had a list of text input boxes with a drop down next to each one that said "As well as" "not including this", etc.

Please keep in mind that we have to rely solely on MySQL's fulltext searching and indexing. We can't really improve the result set further as we don't have access to their algorithms. Also, we have to deliver a functional search tool that can potentially search millions of posts in a very short time and without taking too many resources. Having said that, boolean searching is fairly accurate "this -that", "this +that". And there is an option in the 'advanced' search form to not display posts from a topic.

BBcode is actually just a fancy text replacement so you couldn't perform moderation actions by adding BBcode without a lot of dynamic code. Ironcially, anyone who remembers early Ikonboard may remember #moderation tags....

Ok, hopefully I won't regret this. ;) Brandon (Bfarber) is correct in that the today's posters feature did join on a permission index table to generate an appropriate list of forums as this is generally better than a long list of forum IDs in an IN() clause. However... Over the past few releases, we have been removing this join in favour of an IN clause as the join onto the permission index table causes a filesort with a temporary table which, for a very very busy site, is much like flicking on and off the power switch. I did actually originally flip it around and use NOT IN() in a QA build of 3.0.1 but Brandon removed it rightly because the forum IDs that are accessible via $classForums->forum_by_id are only ones that you have viewing permission on before additional checks are peformed (passwords, can you read topics, other users topics, etc, etc) so flipping it around to a NOT IN can actually expose you to more forums you never had access to anyway (staff forums, etc). Anyway, the end result is this: I did to the today's poster feature what I did to search / view new content and removed the table join in favour of IN(). While I was there, I removed forums that do not allow post incrimination thus restoring IP.Board 2.x's functionality and hopefully pleasing more people that the change annoys.

Often requested, not currently possible, may make a future release.