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.

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.

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.

I’ve been using Invision Forums for a while, and honestly, I cannot recommend it to others. The software itself works fine, but the company’s pricing and renewal policies are very disappointing. When I first purchased the product, it was a one-time cost with a small renewal fee for updates and support. That was reasonable. But now, they’ve changed their policy so that every new major version requires a completely new subscription plan. For example, moving from version 4 to version 5 suddenly costs $199/year, even if you already paid for the product. This means that every future version (v6, v7, etc.) could also demand another big payment. That feels unfair and unnecessary, since most companies include upgrades as part of the product lifecycle. My Recommendation: If you’re considering Invision Forums, I would strongly suggest not buying it. The pricing model is designed to lock you into continuous expensive renewals, instead of respecting the fact that you already paid for the software. There are better alternatives out there with fairer upgrade policies.

1) Invision is continuously pushing for their cloud services vs self hosted plan. 2) Licensing model has changed i.e. if you don't pay subscription cost, 500$ license becomes useless. Even Adobe, Microsoft, doesn't do this non-sense. 3) Features get removed and now it's data loss for many users. 4) Team also removed market place. So now for installing add-ons, you have to visit 10 different places. Imagine if Apple remove App store and ask you to visit 50 different places. It's annoying and not user friendly. It's good platform for corporate platform where companies can pay for features. However, new model is not friendly for community admins.

Invision really wants you to move to their cloud service. God forbid you have the infrastructure to run their (basically 2012 web app) on a server. They want you to scale with them and pay their cloud prices. Leaving users who self host with a less than product. Acting as if it is obsolete to encourage and gaslight their community into thinking it’s a thing of the past.