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We have upgraded the IPS Community to IP.Board 3.2.0!

This is the first step in the testing process for IP.Board 3.2.0's upcoming release. We will be testing the new version here for several weeks and working on fixing issues with the goal of our first public beta release being as stable as it can be.

Please look around and help us in testing by submitting reports to our bug tracker so we can all work together to create a stable release. Keep in mind that our applications - IP.Gallery, IP.Blog, IP.Calendar, IP.Chat, IP.Downloads, and IP.Content - have also all been updated to be compatible with IP.Board 3.2 so please also test those. Your help is greatly appreciated!

You may wish to review the What's New in IP.Board 3.2 topic for information on the exciting changes in IP.Board 3.2.


Downloading IP.Board 3.2.0

IP.Board 3.2.0 is not yet available for download.

We are using it here on our company forums both as a preview for feedback and to identify any possible issues before release. Before a final release we will be testing it here on our company forums for a few weeks and then posting betas for download for all active license holders and invite you to participate in the beta testing process when we reach that milestone. When the final, supported release is made available we will make an announcement here.

We are pleased to announce IP.Chat, our newest application, is now available.

IP.Chat is a DHTML-driven chat room application that makes heavy use of JavaScript and AJAX technologies to present a feature-rich package that you and your members can use to chat real-time on your site.

• Ability to turn system online and offline, as well as ability to allow specified groups access to the system while it is offline
  
• Ability to require users to agree to a configurable terms of use page before being granted access
  
• Ability to ban and kick users from the chat room
  
• Ability to set chat room only opened between specific hours
  
• "Who's chatting" hook for board index
  
• Miscellaneous formatting options
  
• All your IP.Board emoticons are available in IP.Chat
  
• Your IP.Board bad-word list is imported into IP.Chat to filter messages
  
• Sound events for user entering and leaving room plus new messages. Sounds can be disabled per-user.

IP.Chat installs on your IP.Board installation and is configurable like any other IPS application for skinning, colors, and more. The chat message exchanges are handled by IPS servers eliminating the need for you to worry about high-volume chat transactions on your local community server.

Pricing

The IP.Chat service is priced based on the number of users in your chat room at any one time. As a benefit to active IP.Board license holders, the first chat service package of 5 online users will be free!

5 online - Free with active IP.Board license
20 online - $19.99 / year
50 online - $29.99 / year
250 online - $79.99 / year

How to Order and Download

• Login to the Client Area and go to New Purchase. Find IP.Chat: Free under Invision Power Board Optional Addons and click Buy Now.
  
• Order as normal, the package is free so you will not be charged.
  
• Go to Your Downloads and download the IP.Chat package.
  
• Go to Your Purchases and select the IP.Chat package.
  
• To use IP.Chat it must be associated with an IP.Board or IPS Community Hosting package. Select the package to associate with and you will then see a chat service key appear.

You can also upgrade or downgrade your chat service level in the purchases area.

Installation

• If you are not on IP.Board 3.0.5, upgrade to it.
  
• Upload all files contained within the upload directory of the IP.Chat zip file. This is just like installing any other application in IP.Board.
  
• Go to Manage Applications & Modules in your IP.Board AdminCP.
  
• Select the Install link next to the Chat Services application.
  
• Once the install is complete you can go to My Apps and select Chat Services. Just enter the chat service key found under Your Purchases in the Client Area to activate.

You can also view documentation in the Customer Resources section for more information.
It is recommended that you do not use IP.Chat in addition to existing chat services application. If you wish to use IP.Chat and are using ParaChat or AddonChat integration, you should first uninstall that.


As this is the first release of a brand new product there could still be some remaining issues. If you experience problems please post a bug report or open a ticket for technical support.

Several people have been asking about a converter for vBulletin 4 to IP.Board 3.
The converter system on our website at the moment includes a converter for vBulletin 3.8, but not 4.0.

I have been working on a vBulletin 4 converter and it is attached to this post.
It works exactly the same as the converter on our website, and is covered by the conversion service which is available for $60.
For instructions how to use the converter, please see this article: http://community.inv...html?record=175

At the moment, the converter can handle:

• Importing member data to IP.Board. Including preserving user passwords, custom profile fields, etc.
  
• Importing forum data (topics, posts, polls and attachments) to IP.Board.
  
• Importing calendars and events to the calendar application which is included with IP.Board.
  
• Importing blogs, including comments and attachments to IP.Blog if you have purchased and installed IP.Blog.
  
• Importing user's albums, including comments into IP.Gallery if you have purchased and installed IP.Gallery.

It cannot handle:

• Importing users paid subscriptions.
  
• Importing data from vBulletin's CMS feature.

Both of these I will be looking into over the next couple of weeks. If it is critical for you that this data is converted, you should wait until the converter is finished.


If you have any problems with the converter, please submit a support ticket, it will find it's way to me.
If there's any new features in vBulletin 4 which I've missed that you feel could be converted, please let me know

Seeing as it's so easy to leave people negative feedback when one isn't satisfied with services rendered, I wanted to post here to say THANK YOU to everyone at Invision.

