Invision Community Blog: Invision Community

IP.Nexus integration with the bulk mailer

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:00:00 +0000

We identified a use case recently where we wanted to send a bulk mail to all clients who had purchased a particular package in IP.Nexus. This is not uncommon. Perhaps the package is being discontinued. Perhaps you erroneously over charged for this package. Perhaps there will be a special on additional purchases of this package. Regardless of the reason, it is logical and ordinary that you want to email all clients who have purchased a given package.

Because the bulk mailer was improved in 3.4 and now supports per-application extensions, we have written one for IP.Nexus 1.5.7 that allows you to control with the bulk mailer certain ways to filter members based on packages they have purchased.

The way this works is very simple. When you go to send a new bulk mail, there is now an IP.Nexus tab in the filters area allowing you to filter by IP.Nexus purchases. You can also control whether you send to only active purchases, expired purchases, cancelled purchases, or any combination there-of. Here is a screenshot to show you what it looks like on our site:

I'm sure you can see just how valuable this small but useful change will be. This enhancement will be available with the release of IP.Nexus 1.5.7.

What other types of filters have you wanted to bulk mail members utilizing, but can't presently?

More client control over marketplace purchases

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 23:45:00 +0000

Our marketplace is an area where developers can submit free and paid resources for other clients to download and use on their website. IPS processes many, many transactions through the marketplace, both one-off purchases and renewals for applications clients have previously purchased.

When an application has renewals, however, it was pointed out that the client had no way to cancel those renewals. Perhaps the client is no longer using the resource they purchased, for instance, and does not wish to renew the purchase any longer. With our product releases in the client area you can easily opt not to renew purchases if you want, however there has been no way to do this in the marketplace...until now.

With the release of IP.Downloads 2.5.3 (and available in the marketplace now), instead of a button that reads "Buy another", the button has been relabeled to "Manage Purchases". When you click this button on a file you have purchased, you will still have the option to purchase more licenses, however you will also have the ability to manage your existing purchases, including

Canceling a purchase that is active
Reactivating a previously canceled purchase
Renewing a purchase that has expired

Additionally, we enhanced IP.Downloads so that when an author changes a paid file with renewals to free that it clears out the renewal terms for any clients who have purchased the file. If the file is no longer paid and no longer has renewals, existing purchases should not still renew, after all. And finally, if the file name is changed, previous purchases that are displayed in a user's client area will now reflect the updated file name, for clarity.

These small enhancements will make clients better able to manage their purchases, save our customer service representatives time by not requiring them to cancel purchases for clients, and provide an all around more robust and complete experience for users.

(Please be aware that this is an early screenshot of a feature to be included in the next release of IP.Downloads, and subsequently the interface and display is subject to change)

IPS Development Channel Blog

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 01:32:00 +0000

We have launched our new blog The Development Channel to allow our development staff to more frequently update our clients on everything that goes on behind the scenes. From the technical aspects, to fun insights, and new feature announcements you can follow The Development Channel to follow our software being made.

Welcome to The Development Channel

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 01:19:00 +0000

Hello everyone!

Us developers are a strange bunch. We have a lot of crazy thoughts that just don't make sense to anyone else. Our brains are wired different. We get from point A to point B by going around point Z and bouncing off point M first. And very few of us (*cough*me exempted*cough*) are able to type up posts that make sense to more than just other developers.

So what are we to do? Keep all of our great thoughts to ourselves? Nonsense. Nevertheless, we cannot flood everyone with the semi-(in)sane ramblings that go on in our heads every day, nor can we bore everyone with discussions of how great our new class structure will be, or how useful the new methods we've just added to x class will turn out.

Introducing The Development Channel

This blog will be a place us developers can write up our thoughts and discuss developer-specific topics. Anyone can follow this blog if they want to. We're not out to have a private exclusive group that only the elite development community can join. Quite the contrary - if you are interested in the sorts of things us developers do on a regular basis or are interested in the future and development of the software, please feel free to follow this blog. We will be talking about new features, minor tweaks and other changes to existing features, code-level improvements (such as class structure, class inheritance, and so on) and even things not related to the software (think: how we do x on our website, or why we chose to approach a problem in a specific way). If any of this is your cup of tea, we hope you enjoy the blog entries to follow. If this is all Greek to you (and you don't speak Greek), then by all means - ignore us. You are certainly free to continue following our official News forum and our official Company Blog, where all the important stuff will get posted.

If you're still here, we hope you enjoy what we have in store. :)

Minor IP.Nexus 1.5.7 enhancement

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:40:00 +0000

We have added a minor enhancement to IP.Nexus 1.5.7 that we thought you might be interested to hear about.

Our customer service representatives found that when they "voided" an account in IP.Nexus (by clicking the "Void Account" button when viewing the customer screen in the ACP) that they often wanted to leave a customer note at the same time, explaining why the account was voided. For years they simply added the customer note manually after they voided the account. This isn't a big deal, but we identified a way to improve their workflow in this instance.

With the release of IP.Nexus, a textarea box has been added to the "Void Account" page (as long as you have permission to leave customer notes), allowing you to leave a customer note at the same time you void the account. This small change will save our customer service representatives time and effort while they perform their daily routines, and took us less than half an hour to do!

Have you found any small changes like the one identified above that would save you time and effort? Sometimes moving a button around or adding an extra form field can make all the difference!

Auto-Upgrader

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:21:00 +0000

Last year, we added an auto-install/upgrade tool into our client area. The tool would upload the latest version of the IPS Community Suite to your server automatically.
The way it worked was after submitting the request, you were entered into a queue, and a program on our server uploaded the files, and emailed you when it was done so that you could run the upgrader script. It normally took about 30 minutes.

30 minutes is pretty good. For someone without the technical knowledge to upgrade, it's a great alternative to asking for a support agent to do the upgrade for you (especially just after a release when everyone is doing just that). However, many users still prefer to do the upgrade themselves (after all, if you can download the source files and upload them to your server in the same time, what's the point?).

