Just registered here to give everyone my horror story with Invision in hopes that it gives people a better sense of what to choose. Going to try to make a 4 month long story very short. I've recently purchased IPB and converted over from phpbb. If i told everyone that i have been having problems, it would be an under-statement. First, only after a few months went by, i noticed some very old posts would show up blank. After trying to reset the boards cache etc, i figured out that the only way to fix this was to edit the posts by hand. The converter also improperly converts spanish and latin characters. Their SEO portion of IPB is also a complete sham. I had the majority of my forum sections closed to guests in phpbb and had a page rank of 4 and a higher SERP. 4 months into IPB, i have the same permissions setup, practically zero SERP and a page rank of 3. After some long, arduous work on the site. I let my feelings known in their customer feedback forum. Immediately my thread was deleted without any warning. I proceeded to repost the thread and was immediately belittled by the staff because i posted my issues out in the open and didn't use their support ticket system first. I described to them that I didn't issue a support request because short of closing the forums for hours even possibly days, the only possible solution they could have was editing each thread with issues one by one. They claimed that wasn't true. whatever. Zoom over today. Increasingly frustrated with my search engine ranking, i found one of many forum posts by other customers that are frustrated with their search ranks despite their support's insistence that they have the best SEO. After a lengthy discussion about their features,the staff there set all of my posts into moderation and i received this message via private message threatening me with libel. hxxp://i.imgur.com/d90Mj.png So now, i have IPB support threatening me with libel. A few hours later, i see the same moronic support guy ranting about me and my forum on twitter! hxxp://twitter.com/charleswarner Guy has 9 forums: 2 public and 7 hidden. Spiders get 2 for content and 7 of 403 forbidden errors. Gee I wonder what's wrong? If you disable guest access to all of your forums please don't complain about our SEO support. While he never mentions my name, i know he was talking about me and my forum. We can agree to disagree on any number of topics concerning this post. However, there's no reason for any customer support rep to threaten a customer and to air dirty laundry out on twitter. I've used tons of different forums and scripts in my time. Never seen anything like this in my life. I hope it serves as a reminder next time you decide which forum software to choose.
The IPB support has a valid point, if half your forums are closed to guests, spiders included, how do you plan on ranking high in SERP? Pagerank also has nothing to do with your forum software.. lol.
Had a higher SERP with phpbb installed and zero SEO mods with 5 months of the site being opened with the same exact permissions. 4 months into IPB with their super l33t SEO and i have exactly null search hits with the same permissions I was using with phpbb. The majority of my site's traffic stems from two forum sections, my news and columns sections. Both of which are open to guest viewing.
That is simply not IPB's problem, there could be a number of reasons for this. At the end of the day Google ranks site with a lot of content well and also sites who constantly have updated content.
Dude, you posted this everywhere. Literally. You never even showed your forums once. What are you trying to achieve?