I've moved my website back and forth between various webhosting companies, and with various hardware and software I've had a lot of experience with all kinds of technical support.  Hands down and without contest, Invision has given me the best technical support for their software I've ever had from anyone.  Ever.  My Forums aren't even that big or important, and I'm sure my questions are often dumb and could be solved if I'd just read the documentation (which, unfortunately, I have little time to do these days  

Irresepective of that, Invision's responses have always been prompt, detailed, and friendly.  They often give me the technical information (errors, etc) behind what's going wrong even after they've fixed things, which teaches me a little something (even if it's really a little) about how PHP works.  I even got a response on Christmas Day regarding a relatively minor blog issue I didn't expect to hear on until the new year!

So...major props, Invision.      

Now...if only my webhosting company could learn from you....sigh.

Laurel resting isn't an activity we do an IPS and we're all very hard at work on IP.Board 3.1.0 now that we've finished primary development on our suite of applications. We've got lots of exciting things planned and progress has already been made on a few key features.

As an early Christmas present to our community and to continue...

View the full article

Updated with conversions information.

Updated with information on our IP.Subscriptions application, license information and more.

Due to the increased interest in our products from vBulletin users over the past few days, I thought it would be convenient to collect pertinent information in one place and give you an overview of who we are and what we do.

About Invision Power Services
We've been creating forum software for over seven years. We work closely with our community and we're very open about our development and we're all very active on this forum. Our customers range from small focused communities through to Skype, Vodafone, EMI, Sony and more. We take pride in our customer service and treat all feedback equally.

Our Products
We offer many community products and services:
IP.Board
IP.Board has come on leaps and bounds since the early days of 1.3 and 2.0. We've invested heavily into development and the result is on your screen now. A feature set overview is available. It has a built in report center, reputation system and warning system. It also extends the classic PM system into personal conversations that enable you to host private topics rather than a simple email-like PM conversation. It is very extensible with its new hooks system and applications framework. Not forgetting it's incredibly easy to write your own single sign on code or log in module to allow single sign on with your existing website or systems. It also ships with log in integration for OpenID, LDAP, Windows Live and Facebook.

IP.Board also has many SEO tools built in. It allows for customizable 'friendly URLs' with proper 301 redirect headers is tampering is attempted. It also offers meta keywords and descriptions automatically populated based on post content. 301 redirects from standard 'old' URLS (showtopic=xxx) and more.

IP.Board is available for $149.99. This entitles you to run the board indefinitely (for life). You get six months access to technical support, services (Spam monitoring) and to download the latest version of the software. Once that six months is up you can optionally renew for another six months for $25.00. You can allow your renewal to lapse without penalty and renew at any time.

Licenses are not tied to versions so, for example, if you purchased IP.Board in 2006 and now want to renew for $25; you'll be able to download IP.Board 3.0.

We offer one installation completely free and we can upgrade the board for you when requested. 30 days telephone support is also included free of charge. You will also get access to our peer-to-peer customer only forums. It's worth noting though that all our feedback from customers is in this public forum. We don't try and hide it, good or bad.

We also offer a "Business License" - the main difference being that phone support is included while your license is active (not just for the first 30 days). The Business License is $349 and renewals are $50 per 6 months. As with the Standard license, it is not tied to a version and you can let it lapse and renew whenever you like.

IP.Board and its applications require PHP 5.1+ (although we recommend 5.2+) and MySQL 4.1+ or MSSQL 2003+ (MSSQL driver available for an additional $60). IP.Board is just as happy on apache as it is in IIS.

IP.Content
IP.Content is our new community content system. We have avoided labeling it as a CMS as this gives certain expectation. IP.Content can do many things inlcuding pulling content from your forum to display on your home page. More information on IP.Content is available here and here.

Charles put together two short videos to help illustrate what it can do:





It's worth mentioning those videos were taken during a beta of the first version. The next version adds much more functionality. Information available here.

IP.Content is on offer at $49.99 currently and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $30 per year.
Just like with IP.Board, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

IP.Blog
This is our blog application for IP.Board. The best way to see what it does is to have a look at our company blog.
IP.Blog allows your users to create their very own blog within your community, and because it's part of our Community Suite, it's fully integrated and easy to use!
IP.Blog is available for $49.99 and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $20 per year.
Just like with everything else, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

IP.Gallery
This is our full gallery application for IP.Board. We have the gallery installed here.
IP.Gallery is our easy-to-use photo sharing application. Fully integrated with our other Community Suite applications, it allows your users to create albums and share their favorite snaps with others!
IP.Gallery is available for $64.99 and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $30 per year.
Just like with everything else, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

IP.Downloads
This is our full download application for IP.Board. We use the download system here.
If you need to share files with your users, or want them to share amongst themselves, IP.Downloads makes it easy. Documents, updates, utilities, media - whatever you want to share!
IP.Downloads is available for $49.99 and includes 1 year technical support and access to download the latest version of the software. Renewal is $20 per year.
Just like with everything else, we'll be happy to install or upgrade it for you at no extra charge.

