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We are well into beta testing for IP.Board 3.3 and IP.Content 2.3 and so far it's going very well. Practically no bugs are being reported and often times our staff have literally 0 open general bugs in our bug tracker. That is quite an accomplishment and something of which we are very proud! If you are an IPS Client and are comfortable beta testing we would love for you to take some time in the next day or two and visit the pre-release testing forum. There you can download the latest beta releases to try out yourself. Please report bugs to the bug tracker so we can fix any issues before we go for the final, supported release. One of our primary goals for these releases, in addition to feature changes and enhancements of course, was to fix as many issues as we possibly could. While there will always be bugs and such in any software package, we are very proud that we have been able to address every general operational bug report that has come in. That's not something many can say. Of course once this release is used by thousands of people we will need maintenance releases but going out of the gate with basically no known issues is a great way to start! Thank you to everyone who has assisted in beta testing so far. The final, supported releases will be here before you know it thanks to your help.

We are happy to announce that we have made a few changes to enhance the community experience here on the IPS Community. Access to Support Forums Based on client feedback and the mass of good will from many helpful clients who want to assist others, we have opened up access to our support forums to both current, active license holders and those that may have a license but it is expired. As our support forums are peer-to-peer we thought this only fair. Please keep in mind that IPS Staff do not actively post in the support forums but many helpful clients do and it is a great place to get help from your fellow clients. If you ever need official support from IPS please submit a ticket in the client area. Community Tips We have created a new Community Administration Tips forum that we hope everyone will use to learn and share your experience. We already have some great discussion going on in this new forum and encourage you to post a topic with your own ideas. Feel free to link to your own community as a great way to promote your own community. Share your experience and learn from others! OpenID in IP.Board 3.3 Just a quick note regarding IP.Board 3.3: IPS is removing support for OpenID as a login method in IP.Board 3.3. While OpenID seemed to show promise several years ago it has been overtaken by other login methods. More importantly, the PHP libraries that we use to connect to OpenID have been all but abandoned by those that created them and they do not work on the latest versions of PHP. As more and more people will start upgrading their PHP versions, OpenID will start to work on fewer and fewer installs due to the incompatibles in these abandoned libraries. Therefore we will be removing support for OpenID in IP.Board 3.3.

Ten years ago today Invision Power Services was born and we continue to go strong today providing community software to thousands of clients. Ten years on the web is practically forever and we are proud to have reached this milestone! IPS has grown over the years to one of the leading providers of community software. To our many thousands of clients including large, well-known brands like NBC, NFL, NHL, many music artists and more we have been able to offer a quality community experience. Our staff, past and present, have made this possible through their dedication to providing quality software and great support for our clients. We apply the feedback we receive from clients, experience from running our own site, and information from running our own hosting to our product line to create a community suite that is stable, innovative, and easy to use. Thank you to all of our dedicated clients who both give us the feedback we need to improve and also promote us to their friends and colleagues as the best choice for community software. The future is bright for online community solutions. After all: from day one the web was all about communicating and sharing information. Through the crazes of newsgroups, personal web pages (Geocities anyone?), everyone having a blog, MySpace, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever is next the common theme has always been communicating and sharing. IPS will continue as it has for the past 10 years with a focus on connecting people so they can share their world online.

