IPB support

What are you thoughts on IPB support/community?

I heard mixed and often times negative things about them and how they ignore stuff. I think i remember something about how they hide negative criticism away in their private member forums.

However, me myself, I actually love the support and the community

 

Official support is fine, the IPB support staff have been really helpful and have even logged into my forum and fixed problems whenever I reported them. And the members on the support forums are generally nice.

However, there is one big problem with IPB 'support', and that's the marketplace. Absolutely no one does anything for free any more to the point where I'd honestly suggest anyone who's not running a forum for business purposes or isn't willing to spend a lot of money on third party add ons should probably try vBulletin or XenForo instead. There's definitely a sort of corporate feel to much of it.

 

I have heard they are really good and fast, but there were a few people I remember who complained about them because they didn't know what the actual problems were.

 

This was the number one reason I moved back away from IPB when I had made the switch. I was getting annoying at forking over $5 here, $10 there for simple mods that had been free for years under vBulletin.
I don't have a problem with developers trying to make a buck, but when I have to pay extra for a sitemap mod that should of been built into the software, it's going a bit far IMO.

 

Only needed to log 2 tickets since using IPB, both times support was great and really fast. The support forums can be slow to get a response, they are only meant for peer to peer support though. As far as MOD's go there are a lot of free ones, don't think I have paid for one yet.

 

IPB is a big forum software, there also dealing with a lot of support/sales tickets.
So Yeah sometimes the support is kinda slow, but there's always a good reply.

 

I think part of that was a response to users putting a lot of time into free mods in previous eras and not being able to support themselves, thus vanishing off the world of modding. I'm co-developer of iArcade and we receive almost no donations or support from our users, and for a while, our competition was charging $20/$50 respectively to use their addon - we could easily have charged too and made a nice profit, but we went the "free" route.

 

^Isn't iarcade the arcade system I'm using? Yeah, if it's encouraging, I'd like to say that you did a good job with the system. It needs a few tweaks to work with some of the new games released on IBP Downloads, but it's a nice alternate to IBP Arcade for those of us who don't want to deal with encrypted code or don't have the likes of ioncube installed.

 

FWIW I would have no problem paying for an arcade mod, I wasn't impressed with being nickel and dimed over very small profile modifications or a sitemap mod.