How It All Started With Invision Power

Received a message earlier. A person asked why I continue on with such a petty fight. The simple answer is, i didn’t start this nor did i begin the rants on twitter. It was none other than IPS “prez” himself Charles Warner who took some parting shots at me off of the forums. I guess telling about poor features and customer support tends to strike a nerve in some people. After roughly two months of looking like a complete and incompetent tool, Charles Warner deleted his twitter account. Lucky for us, WordPress tends to keep a nice stash of original status updates handy.

If you disable guest access to all of your forums please don't complain about our SEO support.—
Charles Warner (@charleswarner) December 10, 2010

http://twitter.com/charleswarner/status/13707343246135297

 

Unfortunately the second status update failed to cache. Luckily, i have a screenshot of the posts. As you can see from his second update, While he doesn’t mention my name, he then goes into detail about my forum to his therapist, none other than former Vbulletin developer and now lead dev of Xenforo, Kier Darby. I guess we can all see who they head over to when they are having their mental breakdowns.

You always have to ask yourself, What would you do in my shoes? Better yet, would you pay good money to a service that speaks negatively about customers behind their backs?

 

How Invision Power Destroyed A Website And Refused To Fix It

This post is actually an excerpt of an email I sent to Invision Power coder Matt Mecham regarding some of the more hypocritical practices at invisionpower services. As of the date of this writing, not one single invision power staff has ever stepped up to fix the issue.

 

i met XiaNaix, owner of the nintendo wii site, wiinewz.com through twitter. This happened during Charles Warner’s rant about me on twitter, XiaNaix responded to Charles also complaining about IPB’s SEO. Turns out the situation with XiaNaix was much worse than mine. Wiinewz was a prosperous, popular wii modding community. Ad revenue for the site was a few hundred a month. He decided to ditch vbulletin like many people are currently doing. He purchased an IPB license and also purchased the conversion service to convert his existing vbulletin database and his vbseo urls. XiaNaix claimed it took them over two days to complete the conversion. The first time, the conversion had all sorts of errors. he was forced to close the site down again and issue another support ticket. The second time they finally got the conversion right.

Immediately he noticed that his search stats were drastically down. Sooner than later, his site degraded into nothing and was just barely hanging on. The site went from generating a few hundred a month to a projected few hundred a year. I offered to have a look at his site at no charge. Within minutes, i knew exactly what was wrong. IPB staff did not convert his vbseo urls over! They didn’t even bother converting his IPB urls over to the more SEO friendly urls! Charles also openly admits to this on his twitter page

@ultimatetnafan @wiinewz Ah yes redirecting URLs would make a big difference. I believe the scripts do 301 redirects.—
Charles Warner (@charleswarner) December 11, 2010

Even after some open instigating on behalf of XiaNaix, IPB refused to do anything about his situation. Not leaving him to fend on his own, i helped the best i could to get wiinewz.com back on their feet. I helped with his furls and some other settings that could help his, now dead, search rank. We asked them for the vbseo htaccess code and to my surprise, they never responded! To this day, wiinewz has zero vbseo to IPB redirects! This is how they treat paying customers.

This was wiinewz before the switch to IPB. Have a look at the Who’s online list. Quite a popular site before the switch

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090331192607/http://wiinewz.com/forums/index.php

here is a vbseo url that still doesn’t work

http://wiinewz.com/forums/nintendo-news/94838-wii-backup-file-system-wbfs-for-windows.html

Here is a relatively new thread where XiaNaix speaks on the entire situation. You can read a bit further down to see the reaction from IPB staff on the complete blunder.

http://adminextra.com/topic/5706-can-some-one-please-help-me-with-my-seo/page__view__findpost__p__37526

PhpBB Vs IPB: How Far (back) Does IPB “SEO” Get You

This forum post is all about the facts and charts. I’m going to leave out the baseless legal threats sent against me by Invision power, the multiple claims by paying customers that they have been mistreated and banned  from their forums, the petty and quite frankly stupid allegations of cloaking and other forms of search cheating etc. This is all about proving that Invision Power Board’s SEO really isn’t what its all that cracked up to be; It’s a myth. Below you will find a chart with some of the basic search stats for a 14 month timeline. Half for phpbb and the other half for IPB. I have been running invision power board for 7. I will be following up with another post eventually showing hits, pages, spider traffic etc. Following the chart there are a few notes below to keep in mind. You can also click on the chart thumbnail for a larger view:

