Invision Power Board
It's funny 'cuz it's true.
Invision Power Board (IPB) is a "yippy yippy yay" web application by IPS (Invision Power Services, but more commonly known as Idiot-Packed Systems). Some of the support staff are actually from the deepest bowels of Hell (Australia). One support staff member is actually a kangaroo, which, contrary to popular belief, is the mascot of Hell, rather than Satan or Beastie.
Many of the staff members have the curious power of making support tickets vanish into thin air, never receiving a response for years. With makeshift offices located on the kitchen tables of some small backwoods house in both the UK and the hills of West Virginia, USA - IPB is growing more and more everyday, recently improved to support an impressive maximum concurrent user threshold of 3 and a half users. Going beyond this limit has been known to cause large load averages and result in server fires. Unlike vBulletin, it sports a yellow warning label: "MAY CATCH SERVERS TO FIRE".
A recent NetCraft survey revealed that only four in thirty websites are using Invision Power Board.[citation needed] This means that the real Support-staff-to-user ratio is about 3-to-1, even though users of Invision Power Board insist that it's more like 1-to-99,999,999.
Price
IPB comes at a great low price of $68 dollars per year, however once adding the cost of the add-on blog, plus a image gallery, subscription manager, support costs, copyright removal, per-link-click package, 100 make believe AI members, RSS news import (which no one will really use, but is a 'required addon'), and a whole lot of praying that it just plain works, it all figures up to about $1,793 per year, in which you get:
- Support staff from Hell (Australia, UK), and backwoods of West Virginia, including the Demi-President (Charles Warner) being the 7th most formidable businessman ever to live. This is an honorable achievement. Charles Warner is notable for his inability to relax, and instead always has an expression of constipation and very unnaturally placed legs.
- Access to a blog supposedly published by Matthew Mecham, someone who was hypnotized by Charles Warner, made to go back in time and replace his past self with a future replacement, meaning that he never made any promises regarding the license of the product. Some people think that the time modification was unsuccessful, and traces of the once-truth remain in their head. However, these people have been filed for insanity. Because they needed to get the replacement Matthew Mecham from somewhere spare, like the future, they chose GMT 03:14:07, Tuesday, January 19, 2038, because their time machine couldn't go any higher, due to the UNIX 2038 Bug. The future Matthew Mecham would have fixed this bug and become a world savior, if he hadn't been nabbed by the people from his past to replace himself further back in the past.
- A boring and immature community made up mostly of 15 year olds that loves IPB more than Star Wars! They love watching you feel bad and have no common sense. They have a lesser sense of humor than Pee-Wee Herman. They have a larger sense of humor than vBulletin. They are also more British, which generally means they have bad teeth and an intense love of Boy George.
The product itself is innovative according to IPS, where the design is not overladen with mountains of sexually questionable purple and prides itself on being just a simple, plain boring blue.
License
Invision Power Board was initially made by phpBB Group but was bought out later by IPS. After this, a cheap phpBB replacement propped up, replacing the old phpBB.com. They have never made any significant release since their first release after the takeover, phpBB 2.0.
The team behind Invision Power Board is known to be corrupt and violent. Recently Charles Warner was convicted of sexually harassing fellow co-worker Lindy Throgmartin (who is a male).