We decided we should try and get that time down. We also wanted the process to be much more seamless - so you click "Upgrade", get a loading screen, and then are taken immediately to the upgrade script when it's done, rather than waiting for an email.

Interested to see how fast we managed to get it? Take a look for yourself:
Watch Video

In addition, the system can now handle communities that have renamed their admin directory seamlessly without issue (it previously reset to /admin), and the system will automatically detect which encoding of IP.Nexus to use for your server, if applicable (previously it would only use Zend).

We really hope the Auto-Upgrader will provide a much easier way for you to keep your community up-to-date with the latest features and enhancements.

If you've not already upgraded to IP.Board 3.4, why not go and try it out now? To access the tool, simply go to the Purchases area of the client area, select the community you want to upgrade and click the big "Upgrade Now" button.

IPS Converter Updated and Switch Promotion

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:16:00 +0000

We are happy to report some really dramatic improvements to the IPS Converters. If you have been considering switching to IPS from another community software now is the time.

Performance Improvements

One area for improvement we focused on was the overall time it took to do a conversion. Doing a conversion is always going to be a time consuming process as it involves translating all of your data from your old format to IPS format. But we have made two big improvements:

MySQL queries, where possible, now do one 'extended' query rather than thousands of smaller queries. This means your data is fetched in one, large batch and stored rather than many smaller batches.

The member conversion routine has been sped up dramatically. Some test conversions are seeing an 80% speed increase on members alone.

Example statistic: 15 million post community converted 1000 posts a second and about 800 topics a second. Converted completely in 4 hours. The old converter could take more than a day to do the same. That's a huge improvement!

Software Specific Improvements

vBulletin Subscriptions now directly import to IP.Nexus
Gallery 5 support
Photopost 8 support
XenForo 'likes' converted.
XenForo personal conversations converted.
vBulletin conversions now use the same forum/topic/post/member IDs on IPS Community Suite. This is great for SEO.

Feedback Appreciated

We are continuing to work on improvements to our converters. If you perform a conversion please submit a ticket and let us know of any issues you might experience so we can assist you.

Special Switch Promotion

If you are considering switching to the IPS Community Suite we would welcome you as a new IPS client. We are happy to provide 10% discount on new license purchases using the coupon code SWITCH at checkout. This coupon code is valid until 15 December 2012.

With the recent release of IP.Board 3.4 now is a great time to take another look at IPS!

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: Anti-spam Enhancements

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 13:13:00 +0000

It's an unfortunate fact that when you run a successful site, you attract unwanted users posting spam on your site. IP.Board has always been incredibly pro-active in preventing spam users from signing up by making use of built in tools such as the question and answer challenge, spam monitoring service and CAPTCHA systems.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about some enhancements we've made in IP.Board 3.4.0 to help prevent unwanted posts and spam.

Spam Monitoring Improvements

We've further enhanced the spam monitoring service in IP.Board 3.4.0 by adding a new option: "Do not permit the user to register an account". This reduces the amount of clean up you need to do after a new wave of attempted spam user sign-ups.

Furthermore, the "flag a member as a spammer" tool optionally deletes posted content rather than simply hiding them further reducing the amount of work needed to maintain your community.

We have also totally reworked our spammer-detection logic behind the scenes to make the spam monitoring service detect spammers more quickly. In addition to internal changes, we are also looking at direct integration with services like Project Honey Pot and others. The great thing about the spam monitoring service is that we can make improvements on our side that are instantly beneficial to your community.

keyCAPTCHA Integration
IP.Board has made good use of the popular reCAPTCHA service to limit the number of "bots" that sign up to your forum with the intent of posting spam. The idea being that a slightly jumbled selection of letters is easy enough for a human to read but more difficult for a computer program. However, some do find that the CAPTCHA images are becoming increasingly complex to keep up with more intelligently written programs to defeat them.

KeyCAPTCHA takes a novel approach to this problem by using images instead of letters and numbers. You simply arrange a few large pieces of a very simple puzzle to complete an image.

You don't need to be completely accurate when building the image, either.

This is now an option in the IP.Board Admin CP. Should you wish to enable it, you'll need to register an account with keyCAPTCHA. The link for this is contained in the setting form and is very straight forward.

As always, we look for new ways to help make running your community a little easier and we look forward to helping you keep those spammers at bay!

Securing your community

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 05:56:00 +0000

There has been much confusion over the recent exploit reported to us and subsequently patched. I would like to personally apologize for any confusion and inconvenience caused. We have conducted a review and made appropriate changes to our policies to ensure a smoother release and notification schedule for any future incidents.

With that said, it is very important to note that while an IP.Board vulnerability did exist, its impact would have been minimal, if not non-existent on servers that have their PHP installations properly secured. I would like to touch on a couple of basics to minimize the effects of future vulnerabilities not only in IP.Board, but any other PHP application you may be using on your website.

open_basedir

It's very important that you (if you manage your own web hosting server) or your web host enable open_basedir. In a shared hosting environment without open_basedir, an attacker has the ability to exploit a vulnerability, perhaps on another customer's account, then use that vulnerability to scan for other customers on the server. From there, they could gain access to config files containing database details, write malicious files to world-writeable directories and a host of other ill-willed activities. Enabling open_basedir "locks" all internal PHP functions such as readfile() to the specified path, which is generally a temporary directory and your home directory.

disable_functions

While open_basedir is a very positive step in securing your PHP scripts, there are unfortunately instances in which it can be bypassed and this is how the recent IP.Board vulnerability gained ground so quickly. For example, the exec(), system() and passthru() functions allow a command to be issued directly to the operating system to view key system files, navigate through other users' web root directories, install 'remote shell' scripts into other users' directories, etc. without any regard to other restrictions such as open_basedir. For this reason, disable_functions should be set to disable system level functions. For example, this is a recommended disable_functions:

disable_functions = escapeshellarg,escapeshellcmd,exec,ini_alter,parse_ini_file,passthru,pcntl_exec,popen,proc_close,proc_get_status,proc_nice,proc_open,proc_terminate,show_source,shell_exec,symlink,system

You or your host may need to tweak to suit, but at a minimum, execution commands should be disabled.