Since the very start of our company IPS has offered free scripts you can download to assist in converting from other forum or community software to our platform. Thousands of you have taken advantage of this over the years and we are happy you have chosen to be part of the IPS family. We have put great effort into modernizing our community suite and that, combined with clients able to make clear comparisons with how IPS approaches community solutions against others, has resulted in the pace of conversions seeing a marked increase. As you can imagine we are thrilled and honored by this increase! Updates to Converter Scripts We were fortunate to have some clients with complicated conversions recently who were gracious enough to allow us to work with their database to make improvements to our conversion scripts that will benefit all of our clients. Converting from another data source is a complicated process and is never an exact science. In addition to fixing many minor issues with the converter, we were able to greatly increase the speed a conversion takes to complete. Example 1: 170,000 post community conversion reduced from 3 hours to 20 minutes Example 2: 10 million post community conversion reduced from a week to 2 days Of course these numbers will vary based on the hardware of your server but these are significant improvements we are happy to be able to bundle in the software. Beyond speed improvements, these changes also mean less memory and processing power is used by the converter scripts so it impacts overall stability of your server less than before. The bundled redirection scripts we include for popular forum softwares for SEO purposes are also updated to take advantage of other structural changes in the conversion routines to mean faster lookups of old vs. new locations so the redirect takes place with less delay. Though a small change every bit counts when you may have just moved millions of posts! New features in a a converter script are rare since it is, let's be honest here, a pretty boring bit of software :smile:. However we were able to include support to transfer vB tags to the new IP.Board tagging system by popular request from the incredible number of converts we receive each week from that software. Conversion Service For many years IPS offered free converter scripts but also offered a paid conversion service if you preferred for our staff to do the conversion process for you. Because of the great increase in conversions I mentioned above (good thing), we also of course saw a huge increase in paid conversion service requests. The problem was we had so many our level of service dropped to the point we were not proud of what we were offering (bad thing) so we decided to stop offering paid conversion services a couple months ago. The good news is that our great client community has stepped in and many clients who are long-term clients of IPS are now offering conversion services for those of you considering switching and would like some help. Check out our custom services directory for this information and for other services provided by our client community. There is a lot of great talent in our client community! Full Suite Promotion Are you ready to jump in and join the IPS family? We have made it technically easy to convert to IPS, now we want to make it even more enticing for you... When you purchase multiple IPS products at one time you always get a bundle discount. When purchasing our entire Suite at once this discount is 25% off the total price (calculated as 5% off per-suite app you purchase). We are increasing the discount you get for each bundled app from 5% to 7% through the end of the year. That equates to an extra 10% or $43.99 off when purchasing our entire Suite! This is a great time to purchase a brand new full license of IPS Community Suite and join or expanding client base and modern community software! Feel free to email [email protected] if you have any questions about IPS software or services. You can also post in our pre-sales forum to get impression from existing IPS clients.

IPS is making some changes to our pricing to streamline our offerings and recognize changing business needs. That Pesky One Cent It gets pretty old saying "it's nine ninety nine" so we are going to round up all prices to their nearest dollar. So, for example, our community hosting Basic 10 service will now be $10 rather than $9.99 or IP.Blog will become $50 instead of $49.99. Yes, we realize it's only $0.01 but really you have to admit $10 looks so much cleaner than $9.99. Rikki, our interface designer, is very happy at being able to clean up the web site design accordingly. Business Needs We introduced the IP.Board Standard and Business licenses toward the end of 2006 and have not adjusted the prices since then. That was over 5 years ago and as with everything else in the world, the cost of doing business for IPS has increased. In addition to costs, we offer more free services included with the licenses (spam monitoring service, IP.Chat 5, IP.Tracker, Marketplace, free installs/upgrades, etc.) than we certainly could have dreamed up 5 years ago. Therefore, we are changing the price of the IP.Board Standard license to $175 and the IP.Board Business license to $400. The renewal pricing for these two licenses remains unchanged for all existing clients. We will not be actually implementing these pricing changes until January 2012 so if you are considering using IPS software now is the time! Multiple Licenses We introduce a discount program for those with multiple licenses back in 2009 and it has been a huge success with clients purchasing often dozens of licenses to our software. The program we introduce in 2009 has remain unchanged and is simply if you have more than two full price licenses then the third and so on is $99. That has worked great but we want to change it up so more clients can benefit. The new multiple license discount structure is as follows: License 1: full price License 2: 10% off License 3 - 5: 30% off License 6 - 25: 50% off License 26+: contact us for special pricing Best of all these discounts apply to all product licenses! All of the changes listed will go live in January 2012.

