To upgrade or not to upgrade to Invision v5 (and the future of Psynews)

[mars]

Hello

This forum has been running on Invision Power Board for 20 years now. Before that we were on vBulletin I think, and previously on something terrible I forgot the name of. At first Psynewss was not a forum. It was added on top of the reviews resources back in 2001 or 2002. And it moved to a forum/community only as less care was given to the reviews part.

So back in 2006 we purchased a *perpetual* Invision Board v3 license for $185.

In 2017 when Invision v4 was released, they told us our *perpetual* license only applied to v3 and they fucked us! We ended up making a fundraiser (see here and here). And we collecxted more than 300€ thanks to you. Besides the site was moved from a VPS to a spare Raspberry Pi to save on hosting, and more recently on a mini PC next to my fiber box.

Sweet, so we only paid for the Invision subscription basically. We paid $25/semester for 4 years, then those same gentlemen at Invision boosted the price to $40/semester (a 60% raise, mind you) and we've been paying that for 4 years now. Total for 8 years of subscription: $520, so we'll double the 300€ initially collected by the end of the year, but, hey, Psynews cannot be stopped just like that and although it's nearly an archive and that's a cost I can support.

 

One year ago give or take, Invision v5 was released and I didn't care. And recently this appeaed in the Admin console.
Our version of IPS is phased out at the end of the year. After that I'm not sure if/how/how much they'll charge us but the bad part is we'll have no more security upgrades...

 

So I checked the upgrade path, which, obvisouslyn led me to the licence upgrade page, which shows that instead of letting us pay for each of their products separately, now we'll get their whole suite for a better price. Alas...a better price for those who used more of their products than the sole forum like we did. So, I was only half surprised to see a 150% price increase : 40*2 + 40*2*150% = 200.

Well, we've come a long way since our perpetual licence (lol) that cost less than one year of their new subscription model, haven't we ?
I'm really glad they recognize our loyalty in the matter.

 

We have many options:

• Upgrade to IPS v5 despite the price. Honnestly, although I was happy to pay $80/year for an almost-archive site, I'm not keen on paying $200/year for all sorts of features that we won't even use. I'm not in favor of this also because we've been Invision customers for 20 years and they keep fucking us over.
• A new funraiser. MEH. At this rate we'd need one per year for site that's barely got a pulse.
• Migrate to another cheaper/free forum. Maybe doable, we need to check which are available, but they must have some scripts to let us convert our database to theirs.
• Convert the whole forum to a read only archive. I've been thinking about this over the past year after a talk with an Admin here. We have the database, we could maybe hack something (with AI or not), to make all this a read-only site. At all rates it has to be reversible, for, even though Facebook killed nearly every forum on the planet, the monster is also dying now, so who knows if there's going to be a forum revival in the future ?
• * Do nothing. And we might be facing hacks if security issues are discovered, or we might have issues in the future if a new version of php breaks something. But why not, it's a stand we can take for a couple of years.

 

We have (at least) until the end of the year to find a solution. And Id be happy to read your input now.
As you read between the lines, this is not only about the cost. This is also about the future of Psynews. We have to think of what to do with it for the years to come or what legacy to preserve.

With love,

fabien mars.