Rikki

Regarding the maximum size that the thumbnails will expand to... I'm often puzzled why people want this as an admin option. Every user has different specifications of monitor - some have big screens, others have smaller screens. To me it seems to make most sense to resize it to the largest that users monitor can hold, rather than let the admin choose. It's something we can look into for a future update.

No, it is not a shoutbox any more than it is a forum :)

1) We have many large corporations using IPB. One example is NBC, nearly 4 million posts and 260,000 users: http://boards.nbc.com/nbc/. The software is fully capable of handling sites of that size assuming your hardware is. As for search, one of the other developers can tell you more, I'm sure. I believe we recommend installing Sphinx for large sites, which IPB supports out of the box. 2) Our template system works in much the same way, but is also incredibly flexible. As you're probably used to, data is passed into individual templates, and you then use HTML to display them however you wish. The IPB template system also allows you to embed PHP if you want to do advanced manipulation, call templates into other templates if you want to easily reuse content, and even create your own template tags with a simple PHP config file (examples of tags included by default are a zebra striping tag for tables, and a date formatting tag). Although many boards choose to keep the overall general 'look' of the default skin, with a little effort it is possible to completely change the appearance of the product, with nothing other than template modifications. To give you some idea, take a look at Skype's forum: http://forum.skype.com/ Although their live forum is running 2.x, their skin has been created for 3.x with zero backend modifications. It's all templates :) The best way to see for yourself how the templates work is to try the demo, just go to http://www.invisionpower.com and click the Sign Up button on the homepage for a private demo installation :)

Welcome!

But that's the point, what can you include by default that is suitable for any board, in any language? Other than some faces and basic ?, ! type icons, I can't think of much else that can be included by default. We have to appeal to a very wide range of boards out of the box.

It was largely my decision to remove them from topic view, so let me explain my thinking. I don't believe they serve much useful purpose to most topics on most forums. I looked extensively at a number of IPB's while developing IPB3, and very few people used them. It was an additional wasted column on forum view. It is easy to replace the default icons, yet I don't think I've ever seen a board that did it, other than yours. Now, some boards will have a use for specific icons, like in Garrets screenshot, but I doubt it's many personally. Post icons are very rarely brought up. The other problem is what do we include? We can't include any images that contain language, so dumping 150 images marked 'wrong', 'upset', 'culture' etc. is out of the question. So that leaves us with the 'mood' emoticons, which I agree aren't very useful. The combination of the fact that very few people use the feature as it was in 2.3, and the fact it's difficult to include anything useful by default, and the fact there's little demand, means it's not really high on our list of things to include. Perhaps the biggest issue though is this would be superseded by tagging, which we've said will appear in a later 3.x release. That'll give everyone a more flexible system of marking topics and any other content, without us investing time in a narrow feature like post icons. Hope that explains it :)

If people want to speed up logging into the acp, every browser supports the ability to store login details. I don't think that's a decision we should make for people, personally.

We do have a new LoFi skin coming soon which will certainly be more complete that the current one. It doesn't have the iPhone styling that Timan's has though, since we expect it will be used on several different mobile platforms.

Wow, that's a blast from the past!

It's a MySQL restriction more than anything. By default, MySQL doesn't allow fulltext searching with less than 4 characters. This can be configured on the server, but then searches become horribly inefficient.

It's unlikely we'll have a skin by default that's specifically for iPhone, simply because it's only one device. There will be a better LoFi skin in a later release, though.

We could have added hundreds of lines of HTML to add rounded corners, but for something so unimportant I don't think that's worthwhile. It doesn't affect the usability of the software, so in our opinion, it's something that the newer browsers can use, and the older browsers can just ignore :) Not everyone is going to want rounded corners on their skin, which would leave them with all those extra tags that would be useless. Personally, I think creating a working base then enhancing it where browsers support particular features is a better way forward than trying to strong-arm all browsers into one pixel-perfect rendering.

The bulk of the IPB3 documentation is now delivered inline in the ACP - click the 'Get Help With This Page' button on any page to load it :) We'll be adding to what's available over time.

You don't double click, you click the 'Show All Emoticons' button.

Don't worry, we have competition besides vB :)

Let's just be clear, the standard editor works fine - it's the RTE specifically that doesn't work in WebKit.

Welcome, we hope you enjoy using it :)

Our editor didn't support Webkit in 2.x, and we weren't able to add support in time for 3.0. It's something we're going to look into adding in a future version, and sooner rather than later :)

I was going to put bfarber on the homepage, but I figured we wanted people to stick around and buy something. :P

It's just a random picture someone posted to the gallery. I would guess a model...

Indeed, I'm doing usability studies on the site. I find this kind of thing fascinating... We've already made a couple of small tweaks to the site based on these :)

Things... - Client area is going to be messy for a little while - Same for order process, both are integrated with Nexus so pulling them apart for the new design is going to take a little longer - Resource site won't be changing for a while - Download manager, community projects etc. aren't forgotten but we'll be adding them in due course - Demo will be fixed soon

Regarding skins, there is simply no way we can do a major version upgrade and make skins compatible. I understand that's a reason to keep on 2.3.6 right now, but we hope you also understand that to move things forward, we had to redo things.

It's hardly fair to say they're copying in all honesty. A forum looks like a forum, there's only so much you can do to change it without alienating users. Plus, when you go fully tableless & semantic, you're kind of guided into a particular structure by the tags you choose to mark up the data.

We're all getting ready to go on vacation :P