Other Products
We also offer the following:
IP.Converge
IP.Converge is our innovative authentication system that enables separate applications to centrally authenticate users, and optionally share data such as profiles. IP.Converge works with all IPS products, and third-party products such as Wordpress and Joomla. It effectively provides a central log in system that all your applications can use so that your members only need one username and password. It does not need to be on the same server, either so you can link up a dozen IP.Boards from all over the internet if you wished.
IP.Converge is free to all IPS customers.

IP.Subscriptions
This is an application for your IP.Board that allows you to sell subscriptions to your members. It is based on elevating permissions via the member group system. It works with PayPal, Sage and Authorize.net. PayPal allows for recurring payments.
IP.Subscriptions is a free application for all IPS customers.

Spam Service
Even with a good CAPTCHA, communities are seeing a rise in human spammers that can bypass all "anti-bot" systems. There is no real way to automate protection against these spammers other than to learn and block them and that's precisely what this system does.
Each IP.Board has a feature to "Flag a user as a spammer". This will unapprove all their recent posts and flag them as a spammer in the Admin CP. It also sends a ping back to us with their email address and IP address. If enough people report the same details, they are marked as a spammer. You can then set your board to not allow these users, or manually review them before validating the account.
It's an incredibly effective tool and it's caught many dozens of spammers on this site alone.

The spam service is free to all active standard license holders.

IP.Tracker
This is a community developed free application for IP.Board that adds project tracking to your forum. We use it ourselves here.

IP.Shoutbox
This is a community developed free application for IP.Board that adds a shoutbox to your forum.

Modifications and Skins
IP.Board has a very healthy modifications and skinning community. There are many independent skinning and modification websites dedicated to IP.Board. We also maintain a list of resources here. IP.Board 3 is a new product but the modification authors are gaining traction and making use of the new systems to product easy to install modifications. There are modifications for donating via PayPal, arcades and more.

Please list any modifications you have and we'll try and match them up with IP.Board equivalents.

Other Information
Volume Discounts
Please contact sales@invisionpower.com to discuss volume licensing.

Standards of Service
Our average support response time is less than two hours but, depending on the nature of your request, it may take up to two business days for your issue to be addressed. Our technicians will work to keep you updated on your request's progress.

You can always view your existing tickets to see the progress of your request or what department your ticket has been assigned to. After a ticket has existed for 48 hours, you may use the management escalation feature to tag your ticket for management review if the issue is not being resolved properly. Billing, customer service, and special requests will only be answered during normal business hours.

Our full standards of service page is here.

A copy of our software license is attached below:
 license.txt   5.94K   82 downloads

Example Sites
Here is a list of some sites that make use of our software:
Skype - http://forums.skype.com/
Vodafone - http://forum.vodafon...dex.php?act=idx
O'Reilly - http://forums.oreilly.com/
nVidia - http://forums.nvidia.com/
Roxio - http://forums.support.roxio.com/
NBC - http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/index.php
Television Without Pity - http://forums.televi...ithoutpity.com/
Atlanta Falcons - http://life.atlantafalcons.com/index
American Idol Forums - http://idolforums.com/
Neowin - http://www.neowin.net/forum/

Conversions

We can convert your data from vBulletin, including converting vB Blog to IP.Blog, and the albums feature in vBulletin to IP.Gallery. If you use the popular Photopost gallery, we can convert that as well.
Almost every piece of data can be converted - and members will be able to log in with the same username and password they did on vBulletin.



You needn't worry about broken links after you convert either, we have some redirection scripts that will take users from your old vBulletin URLs to the new URLs on IP.Board - so if members follow links from search engines, they'll still be shown the right content on your community.

There are two ways to convert: firstly, you can download the free converter scripts on the conversions page and use them yourself, or you can purchase our conversion service and one of our technicians will handle everything for you.
The conversion service costs $120.
It's important to note that the free converters will only work with vBulletin version 3.8 - if you're not using 3.8 you should either first upgrade your vBulletin installation before converting, or if you purchase the conversion service we'll handle everything for you.

If you have any special requirements such as merging multiple forums - please contact sales@invisionpower.com and we'll do our best to accommodate.




Please feel free to reply. I'll maintain this post to add more information if required.

You can get most of those things back thru modification or official IPS add-ons (we do offer a IP.Gallery which is like photopost is to vB) and well, there is unofficial SEO options available for IPB, such as IPBSeo or MinerveraSEO I think i'm spellin that right.....


I'll let someone else help you with the rest of the questions, but there is a converter that will convert all your stuff (Posts, topics, members, etc) For you

As for the thanks button, we have a reputation system in iPB3, and the thanks button can probabl be turned into a modification for it, if you're willing to pay for it i'm sure someone will be able to code it for you.