Following the above, you will not necessarily create a fool-proof environment, but you will have additional reassurances that you or your host have taken appropriate measures to better secure your PHP applications.

For those that run a cPanel/WHM server you may enable open_basedir by visiting WHM and clicking the "PHP open_basedir Tweak" link under "Security Center" then clicking enable.

You may modify the disable_functions line by visiting WHM and clicking "PHP Configuration Editor" under "Service Configuration" then clicking "advanced" and searching for "disable_functions"

If you are unsure or do not have the necessary permissions to carry out these tasks, please do contact your host. You are free to link them to this blog entry as well.

I hope this helps better explain the recent security concern and what you can do to help protect yourself and your users in the future. As always, please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you might have. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

IP.Board 3.4 Coming Soon

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:34:00 +0000

We are nearly ready to release the supported version of IP.Board 3.4 and are very excited to get this great new release out to you.

Beta Testing

We are currently doing a public beta test of IP.Board 3.4. If you are comfortable testing pre-release software please consider testing and letting us know any bugs you might find. You can find the pre-release on our forums but you will need to login as an active IPS Client to access. The more people who test our beta releases the better for everyone!

What's New

Please read these blog entries for a full list and explanation of what's new in this release.

IP.SEO Removed (we have removed IP.SEO and merged all its functionality right into IP.Board!)
Editor Improvements
IPS Connect (please note that with the release of Connect our old Converge product will no longer function)
SEO Improvements
VigLink Integration
Best Answer Feature
AdminCP Interface Enhancements
Bulk Mail with Mandrill
Miscellaneous Enhancements
IPS CDN Service

In addition to the specifics in the blog entries we have fixed many issues and made many smaller improvements.

New Backup Service Delayed

We had announced a new Backup Service however this service will be not be available at release time. We want to be sure the service works reliably and would rather delay a bit than give you something that may not work properly. Obviously something as important as backups on your community is something we want to feel confident about offering.

Depending on how our beta testing goes we hope to release IP.Board 3.4 by the end of November. If you are comfortable testing we encourage you to do so so we can be sure this release is as stable as possible. Thank you!

Mobile Apps Status

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 07:36:00 +0000

At IPS, we pride ourselves on providing industry leading products and services, unsurpassed in quality, features and support.

Much like any other company, we indeed have our strengths and weaknesses. One admitted weakness is clearly developing an independent mobile app platform that can meet your and our expectations. We have struggled over the past several years in securing a proficient mobile app development team and ultimately, the platform has not met our expectations. Our mantra has become: if we can't do it right, we simply will not do it. That is where we are at with the mobile app platform.

Unfortunately, this means the Android app will not make its debut as we originally hoped. We do not wish to release something that we cannot provide proper support for. Instead, we would recommend Android users with an immediate need for a mobile app, visit a third party such as Tapatalk.com Please trust that we are just as disappointed as you in our failure to deliver this particular product as promised and I offer my sincerest apologies.

With that, we will do our best to continue polishing the iOS mobile app (which will now be made available for free in the app store) in the short term. For the long-term, we will be incorporating a new mobile integration directly into the product beginning with 4.0.

An integrated web app uses the latest standard web technologies such as CSS, Javascript and HTML combined with mobile extensions which will make the site render and feel like a native mobile application. This will allow far more flexibility and tighter integration across the IPS Community Suite (imagine approving orders, responding to support requests or publishing an article with IP.Content from the comfort of your mobile device) than an independent mobile app while being cross-platform compatible with all mobile operating systems. This is also something we have the existing internal expertise to carry out to our standards, alleviating the need to rely on third parties.

As always, we welcome any constructive feedback and appreciate your continued business and support. Once again, I apologize for any inconvenience and rest assured - we will continue to do what we do best.

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: Miscellaneous Enhancements

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 10:30:00 +0000

As we wrap up principle development of new features for IP.Board 3.4, I wanted to go through some of the other changes we've implemented for the new release.

Share a single post

A common feature request has been the ability to share a single post. You might want to share a great reply to a topic on Facebook or perhaps email a link to an interesting post to a friend. You can now do this by clicking either the post number or the little share icon to the right of the post number. This brings up a new modal window

System Templates

Some "system templates" such as the wrapper used for HTML emails were previously only editable by manually changing the files which contained those templates. This is inconvenient, especially as it means one has to remember not to upload those files when upgrading IP.Board.

In IP.Board 3.4, these templates will be editable from the Admin CP making it much easier to maintain edited versions of these templates.

Mobile Moderation

Our mobile theme is suitable for all mobile devices. Even though we have our mobile application available for the iPhone and iPad, we want to ensure that other devices are able to interact with IP.Board.

A very common request has been to enable basic moderation actions from within the mobile theme. To that end, we've added buttons for common topic moderation into the mobile skin.

Editor Pasting

A lot of the time you find that you just want to paste plain text into the editor so you don't have to then remove formatting such as background and font colors. We've made this an option from within the IP.Board 3.4 editor via the new Options icon (far right on the screen shot). You can still paste as rich text by clicking on the relevant paste button on the top right section of the toolbar.

We hoped that you've enjoyed reading this series of blogs on IP.Board 3.4. We're currently putting the finishing touches to this major new release and can't wait make it available for release!

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: Bulk Mail with Mandrill

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 22:30:00 +0000

IP.Board has for a long time allowed administrators to send bulk mails to members, including the ability to filter recipients and use variables to customise the message sent to each member.

This is an important tool for communicating with the members of your community and in 3.4 we've made it even better.

