Now we all know what has happened with Invision Power Services removing their free trial downloads. I am curious as the author of the Open Installer for cPanel just how important Invision Power Board is to you as a hosting provider?

If it was suddenly dropped from Installatron, Fantastico or others.. how would you as a webhosting provider handle that?

Thank you for your input. :)

Personally I wouldn't notice if it was gone. Phpbb2 is fine for most of our clients needs.

I agree, I think phpBB is more popular and having no Invision wouldn't really make much difference to the host.

As if anyone asked me, but I think they made a poor decision... they're charging for a board that isn't up to par with other boards. Their charm was the open source thing and now they've totally phased that out.

The only annoyance is, those that took the lazy approach and installed it from one of the many installers, will likely never manually update to the paid version, thus leaving possibly vulnerable versions on the server. We all know where this can lead.

I think it would be a good idea to include a migration tool in the auto installer, so users can switch from invision to phpBB if possible.

Originally posted by PMichaud
As if anyone asked me, but I think they made a poor decision... they're charging for a board that isn't up to par with other boards. Their charm was the open source thing and now they've totally phased that out.
The same kind of thing has happened with Movable Type, which is why so many people have moved over to Wordpress.

Scripts come, and scripts go, software becomes "hot" software becomes cold, nothing to get worked up over.

wwwboard used to be the shiznit, then phpBB was popular, IPB came along, there's alternatives if you don't like what IPB has done, use the others. Personally I just paid my $40 and kept on trucking, if I waste an hour of my time replacing IPB with something that's still free then that $40 becomes well spent. If IPB fell off the planet I'd barely notice, I'd have to migrate my forums database to something "else" of course, but I'm sure there's tools that'll import ipb into phpbb or vbulletin or other software.

All very true, however the topic is more related to auto-installers for hosts than scripts for individual accounts.

Basically on our side, we wont notice whether it is gone or not. There are far too many alternatives available.

We are simply replacing IPB with other, open-source forums. No biggie :)

Most of my customers would rather go with free hosts if their sites are just starting out. Those currently using IPB installed from fantastico are now moving on to phpbb and other free forum scripts.

I'd forget about IPB... I'll be converting my hosts back to phpBB for good as soon as I get a chance.

I wouldn't mind if none of the clients used it but if one has it installed, would they have to switch Forum Scripts??