Notes:

• The forums were converted from phpbb to IPB on August 7 2010.
• Our phpbb forum had 9 forums total. 2 had threads viewable to guests. 7 that had posts hidden to guests.
• The phpbb forum permissions were left exactly the same as phpbb until december 20.
• On december 20. I made nearly all of the forum threads viewable to guests and forums spiders.
• IPB.SEO package was installed December 20.
• February the site was linked on a number of higher ranking websites in my same demographic. While that’s hardly an excuse, it’s also not much of a selling point forIPB either.

This chart just provides basic info for now but as you can clearly see, IPB’s mythical SEO is just that, a myth. While i clearly understand that some search engines negatively impact sites that convert. I don’t think anyone would have expected such poor results after so much time has passed. As of this writing, IPB has not been able to beat phpbb’s best numbers in a 7 month run with all forums open to public (and spiders) viewing as opposed to phpbb with most forums closed for guest and spider viewing. At best, IPB is hovering over the median average phpbb generated during its last 4 months on my site.

As i mentioned before, these are basic numbers with no other data given at this point. I will return to give more detailed numbers shortly. This also does not cover the loss of search term ranks which were higher under phpbb. Some may use that as an excuse for IPB, website owners that convert will see that as another hindrance either way. This is just my interpretation of the poor numbers. This is also not an shinning endorsement of phpbb. I switched to IPB mainly for the SEO, other more advanced features enticed me however, those features aren’t going to bring in new users.

PhpBB Vs IPB: How Far (back) Does IPB “SEO” Get You

This forum post is all about the facts and charts. I’m going to leave out the baseless legal threats sent against me by Invision power, the multiple claims by paying customers that they have been mistreated and banned  from their forums, the petty and quite frankly stupid allegations of cloaking and other forms of search cheating etc. This is all about proving that Invision Power Board’s SEO really isn’t what its all that cracked up to be; It’s a myth. Below you will find a chart with some of the basic search stats for a 14 month timeline. Half for phpbb and the other half for IPB. I have been running invision power board for 7. I will be following up with another post eventually showing hits, pages, spider traffic etc. Following the chart there are a few notes below to keep in mind. You can also click on the chart thumbnail for a larger view:

Notes:

• The forums were converted from phpbb to IPB on August 7 2010.
• Our phpbb forum had 9 forums total. 2 had threads viewable to guests. 7 that had posts hidden to guests.
• The phpbb forum permissions were left exactly the same as phpbb until december 20.
• On december 20. I made nearly all of the forum threads viewable to guests and forums spiders.
• IPB.SEO package was installed December 20.

This chart just provides basic info for now but as you can clearly see, IPB’s mythical SEO is just that, a myth. While i clearly understand that some search engines negatively impact sites that convert. I don’t think anyone would have expected such poor results after so much time has passed. As of this writing, IPB has not been able to beat phpbb’s best numbers in a 7 month run with all forums open to public (and spiders) viewing as opposed to phpbb with most forums closed for guest and spider viewing. As i mentioned before, these are basic numbers with no other data given at this point. I will return to give more detailed numbers shortly. This also does not cover the loss of search term ranks which were higher under phpbb. Some may use that as an excuse for IPB, website owners that convert will see that as another hindrance either way. This is just my interpretation of the poor numbers. This is also not an shinning endorsement of phpbb. I switched to IPB mainly for the SEO, other more advanced features enticed me however, those features aren’t going to bring in new users.

IPB Has Gone Censor Crazy, IP.Portal Gone.

It seems the “great” folks at invision power have gone “Mubarak” on a number of paying customers recently. As i have already mentioned here, after a series of amusing discussion regarding just how poorly IPB’s SEO is, all of my posts must now be approved before they appear. Even support questions. Rarely have any of my posts been approved. It’s not something i would make a big deal out of anymore. I have come to accept that they have no interest in having any kind of real, adult conversation , even after i challenged their claims and volunteered to put my site stats out to prove once and for all, their SEO is a mere myth. Who could blame them, it’s easier to simply shut me up than to prove me wrong. I also issued an open challenge to speak on and compare their spam deterrent tools. That too, went ignored.