The problem with bulk mail

Sending vast amounts of email through your own server is troublesome.
Firstly, it takes a long time (you can't just send out thousands of emails in one go) and due to the way PHP works, you need to have activity on your community to initiate the sending of each batch of emails (you could set up a cron, but you'd probably only want it running when you actually have a bulk mail sending, and they're fiddly to set up).
Secondly, if you're on shared hosting, other sites on the same server may have given your server a bad reputation and caused it to be placed on blacklists, this causes the emails you send to be more likely to be marked as junk.
Thirdly, sending vast amounts of email through your own server is an expensive task - most communities we see use the same server for sending emails as hosting the community itself, meaning resources are being used for the sending of those emails and not serving your users.

Fortunately, these problems are well-known throughout the internet and a number of companies offer services to send mail for you, through their servers to alleviate these problems.
In addition, these services provide web applications where you can view statistics, and track how many of your emails have been opened, rejected, etc.

We're really pleased to announce that in IP.Board 3.4 we've built in integration with Mandrill, a service of well-known and respected MailChimp.

How it works

Setting up integration with Mandrill is really easy. In the new "Community Enhancements" section of the Admin CP (which we've mentioned in earlier blog entries), there will be an option for Mandrill:

After creating an account on their site, all you do is enter your account details:

IP.Board will from then on send all bulk mails through the Mandrill service.
And it's not just bulk mails. You can even configure IP.Board's normal email settings to send all outgoing emails via Mandrill's SMTP server.

Sending bulk mails

As part of our improvements, we've also:

Tidied up the interface for sending bulk mails
Improved the unsubscribe link sent in emails to be a one-click link (rather than requiring users sign in and uncheck the box)
Built extension capabilities the filter options available when composing a bulk mail, meaning 3rd party applications can add their own filter options (we'll use this for example, in a future version of IP.Nexus to allow you to send bulk mails to anyone who's purchased a particular item).
Added a tab on the confirmation screen to allow you to view the list of recipients before actually sending the bulk mail.

All these improvements are present even if you choose not to use the new Mandrill integration.

Statistics and Tracking

You can view statistics via the Mandrill web application. Emails sent from IP.Board's bulk mail system automatically enable tracking for opens and clicks.

They even have iPhone and Android apps available.

Pricing

Full pricing details are available from Mandrill - for up to 12,000 emails per month though, the service is completely free.

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: ACP User Interface Enhancements

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000

The Admin Control Panel (ACP) is a very comprehensive section of your IP.Board. The ACP is used for everything from managing members, creating forums to dealing with support tickets from within our IP.Nexus application.

Indeed, the ACP has grown so large that it can be a little bewildering remembering where pages are and you may find that there are areas of the ACP you rarely use and would like to tuck out of the way.

Happily, we've made significant improvements in these areas for IP.Board 3.4.

Bookmarks
You probably use a handful of ACP pages numerous times a day and navigating to those pages may be a little cumbersome or you may find a really useful settings page but struggle a few days later to remember where it was.

The brand new bookmarks feature solves these problems.

The new bookmark system is available by the bookmark icon to the left of the tab bar. Clicking this will allow you to add a new bookmark for the page you're on while hovering over the icon opens the menu.

You can make the current bookmark your 'home' page. This means that after you log in, it'll take you to this page directly instead of showing the dashboard.

You can also drag and drop items to move them if you prefer more useful links at the top of the list.

Tab Preferences
Another common feature request has been the ability to re-order the tabs within the Admin CP. This functionality is now available. You may wish to give greater priority to a specific application or just clean up your tab bar by removing some of the pre-set tabs such as "Look & Feel".

Clicking the "Edit Tabs" link at the far right of the tab bar opens the preferences page.

You simply drag and drop the tabs from the Main Tab Bar onto the 'Other Apps' menu or vice-versa.

Here you can see that I've moved everything except the Nexus tab to the 'Other Apps' menu. This is ideal if you spend most of your time within IP.Nexus and want quick access to it.

We hope you enjoy these additional features to the Admin CP and we really believe they'll speed up your day to day tasks!

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: "Best Answer" Feature

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 16:00:00 +0000

We're always amazed at how diverse our customer base is and how many different uses customers find for their IP.Board. Many customers, ourselves included often have a forum that invites questions such as pre-sales or support forums. These forums often generate a lot of topics with many replies and it can often be confusing for other readers to know which reply definitively answered the original question.

The Best Answer Feature
IP.Board comes with a brand new 'best answer' feature. This enables the topic starter (when allowed), moderators (where allowed) and super moderators/admins to mark a post as the best answer.

This screen shot shows a typical question topic and the best answer has been flagged. You'll also notice that at the top, a small excerpt of the post is shown with a button to go and read the full post. This is useful for when the best answer may be on a different page to the one you're viewing.

Looking at the forum view, you'll see that the answered topic has a badge that when clicked takes you to the flagged post.

You can also quickly filter the forum list to remove answered or unanswered topics. This will be handy for forums that have staff answering questions!

As you'd expect, this can be enabled on a per-forum basis and you can choose whether the topic starter can flag a topic or not on a per-forum basis. There is also a moderator toggle to empower moderators to flag a topic as the best answer. This enables you to retain as much control over this feature as you need.

We hope you enjoy this feature new to IP.Board 3.4. We know that it's been requested many times and we're very pleased at being able to include it!

Introducing IPS Backup Service

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

The new IPS Backup Service is our latest addition to our Community Enhancements services being introduced in IP.Board 3.4. This service allows for remote-backups of your community database processed constantly without any work on your part.

How it Works

The service works by logging all "write" queries to your database that are processed by the IPS Community Suite. What this means is that any time a database entry is inserted, updated, or deleted a log of that action is created. We ignore what we call transactional tables like sessions and topic markers that are updated often but if you were to lose those tables it does not really matter to your community. When you first activate the service it populates an entry in this log table for all existing items in your database to start the process fresh.

The Suite then takes these logged queries and, every so often on a task, will collect a certain amount of the oldest queries and send them to the IPS Backup Service servers (over a secure connection of course). It limits how many it sends per-cycle to ensure we don't run out of memory or reach any post limits. Once those queries are successfully sent to the remote server it will delete them from the log.

Using this method we do not have to create huge database dumps of your community which can cause all sorts of issues with timeouts, disk space, bandwidth requirements, and general hosting problems.

