Tomorrow is just an advert for today

Finally!

If IPB had this 2 years ago, I wouldn’t had to f*** up two boards :p

Great addition!

I guess that when you say “still” handled localy there might be a chance you’ll make it possible to share also the replies(in both directions).
That would be an even nicer feature. I remember this being suggested by some other users to, not as RSS though, but this would be good.

That one is nice keep up this nice movies that is so cool….

An they way, RSS Links is working is the boomb.

RSSync sounds better :).

I agree with Lindy.

How would you pronouce RSSync? r-r-s-new-york-city??

RSS-Link is the better name.

Looks tops Matt

Now if the original RSS that posted the topic included meta data for a trackback link and that trackback link was used when a reply was posted…. hmmm

Well Chris Griego then Invision would be a glorified blog

I wonder how long it’ll take for this feature to be ripped wholesale by an ‘un-named’ competitor. This blog seems to be a place of inspiration for some, which is nice.

Two points:

The first is the topic title. Wrong in so many ways, but for simplicity, or more accurately to not highlight how long I thought about it, I will leave it at that !

Secondly in terms of the idea transfer which seems mostly to be one way out of IPB, I believe an idea is one thing, but to take the idea, concept and template is something quite different.

I suppose one consolation Matt is it reflects on the good ideas you consistently move forward.

I strongly believe in the free-flow of ideas and concepts between competitors.

It pushes development faster and is better for the end user.

However, I don’t think that one can simply port the implementation wholesale without at least putting your own touches to it or to enhance it someway.

Let’s be honest, we’ve all taken ideas and concepts from other products; there’s no shame in that. But, in most cases we’ve added something to it to develop it further.

What vB have done is simply take our idea, concept, logic, presentation and procedure and implemented it so blatantly that I actually consider it rude.

If they’d developed it and put their own touches then I would have filed it as “all’s fair in love and development”.

So true Matt! I think that goes with all *normal* developers.

agreed, but cant you just trademark the process so if they want to follow the same path they have to innovate?

I believe inline moderation to be a big step forward and very different to the current method; I dont see why IPB cannot trademark such a process…

I don’t really think that patenting everything is really a great step forward.

Just a nod in the direction of the creator is all that’s required in most cases - or at least the effort of re-working so that its at least somewhat unique.

That’s one annoying thing I find about the internet – it’s so easy to copy/ use/ simulate others ideas. In business, especially in this case, they have the best of both worlds; using your features as well as maintaining their own.

I have just had something I’m working on patented and if it requires the same process I can see there being a cost constraint as well (infact anything involving lawyers has a cost constraint).

Anyhow, I look forward to 2.1…

Matt… it’s looking nice. I can’t wait to get my hands on it. About the competitor… I just looked over on their site and I can’t believe how blatant they are being. They even seem to be saying their public beta will be about the same time as I hear yours will be.

As least you had it on the company forums first. Any way, hurry up and show those lazy bums who’s boss.

So let me make an example.
Lets say someone develops a script with very small snippets and concepts of the same features in their script from yours. The snippets were sorta “copied” because they would be exactly the same as if they wrote it by their hand.
The concepts were developed themselves but did the same thing as where the idea came from.
Now lets say they copied a snippet that was somewhat large. However, they changed it and talored it to their needs and the snippet almost looks different.
At the same time, they gave total credit where credit was due for the whole process of all the ideas.

Explain to me which of those ideas are ok and which are wrong, if you could.

In my eyes, the last one would have to be determined on a case by case basis, I guess.

Chad

Perhaps you should keep all your new developments and ideas to yourself until the release, Matt. It would make it harder for vB to keep up if we didn’t know the features until you released it, which would also give you an edge for a few months.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the movies, but I think that being secretive on at least a few (major) features would be great.

I agree, he might just have to. After reading the announcement at vB, they practically just ripped all of Matt’s ideas. It isn’t fair, but I guess it happens.

