Invision Power Board

Invision or IPB is one of my favorite message boards due the ease of the board and among other things. I am a technical type of person so I can handle any message board out there. The one thing I like about IPB is the fact it easy for a new user to use with the tabs and all.

It was founded by Matt Mecham and Charles Warner back in 2002.  Before founding IPB, they worked for Jarvis Entertainment Group which ran Ikonboard. 

There a few different type of licenses I've heard of. Lifetime, perpetual and standard. Lifetime came before me. I have the perpetual license which I managed to get before they changed their license structure. What is the difference between them all? With the lifetime, you get free upgrades and support for life. Perpetual you only get free upgrades, but can get support for like $30 per year. Then there is the standard which does not have the upgrades for life but you can get it if you pay for support every 6 months.  I believe the price of upgrades with standard is $50 every six months. 

Invision 1.3 was the last free version for ipb.My first taste of IPB is because I had started Star Trek Simming and it was on this version of IPB. So obviously this was my first taste of IPB and ever since then I love IPB regardless of it being free or not.

Then there is Invision 2.0 and 2.1. 2.0 was the first non free ipb board out there. I have no experience with 2.0, but I do have experience with 2.1. When I first got my own website through invision, I was using 2.1.

Invision 2.2 was the next series to come along. It had some improvements over the previous version. It had some enhancements that made it better. One being that I felt that their skinning system was better than 2.1. I only created one skin in 2.1. Between 2.2 and 2.3, I made about 10 skins.

Invision 2.3 is the current version they have out there. It fixes many problems that were plaguing the previous version and was the first version that the skins didn't have to be redone. People were having problems with spam bots posting on their boards. It didn't matter which message board you were using, but spammers were posting and registering like crazy. With this version, it fixed those problems and kept them spammers out with the addition of the capcha. Up until October 1st, 2008, this was true. IPB had to release a patch to fix the problem which did not help and then the following day they released version 2.3.6 which is supposedly will fix all problems.

Invision 3.0 is was released in June, I believe.  A new hub about this one will be coming out shortly.

People have complained that they had lied to them about aways being free but you know companies change. The current going price for the board is $150. Yes its expensive, but its well worth it. Its better than most of the free boards out there.

Because people refuse to pay for the board because they feel like they been abandoned or just because they cannot afford it resort to using it illegally. They either go to the people who have an actual license see if they would be willing to give them the copy of the download or they actually go and find a null version of it.

The rank set can be located anywhere on the web so if you have more than one license, you don't have to download the rankset for each time you need to use it.  Mods take a little work, but they getting better with the universal installer.