Invisionpower Reviews 13

Removing the marketplace was an insane decision that's made us have to move software entirely. Scattering 3rd party developers to the winds to maintain their own licencing essentially violated one of the core principles of why we used IPB in the first place.

This has been an expensive headache to migrate away from IPB and many months of our licence, countless custom work and 3rd party module licences will go wasted.

After 8 years paying your fees all I can say is good riddance and I hope that whatever business development executive signed off on moving more towards corporate and away from hobbyist users holds the bag when you realise that a lot of companies use IPB because many of their IT professionals have grown up around the software and recommend it internally.

Disgustingly cynical company.

19 years of a great community. We're just waiting for them to pull the plug on the life support. IPB or IPS or whatever it is this year, started out as a community forum software. About 5 years ago, they decided to go for the bucks and attract businesses over simple forums. In the before times, developers would make add-ons free to help communities grow. Then the software started getting updated that broke things so often, that developers, who had many apps, couldn't keep up with the changes. So they started charging a small fee for "support" in case IPB broke something in an update.

Then many developers jumped on the money making train, and started charging high prices for apps. Plus, an upgrade fee every six months.

I bought my software in 2006 for around $140. paid 25 every six months for upgrades that broke things. That support has jacked up to 40 now for self hosted sites, and I don't think I've needed it for the last 4-5 years. If you don't pay the support fee (or ransom fee), whether you use it or not, then your spam filter stops working, you can't access the general IPB community for tips, Other features cease to function gps mapping etc.

Apparently, things aren't making them rich as they had hoped it would. They now want you in their cloud. So instead of us older people of many years, just paying for cheap self-hosting, and the $40 support/ransom fee. They are forcing people to move to the cloud. A bare-bones forum will cost $89 a month on their cloud. When their highly touted V5 rolls out soon, prior self-hosted versions will not get support, so you run, till you get hacked.

A Theme to make your community look other than plain vanilla? Around $40 for a cheap one, plus a 6-month support fee for that software, plus a new higher support fee from IPB V5

While on the subject of costs. They eventually closed their community marketplace, where you could find low cost apps or a few free ones. No need in griping, though. I knew when they decided to no longer honor lifetime licenses. The end would be near. That was enough to tell me if I should purchase the new IPB/IPS software. Besides, I run a community, not a business.

Maybe it's Karma, but I think I noticed that where they have gone from using words like grow your business/presence. It's now shifting back to improve your community.

Doesn't care about the customer, it's all about enterprise and money. They jacked up the price by 3-5x for us older customers effectively leaving our communities to die. Be warned.

The software itself is full of bugs and bloated with useless features that don't justify the ridiculously high prices that they charge. Also the staff is very arrogant and if you so much say something that they don't like they put you in post moderation.

This to the Ipb Team who is asking members on their forum to leave positive reviews here. You should get your act together rather than pressuring your members to leave positive reviews. Shame on you.

Stay away from this company. There are much better alternatives like XenForo or Smf.

We didn't wind up using the service, and now Invision is throwing up roadblocks to cancellation. Unlike reputable platforms, there is no mechanism for cancellation from within the service. If you contact the firm directly to cancel, they will not do it without a "verification code" that they claim the user submits when the account is created. However, there is no recovery mechanism for it, and the only means to cancel is to remove the payment method from the account. That requires a verification question that doesn't work and again doesn't provide a recovery mechanism. Reputable software doesn't function this way. A colossal waste of time and energy for a software platform that's clunky at best.

They got extemely greedy! I would never recommend invision to anyone, and I've been an ips user for more than 10 years! They're trying to get clients who use self hosted accounts to change to their subscription schemes, which start at over 1000$ per year, which is ridiculous. Avoid them, they want your money and nothing else!

I’ve used invision power board for 10 years. I switched to xenforo forum software and here’s why I recommend that you also should switch to xenforo:

1. Invision power support absolutely sucks. This company is an absolute joke when it comes to supporting clients. You now have to ask the community before your issue can be looked at by their support team which you’ve paid for when you buy a license. Currently it takes 3+ days to get a response, every response. So your issue could take weeks to solve after you have to wait for days to get your issue converted to a ticket after asking the “community.” WHAT A JOKE!!

2. This company and its employees are thieves. They automatically bill your card and if you’re not ever planning to use their garbage CMS again because XENFORO IS BETTER, they won’t refund your money. You have to charge back.

3. Renewal prices are currently $75 every 6 months. This price is absolutely outrageous when there are several free and open source alternatives. Or xenforo which is very affordable. IPB and it’s addons are not worth this much money.

4. Invision powerboard forum software might as well be renamed to invision power bloat software because it is bloated with code that isn’t used most of the time. The software loads slowly even if it’s on its very own dedicated server. It is vulnerable to several different kinds of hacking attacks.

Summary:
IPS and Invision power board forum software both suck. The forum software is slow and clunky. The company that maintains it is made up of lazy, good for nothing people.

Support is lacking, three day response times isn't ideal and the community forum doesn't really help - had very little productive responses and takes days to get a reply. Will be looking for alternatives. We switched to invision with high hopes and our forum is now dead in the water with no real support from invision, serious concern for future issues - What happens if we need urgent support? Do we just wait for three days whilst our forum is down? :(

I've been using them for around 6+ years. I paid another year of license through PayPal, login the next day and see a message that I have been blocked!?!? No reason or explanation.

I sent an email to their CS about a week ago, still no response. Meanwhile I migrated forum to another provider.

No serious company acts like that. If I knew I wouldn't put so much time into SEO for links that no longer work.

I suggest to everyone not to make my mistake and goes somewhere else for forum solutions.

Millions of bugs in every version. Every new release fixes some bugs and adds twice more. Even old stable versions (2-3 years old) have bugs. Looks like they don't have QA at all.

Too many useless functions and lack of vital features. Nothing changes for decades.

Instead of focusing on one main product (forum) and main functionality (for ex., good search, easy moderation) they waste time on adding more and more additional "cool" features like clubs, leaders table, 2-step auth e.t.c.

If you need a good forum, only a forum, consider phpBB or Discourse.

IPS is a good company but they criticise they customers too easy, they have too many updates but they care about keeping your community safe and the best, IPS runs alot of good communities online and they have made alot of amazing applications for users to use

I had a very bad experience with vBulletin (which I also reviewed on TrustPilot), so I decided to try InvisionPower instead.

I only required a very small forum for the small website I built, and InvisionPower is offering that for just $10 a month, without the need to even pay for hosting, no need to install the forum (unlike vBulletin which does require you to install it and it could get stuck there, that's what happened to me).

Hence, I got exactly what I needed ... a small forum, easy to manage it, to customize it the way you want, to use lots of different skins, and basically it's really that great and the cost is so cheap.

The only thing I'm sorry is for myself not going directly with InvisionPower... their customer service replies to tickets much more quickly and I really had nothing but great service with them.

Totally recommended.