I’m not going to change my development ideals because a competitor took a cheap shot.

I’m pleased my humble “hobby” project often overlooked and ignored as a serious competitor by the self titled market leader has been such a rich source of inspiration.

When I read a post on their forums saying what a great idea in-line moderation or in-line editing is, I’ll accept their thanks.

Thank god for that. I love the way IPB is currently developed, and I check your blog most days. vB will steal your content anyway.

“What vB have done is simply take our idea, concept, logic, presentation and procedure and implemented it so blatantly that I actually consider it rude.”

I suppose ripping ubb’s linear thread viewing is rude to? Get over yourself, they coded their own php/mySQL/javascript just like you do, I’m sure you have taken just as many of their ideas as the have taken from you.

Thank you for you well considered, knowledgable and balanced viewpoint anonymous vB fan.

After reading through the 19+ of mostly “moderated” pages over at vB I decided not to reply given the level of some of the replies.

Being influenced by many sources is a key to active development even if one of those sources is your competitor. The point here though is that vB have announced one of their top features (Inline Moderation) with it having the exact same look and function as IPB.

My opinion is that the hardest part (and were you make your money) in development is making the decisions of what should go into the software rather than the actual coding. Learning a language takes time, being able to make objective (and successful) decisions on how to move forward, given 1000’s of feature requests, determines a products long run success.

For me the bottom line is they have stole the latter and haven’t even given acknowledgement; rather they have denied it completely.

As a note I see a topic rate system as a small mod addition which has been heavily requested on every BB. The WYSIWYG editor has also been heavily requested but from what I understand it takes a very long time to make and hence other features were prioritized. Both of these are just ‘addons to the current environment’, the first one to the topic view, and the latter to the post view.

Inline Moderation and Inline editing are new concepts changing massively the way we use certain elements of the forum. Good to see IPB leading the way with the future direction of BB features..

http://files.vbulletin.com/3.5/ajax.html - Hmm, where have I seen that before?

They even stole the forum/thread marking idea. Damn I hope they go bankrupt!

For what it is worth, their attempt at topic read marking isn’t as successful nor as efficient as IPB’s - vB’s requires 3 extra queries according to posts at vB. Expect crashes on big boards when they upgrade to vB2.1… sorry, 3.5.

“vB2.1… sorry, 3.5″

Heh that cheered me up a bit after a bad day

R-S-Sync

Sad they had to copy Matts ideas What do they think IPB is? Open Source?
(Umm… is that even possible on the net without something like Zend?)

Anyway, Matt, things are looking great!
Now program RSS Robot to find cheep vacations and take one (Cheep in cost not cheep in stuff to do)

I don’t need no vacation, I’m having too much fun.

They use 3 Queries just to determine if a forum is read or not. IPB uses a total of 7 for the whole board view.

Wow how do you guys know so much about unreleased code?

You honestly think that the time Matt announced it and the time they posted that they were able to suddenly make all these features appear?

I dont mean to flamebait but your having cheap digs at another company because they took a heavily requested feature and implemented it.

As far as I know they had a host of features that appeared in IPB2 and even some architectural things were borrowed such as the datastore cache in vBulletin, I dont remember Matt acknowledging that he borrowed that.

So wait, since when did IPB invent inline moderation?

Sorry, that feature was available in ezboard, and other boards, as both a hack and a standard feature ages before it appeared anywhere else, including IPB or vB.

A wysiwyg is also nothing new, Microsoft word, and others before it.

When I first heard that you thought it rude matt, that someone would “steal” your code, I laughed, I cannot remember how many times I’d notice a new vB3 feature, then soon after, IPB2 magically got the same feature, with a well, as you would call it own touches, but in reality it was a renamed feature.

To Phill B

I watched that thread as people posted, i only noted 2-3 post removed. On top of that, at least you can post a negative opinion about the company and not be banned, and told to “quietly fade away”

So, poor, poor, poor Matt. Cying that feature ideas were stolen from him even though they have been long requested features from vB members.

