Interesting whoever submitted the update didn't mention they've only started monitoring GA and GWT within the last year. I actually remember The Brandon Farber <moment of reverent silence> telling everyone how they simply didn't have time to use those tools and how we were all wasting our time, by watching it ourselves. I'm wondering why they never had time before, yet now it's worth mentioning?
And yet any time we would mention stuff like that, they would pull some rabbit out of their hat and be like "see, you are wrong". I glance at the things they are releasing and while some look good, I can't help to continue to feel relieved that I moved to a better platform. So many of my html errors, title/meta tag/etc errors...all came from IPB. Just waiting to see how things look once IPB's info is flushed from the system and I can really see where problems are with xF. Also...I just enabled MaxCDN on my site....sooooo much easier to do and works so much better than IPB (not to mention for it to work decently, you needed a mod and even that became outdated on newer versions of IPB). I have 3 pull zones; data, js, and styles. Due to the IPB mayhem when I used it, I was making it out to be harder than it actually was.
It's this attitude along with the "we know better than you" that has caused me to plan on dropping them. Now that there is a decent bridge with XF and WordPress, we'll be testing starting next month with an eye on converting over within 2-3 months. Their failure to take into account different business models in their dealing with customers has really left a foul taste. I'd go back to using vBulletin before using IPB again.
I'm using the xenscripts bridge and it seems to be working quite well. We've yet to design the homepage...just took the xendynamic mod for the time being so we could get off of IPB ASAP. I have the prelims of my new design so coding should start shortly and the new design up hopefully within a few weeks. But you can check the bridge out in action on my site right now (se7ensins.com).
I have no insider knowledge or experience, but it looks like a game of 'oh f*ck' catchup based on the various posts/threads that I have seen on the internetwebtubes..... Better late than never eh?
A little bit of competition is good. Its no doubt for the good deal of the last 1.5 years Invision had no competition with the crumbling of the vB company. A new player in the game allowed for them to re-shuffle their efforts.
Exactly! But did you ever notice the rabbits they were pulling out were all just mongrel dogs with long ears? Late last year, I contacted Matt via e-mail. I explained I had hard data to prove IPB 3.1.3 was all wrong. I could prove it sucked the life out of all 5 of my sites, which were not all converted at the same time. I told him I had waded through the 3.1.4 files and had fixed a lot of their mistakes and oversights. I then took their claims about how well they had optimized 3.2 and updated to it, only to watch my remaining 2 sites catch fire and crash to the ground. In spite of his denials, a year earlier, he admitted they might have made some changes that were ill-advised, but they had corrected them. And even though I was expected to pay for their files, he asked me to give him my file edits, so they could look them over and -possibly add them into 3.2. That was when I decided to convert to XenForo. So Barry, no, not better late than never. In early 2010, I had 5 forums. I bought five IP.Board licenses, five IP.Content licenses, two IP.Blog licenses, one IP.Gallery license and one IP.Nexus license. Today, I have one active forum running on XenForo and one dead forum on IP.Board. I look back at what I invested in Invision and the revenue I lost with their so-called updates and it's enough to make me cry. It might seem they're getting things working better, but the fact they screwed the pooch is what cost me all the money. I look at their current propaganda and it really doesn't sound any different than it did in 2009. So I see it as more of a case of too little, too late.
Yeah. We took a HUGE hit on SEO when we went from vB to IPB. Hoping to correct that after the conversion to XF and WordPress.
Though I've only been converted for a few weeks now, we didn't lose any SE traffic. All the numbers have stayed pretty consistent but our users are happier. Our staff is much happier that the site loads faster, they can get to things faster, and the moderator tools work so much faster. Soft deleting would take 1 minute to process on IPB so our moderators asked us to remove that and allow them to just unapprove (which took about 5-10 seconds). Now, they are soft deleting on xf withing 1-2 seconds! The admin end is much better and our admins can get things done faster and more efficiently. There is much more ajax with xf, so I expected there to be a drop in pages/visit, but it's stayed rather consistent. I've yet to find my stats on post/day on ipb to compare...but when I do I'll be posting them.
Thats basically why IPB feel they have needed to mention SEO so much in recent updates because there are large numbers of people whom converted to IPB with big boards and with in 3 month moved back or moved to a different platform. I moved a board which a decent amount of active members to IPB because the members liked it better and IPB was the "norm" in their niche . I had built the site up to 3000 uniques per day and growing rapidly , switched to IPB with all the correct redirects and BOOM . I expected a slight drop while redirects we're picked up and reindexed but it never recovered , After 2 months and stats continuing to fall we had lost 60% of the natural long tail traffic . I couldnt stand IPB then and i will never gain respect for it enough to use it ever again or recommend it for that matter, If it was just my bad luck it happened to then i could probably move on and forget but i know of 6 big boards personally that it also happened to and huge amounts of stories also relating to what ive said above. IPB looks and feels awesome on the front end, the styling is probably the best in the commercial forum world as a default template stands but there are other more important things to consider and they fail dramatically at that.
I'd have to disagree with that. I grow increasingly irritated at package developers who fail to take into account their entire customer base. IPBs recent deletion of various features from the package to the complete redesign of the default look left a very foul taste in my mouth. The new color scheme sucks for older eyes, and it's very difficult to see everything on the page. And when you're told to just change it yourself, well... I've been there, done that, have the t-shirt, bumper sticker AND baseball cap. I refuse to spend 3 days coding after I do an update. Did that with vBulletin and I'm not going to do it again. When developers loose touch with what it's like to run your own community, it's time to look for another solution. I'd go back to using vBulletin before using IPB again.
Yeah i have to admit that was my person opinion of something looking cosmetically pleasing to the eye, no longer being a IPB user i have no idea if the looks have affected the functionality of the board