IPS is looking for a mobile app developer to assist us in greatly enhancing our presence in the mobile application space. Key Requirements Experience in iOS and Android development (Windows phone a plus) Working knowledge of IPS community suite software Examples of previous application development Other RequirementsWorking knowledge of SVN or similar revision control systems Self-starter who can take a project plan and make it a reality Ability to work with a team toward a larger goal Time management skills to be able to deliver a goal on time If interested, please contact [email protected] with information on requirements listed.

We made changes today to the way we meter and track data and media storage on our hosted communities. Previously our main limiter for a package was online users. This normally works fine as it's a simple formula of the more people you have online the more server resources your community consumes. However, there are some long-established communities that have been lucky enough to accumulate thousands (sometimes millions) of posts over the years with only a small number of online users. Those types of accounts were causing unfair resource usage when compared to other clients on our system. To ensure fair resource usage and good service for all of our clients, we will now start counting database storage along with file storage toward the storage quota for our packages. This will ensure that those accounts using more resources are not impacting those with smaller communities unfairly. It's our end goal to ensure all of our clients receive the best service possible. Increase in Data and File Storage Limits Of course we do not want these changes to be an unnecessary burden for any client. So, although we will now start counting database storage in our storage quotas, we are also raising our package quotas! Package Name: Old Limit to New Limit Starter 5: 200MB to 300MB Basic 10: 350MB to 700MB Standard 25: 500MB to 1GB Plus 40: 800MB to 1.5GB Super 65: 1GB to 2GB Ultra 100: 1.5 GB to 3GB Advanced 175: 2GB to 5GB These new limits will benefit all our Hosted Communities by giving them lots of room to grow! Yes, talk of file and data storage space is a dry subject many of you will not be too excited about. But wait there's more: Overall Network Improvements After months of planning, countless network diagrams, visits to network provider data centers, waiting on hardware deliveries, and hours of migration planning: IPS has started the process of a network-wide upgrade! Every piece of hardware - from network switches down to the actual server hardware - is in the process of being updated. We are already in the process of transferring client communities to the new hardware. Depending on the nature of your Hosted Community we may be able to do this with no intervention on your part. If we do need your assistance we will contact you. Those of our who choose to take advantage of our Hosted Communities will see noticeable improvements in the speed and reliability of your community. Even if you do not host your community with IPS, our other services such as IP.Chat, Spam Monitoring Service, the license system, client area, company forums, etc. will all be faster and more reliable. We are very excited to be starting this upgrade process and look forward to its completion. It is work that will benefit every IPS client!

Ever have a question you wanted to pose to our staff? Now is your chance for one on one Question and Answers with IPS. Post a new topic here: http://community.inv...um/474-ask-ips/ For a limited time only. Act now. On sale today. Come on down. Etc. Note: we're getting some duplicate questions so we will only answer one in that case :smile: Thank you everyone. We all enjoyed answering your questions. It was a lot of fun. We will do it again sometime.