Security and Protection

When your data is sent to our servers it is stored on what we call our Internet gateway server. This server is a sort of dumb system that just accepts the incoming data and temporarily stores it for later processing. The "real" storage servers that permanently process and store your data are not even connected to the Internet. Of course we also implement other security measures that we will not get into but by starting with this very basic approach of not even being on the public Internet you can imagine that we take security seriously.

Your data is stored in three states: active, archive, and snapshot. Active is your database that exists as it processes the incoming data. It's always the most recent copy. Of course the problem with this is if someone were to get into your community and prune all your posts that prune action is also sent to our backup servers meaning that your remote backup would also be pruned. Obviously that's an issue.

To mitigate such risks we also automatically take a weekly archive of the active backup. We keep two of these archive backups (two weeks) at a time. This means that if someone were to do a prune of your topics or, for example, actually just shut off the backup services in your AdminCP you would still have a recent archive on our systems. The snapshot state is basically the same as an archive but it's one that you can manually request in the Client Area that's taken when you tell us.

Failure Support

At any time various things can happen that might make your remote backup no longer be of any use to you. Maybe there was an issue in your IPS Community Suite that caused an important query to not be logged. Perhaps you manually ran a query outside of the Suite. Maybe our remote servers suffered an issue. You never really know and that's why the system has two-way failure support.

If the backup processing on your install has issues, or you manually do something, you can request a reset of the service in the AdminCP. This will basically start you from scratch and empty your remote backup to start from the beginning (note that archives are kept to keep this from being used maliciously). On the other hand, if our backup service has a fault (or it detects that there is some mis-match with your data) the service will do the reverse and self-delete then tell your Suite to restart from scratch.

The idea here is to think ahead and recognize faults can happen and have the ability to both manually and automatically refresh a backup as needed.

Accessing Data

The last step in the process is of course accessing your backed up data whenever you may need it. We employ a dual authentication process to protect you: [*]Later when you might request to access your backup an email is first sent to the stored email address in step 1 with a download key. [*]Once the backup is ready a second email is sent to the current email address on record on your client account with a download link. [*]You need both the download key and the download link to access. So why do all that? The scenario we are concerned about is if someone were to gain access to your client area account on our site and change your email address to their email address. In that case they could download your whole database through our system. However, since we store your old email address that cannot be edited this makes it so they cannot access as they need to be able to check that email account too. If you lose access to one or both email addresses we will have alternate procedures in place. Of course this is not a 100% solution, nothing really is when dealing with account security, but we think it's a great extra level of protection for you. Pricing and Service As you can imagine this sort of service will require a lot of fine-tuning and will also become a mission-critical component of your community so we want to be sure we get it right. Therefore, we will initially be launching the IPS Backup Service as a beta service and there will be no cost to use it. The service will improve over time while in beta based on your feedback and, once we are comfortable that we can stand behind it and you can trust it, we will be able to announce pricing and full support. During the beta stage will be engaging our clients who are comfortable with database management to simulate failures and restores to confirm the viability of a backup. This service is very important so it's also important we check every angle possible. We are very excited and hopeful that the IPS Backup Service will be a welcomed addition to the IPS Community Suite. The service was created because of the sometimes heartbreaking situations we see in technical support from people who lose years of community data because their host fails. We really hope that this service will help people out in those horrible situations. Note that if you host your community with IPS we already perform backups for you.

[*]When you first activate the IPS Backup Service your current client area email address is stored.

Switch to IPS

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:51:00 +0000

IP.Board 3.4 is approaching and will be released soon with all sorts of great enhancements such as SEO improvements, upgraded editor, login enhancements, core performance improvements, lots of minor changes from feedback, and more still to be announced.

This is a great time to take a look at IPS if your community might still be running another software. Perhaps you have a friend or a site you visit frequently using another software and you want to encourage them to switch to the IPS Community Suite. By starting the switch process now you can have your community ready to go, be familiar with IPS software and services, and have any questions answered so when IP.Board 3.4 is released you can jump right on this new version!

Advantages of IPS

IPS prides itself on a few key points that have driven our success for over 10 years making community software. While there are many points these are the key factors:

Our staff is engaged in the community

We use our own software

Great customer service

Active, responsive development

Switching to IPS

If you are using another software provider and are ready to switch to IPS please check out our converter page on our site. We offer a free converter script that supports many existing packages. If yours is not listed please contact us and we will do our best to assist you. The converter script is very easy to use and makes a copy of your old data so you are free to try a few test conversions before going live. That's a great way to be sure all is well as switching software can be disruptive to your community so the more careful you are the better.

Depending on what software you're switching from, our converter scripts can convert various data in your community. For many software packages we also offer 301 redirection scripts so your old URLs will automatically redirect to their new location. This allows for as minimal an impact as possible to your SEO and search engine exposure. Of course changing software will always have a short and medium term impact to your visibility but these scripts are a great way to help mitigate that.

Ask Us or our Clients

If you have any questions, need some advice, or want to get first hand experience just email sales and we will be happy to help. You might also consider posting in our pre-sales forum where you can get first-hand information directly from IPS clients. By talking to IPS clients directly you will get a realistic view of what's involved from others who have done it. There's no better way to decide if IPS is best for you than to talk to clients who use our software and services.

Special Promotion

We are running a special promotion now through 1 October 2012 for anyone wanting to switch to IPS Community Suite. Use the coupon code SWITCH at checkout to receive 10% off your entire order. This is in addition to the existing bundle discounts you get when purchasing multiple IPS apps!

Take this great opportunity to have a look at IPS Community Suite. Tell a friend or convince a web site you visit to have a look. Try our free demo to experiment with our Suite for a few days. Ask our sales team questions or post in our pre-sales forum to get information from existing IPS clients. Our community and staff are welcoming and here to help!

Current IPS clients can also use our SWITCH coupon code. It's a great time to get another license...

