The Ugly, Hidden, Unspoken Truth about 3CX

  • The 3CX Moderation System Part 4 – AKA Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud

    As we’ve mentioned in the past, 3CX goes to great lengths to curtail any negative postings about them. In the past they’ve banned forum members, canceled partnerships, attempted to seize domains, silently edited posts on their forums, and more – something we call “The 3CX Moderation System“. For the most part, this was only visible…

  • The 3CX Moderation System Part 3 – AKA Banning 3CX’s MVP (Most Valuable Partner)

    If you’ve spent any time on the 3CX forums, you’ve almost certainly run across a very helpful partner going by ConceptsWeb. This user was constantly posting on the 3CX forums giving other users advice, tips, troubleshooting help and in general giving 3CX free labor in terms of support. They were so helpful, that according to…

  • The 3CX Moderation System Part 2 – AKA You’ll Say What We Want You To Say

    The 3CX forums are home to many daily visitors, some with the goal of asking a technical question about their system. They start a new thread, giving it a title and content, and others, sometimes even 3CX employees, will reply back. 3CX has taken to silently editing some post titles and changing them completely. For…

  • 3CX Partners Minimum Sales Quotas – AKA Your Partnership Is Just Giving Us Money

    A few days a 3CX partner posted that they received a warning from 3CX. They are a brand new startup and had only been approved as a partner the week beforehand. According to this partner, they were told by 3CX that they must have sold at least $500 of 3CX licenses in 2 weeks or…

  • 3CX Cert Changes – AKA I Hope You Like Reinstalls

    In March 2023, 3CX release v18 Update 7 (stable). This version is widely known as the compromised version and in April of 2023 3CX released v18 Update 7A. This build is tagged as Alpha and 3CX states that Alpha builds should not be installed on production systems. Following 7A, 3CX released another build, also known…

  • 3CX Editions, 2023 Q3 Edition

    I started writing this post in July to discuss how 3CX was changing the various editions of the 3CX software. I didn’t have time to finish the post before now, but here we are in August and almost the entire post had to be rewritten because 3CX has changed their software editions again. Long time…

  • 3CX EOLs Maintenance Agreements AKA Goodbye to Forever

    On June 26th, 3CX published a new blog post detailing how, effective immediately, they were no longer selling maintenance agreements. This announcement caught users and 3CX partners off guard, as there had been no warnings or time given before the announcement and when 3CX stopped sales. Maintenance agreements are important to perpetual license holders as…

  • The 3CX Free License – AKA Fooled Ya

    3CX has, for many years, offered a “FREE FOREVER” license. What that license included has changed over the years, at one point being feature limited to 1 SIP Trunk with no BLFs to later on removing the trunk limit and so on. Another example of the limits of the free editions was the mail server…

  • The 3CX Legal Team – AKA “Gimme That Domain”

    In the United States, the first amendment of the constitution allows for freedom of expression. And while that doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want without consequence in every situation, it does allow you to publish “an oppinion site” online without fear of legal action for the content within. One such person, fed up…

  • 3CX License Activation – AKA Perpetually Subscribed

    Like many companies, 3CX requires their software to call home for activation. This is all fine, except it needs to continue to call home to maintain it’s activated status. Failed call homes will cause 3CX to revert to a free license… and with it, loss of features. The problems start when 3CX turns off the…

  • 3CX’s Breaking Changes – AKA Good Luck Out There

    3CX often likes to change how their software and systems work. Many times, these changes are forced and without recourse. Sometimes these changes are without warning. In an ideal world 3CX would version out these changes, allowing anyone who is not ready to adopt these changes to stay on their current version. Unfortunately this is…

  • The 3CX Hack – AKA We Are So Sorry

    On March 22nd(ish), 3CX released an update for their PBX (v18 U7) which contained malware. Below is a breakdown of what we know so far, in a very short and concise manner. It is not the goal of this post to talk about the hack (which is a very bad name for what happened), but…

  • Supported 3CX SIP Trunks – AKA Pay to Play

    3CX claims to be an open standard PBX. For the most part, that’s true – anything that follows the SIP Protocols can usually interact with 3CX. But unfortunately that’s not 100% true – sometimes a system “won’t work” and it’s because 3CX hasn’t gotten their kickbacks from the system provider. In this post we’re going…

  • The 3CX Moderation System – AKA You’re Banned

    3CX operates a very active forum on their website, 3CX dot com. This forum, powered by XenForo, has almost half a million posts by over 125,000 members, in almost 100,000 threads. It’s widely considered to be the first place to go when asking for help with 3CX or to engage in a discussion with 3CX…

  • The 3CX Partner Program – AKA the Abusive Spouse

    The 3CX Partner Program is… a shock to many. When compared to how most phone systems partner programs operate, 3CX does not follow the industry norms, something that catches almost every partner by surprise. In this post I will dive into the main points of the Partner Program and why 3CX Partners might complain. Main…

  • What 3CX Is – AKA Where Am I?

    Throughout this site we talk about 3CX – it would probably be a good idea to explain what 3CX is. Simply put, 3CX is the company that produces a product also called 3CX, which is a Unified Communication Platform. 3CX’s Unified Communications Platform consists of a few parts, namely: When dealing with telephony, the core/original…