IP.Nexus 1.3 will soon be released alongside the upcoming IP.Board 3.2. Dozens of our clients specifically requested 2Checkout as a payment gateway and we are happy to say that IP.Nexus 1.3 adds 2Checkout as a payment option. Special Promotion from 2Checkout We are happy to say that 2Checkout has agreed to waive their normal $49 setup fee for all IPS clients for the next 60 days. While IP.Nexus 1.3 is not out just yet you may want to take advantage of this great offer now to prepare for its release. To take advantage of this offer: [*]Signup for an account, along the right side of the page, just below the fold. [*]During the signup process, when you are prompted for payment, you will find a "promo code" option. Enter invisionfree promo code in this field to receive the discount. Offer ends 15 September 2011. About 2Checkout 2Checkout.com (2CO) is a worldwide leader in payment and e-commerce services. Since 2000, 2CO has helped hundreds of thousands of online merchants with a global platform of payment methods and world-class fraud prevention services, hosted on safe, secure, and reliable PCI-compliant payment pages. 2CO’s merchants can accept Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, Discover, PayPal, Diner’s Club, JCB and Debit cards (in the U.S.) through one full-service payment solution. The system is functional in 30 currencies and is translatable into 15 languages to support international buyers. Best of all, it's entirely turnkey and you only pay when you generate a sale, empowering you to focus more time on building your business and less time worrying about payments. A bit of history... IPS was founded over nine years ago (in Internet time that's forever!) and when we were first organizing the options for collecting payments were difficult for a small company just getting started. For the first couple years of our operation, 2Checkout was the payment provider of choice for IPS. We would not be where we are today without their service and we know they are great option for a new business, or even an established business, making their place in online commerce. [*]Visit www.2checkout.com

Just a bit over a week ago we opened the first public preview of IP.Board 3.2.0 and the response was more than we could have ever expected. Most everyone reported they loved IP.Board 3.2 and could not wait to use it on their own community. We received a lot of great feedback and have spent the last week reading and organizing that feedback. While we cannot apply every bit of feedback received, we were able to go through all the feedback topics and make many changes based on what we saw were recurring themes. Here are a few changes we have made since the preview... User control panel pages updated to be simpler to use and understand Several 3.1-style elements updated and refreshed Topic icons tweaked for readability Ability to hide sidebar reintroduced Added support for Breadcrumb microdata Many editor updates and fixes, including a new skin that ties into the IP.Board skin system, for customization by skin designers. User profile default tab changed to overview Hundreds of bug fixes and minor tweaks based on feedback! http://internal32.invisionpower.com If you have not already, you will need to register an account to login on the preview site. Note that the preview will go on and offline now and then while we process feedback and make changes.

On 13 January 2011 we posted some information on our Spam Monitoring Service that was helping to block the huge amount of spam accounts hitting communities all over the web. There's not much new to report - spam will always exist unfortunately - but we thought everyone would be interested to know that we were recently able to block huge ranges of attacking IP addresses. IPS has a hosting division that provides managed community hosting for many thousands of communities. We host everyone from small, hobby sites to large enterprise clients with thousands of online users. We manage our own network and hardware to have the best possible control over the experience we can offer our clients. We have been able to leverage our hosted network of thousands of communities to detect the signatures that the spammers were using to get past the various defenses in IP.Board. The spammers were using automated software to, for lack of a better term, brute-force their way past the reCAPTCHA service and this program left clear marks in our server logs because of the unique way it accessed the servers. Our network staff were able to, across our dozens of servers, gather up all the IP addresses used to register spam accounts and add those to the block-list on the Spam Monitoring Service. While this is not a complete solution we were very happy to be able to detect these trends and block those spammers at the service level so the knowledge we gained from our own network could be applied to help all those with an active IP.Board license. Fighting spam is an ongoing battle of course but we will continue to do our best to help blocking those who would try to disrupt your community. The better your community runs the better IPS grows and we take our responsibility to your community seriously.

We thought everyone might find a few statistics from our Spam Monitoring Service interesting. Since the rate of spam registrations has greatly increased since the first of the year we are of course seeing greater activity on the service. All stats are since 1 January 2011 to 13 January 2011. The spam service has processed 300,000 requests and the rate is accelerating as more people are activating the service since spamming has increased over the last couple weeks. About 30% were marked as spam accounts and therefore prevented from registering on IP.Board's that use the service. This is of course a much higher percentage then even a few weeks prior to the influx of spam registrations. The service has "learned" from the activity and permanently black listed about 5000 emails and IP addresses. Of those the service blocked, about 10% were due to IP.Board administrators and moderator using the "flag as spam" feature which tells the service that an account is from a spammer. So keep reporting! It's our hope that Google's reCAPTCHA service will soon be improved. In the mean time be sure to follow the tips in our announcement to prevent spam registrations. We can never 100% stop spam but our Spam Monitoring Service is another tool to help prevent registrations from impacting your community. The service is a free IPS Extra for anyone with an active IP.Board license or IPS Community Hosting client.