We talk to clients, joke with clients, and listen to feedback. Sometimes we cannot implement every bit of feedback we receive (image the chaos if we tried!) so we try to spot trends to pick out what is clearly a must have change.

Both on our company forums and our own web site we use what we make. Nearly all of our staff comes from a background where they also ran their own community giving us a unique perspective as both creators and consumers of our services.

The technical support services we offer are second to none and any IPS client will tell you that we always do our best to help a client out with technical problems as quickly as we can.

Perhaps our biggest advantage and difference is our continual development and improvements. You will never see us sitting around idle. There is always something new in development or something old getting improved. Sometimes these are big changes and sometimes they're small but we are always doing something behind the scenes. We never abandon our clients and allow our software to stagnate.

Introducing IPS CDN Service

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:24:00 +0000

A Content Delivery Network, or CDN is a distributed system of servers to provide high-availablity and high-performance. For example, rather than serving your CSS, images and Javascript from the same webserver that PHP and the rest of your community runs on, these are loaded from a network of servers, improving performance and reducing load on your server.

Having a CDN can improve your community's quality, reliability and scalability, as well as reduce your hosting costs. By offloading the serving of images, CSS, Javascript, etc. you free up your system resources to serve the real content which makes for a better experience. Some say that there are also SEO advantages o CDN use.

The IPS Community Suite has supported Content Delivery Networks for some time. However, they can be expensive and difficult to set up. Many clients want a CDN but do not know where to go and we hope to help them out.

We are pleased to announce a new service, IPS CDN, which will allow you to quickly, easily and inexpensively start using this important technology on your community.

How does it work?

The IPS CDN service will be supported in IP.Board 3.4. After upgrading, you'll notice a new section of the Admin Control Panel called "Community Enhancements" - one of the options available here is "IPS CDN".

On this page you'll be able to enable the CDN, which will take you to a new page in the client area where you can purchase credits:

Note that the packages shown in this screenshot are examples only.

As you will notice from that screenshot, you can purchase credits for your CDN account as and when you want, and optionally set up your account to automatically top-up as you run low on credit.

Once this is done, your community will automatically start using the CDN service. If you do not set up automatic top-up, we'll send you an email when your account is running low on credit (when you go below 10GB, 5GB and 1GB). If your credit runs out without you topping up, your community will automatically stop using the CDN service - there will be no interruption to the running of your community, it will automatically notice there's no credit remaining and go back to serving resources locally. If you top up again, it will automatically enable itself again.

One problem of using the IPS Community Suite (or indeed any application) with a CDN is that when a resource is changed locally, the CDN needs to be recached to notice the new changes. Unless the CDN is notified of a change it will keep serving the old copy of the file - sometimes for up to 24 hours. This can cause much confusion to you and your visitors.

To remedy that problem: since editing skins and the CSS is done from the Admin CP, the system will automatically call the CDN service to recache resources as and when you change them, so you don't need to worry about this.

You can keep track of your usage in the Admin CP, where you'll be able to see a graph with your usage over the last 7 days. You'll also be able to buy more credits, disable the system, and manually recache.

How much does it cost?

The service will be based on "Pay As You Go" pricing. Meaning there's no minimum sign up fee - you simply purchase credit on your account and that credit is good for an amount of data transferred through the service. As you use the CDN, your credit will decrease and you can top up with more.

The base price for the CDN will be at or around $0.18 per GB of bandwidth served through the CDN and may drop as you reach higher levels. We realize this is rather unspecific right now but we are negotiating with CDN providers to get the best bulk pricing. It will be our goal to pass any volume savings we receive on to our clients as we look at this service is a great way to enhance our client's experience and want to encourage its use.

Everyone will however be offered their first Gigabyte for free to try out the service before purchase.

Of course if you do not want to use the IPS CDN service and want to use another provider you can certainly do that. We believe the click and go setup for the IPS CDN service will encourage usage and benefit all IPS Community Suite users.

Future CDN Integration

Right now the CDN is a basic "pull" implementation whereby it simply pulls data from your live server then serves it via its cache. In the future we hope to implement storage services. This would mean that uploaded files would be stored on the CDN rather than your local computer. This is great to reduce storage costs on your hosting and also means that, other than the actual processing of data, your community's files are geographically distributed. For our power users this would also mean even easier cluster/cloud hosting.

Storage and other CDN integrations will come in future versions of the IPS Community Suite so for now enjoy the current features while we work on even more great additions!

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: VigLink

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:30:00 +0000

VigLink is a service which works with a number of affiliates to provide you commission when a user visits the affiliate from your website.
So, as an example, let's say someone posts a link to an Amazon item on your community, with VigLink integration, you'll be provided with compensation every time a user purchases that item if they bought it after following the link from your site.

VigLink, and services like it, have been a popular addition for many of our clients and we have received requests for built in integration. Monetizing your community is something IPS has been working to enhance support for over the recent years. From ad code integration spots to our full commerce system IP.Nexus our clients who are interested in monetizing their community have benefited greatly. The addition of VigLink enhances those offerings.

This video provides more information on how VigLink works:

We've been working closely with VigLink to provide direct integration with this service in IP.Board 3.4.

Setting it up couldn't be easier - we've built a new page in the Admin CP called "Community Enhancements" which lists all of the services we integrate with. You simply click on "VigLink" in this page and you'll be taken to the VigLink site where you can either sign up, or log in with your existing VigLink account, if you have one:

Once that's done - you're all setup. You don't need to copy and paste any code - the integration will be enabled for you, and you can now track your usage through your VigLink account.

There's a number of settings you can configure for finer control over how the system works. You can set which users VigLink applies to (both in terms of who gets redirected through them and whose posts get VigLink enabled) and you can disable the system on a per-forum basis:

We'll also be releasing an update to our iOS app around the 3.4 release to support this integration too. IPS benefits financially through a reciprocal marketing agreement when someone uses VigLink through our software however we do not take any cut of the commission offered from VigLink to you. Anyone familiar with IPS knows that taking a cut is not how we would operate :smile:

Community Enhancements Section

Mentioned earlier in this entry, the AdminCP has a new section called Community Enhancements. This area contains all the various external services that your IPS Community Suite can use to enhance your community. It's not all new though: we have moved services like our Spam Monitoring Service to this section as that too is an external enhancement to your community.

