Lazy Buggers At Invisionfree
Ever heard of Invisionfree?
Long before sites like Forumer came up offering free hosting with very limited control for forums, there was one major service on the net called Invisionfree (IF). Invision Power Board (IPB) was a forum development company that sometimes released their old versions for free usage.
What IF did was take IPB version 1.3 Final and then modify it to use on their servers. So you could provide some details and a free forum would be created for you at http://invisionfree.com/forums/yourforum and you could begin using it immediately. It wasn’t exactly free though. They put ads just below the header to get revenue. In those days we didn’t have Ad Block so we were forced to put up with the ads. (Well the amount for ad removal was decent but back then we had no source of income either.)
I started Alternation, our first forum, sometime in 2003 along with Krish Raghav. It’s a long story for another day.
We started on Invisionfree since we had nothing to do with domains or hosting or forums scripts at that time. We just needed a place to talk and waste time. After a few years of usage we realised that the platform was too limited for the customizations we had in mind.
Looks like many people felt the same and the people at IF finally decided to upgrade their forum script. They said they would build it from scratch and that it would be done very soon. They called this venture ZetaBoards. So we waited and waited and waited… Finally we moved to other forum scripts like IPB, phpBB and myBB.
That was about three years ago. We checked the IF support forum now and then and every time there was never a release date.
Today I went to IF expecting to see a grand new forum script running and a vibrant community and this is what I see:
November 27, 2007
After countless hours of hard work we’re proud to announce the full release of ZetaBoards.com. Registrations for new boards are open here – http://s1.zetaboards.com/zb/register/
Unbelievable. They had finally finished it 6 days ago. After working on it for YEARS. I think myBB was developed in lesser time than that!
December 4th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Funny to think that IPB was started because there were no good free forum scripts.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:09 am
Really? They’ve become something only official forums use these days. vBulletin has taken over completely.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:43 am
Yeah, when they started it they claimed that it would be free forever.
vBulletin does seem more popular these days. I remember the invisionfree.com days. We spent all our forum time trolling each others’ posts
December 4th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
Don’t we do that even now, except in blog comments?