IPS is currently seeking a self-motivated individual to join our general support team. Requirements: Excellent communication skills Advanced knowledge of IP.Board and related applications Ability to work in a fast-paced, team-oriented environment and be self-starter Linux, cPanel/WHM experience strongly preferred, but not required You must be 18 years or older to apply for this position. US residency required. For more information about this position, please e-mail [email protected]. Be sure to include your background with IPS products and how you feel you could benefit the team. Thank you for your interest!

We are into the development process for IP.Board 3.2 and wanted to share some general expectations for this release. First of all it won't be out for several months so don't start asking about release dates now :) In addition to the obvious enhancements to make the software work better, faster, and smarter we are focusing our development toward three key goals: Community Promotion Front-end Usability Modernization Let's quickly talk about each of these three goals and what you can expect from IP.Board 3.2. We are dealing with a successful and widely used platform so we do not intend on making sweeping changes but instead picking individual features and areas of our software platform and working to improve them with an eye toward the three goals. For the purpose of this blog entry we are not going to get into specific features planned as you will start seeing blog entries on specific entries starting in early February. Community Promotion One could argue that this is the most important goal of IP.Board 3.2 in that our key focus is to help you promote your community and help it grow. Small things like a more streamlined registration process, more attractive emails sent to your users, and core features like view new content or SEO improved. These changes all add up to a community that is more inviting to new users and quicker and easier for new users to register and start participating. Front-end Usability As the web evolves so must software like IP.Board that is designed to be a showcase software for the ever-growing presence of online communities. To that end, we will be working on modernizing the default skin that comes with IP.Board. The goals of this redesign are to create a default skin that is clearly updated and modernized without completely scrapping all the great elements we have today. This means that, although skins on 3.1 and below will not work on 3.2, the update process for those older skins will not require a 100% rewrite as many elements will be shared between the old and new versions. To put it another way: version 3.2 will be cleaner, more modern, and slicker but it will still clearly be IP.Board. In addition to purely cosmetic updates we will also be putting great effort into general usability. Small changes like rewording the name of a button or moving a control to a new area make a world of difference for your member's usability and will encourage them to stick around and participate in your community. Modernization There are many features and settings in our software that made sense years ago but today are antiquated, redundant, or simply pointless. We will be evaluating all the various settings in IP.Board to streamline the management of your community. One example is the Question and Answers settings for the registration page. There is a setting to enable this and then a whole separate page to configure the actual questions and answers. Why have both? We can remove the redundant setting without getting rid of any functionality. This is just one example of dozens of settings areas we can streamline without sacrificing functionality. We are also going to be removing some select features that are a bit antiquated. Specifically the linear+ and outline views will be removed in IP.Board 3.2 as these two functions are relics of the beginning of the Internet and have really outlived their use. We realize a handful of clients may use these features but the vast majority do not. And speaking of antiquated we will also be putting great effort into areas like the calendar and user profiles to make every part of our software modern and updated. Of course this is a high-level summary of what to expect from IP.Board 3.2 but everyone at IPS is very excited about our plans for IP.Board 3.2 and cannot wait to show you specifics! Look for frequent blog entries starting in early February to present new features and enhancements. As is always our policy, IPS does not release specific roadmaps but instead posts blog entries about new features once they are completely finished and will definitely be in the next version.

We had previously posted a release schedule for our product line through the end of this year. When we made that schedule we neglected to factor in that our staff in the United States would be off work for the Thanksgiving holiday. Obviously releasing a new version of a product when two days later a good percentage of our staff will be off would not be good for our customer service. Therefore, we will not be having a release on Tuesday, November 23rd. Along this same subject: Please note that we will be closed Thursday 25th and Friday 26th November for Thanksgiving holiday. Telephone support will be unavailable, but ticket and forum support will be provided.

