Educate Me About IP Board

Hey Guys,

I've been looking to expand my horizons so to speak. I already know the vBulletin and XenForo side of things. IPB is the only area where I'm lacking in the popular paid forum software arena. I've moved a couple of IP boards between hosts but that wasn't a huge deal; Dump database, import database, copy files, update config file, and done.

Are there any hidden gotchas when buying a license? If I dropped $175 on a license today would I get version 4 when it comes out? Stuff like that is what I'm curious about.

Thanks,
Dan

 

IPB is nice but it has some stuff that is not so nice the admin panel is nice but it is not sorted. Making a theme or add-on is not easy but if you know how then its easier. I has flaws like Xenforo and vBulletin but its far better then vBulletin IMHO.

As for dropping 175 dollars i would not do that i would wait until IPB 4.0 is released IPB 4.0 is a complete rewrite (read the blogs on their site) so if you get IPB3.x.x now you need to unlearn what you learned and then look freshly at IPB 4.0. There renewal scheme is pretty nice but expensive compared to other forum software. If you only take forum only then its 25 dollars in 6 months if a new version is released when you have an active license then you may download the newest version. If you do not renew you lose spam solution and a few other extras like the 5 user chat. But when you renew you will get ticket support to for the6 months, they do not limit use of their site so you have acess to all forums.

Like i said read their blogs about IPB 4.0 http://community.invisionpower.com/forum/1-news-and-information/ everything that starts with 4.0 is about the new product.

 

IPB is a nice script however it also has some flaws. We moved our big board to IPB , it was not an easy process as there were tons of bugs on convertor script. We had to correct many of the bugs ourself and completed our move.

We had to invest a lot to resolve the flaws we identify. Major flaws can be highlighted as

1. Moderation is complete pita however it is not hard to resolve these issues. We studied all flaws detailed and developed tons of improvements. Now moderation is way easier then vBulletin. In fact it is amazing as everything is tied together.
2. Terminology changes , this may not be an issue for a new board but for a long time vBulletin user it is a huge issue imo. Their language system doesn't also help resolving the issue as on each upgrade stupidly your custom language is getting overwritten with default language. So you need to educate your users heavily about terminology changes
3. Style system is good but too complex compared to vBulletin. Template organisation is way problematic.
4. Integration between applications are not perfect. Basic things work differently through applications which causes issues for end users.
5. Search is disaster
6. Permissions are way too complex and definitions are confusing.

However it also has a lot of nice things. SEO is close to perfect , we only had to do minor tweaks regarding SEO.
If you know how to configure your server it is a fast loading script.
It is stable , not too much bugs out there.
Allows you to turn your forum to a complete website.
Admin Panel may look confusing but when you get used to it , you can control everything easily. Admin search is a huge bonus and allow you to find settings/users etc.. so easily.

For us IPB seem to be working pretty nice. Our traffic increased over 25% compared to vBulletin days in less then 7 month and technical side , we are spending way less time compared to vBulletin which is a huge bonus if you are lacing enough time on your life

More importantly IPB 4 looks like a pretty good script.It seems IPB team learned their mistake and fully focusing on an amazing script that can dominate the next 4-5 years of forum world. We are following their blog entries closely and imo if they don't mess up they will have the best script.

 

Lizard King what is the issue with the CMS of IPB, it has something to do about the storage of the custom fields that was not 100%. But i do not know if they fixed it in the latest version.

 

Come on over

We don't know when an official IPB 4 is being released by something tells me we WILL BE seeing in the first half of 2014. A lot of customers on the official support forums feel the same as well. I recently just renewed my licence as of the other day.

@Lizard King has a way much bigger site than i do lol(I am not into his forum's niche by any means, however it is one of the site i always go to see how they manage to handle using IPB on such a big board as i do aspire for that level of success myself) so i do trust his judgement in what he says as far as knowledge and what not.

I am the opposite, I am more of a newbie when it comes to most software and also administration so below are my personal experiences.

For me, I've never used Vbulletin aside from a brief demo and at the time as a newbie admin, I literally couldn't be ask to try and learn that software. People complain about the IPB panel but Vbulletin 4 panel confused the crap out of me lol.

I've used Xenforo and Ipb interchangeably for the past 2 years and while Xenforo has a much more visually attractive panel, a lot of the complaints about IPB's is quite negligible....the search function works near perfectly.

The search for me is not a disaster, then again LK DOES have a much much bigger site than I, so ymmv with that.

Permissions aren't that complicated...I actually had more issues with Xenforo's and a lot of people said it was the easiest permission set compared to Vbulletin & IPB but even after i figured out how to do it, it didn't seem quite as intuitive. With IPB it's literally a matter of checking or not checking something to give permission(take away).

My only complaint for IPB is actually quite small...The notifications really could use some improvement. After using Xenforo and their notifications system, IPB did slightly bug me but it is such a small complaint and i've yet to hear any members complain about it.

You should really give it a try though.