[CharlieS]

I?m a current IPB user and am considering switching to vB but?

You can actually *get* support when errors occur .

The staff are friendly.

From my experience at the IPB forums this is completely and utterly untrue. The reason I have considered switching is because I heard it has better features. But I haven?t found that to be true yet

Firstly it has no file attach

Not true ? 1.2 even allows you to make large images automatically appear as thumbnails

and as for the support i couldn;t even find that

http://forums.invisionpower.com/index.php?showforum=73

if you want a crap 1 month board with 6 members, go with phpBB...

or if you want a site with about 500 members and up for a long time (2 years) then go with vB, and if you dont have the money, get a job or become admin at a friend's site :-0

There are some very successful phpBB and IPB boards (such as neowin.net). People won?t flock to your site because you?re using a slightly better script. People flock because of community - and in my opinion there is no such thing as instant community, so I don?t really like the vB slogan.

It is very true that there are some ?fly by night? users of phpBB and IPB.

PhpBB is faster than other free boards

Hmm? I?ve found IPB to be faster but I will check that out, haven?t been to the phpbb website in a while.

But umm, yeah, Invision is up there with VBulletin, but unfortuantenly lacks a few of the key components that make VB the best forum software out there.

Such as? I agree there are some things missing. The main three are threaded view, collapsible categories (not sure what they are called, but that?s what they look like), and Similar Threads. The only one of interest to me is collapsible categories (similar threads seems to bring up either irrelevant threads or old dead threads), and it isn?t worth an entire vB license just for that.

The answer is simple. There is no compelling reason to choose VB over Invision board. VB is better at something, Invision at others. Neither has a clear feature advantage. Thats a straight comparision ov VB2 to IBF1.1.2

Agreed.

So, are you going to run out-of-the-box or are you going to customize. For $160 investment into programming help for IBF you still won't come close to the code mods available to VB.

Semi-true. For $160 you are buying access to a few more hacks. But IBPlanet.com is more active then you think.

because I am sure if they had 160$ or 85$ they would of tried vBulletin

Please do not characterize all freeboard users as cheapskates or poor people. Not only is it incorrect, it is rude. I could afford vB, and I?m looking into it, but so far it seems my money is best spent elsewhere.

I like all of the features in 1.2 of Invision, and thought ?maybe it?s time to see what vB is doing?. It seems the features are comparable, and in my opinion, IPB is much better in some areas (such as search engine friendliness and topic ?multi-moderation?). There just isn?t a compelling reason to buy vB for me.