Over this summer we have put a lot of work into the IPS applications to get them up to the same level of modern code that IP.Board itself features. If you have been following our blog you will have read about all the new features and enhancements coming to the applications. More blog entries on updates to other applications are coming so keep reading our blog for updates. You may have noticed that there have not been a lot of releases to our applications over the last couple months. This is because we decided to take a new approach to our development cycle and we are happy to say we are wrapping up development on updates to all of our applications! Anyone who has been a customer of IPS for a period of time knows that we are always reluctant to post any sort of schedules. They are too easy to miss and, when that happens, people tend to get a tad... upset :) For the first (and who knows: perhaps the last) time we are able to announce a general release schedule. On October 26 we will release IP.Board 3.1.3 which is a maintenance release that addresses many reported bugs and also contains code needed for the upcoming updates to all of our applications. After this release, we plan on releasing either an update or maintenance release to one of our applications every Tuesday through the end of the year! Some weeks there may also be an additional release on Thursday depending on schedule requirements. So that's one or two releases every week through the end of the year! The following applications (not listed in release order) will be released, updated, or see maintenance releases as needed: IP.Blog IP.Chat IP.Content IP.Downloads IP.Gallery IP.Nexus Once this application update release schedule is complete we will have a new, modern line of applications that work with IP.Board and will be well-positioned for the upcoming IP.Board 3.2 series. Everyone at IPS hopes you are as excited we are at this aggressive release schedule and the improvements to your community all of these updates will bring!

We are very excited to be nearing the first public beta release of IP.Nexus! There has been much interest in the community for this new product and we cannot wait to get it out the door so everyone can start to enjoy its ecommerce, support, and other features. As this product deals with monetizing your community, we are being very careful with its release. We do not want to release a product that might be unstable when it is designed to collect money on your behalf. Therefore, we are going to offer pre-sales for IP.Nexus in two phases. We are now ready for the second pre-sale phase. This second phase is available for purchase now and will be available for 24 hours. The final, retail price of IP.Nexus will be $74.99 plus an optional renewal of $35 every 6 months for continued support, services, and upgrades. For this second round of limited pre-sale, we will be offering those that purchase during the next 24 hours to buy IP.Nexus at a reduced up-front price of $50 plus no renewals for a full year. In return for a large discount, those choosing to participate in the pre-sale phase will have access to a beta release of IP.Nexus and a private forum to give us feedback. Please note that if you are one of the pre-sale participants, no ticket support will be offered. You are also going to be using beta software so there will be issues and we will appreciate your feedback and bug reports. To order, simply login to the client area and click New Purchase. You will see IP.Nexus under IP.Board Optional Addons. Once 24 hours has expired it will disappear so act now! Once you purchase, login to the company forums with same you use in the client area and you will see an IP.Nexus testing forum appear under the Customer Lounge forum. Promotion Expired The 24 hour time for this promotion has expired. Thank you!