We are also introducing some new services that will integrate with your community in this section! Certain services are from external partners, like VigLink, that clients may opt to use and some are new IPS-created services. Some services are free and some carry a small cost depending on the nature of what's being offered. They are all of course optional and if you do not enable them they do not execute or engage any resources in the Suite.

Keep an eye out for future blog entries introducing these new Community Enhancements!

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: SEO Improvements

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:30:00 +0000

As part of our regular SEO round-up when developing a major new release, I'm happy to run through the latest SEO changes we've made for IP.Board 3.4.

Friendly URL Changes
After much research and discussion with other SEO focused forum owners, I decided to revamp the FURL structure when handling additional page parameters.
The existing format uses the following structure:

board.com/topic/123-title/page__foo__bar

This is then parsed as foo=bar when converted to a normal query string.

The problem with this is that it confuses search engines because it looks like another page rather than just a variant of a single page. We have a canonical tag which helps to reduce confusion but it's still not perfect from an SEO perspective.

With that in mind, the new format is:

board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=bar

Now humans and search engines can quickly see that these are additional parameters of a single page. The canonical tag now backs this up and there is absolutely no confusion!

New page parameters
Another item that often came up when discussing URL structures and best practises was the current pagination method which is:

board.com/topic/123-title/page__st__30

This is then parsed as st=30 when converted to a normal query string. This tells IP.Board to start from the 30th post in that topic, which is page two if we have 30 posts per page.

This was less than optimal because some search engines had trouble understanding this was an additional page of the same topic.

I've made this more explicit by making use of a special page parameter:

board.com/topic/123-title/page-2 board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar

The eagle eyed will notice that there no additional slash after page-2. This means that search engines (and humans!) will identify the root page, a page with parameters and a page of a topic:

board.com/topic/123-title/ board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=bar board.com/topic/123-title/page-2 board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar

In this case 'board.com/topic/123-title/' is the root page.

Of course, IP.Board will happily 301 redirect visitors using the old st=x method or the old page__x method.

Unread Topics
In IP.Board 3.3, there was a special 'unread' folder added to topic links on the board index. This was often confusing as it seemed like yet another page from the root topic. In 3.4 we're using:

board.com/topic/123-title/?view=getnewpost

This explicitly states that it is simply another way of viewing that single topic.

Statuses
In IP.Board 3.3, each status update from a member was given a new page, like so:

board.com/statuses/id/12345

During Google's Panda update, websites with 'thin' content could be penalised. It could be determined that these status update pages are very thin and a moderately busy board could generated thousands of them.

In IP.Board 3.4, we use the new FURL format:

board.com/status/user/1-matt/?status_id=12345

As you'd expect:

board.com/status/user/1-matt/

This URL shows all of the user's status updates.

Multiple SEO Titles
I've improved the SEO URL builder to allow for multiple 'seoTitles'. Right now, IP.Board 3.3 is limited to just one, so you can only create FURLs like so:

board.com/topic/123-#{title}/

Multiple titles will allow you to create complex titles like so:

board.com/#{title-1}/123-#{title-2}/

In addition to the bundled inclusion of the old IP.SEO, this wraps up most of the big SEO changes coming in 3.4. I'm confident that the new pagination and new FURL structures will clarify your site's structure to search engines making it easier to spider and associate content without being penalised for thin content.

Of course we're always open to well-constructed feedback on SEO improvements. Everything you see in this blog entry was implemented from feedback. Please start a topic in our feedback forums if you have SEO suggestions not directly related to the content of this blog entry.

Nominated Charities

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

IPS is introducing a program whereby we nominate a charity to receive our attention and support. These nominated charities are chosen by IPS for the work they do and how they might impact us personally.

The first nominated charity is Autism Speaks. You can find out more information on our charity page.

IPS and our Client Community

It is our goal to expose various charities to our client community and organize our many thousands of clients to do something good. We make community software and sell that software to our clients who use it to create thriving online communities. We believe that IPS and its clients share a common goal of communication and conversation - be it online or offline - and can work together for a greater purpose.

Every so often we will change up our nominated charity to spread around the good will of our client community to other worthy causes.

Please consider donating to this or other charities we may nominate in the future. We will collect all funds and distribute them to the charity and IPS will also donate funds as a company.

IP.Board 3.4 Dev Update: IPS Connect

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 12:00:00 +0000

The IPS Community Suite provides a fantastic community solution for all kinds of websites.
For many of our customers, the community is just one component of their site. Many of these customers utilise single sign-on systems for integrating the community with the other areas.

At IPS, we get requests for this on a regular basis, and over the years, I've worked on many of these solutions as part of my day-to-day workload.
Companies like Evernote and Roxio have created a single sign-on solution with the IPS Community Suite and their existing user databases.
Other companies which manage large numbers of communities like the NFL and the NHL have created a single sign-on solution allowing all their communities to share the same user database.

Creating these systems can be quite arduous though. Every setup has different ways of handling data and systems must be created bespoke to each situation.

6 years ago, we had an idea to simplify this. What if we could create a solution that would allow a network of web applications to share user information? We created a solution and called it IP.Converge.

Over these 6 years though, the internet has changed. IP.Converge was designed to be a "master" in a network of "Converge compatible" applications. This approach had two main shortcomings: firstly, it is often the case that our software needs to be the "slave" in a single sign-on network, secondly, the approach was too general which made both facilitating full single sign-on (where users are automatically logged into all applications after logging into one) was difficult, and making non-IPS software compatible with Converge was extremely difficult.

Fortunately, we think we've come up with a better solution. As of IP.Board 3.4, we are completely removing support for IP.Converge, and have developed a new system, which we're calling IPS Connect.

