Invision Community ClassicReviews of invisioncommunity.com

Dit is de slechte vertaal bureau dat er is. Vertaling van Engels naar Nederlands is erg slecht. Woorden worden weggelaten door hun waardoor onze taal maar ook de Engelse taal naar de maan wordt geholpen en het lijkt wel of hier meer achter zit zoals de haat naar het westen

Many years ago i moved from a self hosted forum to an Invision hosted one on the promise that everything would be smooth and updates all managed by Invision. Over the years, the price continued to increase, support got worse, i had to do my own updates and features have been dropped or just dont work. Then today i found out that i have to move to v5 for continued support which means i need to move to a new package costing more than double what i pay now. Absolutely ridiculous.

I've started using InvisionCommunity 4 on their Cloud Host almost exactly 10 years ago. For better or worse, the amount of communication between me and their support staff has been topping any other contact I have with other companies. From mundane questions, not understanding certain features, to bugs in the software, to the site just going down for no reason and no fault of my own and that several times, to, one time, all our DNS entries of our domain just getting lost altogether (for a while they were our nameserver for our domain). It's been a wild ride. There are aspects of their hosting service and future vision for IVC that I strongly disagree with, such as dropping the support tickets system from IVC5, but on the other hand I cannot deny that their Software helped me grow a one man business to a gamedev studio that employs 20+ people now, and in the process utterly outgrowing their hosting capacity. In life you have to take the good with the bad, and the same rings true for InvisionCommunity. Despite all these flaws, thank you for your 10 years of service and giving an effort to deliver a good product.

Back in 1999, Matt Mecham, who is an outstanding php developer, created a brilliant piece of online forum software called “Ikonboard”, which was available for free. The software became incredibly popular and was installed on thousands of websites all around the world. In April 2001 Matt decided to join the Jarvis Network in return for 50,000 shares, but apparently (and sadly) he was ripped off because he was never able to sell any of the shares. Later Matt cofounded “invision community” with Charles Warner and Lindy Throgmartin. A large portion of Ikonboard users, myself included, followed Matt. The software kept evolving, was no longer free, but it was very reasonably priced. In those days 99% of the clients were “self hosted”. In recent years, the company has grown and the target audience is no longer small communities, and the pricing structure has changed dramatically. At present, self hosted clients are only around 10% and shrinking, and they’re mainly focusing on “Software as a service on the cloud”. They no longer offer “lifetime” licenses (your know, you only pay if you upgrade to a newer version) to self-hosted clients, they want to charge us 200$ every year for a crippled version of the software, (for the time being, although that could increase at any time, and realistically, the most likely evolution is that they will no longer develop the self hosted version in the not too distant future). Many of the old “faithful Matt Mecham followers” believe that the cloud version is outrageously priced and that prospective clients would be much better off studying much cheaper alternatives or even free ones… I have 3 invision licenses for the 4.x version, and I will not be renewing any of them. I understand that things change and some products are no longer profitable, but Invision could've sold the self hosted version of the software before they closed the add-ons market and focus on the cloud-only version only, they're such different products now, but apparently they preferred to keep "milking the cow". Kicking those who believed in Matt and were loyal to him deserved better. Now Invision community has become greedy and without a soul. I cannot possibly recommend Invisioncommunity to anyone other than wealthy individuals and corporations who don’t care about spending a fortune on something that they could get for much less.

About 19 years I think, I've hosted a wonderful "community" forum, self-hosted. I'm still chugging along on the V4. The early years were super. Then things started changing, dropping/removal of features, but that happens in any growing product trying to improve. I saw the business model coming out years ago as the store with themes and mods was dropped. But to make this a review, I need to stick to the service. I gave 3 stars *Support was always great for me, *Reduction of available customization. *No longer a "community", more like a business. platform. **Affordability. When support for V4 ends, *Operational costs too high for just a forum. That's an important distinction, unless you have a customer base that can afford it. If you're looking for a business or organizational platform, that has plenty of funding it would be a nice platform. If you're a small town, individual with less than a over modest income, I'd look elsewhere. I haven't needed support in a good while, but if you don't pay the fee, you lose features that used to come with the forum. Recently announced that you will need to provide your on recatpcha. Unless you go to the cloud. Best of luck to them

Removed core features of the website, breaking almost every article page we had when upgrading to v5. Users have asked to bring them back, and have been instantly shot down. Community members have tried to make plugins to fix these issues and had their links removed. I am going to find a different forum backend, and I suggest you do too. This site and their admins are not friendly to users requests.

Invision Community wants to be used solely as a “forum++”, basically, a forum with a few extra features like a gallery and downloads for forum communities. For years, they’ve been stripping features, removing functions and services, while continuously increasing the price as if they were following Venezuela’s inflation rate. Support has gone from decent to worthless. Here are a few things that come to mind (though it’s far from a complete list): For Version 5, they removed: -Status updates -Commerce support requests (yeah use alternatives, what a joke of a suggestion) -Q&A mode They even created a feedback forum, and then proceeded to ignore every single request or suggestion made by customers. Additionally, the marketplace for applications, plugins, and themes has been removed. It used to be an easy place to get plugins for a fair price instead of paying a developer full price for something small. Removing it completely killed the plugins, applications, and themes market. Just look at all the developers who used to be active and contributing, they’ve all been gone for a year or two now. I even talked to one developer who said he abandoned Invision Community for a competitor. If you need support with any of their software, you’re in luck, there’s a public support section where you might get a reply that fits your question… or you might not. You also have to post everything publicly visible to everyone. There are alternatives out there that are better supported, more customer-friendly, and easier on the wallet. Just do a quick search and you’ll find them.

The multiple changes in licensing/pricing model are concerning. With the price increases and the need to alway renew the license (even if we are not interested in the new features or support), the price becomes more than 5x of what we used to pay. It is also worth noting that originally we had access to security patches for free, but at some point they became only available with renewals. For small volunteer communities, this is not sustainable. At the same time prices increased, the quality of support has been decreasing, and right now we only get access to "support" on the public forums. But even before, we had bad experiences with IPS "ignoring" the bugs. On the positive side, on the recent years the software itself reached a reasonable quality level (good set of features, and not as buggy as before).