Unlike Matt, I’m sure the vB developers didn’t have access to the source code like Matt did when vB3 was released in Beta and suddenly, after a decent amount of time to reverse engineer the code, they mystically appeared in his announcements for Imitation Power Board 2.

I watched the developments cycle of both products, and at one time used both. When Matt’s blatant thievery became apparent, I decided to stick with the product that originates, not imitates.

You have a lot of nerve, Matt. At least they developed their own code and didn’t “borrow” from yours.

Mr. Rant, vB3 never claimed to originate WYSIWYG, but they were the forst PHP powered message board to implement such a feature. Matt “borrowed” the code not long after that.

Yeah it looks great, actaully a little too easy on people, I mean what’s a little pain going to do?

“IPB2 magically got the same feature, with a well, as you would call it own touches, but in reality it was a renamed feature.”

vB doesn’t even bother doing that! Anyway, it isn’t Matt complaining about vB (he said it doesn’t bother him) it’s his readers, so have a go at them, not him. The day you produce a successful bulletin board, I will be your loyal slave.

I can’t believe people are upset that two competing makers of commercial software are stealing ideas from each other. Of course they do. They have to. I’m so glad I’m not trying to make a living out of my forum software
As you know Matt, I’m still not entirely convinced regarding “in-line editing”, but I must say this RSS import/export system you’re making looks great. Good job How’s the performance? XML might be portable, but it’s far from efficient.

I love how all these IPB fans act like five year olds about this. You see vBulletin license owners going over to the IPB forums and flaming you. Javascript expandable menus, who used that first, Jelsoft. WYSIWYG, vBulletin. Which system was coded first, vBulletin, meaning that when IPS first started, they copied the image of the vBulletin 1.x or 2.x forums.

I totally agree with Mr. Rant.

Almost every new feature that IPB 2.1 has, I can find a hack at vB.org on it before IPB 2.1 was even in production.

And what about Matt having a vBulletin license, alot easier when you can steal code, eh?

Some people ought to watch what they say, there’s a whole ocean between accusing one party of taking ideas, and outright stealing code. Carry on posting those accusations and you might find yourself in trouble
And Matt has a vB license? Uhhh, have you never heard of a company following the competitions product? You don’t think Microsoft would have competitors products installed somewhere for evaluation? Get real!

More on’s anyone?

Q does not imply P. Thread defeated, all sides.

When logic alone cannot make your point, proof is required.

It is obvious that most people hate IPS, so Matt should come to Jelsoft, he can help develop to keep the old IPB customers happy, and the vB developers can develop their famous backend.

Sorry, some of us don’t really care for all this VB this and IPB that… I just like Matt’s inspriation.
If anyone borrowed anything, who cares? We all borrow stuff. If Bill Gates didn’t lie about making a computer language, then actually created it, we wouldnt’ be reading this now. So please stop. Maybe this is why Matt’s blog is on the IPS Company Forums?

I believe Matt’s maintained a license of VB ONLY because the company offers a conversion from VB to IPS … and u can only code the conversion script once you’ve got the structure of the other software….. I dont think vb’s got an official ipb->vb convertor…

Actually vBulletin has an importer system (Impex) which supports like 80% of all bulletin boards:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102412

“Actually vBulletin has an importer system (Impex) which supports like 80% of all bulletin boards:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102412“

Umm… thats anything to vB. The sugguestion of Matt needing a licence is to go from vB to IPB… which would mean vB Export

There’s nothing wrong with IPB taking and implementing ideas from vB and the other way around. The main problem with IPB is the company staff’s willingness to abuse and tell off their many dissatified customers, instead of treating them in a decent and respectable manner.

Oh dear, Mr Former Customer. Wonder who you could be.

Still very bitter. Very very bitter

Ok. I’m glad to see that some people haven’t given me the courtesy of actually reading what I’ve written.

