Invision Power Revokes Perpetual/Lifetime Licensing – My Thoughts

Written by William Roush on December 28, 2014 at 1:56 am

A story about a board administrator’s experiences with Invision Power’s move to drop Perpetual/Lifetime licensing, and the responses from the community.

What Is Perpetual/Lifetime Licensing?

Perpetual/Lifetime licensing allowed those of us on the older Invision Power’s IP.Board software (prior to 2007) to have lifetime upgrades for as long as the product was around and only pay for support if we wanted to open support tickets. For someone that wanted to run the boards for an extended period of time and didn’t need to rely on support for anything could break even after quite a few years of operation (usually around 4 years).

The Decision To Purchase

Back in 2006 I was running a small board with a handful of users, mostly friends. I had some plans to expand the board that never really panned out, during this time Invision Power was closing out their lifetime licensing and I decided that dropping the extra cash for the software would be a worthwhile investment if I ever decided to start up a board again.

This is important, because I honestly haven’t really been using the software for the past 8 years, which sets the tone for why I feel burned. Recently I decided to investigate the use of IP.Board for a new project…

Invision Power’s Move To IPS4

So Invision Power is working on a new version of their forum software, called IPS4, it’ll consist of a “core” module and their forum software.

“With IPS4, we’ve changed directions somewhat in that IP.Board as we all know it will become a forums app within the suite. Members, profiles, search engine, ad management, spam mitigation and other key items are now part of the suite core. This allows for cleaner, more streamlined integration across the whole suite with the forums app no longer carrying the weight of the load which led to clunkier integration in the 3.x line.” – Lindy, IPS Management

No different than it is now...

No different than it is now…

Whoops, that’s how our software is technically licensed in 3.x, oh well. Sure more responsibilities are in the core, but the point still stands.

“After careful consideration, we determined the most appropriate thing to do is offer the ability for legacy customers to switch to the newest structure, free of charge — this would allow them access to anything current customers have access to. Legacy customers would receive six months free renewals, so there are no out of pocket expenses. After that period, renewals would then be $25 every six months, which would include all of the latest services such as chat and spam mitigation.” – Lindy, IPS Management

“After careful consideration, we decided to invalidate lifetime licensing and ask for more money.” Bold strategy cotton, lets see if it pays off.

“I would like to stress that these legacy licenses were only offered for 2 years – there really aren’t that many of them and even less exist today as most have converted to the new structure over the years to leverage hosted services such as spam mitigation. All told, these changes will only have a net impact on less than 4% of our license holders – of those 4% we’re not sure how many still even use their license. From IPS’ perspective, it makes sense to clean up our backend systems and rid them of 10-12yrs of accumulated coding provisions to handle different license types under different scenarios. Further, it allows us to more cleanly reintroduce our software as a true suite of community applications with seamless integration across the offerings.” – Lindy, IPS Management

If those of us with lifetime licensing don’t make up a substantial part of your customers, mind refunding that licensing then? Also, customers shouldn’t have licensed benefits revoked because you didn’t consider it in your billing software setup.

A forum member brought this up:

“The license was for IP.Board, not IP.Core + IP.Board. If IPS wanted to, they could call the forums “IP.Forums” or “IP.Discussions” starting with v4 and legacy license holders wouldn’t have any claim to it at all. Might be off of IP.Board, but since it’s a rewrite of the code and such, it could be given a different name and would be perfectly legit.” – Wolfie, Forum Contributor

However that wasn’t the case when Invision Power 2.x (around 2004) or 3.x (2009), when under both of these releases they could have just renamed the system (and if I’m not mistaken 3.x was actually rebranded to “IP.Board” from “Invision Power Board”).

Discussion link 1, discussion link 2

Further Iffy Behavior – Charging For Domain Changes

Another fee they’ve tacked on is some “administration” fee for changing your domain more than once every 6 months. In the early days of testing I hosted the site on a handful of different domains (all variances of the original domain name), it was a pain but I got the license changes done during the process. Now you pay $15.

“It’s to stop dishonest clients from “domain hopping” a licence in order to be able to get support on them all, instead of legitimately paying for support on them all.” – The Heff, Invision Power Client

That doesn’t make sense, you only get support for whatever the currently licensed and active board is. Auditing can easily track hopping, and paying $15 doesn’t prevent this (and is still much cheaper than buying multiple licenses), it barely impacts those that are stealing $200 pieces of software, and harms those that are experimenting or host multiple domains (and aren’t just reverse proxying their way to victory).

Also, this system is completely broken for lifetime license holders. Those “hacks” that make the system work are working well.

This sounds like a cash grab and less like they’re resolving an issue.

Leaving Early Adopters Out In The Cold

Mind you, the solution we’re being given is to give us a $100 credit towards a platform that we must pay $25 every 6 months for updates (something we got for free prior)! This is their “generous” offer to us (and they’re using this word so many times it’s raising my blood pressure. We get to decide if it’s generous, it’s pretty crass for you to be repeating it yourselves so often hopping we’ll parrot it back to you).

I think one of the biggest telling pieces is this bit from Lindy:

“Naturally, we consulted with our legal counsel just as a matter of due diligence and the option to simply discontinue legacy licenses without any further intervention was technically within our right, but we did not achieve our position as a respected leader in the industry by being that company. After feedback discussion from customers and other parties, we devised and fine-tuned this solution, which we think is very fair.” – Lindy, IPS Management

Pretty much telling me “yeah, we were so unsure about this we consulted a lawyer” is already pretty telling, you knew this wouldn’t go over so well you had to seek legal council.

