Is IPB right for me?

I am prob­a­bly going to end up kick­ing myself for not tak­ing advan­tage of the Invi­sion Power Board sale that ended on 30 June.  Because it looks as if I am get­ting closer and closer to port­ing at least one of my forum sites over to IPB.

I spent a few hours play­ing with an IPB demo board (thanks IPB!) on the 30^th.  Yeah, I know, I should have been doing that a week ear­lier.  It is pretty for­eign to me, although I did notice the admin con­trol panel was vaguely rem­i­nis­cent of the MyBB lay­out.  So while it seemed really dif­fer­ent, the expe­ri­ence I have with MyBB was help­ing me find my way around.

It would really be nice to learn that Crawla­bil­ity is work­ing on a solu­tion for Invi­sion, with all the func­tion­al­ity of their vBSEO pack­age for vBul­letin. I have enjoyed suc­cess by using the vBSEO script on my sites and the idea of los­ing all their advan­tages is not comforting.

Invi­sion is using friendly URL’s in their 3.0 release, but search engine opti­miza­tion is so much more than just hav­ing human-friendly URL’s. I’ve looked at Com­mu­nity SEO as a pos­si­ble replace­ment for vBSEO, if I do go ahead with the con­ver­sion. Unfor­tu­nately, from what lit­tle I have been able to learn about Com­mu­nity SEO, they have a log row to hoe, in order to catch up with vBSEO’s functions.

I’ve used vBul­letin long enough to become famil­iar with it and have enjoyed run­ning the script on all four of my forum sites. How­ever I feel Inter­net Brands is lack­ing in cus­tomer rela­tions and I am strug­gling with giv­ing them any more of my money.

The sug­ges­tion Inter­net Brands has no idea of how they are going to han­dle license pric­ing for vBul­letin 4.0 is ludi­crous. I’ve yet to see a com­pany develop a new prod­uct with­out first doing a cost analy­sis and stag­ing that up against a mar­ket analy­sis to see if the new prod­uct will even be fea­si­ble in the mar­ket­place. Yet IB con­tin­ues to say they are work­ing on pric­ing and no real deci­sions have been made. I call B.S. on that one.

If that is the case, then this is just one more rea­son to be leery of doing busi­ness with IB. If they have devel­oped a prod­uct with no knowl­edge of what their devel­op­ment costs were going to be, then they are quickly going to find them­selves lost in today’s com­pet­i­tive market.

I am never one to make a change just for the sake of change, but I’m not going to be hob­bled by IB’s inef­fi­cient and cav­a­lier atti­tude with respect to cus­tomer rela­tions. And I am reminded that doing the same thing I’ve always done is going to guar­an­tee I will receive the same results I’ve always received. Maybe it is time to make the switch, just for the sake of doing it.

Excuse me, it’s time to do some more study­ing on the Invi­sion Power Board platform.

Related posts:

1. Why fight when you can eas­ily switch?
2. Deci­sions, decisions…
3. It never slows down
4. Play­ing catch-up around here

Tagged as: Crawlability, Invision Power Board, IPB, MyBB, vBSEO, vBulletin