1) I’m not “moaning and crying” because vB has taken IPB features
2) I’m not accusing anyone of stealing actual code
3) I can’t believe Jelsoft have publicly stated that I’ve got a license and keep it updated. So much for data protection laws in the UK.

Right….

This is my problem: Inline moderation. Their implementation is exactly the same as ours. Same location for the interface, same logic flow same everything. It’s identical. It’s possible that Ezboard came first (I’ve never moderated an Ezboard) but I doubt it’s identical to IPB2’s inline moderation.
Inline Editing: I add the concept to IPB 2.1, blog about it and post some movies. Before I even get to release our first beta, our competitor is touting that as a new feature sporting the very same interface and the very same terminology.

I know from a conversation from Scott (dev. at vB) that they had a huge demand for these features and based their implementation on ours - that’s a fact straight from their developer’s mouth.

I’ve also stated a zillion times that I strongly believe in the free-flow of ideas between competitors and that we’ve ALL taken concepts and ideas from other products BUT in most cases a new spin has been added onto it.

How would vB feel if I’d taken their exact WYSIWYG implementation and added it into IPB 2.1 icon for icon, interface for interface?

Some people forget that I’ve been creating features for discussion boards since 1998 and remember creating one of the first PM and control panel modifications for BoardPower in 1999 long before vB existed.

These people seem to think I’m some kind of unimaginative letch who’s only appeared recently to steal vB’s ideas.

Regardless, I’m very pleased that vB owners are taking note of this blog. Exepct some cool new IPB 2 features to be announced soon.

And, shall we assume Matt, new vB 3.5 features too? LOL

Well done, good answer to all these posts !

Well I gotta hand it to you, you handled that well!

“And, shall we assume Matt, new vB 3.5 features too? LOL”

LMFAO!

Nice raison d’etre

Matt i was just wondering if u could sue them or anything for disclosing this informatino ?

Porbably, but that wouldn’t be a wise move, would it? Imagine the abuse he would get then!

to end this controversy, he should definitely go for this.. and abuse wont last for much long because what THEY have done is not legal

For anyone who thinks that IPB can even steal vBulletin’s code, you are mistaken. If you know anything about coding, you know that the OOP IPB uses and the straight coding vBulletin uses can’t be intermixed easily. The method for doing something can be copied, but not the variable per variable code.

Even then, how do you know if something is being copied. Also, how do you know that vB didn’t get that code from somewhere else? They replicate ideas, NOT code. Anyway, Matt, can’t wait to see the new features :D.

Well, why don’t we just have invision concentrate on Invision, and Jelsoft concentrate on vBulletin. Right now, saying IPB copied all of vBulletin’s features, or vBulletin copied all of IPB’s features is all a matter of opinion, because neither side has stated, “I have never tried stealing x competition’s feature ideas” and probably never will. IPB users will say, “Jelsoft Suxs” Jelsoft Users will say”Invision Power suxs”.

It is all in a perspective of personal preference, I guess alot of people can’t understand that.

and all the other people say ‘they both suck!’

It’s also very interesting that vB 3.5 now has “Member name suggest” when sending a new PM. I’ve seen that somewhere before, too.

“to end this controversy, he should definitely go for this.. and abuse wont last for much long because what THEY have done is not legal”

But then he would have to explain why he holds a vBulletin license and they don’t own one of his. He probably wouldn’t want that kind of scrutiny.

Why would he have to explain that? Still, there can be an X no. of reasons which could explain why he’s holding a vb license

I hold a vB license so we can maintain our convertor.

I could either do two things:

1) Find a pirated copy of vB and use that to write our convertor - after all, who’d know?
2) Purchase a license to do it legally and above board.

I chose 2.

They don’t own an IPB license because we offer a free trial which will give them a legal installation on which to base their convertor and as the DB contents aren’t encrypted, that’s all they need.

Thats exactly what i said above….. and i was right … ips maintains a license of vb for their convertor