Today i found something even more amusing when the announcement came that IP.Portal will not longer be supported and packaged with the upcoming IP Board 3.2 update. There’s at least two threads on the matter already. I caught some humorous irony just in time as a new post was made to one of the complain threads, i read it. I got a good kick out of a response from a user named “XiaNaix”. He was angry about the ousting of IP Portal and the insistence by staffers that he purchase IP. Content separately.  now, XiaNaix was spot on in his assessment.  I have always felt that IP.Portal was purposely crippled in favor of weaning people into buying IP.Content. My initial complaint about IPB as a whole also revolved around the fact that their portal was very poor. I too, was also pressured numerous times by both staff and other IP supporters into buying IP.Content. I sentiments were always this, If I am not happy with what i currently have from Invision Power, why on earth would I buy another product from them?

Within minutes of reading the message i refreshed the page only to find the post by XiaNaix gone. To no surprise, i viewed which members were viewing the thread and none other than gestapo extraordinaire, Charles Warner was lurking the same thread. I contacted XiaNaix not long after to speak about his post. He noted to me that Charles had sent him a private message stating that Xianaix’s claims were completely false.  XiaNaix also noted that his account was now under post moderation just like mine. Big surprise

It’s quite obvious that IPB has some real issues finding professional support staff that can handle criticism (and properly read logs!).  I’ve started creating screenshots of all of my posts before i submit them.

UPDATE: Apparently, I wasn’t the only one that saw the censorship! LOL!

http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/332500-ips-portal-end-of-life-mark-not-a-good-idea/page__view__findpost__p__2081882

Nearly six months in

So after nearly six months into using this terrible forum software I noticed something last week. My site is finally ranking in google in the same ranking and terms that I was under while using phpbb. Not any better but finally going back to where I was before i purchased this horrendous script. It only took 5.5 months to get there.

Clearly, this simply wasn’t worth the hassle. PhpBB isn’t that great of a forum software. They take forever to release milestone updates. Those updates seldom have very good features (bugfix releases are a bit faster). With that said, IPB clearly just isn’t worth the money and trouble. Paying for constant support and small features is just not worth the money. The hassle of migration and all of the general trouble in moving from free software to commercial web software just doesn’t have a smart appeal to it any more.

I’m a firm believer that scripts like IPB, Vbulletin and Xenforo really need to step up their game. They need to give free forum users like me a reason to fork over money. Having just a small handful of features that other, free forum software do not have simply doesn’t cut it these days. I made the grave mistake of migrating my forum because I wanted better SEO; A feature that has not been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be effective.

My invision forum support account is also under severe scrutiny. All of my posts now need to be approved by a moderator. My last few posts on their support forums were never approved for member viewing and were deleted. Hell, my very first complaint was deleted within minutes. Obviously, they don’t take criticism of their product any better than the gestapo at VBulletin.

Worst of all there is no script that will allow IPB users to migrate back to PhpBB. My six month license is almost up and I won’t be able to get any updates for IPB after this. Definitely got the bad end of the deal here.

Ivision Tech Support Doesn’t Know How To Read Logs?

What an interesting 24 hours it has been. Spammers are hitting forums left and right. Webmasters are either furious, panicking and/or frustrated.

as i posted yesterday, my forum was hit by spam along with many others. I wrote a generalized topic of why i thought Invision Forum’s Spam Monitor was ineffective. That’s where things get amusing. I already have less than a stellar reputation with Invision on a number of subjects. To put it lightly, they hate my guts. All of my posts must be moderated by an IPS staffer before they show up on the site. Generally that takes 1-2 days. That is, if they even publish my post. In other words, they are censoring out a paying customer.

Yesterday I visited the IPB forums to post my gripes about just how ineffective their spam monitor is and why other forums have better methods of stopping spammers at the registration process.

Below is my first post followed by a response so crazy that it will make you wonder how these guys got their jobs.