We are very excited to be nearing the first public beta release of IP.Nexus! There has been much interest in the community for this new product and we cannot wait to get it out the door so everyone can start to enjoy its ecommerce, support, and other features. As this product deals with monetizing your community, we are being very careful with its release. We do not want to release a product that might be unstable when it is designed to collect money on your behalf. Therefore, we are going to offer pre-sales for IP.Nexus in two phases. The first phase will be limited to 50 people and will be offered at a generous discount off the retail price. In return for this large discount, these 50 people will have access to pre-beta release of IP.Nexus and a private forum to give us feedback. The final, retail price of IP.Nexus will be $74.99 plus an optional renewal of $35 every 6 months for continued support, services, and upgrades. For this first round of limited pre-sale, we will be offering the first 50 people to buy IP.Nexus a reduced up-front price of $50 plus no renewals for a full year. Once this first limited, 50 sale offer is full we will not accept new sales until our second pre-sale which will come when the first, public beta is available. The second pre-sale will be offered to unlimited people for a short time so please keep an eye on our company blog for updates. Please note that if you are one of the lucky 50 pre-orders, no ticket support will be offered. You are also going to be using pre-beta software so there will be issues and we will appreciate your feedback and bug reports. To order, simply login to the client area and click New Purchase. You will see IP.Nexus under IP.Board Optional Addons. Once the first 50 are sold out it will disappear so act now! Once you purchase, login to the company forums with same you use in the client area and you will see an IP.Nexus testing forum appear under the Customer Lounge forum. First 50 Sold Out In just an hour we have sold out of the first 50 pre-sale licenses. Please keep an eye on our company blog for the public pre-sale coming soon. Thanks for your support!

The new IP.Board Community Directory is a great place to list your community to get more traffic and members on your site. It's free for all license holders and IPS Hosting customers to submit their community in the directory. As this is brand new it is still growing and we are taking suggestions for new categories and enhancements so please let us know how we can improve it. The directory has been online for a few weeks in a preview testing form and 206 listing have been made. These 206 listings have received over 4100 clicks: that's nearly an average of 20 clicks per listing! This is a great way to drive traffic to your community. Be sure to list your community in the directory... In addition to being listed on the official IPS Community, the community directory will be available in the next version of our iPhone App for IP.Board. This means members can browse the directory, find your community, and register on your community all while on their iPhone! The directory is powered by IP.Links: one of our great, free Community Projects for IP.Board. The IP.Links software is written by Brandon D here on our community.

IPS is changing the name of our new IP.Commerce (as yet unreleased) application to IP.Nexus. We have received an exceptional amount of interest in this product to date and many have been a bit confused with the name. The major confusion lies in the fact that this application is not just an ecommerce application but also used for advertising, metrics, customer interaction, and more. So, we thought that a more generic name suited well and hope this will remove the "commerce-only" connection that the old name created. Also, there are many similarly named products out there that we wish to avoid confusion with. As the product has not yet been released this is the best time for such things. Note that all previous blog entries have been updated. Long-time IPS customers may be familiar with the IP.Nexus name as it was the name of a previous product (fairly similar to this one) that we decided not to release. We thought the nostalgia factor would be a great benefit to this new product. Thanks for your interest!