“The goal behind this change is to allow the software and internal systems to move forward without provisions and hacks from purchases made a decade ago. When these licenses were offered, we had limited product offerings, no spam mitigation, chat, etc. Since introducing those, we’ve incorporated hack upon hack to accommodate older licenses because we genuinely do appreciate those early adopters and their purchases. Further, we had IP.Board – which was everything – the core and otherwise. In IPS4, we have a forums app, which is an independent component of the suite, much like Gallery, Blog, Nexus, Content, etc. Search engines, file/storage handling, members/profiles and much more is all part of the community suite core that all applications share. With that, the time has come to press forward for the future and we would very much like to take our early supporters with us – hence the, in my opinion, appropriately generous offer which in some cases, more or very close to the original purchase price; again, even after a decade of usage.” – Lindy, IPS Management

You’re telling me that because of your team’s inability to plan on how to support various configurations that you’re just dropping a chunk of your customers, a good chunk that is the reason you guys are here today? Your earliest adopters?

Let alone WordPress can monetize on a hybrid system of free/paid services, are you telling me Invision Power’s engineers can’t figure out how to write a system that’ll handle it?

Literally telling me they must “hack” the system to make it compatible is telling me they don’t know how to properly implement a system that’ll handle it.

Mind you these are my options if I stay with this product:

  1. Don’t upgrade, stop receiving updates when Invision Power stops updating 3.x, get my IP.Board install hacked.
  2. Upgrade, get two years free usage, then pay $50/yr after that.

At the end of the day, I’ll just find another board, but I’m sure going to recommend a long list of boards before this one now, and I’m going to feel really burned that I dropped money on the future of a product (literally), and got that taken away by the very company I gave money to.

 

And to leave with this tidbit:

“Please think about what the Internet has done in the past decade, how it has evolved and how we, as a company, have evolved. Ultimately, we need to move forward and we feel we’ve found a fair and just way for you to join us. We do recognize, however, that not everyone will feel that way and apologize for those ill feelings.” – Lindy, IPS Management

Literally “People are moving things to recurring payment services now, and we want a piece of that”, thanks Invision Power.

5 thoughts on “Invision Power Revokes Perpetual/Lifetime Licensing – My Thoughts

  1. Disgruntled

    Agree with all this. Disgusting behaviour towards us lifetime license holders. Really good comms too. No emails to affected customers, no offical announcement on the forums, no blog post.

    Dodgy company now, used to be so good. I guess the extra money coming into the company will keep Matt Mecham in running shoes for a while. :/

    Reply
  2. Josh

    Didn’t realize this, as I’m not a lifetime license holder. Given what they’ve done in 4.0, it doesn’t surprise me. The company seems iffy now.

    4.0 gutted IPBoard (or IPS, or whatever the name of the year is now). Literally, half the features are gone. Many users have no upgrade path, as it’s impossible to use IP.Content to pull data from other Invision apps. All blocks are incompatible with 4.x. Their forums are filled with posts begging Invision to bring back critical features, like the ability to control attachments. People could upload viruses to the new 4.0 board and there’s no admin way to restrict it. It’s just half baked sillyness.

    There’s a noticable uptick in posts on competitor forums asking how to convert away from IPBoard. I don’t see how Invision survives this.

    Reply
  3. disappointed IPS client

    They recently announced (it appears in my admin area) they stopped security patches :

    Bulletin IP.Board

    IMPORTANT: As of April 1, 2017, IP.Board 3.x (all versions) have been discontinued. No further support or security patches will be provided and you may be operating the software in an insecure state. We recommending updating to our latest IPS Community Suite (IPS4) release at your earliest convenience. Please contact us with any questions.

    This means the product is no more usable because of security issues. So they definitely killed the perpetual licence. They sold perpetual licence that are now expired (this is the official status of my licence in their client area).

    I suggest a class action against them. Who is ready to fight ?

    Reply
    1. William Roush Post author

      It’s something that if it popped up on I’d throw my license into the pile, but right now I’m happy enough telling everyone to not use them when the discussion for a commercial-grade forum software is asked.

      Reply
  4. chris g tucker

    I have IPB version 4.0.8.1, and have been having all kinds of problems with it. WHO can I get to help me fix my forum, w/o giving Invision another Dime of my Money.

    We would like to begin by informing you that we have now resolved your experienced issue and your website is now loading with no further difficulties.

    Additionally, we found that the issue is caused by a Backend PHP Fatal error that your database generates periodically, more information can be found in the following error log:

    [Sun Sep 03 11:10:18.408405 2017] [lsapi:error] [pid 10840:tid 140555061282560] [client 40.77.167.134:43840] [host roofcleaninginstitute.org] Backend fatal error: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘IPS\\Db\\Exception’ with message ‘Prepared statement needs to be re-prepared’ in /home/roofclea/public_html/system/Db/Db.php:389\nStack trace:\n#0 /home/roofclea/public_html/system/Db/Db.php(622): IPS\\_Db->preparedQuery(‘REPLACE INTO `c…’, Array)\n#1 /home/roofclea/public_html/system/Session/Front.php(274): IPS\\_Db->replace(‘core_sessions’, Array, true)\n#2 [internal function]: IPS\\Session\\_Front->write(‘s91r5sbhqhiuprb…’, ”)\n#3 {main}\n thrown in /home/roofclea/public_html/system/Db/Db.php on line 389\n

    We ran a Database repair in order to resolve this, however, we would advise you to contact the script vendor and report the issue as they may be able to provide more assistence with the issue.

    Considering the information above, if we can be of any further assistance please, do not hesitate to update us again.

    We remain 24/7 at your immediate disposal!

    Kind Regards,

    Reply

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