Matt

And I've replied to your ticket.

Hello, I see that it's been just over 90 minutes since Larry's last reply. I'm sure he will get back to it ASAP but he's in the middle of another upgrade. Needless to say we won't leave you like this for long.

To reiterate, you would not be receiving a new feature but rather a new service. It's an important distinction to make. We are offering a brand new service free to standard and business license holders. It really is as simple as that. What would be the nature of your complaint, though? The fact that we are not allowing you access to a brand new service? We immediately clarified the term 'support and service license' with a reply to the announcement. I certainly apologise if the wording wasn't clear. I really don't see how anyone can claim that we've moved goal posts. Again, I reiterate, we are offering a new service that is free to current standard and business licenses. It is not a new feature within IP.Board. You still get exactly what you paid for and continue to pay for. Please understand this basic concept: we are not 'stripping features' for legacy licensed customers. We will not do that. We have a duty to uphold the terms of your license and we continue to do so willingly. It is a brand new service. At no point did we say that a licence purchase will entitle you to all new products and/or services that we provide. It's no different really from IP.Blog or Gallery, etc. They are all separate products and purchasable separately. I have a Blackberry and an unlimited data plan yet I would have to purchase a subscription if I wanted to use the installed GPS navigator. I own an iMac yet I had to purchase an extra subscription for .Mac (mobileme) access. These are additional opt-in services. We just decided to give ours away free as long as you have an active or business license.

We have looked at options. The biggest issue for us is entrusting the data to a third party. Grading users registering would be out of our hands. Askimet deals with content, though, not members. There are other free services out there but none of them could handle the load that tens of thousands of IP.Boards would generate. We wouldn't want to rely on something that was unreliable. There would also be nothing stopping them from changing how their services work at a drop of a hat forcing us to make a quick release or update, etc.

It would be a one way conversion.

You are getting precisely the level of service you paid for, so it is not a waste of money. You get the same download as everyone else and the same support as everyone else. You are not excluded from ongoing developments within IP.Board. If we add a cool new feature within IP.Board then you'll get that too. The spam service is an external service it is not a cool new feature within IP.Board. Any new services we roll out will be just that; a service - not a cool new feature in IP.Board. Arguably the spam service does not enhance your IP.Board in anyway. It just helps prevent spammers from signing up to your board and you just need an active current license, not an active legacy license. Then you can carry on with your current license just fine. :)

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.

Done. Will be in 3.0.2. Too many template, lang and file edits to release a quick 'patch'.

Simply turn off the ability for validating members to view or edit their profile information for now. I think we probably do need to add a field per group to filter this out. Actually, I can do this with the bitwise options. I'll do it now.

The words "Future" and "IE6" are at odds with each other. I am aware of the service and while it's great for off-the-cuff discussion it's not really designed as a fully feature forum. It's too basic in terms of moderation and managing discussions.

Of course you did. Once you start a public rant that compares us to Nazis, the best course of action is to keep quiet on any details that back up your complaint. ;) Regardless, I see no way to move foward and will lock this topic. I have nothing further to say either publicly or via PMs. Jawohl

A couple of days ago? I got a PM from you yesterday evening at 5:30pm my time which was after I had left work for the day. I try and reply to PMs where possible but it might take a day or so to get a response. For the record, I remember you very well. Oh yes. I remember you very well indeed. We had quite an interesting time, didn't we?

Why do we need to take a closer look? My eyesight is fine.

There were just so many changed files. It would be easier just telling you what wasn't changed. We can provide a DIFF but our repo contains everything including blog, gallery, downloads, etc. It would be a pain to go through it and manually remove those items.

We have stuff in the pipeline for spammers. Watch this space. Well, figuratively speaking.

Yeah, we tweaked search and somewhere along the multiple SVN commits some code went missing. I fixed that. I still have a few other things to tinker with. FTR, 3.0.1 contains the 'fixed' version of search.

Cheques in the post.

Things should be improved.

Easy, tiger. I don't think name calling is required. :) If you use PayPal, non-recurring and set up lifetime or permanent subscriptions and only get a few each month then the chances are you aren't affected by any bugs.

Date bug is definitely fixed. E-checks now definitely work.

One more beta then an RC. I don't think many people are going to test it properly until they use it on their website properly. The best I can do is make sure it all hangs together correctly and then dive in and fix up whatever is reported as quickly as I can.

Done, I have.

#3 Done for 3.0.1

I have a few more I want to add. Android is one, Opera Mini is another and another little smartphone web browser 'Bolt' which is getting some popularity. Unsure if this will be a 3.0.1 thing, though. Might add a way to import/export groups via XML. That would be handy dandy.