IPS has a fully featured community suite of products including forums, blogs, image galleries, file management, live chat, and content management. We felt the clear missing piece to this product line was an application that allowed you to monetize and promote your community. We are happy to introduce IP.Nexus to fill that space! The new IP.Nexus application is designed to help you earn money from your community both directly and indirectly. Direct options include features such as payment processing and shopping carts whereas indirect methods may be banner tracking and donations. Everyone here at IPS is very excited to introduce this new application and hope our customers will be able to take advantage of the variety of features in the product such as: Shopping cart functionality. Pre-defined packages and custom packages for purchase. Custom fields for package definition for great flexibility when creating packages to purchase. Purchase standalone items. Purchase packages to upgrade to a "higher" member group and automatic downgrades on expiration. Support ticket system including incoming email parsing. Community donation system with goal support. Ability to give members "credits" for commissions, awards, or other purposes. Credits can be used for future purchases or member can request a payout. Payout support included. Members can give out a referral link and can earn commission on sales that members they refer make. Multiple payment gateways including PayPal, Authorize.net, and offline payments. More gateways will be added based on feedback. Global search box on every page of IP.Nexus admin area to easily lookup customers, invoices, or support tickets. Stock actions/replies for support ticket system on admin side. Multiple status types for tickets. Ability to track tickets for future follow-ups. Upload banner images for display and tracking using IP.Board's ad management system. Customer overview page showing complete customer history, current orders, and options. Audit new transactions and purchase to catch fraud. Integration with IP.Downloads to handle purchasing of files. Support for sales commission in the IP.Downloads integration. Functions available for third-party developers to initiate payment processes in other applications. Payments are handled by IP.Nexus creating a central payment system. We are quite sure you will want to see it to believe it and, over the next few weeks, we will be posting individual blog entries going over the features listed above (and others) with screenshots and videos. Subscribe to the IPS Company Blog to get email updates when an entry is posted or subscribe to the Blog RSS feed. When will it be available? As always that's very hard to say. The good news is that every single feature listed here is already completed! We are not announcing a future product being worked on: we are announcing a product nearly done. In fact, IP.Nexus will be given to our internal beta testing team very soon. From there we will collect the feedback from you and integrate any features we missed. We expect a final release before the end of summer 2010 and beta releases within the next month. How much will it cost? No price has been set as yet but you can expect it to be priced similarly with our other applications. As is our tradition, we will offer a very good early-adopter discount price. What about Subscriptions Manager? We have a product, Subscriptions Manager, available for free for IP.Board that handles upgrading/downgrading member group permissions with paid packages. Nothing will change with this product and it will be available just as it is today. We will continue to make maintenance and compatibility releases. Those of you who are currently using Subscriptions Manager and may want to upgrade to IP.Nexus will be able to do so without data loss. I have a question, comment, cheer, or suggestion... Great! One reason we are announcing IP.Nexus now is to get feedback on how our customers may see themselves using a product such as this. We want to create a system you will want to use that suits your needs. Obviously handling the profit and promotion aspects of your community is something we are taking very seriously and we will be actively seeking your feedback on the best way to do this. You will notice comments are disabled on this blog entry as we do expect a lot of feedback so please use the newly created IP.Nexus feedback forum. Looking forward to hearing from everyone!

The first public beta release of IP.Board 3.1, applications, and related services is fast approaching. This blog entry will let you know what to expect and what you can do to help us in the process. We believe, as most other responsible software development companies do, that releasing beta versions is the best way to ensure that the software is as stable as it can be before a final, supported version is released. These beta releases are for testing purposes and allow our customers who are interested in testing them prior to release a chance to let us know what problems they may find so we can fix them before the software goes out to the many thousands of casual users all over the web. A beta release will always have issues with the software that need to be addressed so, as always, we do not suggest using beta software on your live site. Please do not use the beta software unless you are comfortable working with software that may have various issues that will need to be addressed in updates. Over the next two weeks you can expect to see public beta releases of the following: IP.Board 3.1 (see this announcement for a list of what's new) IP.Gallery 3.2.0 (maintenance release for IP.Board 3.1 compatibility and bug fixes) IP.Blog 2.2.0 (maintenance release for IP.Board 3.1 compatibility and bug fixes) IP.Downloads 2.2.0 (maintenance release for IP.Board 3.1 compatibility and bug fixes) IP.Content 2.0 (please see our blog to find info on what's new) IP.Chat 1.1.0 (please see our blog to find info on what's new) CleanCut Skin for IP.Board 3.1 MS-SQL Database Driver for IP.Board 3.1 and Applications As you can see, that is quite a list of new versions coming out so we will certainly appreciate everyone assisting with testing and reporting any issues you come across in our bug tracker. The announcement for these beta releases will be made here on our company blog so be sure to track or subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog. Beta versions will be available to those customers with an active license to those products. The announcements of each beta release in this blog will also contain information on what you should (and should not) do with the beta releases. We will also let you know if there will be upgrade options from Beta 1 to Beta 2 of the various products. Please (we beg of you) read those announcements very carefully before downloading the betas to save yourself time. Take this time between now and the beta releases to prepare your testing environments on your hosting and make backups of everything so you are ready to go on beta day. We are very exited to be entering the public beta phase as this means the final release is just around the corner!