My original response to a thread:

I already had it out with the IPB staff about the spam issue. Their spam monitor, at least on my site, has been ineffective at best. Over 60 registrants in the past two days and it only discovered two of them. That number doesn’t even include the ones today. The spam monitor only found two, Banning one and forcing another into validation. Two out of roughly 63 is a terrible quota.

I already brought up the captcha issue with IPB. Phpbb on the other hand has admin selectable captchas. This means you can use a variety of captchas or create your own. It’s quite fair to criticize phpbb but this time around, IPB is way behind on the times with this. http://www.phpbb.com…?f=14&t=1705955

Here is their response. The average person won’t notice their crucial mistake until i explain things further.

Actually, that’s the Spam Queue – those are all members who were actually caught as spammers.
If you go into ACP -> Logs -> Spam Service Logs, that will show you the full list of logs and actions. IPB also allows you to choose several different captcha methods as well. GD, ReCaptcha, and you can also use your own fonts…. Not sure what your complaint is here.

The big problem with his response is, he never even bothered to look at the screenshot of the spam cue i provided a little closer. As i already stated, because the spam monitor didn’t do it’s job well in the first place, i was forced to find and flag spammers by hand and then ban them. Spam Monitors purpose is to find spammers during the registration procedure and ban them or flag them into the validation usergroup so that administrators can have a closer look. Clearly, that isn’t working. One also has to question whether the tech support guy in question looked at my screenshot well enough or if he even knows how to properly interpret the spam cue log.  Click on the image to see a larger version with a very simple explanation of how to read the spam cue.

Here is my response which also has an explanation of how to read the cue to Invision’s marvelous tech support:

No, Not quite. members that are flagged using the Spam Monitor are automatically placed in two permission groups; Banned and Validating. Look closely at the previous picture i posted and take careful note of which user group they are currently in. All but two are placed in “banned” and “Validating” user group. The rest are still in the “members” user group. Even i know that.

They are still in the members group because spam monitor didn’t catch them. I had to go through every single one and flag them as spammers and then ban them through the cp afterwards. The screenshot is a screen capture from the spam members list after i flagged them all for spam by hand. None of them were were flagged by the spam monitor and banned automatically. The spam monitor clearly didn’t catch them and still isn’t catching many of the spam registrants today. I attached another pic. This is from the spam log. Look closely at the bottom. those two at the top of my previous spam list are at the very bottom of the spam log page.

We can conclude two things with this new picture i attached. Either the log only saves a day or two or the Spam Monitor didn’t catch the guys i already claimed it didn’t catch and the monitor isn’t the et al solution. I go with the second option. I can also show you a screenshot of my current spam cue. It’s much longer than the one i posted yesterday. Including today, i have just under 200 registrants in the past 3 days. Out of those, about 6 of them are legitimate, non-spammer registrations.

IPB Spam Monitor Fails At Banning Spammers

I originally wanted to post my original gripes with Invision’s SEO and the rather stupid way their tech support rants on customers. Unfortunately, over the past two days my forum has been bombarded with spam registrants. Apparently IPB’s main source of deterring spammers has been cracked. Google’s Recaptcha, which invision heavily relies upon has been cracked. You can get more info on this here and here.

On paper this normally wouldn’t be a problem. Invision Power Services advertises a spam monitor with every active license. Unfortunately, I have found that this tool is quite ineffective. Only banning roughly 4 out of the 60+  registrants that i have had in the past 24 hours alone. As you can see, this clearly is not an effective way to combat spam at all.

This also brings up another issue. What about spammers hitting sites with expired support licenses? Well, they are completely screwed. If IPB released an update that included another captcha, those users cannot download it until they renew. Same goes for using the Spam monitor. They would have to fork over more money just to stop forum spam. Seems pretty clear to me that IPB make the most money off of these hard times.

Why I Think IPB Sucks

While there seems to be quite a bit of users very happy with their invision forum, some like me aren’t so happy with their purchase. To be quite honest, It’s been a lame cat and mouse game with their “support” ( i use that term very loosely) of invision forums. Not to mention the lack of professionalism and frustration i have been put through by their so called features. Even having one of the IPB staff call my claims of their  dubious features “borderline-libel”. More on this soon. This site is a personal blog of my take with this terrible piece of software and on occasion, the experiences of others on their bumpy road with invision.