IPS Connect has no central application. In an IPS Connect network, one of the applications will serve as the master, and there will be any number of slaves working off it.
When writing IPS Connect, we had three main objectives: So what does this mean? As of IP.Board 3.4, it will be easy, and completely seamless to create a single sign-on network between 2 or more IP.Boards, and 3rd party developers will also be able to write support for any other web application to join in in the network. How does it work? For the simplicity of this example, let's say you're networking 2 IP.Board installations. The "master" installation has a secret key which will be given the "slave" installation. When a user visits the "slave" installation, IP.Board will check if they are logged into the "master" installation - if they are it will log them in automatically, creating the account if necessary. If they're not logged in, but then choose to log in on the "slave" installation - they will automatically be logged into the "master" installation. This happens transparently, without the user leaving the "slave" installation. When a user registers or updates their account, the "master" application will be pinged and updated. Again, this happens transparently. How simple is it to write support for my custom web application? Really simple! If you want your application to be the "master", all you need to do is create a single php file which "slave" applications will send requests to. This needs to do things like facilitate log ins, account registrations, etc. If you want your application to be the "slave", you simply ping that file on the "master" application when stuff happens. We've created 2 completely functional example websites which demonstrate exactly how to do this, which will be available to download when 3.4 is released.

[*]Single Sign-On must be completely automatic and effortless. After logging into any application in the network, the user should be automatically logged into all others. And similarly, after logging out, the same. [*]The process should be completely transparent to the user. The user should be able to register an account, or update account information on any application in the network, and these changes should be pushed transparently to the other applications. [*]It should be easy for developers to make their web applications compatible with IPS Connect - and they should be able to make their web applications serve as either the master or the slave.

IP.Blog 2.6: Moderation, Interface, and Odds & Ends

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 10:30:00 +0000

Custom Sidebar Blocks and Profile Photos
Since the IP.Board 3.2 update, the look & feel of content blocks and sidebar widgets has been somewhat left behind in IP.Blog. Inconsistent avatar image sizes and design decisions that were made for IP.Board 3.1 have left some areas of IP.Blog looking dated and disconnected from the rest of the suite.

For IP.Blog 2.6 these sidebar blocks have been given an overhaul and brought up to date with IPB 3.3.

In addition to this, the much loathed pink Twitter block has finally been replaced by a more modern and clean look;

vs

Inline Moderation
Moderating blogs from the front end has become somewhat tedious over time. With this release the moderation tools have been updated and now use the much more friendly popup style as seen in the forums. Furthermore, moderation now works across pages. No more selecting multiple items only to move to page 2 and see your options removed for you to start over.

This inline popup is also context aware and only shows those options that are relevant to the selected items.

Managing Categories
Another source of frustration for Blog users and an issue that comes up often is the inability to edit individual blog categories. Many users have spent time setting up categories only to discover they cannot be renamed and must be removed and then re-added causing the blog entries to have to be recategorized. Thankfully it is now possible to edit these category names inline on the front end with the changes automatically assigned to entries.

Wrapping Up
Continuing to ensure the look & feel of all IPS products remains intuitive and consistent is a key goal. We hope that these small changes will help refine the end user experience in IP.Blog adding to the already feature rich options.

Whilst it's not always possible to release with no outstanding bugs, I'm also pleased to say that all confirmed bugs reported to the tracker have been fixed for IP.Blog 2.6 in time for QA testing.

License Changes Live

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0000

The license changes that we blogged about back in May are now live!

License Structure Changes

The main change is that IP.Board is no longer be the "root" license item. You now have a license to the IPS Community Suite and will then have the various applications as additions under that root license. Anyone with a current IP.Board Standard License or IP.Board Business License will see this change happen automatically in their client area in the coming weeks. There will be no change to your services of course. Those with an IP.Board Business License will see a new Priority Support package listed.

Here is how licenses worked before today:

IP.Board Standard License

IP.Blog
IP.Gallery
IP.Nexus
IP.Content
etc.

Here is how licenses now work:

IPS Community Suite

IP.Board
IP.Blog
IP.Nexus
etc.

Renewal Consolidation

We have also consolidated renewal dates on your packages. It was very cumbersome for both IPS and our clients to have the various apps under a license have different renewal dates. So we have changed this to prorate purchases so they all have the same renewal dates. Of course the renewal frequency and amount will not change from how it is now. For example, if you choose to add IP.Nexus to your existing IPS Community Suite license the order system will automatically give you a credit based on the number of days until your next renewal cycle so everything balances out.

When we switch over to this new setup your existing purchases will also be prorated and your renewal date for your licenses will adjust based on a formula that gives you credit for all days remaining on all of your licenses. This means your renewal date will change slightly as the system gives you credit for prepaid renewals.

If your license is currently expired then you will still be put into this new structure but just in an expired state so nothing will change. Legacy license holders will see no change to their license terms but will also see an adjustment in the structure shown here.

FAQs

What if I don't want to renew a particular app?
No problem! Just log into the client area, click the app you don't want to renew and then click Cancel. This will cancel the renewals on that app and adjust the renewal rate on the IPS Community Suite license.

How do I cancel my IPS Community Suite license?
There is no need to cancel the IPS Community Suite license as it does not have renewal charges unless you have an active app under the license.

If I do not renew one or all of my apps what happens?
If you do not renew you will lose access to support, upgrades, and services related to the applications you chose not to renew. It's of course in your best interest to keep up to date with our latest releases for performance, features, and security plus access to our great support services. If you let your services expire you can of course renew them at any time by going to the client area, clicking your expired package, and then selecting Renew Now.

What happens when I purchase a new app?
If you want to extend the capabilities of your IPS Community Suite by purchasing a new app you can easily do this in the client area. Just order the app as normal and then you will associate it with your Suite license. Your purchase price will be automatically adjusted to account for the next renewal date on your license to keep everything in balance.

Why the change?
Not only is this structure easier for everyone (just one renewal date for everything) but also goes along with our future plans of releasing all of our products as one Suite rather than individual apps under IP.Board. It's an exciting project and we cannot wait to roll it out over the next few releases.