Charles

We have started work on IP.Board 3.4 and this blog entry will give you a general idea of our goals and also introduce some important license changes and future plans from IPS. It's an important entry so read on! IP.Board 3.4 As always we will be blogging about specific features as they are completed. IPS does not post traditional roadmaps as roadmaps are subject to change. Instead, we post blog entries when a topic is completed and include screenshots and details so you know what you see is for sure going to happen. Here are the three high-level areas of interest for IP.Board 3.4: Very few front end changes so version 3.3 skins will work with little changes on 3.4. Focus on back-end improvements (AdminCP user experience, SSO integrations, SEO options, and so on). Versions 3.2 and 3.3 were more about front end experience so now it's time for the AdminCP and other areas to get some focus. Work will be put into making areas that are difficult for non-technical/non-designer clients to use. Examples include skinning system, Visual Skin Editor, and upgrade system. Three areas of focus will result in a lot of great changes and of course we will be doing other, smaller changes outside of those three areas but these will be the focus. Beyond this we have some bigger things planned but that will be revealed later. In addition to IP.Board: IP.Nexus and IP.Gallery are receiving large updates and other apps will receive smaller updates for maintenance and consistency. We do not currently have a release date for IP.Board 3.4 (and if we did ... well you know :smile: ). Our continuing goal of offering the most stable platform possible will see continued maintenance releases on the 3.3 series and other applications. Expect to see an IP.Board 3.3.3 release coming out soon. License Changes To make our licensing system easier to manage for everyone we are going to be restructuring how they work and are displayed. Here is how licenses show now:IP.Board Standard License IP.Blog IP.Gallery IP.Nexus IP.Content etc. Here is how the new structure will be implemented:IPS Community Suite IP.Board IP.Blog IP.Nexus etc. The main change is that IP.Board will no longer be the "root" license item. You will instead 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. Another change we are making is consolidating renewal dates. It's very cumbersome for both IPS and our clients to have the various apps under a license have different renewal dates. So we will be changing 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. Said formula is a bit involved so check out this topic if you are so inclined to pull out your calculator :smile: Finally, 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. This will all be implemented soon after IP.Nexus 1.5 is released which offers many great enhancements. So why are we doing all this? Future Plans IP.Board 3.4 will be a milestone in the history of IPS because it will be the last release of IP.Board as we know it. It's pretty amazing to think that after 10 years this will be the last time IP.Board is released on its own as the flagship product. After IP.Board 3.4, we will introduce the IPS Community Suite. The new Suite approach will see IP.Board become an application under the Suite just as IP.Gallery, IP.Nexus, and all of our other apps are today (hence the license structure change). There are some huge advantages to this way of doing releases: Of course beyond these changes we have lot of exciting changes in store for IPS Community Suite 4.0 but that's for the future after IP.Board 3.4, new versions of IP.Nexus and IP.Gallery, and continued laser-focus on stability. Summary To clarify everything here is a summary timeline: Very soon: IP.Board 3.3.3 maintenance release Near future: Blog updates about IP.Board 3.4, new versions of IP.Nexus and IP.Gallery, and working toward releases After next release cycle: Changes to the license structure Then we will start work on IPS Community Suite 4.0! The good news here is that we are not talking a long period of time. Since the IP.Board platform is very stable we can develop these releases in months rather than years. We have disabled comments on this blog entry as a lot of various subjects were presented that clients will surely want to discuss and comments would get overlooked. However, feel free to start topics in the Client Lounge. Thank you for your support and continual feedback!Only one versionCurrently we have a version number for each of our products. This gets very confusing for everyone to know what version works with what other version. When we release IPS Community Suite 4.0.0 at that time all of our Suite will also be on 4.0.0. No longer will each application have its own release cycle and version numbers. Just one version number for you to look to when you are checking to be sure you're up to date!Suite consistencyAs we will be releasing our entire Suite at once for both new features and for maintenance releases you will always know everything is consistent and up to date. For example, if we add a new feature to moderation in one area it will be available in all areas without having to wait for a separate update.Tighter integrationIPS community products have always had great integration with each other. Our new Suite offering will further this integration by offering total uniformity and compatibility between all the features of the Suite.No forums requirement Currently if you want to use IPS products you are required to buy IP.Board even if you don't need a forum. Even though you might just need a commerce platform or a CMS you have to buy IP.Board as it is also the "core" application. No more with IPS Community Suite. You will be able to run a community with just a gallery, blog, and member list if you so choose. Maybe you are just looking to run a site and need a CMS and commerce system. The ability to mix and match our great product line will finally be here!

Referencing our coming soon blog entry ... Apple was fast and has already approved our new app! Download now A few things to keep in mind: The app will work on all IP.Board 3.3 versions for the most part but will be much smoother with the soon to be released IP.Board 3.3.2 Please submit bug reports as we will be releasing updates to address any issues often over the next few weeks. Be sure to keep your app up to date! Your feedback on how to improve the app is appreciated. There are some known issues with those using IP.Content as their front end that will be addressed. We will be releasing frequent maintenance updates to polish this new app. Please let us know your feedback but we will not be adding new features until we also have our Android app released. Once both iOS and Android are out and working great then we will start adding many fun features on our roadmap. We think it important to keep iOS and Android on equal footing as much as possible. Once we are happy with the quality and stability of the app we will start promoting it to the broader audience but you as an IPS follower can get a head start and let us know how we can improve. IPS is very excited to be investing in our mobile services and we look forward to continued development on our mobile apps!

UPDATE: The app is now available! We are happy to announce that the new version of our iOS app is in the Apple App Store review process now! Once approved, the app will be available for members to enjoy for just $1.99 one time. The new app will work with all IP.Board versions 3.3.2 or newer. This new version has a native interface, push notifications, iPad support, and multiple community support. Check out this video for a walk through of the new app: [media=] Admin Control As an administrator you can also upload new image packs for the app to use for the interfaces. You can change colors and such to match your community branding. Another great option will be admob integration for administrators to monetize users browsing their community through our App. IPS will not get involved or take a cut so it's directly between you and your visitors. More to come... IPS is investing in the mobile space and has brought on new staff to continue development in this area. An Android version is in development and will soon follow this release (really it will). We have also opened a new forum for feedback and a bug tracker category so you can report any issues. Features coming very soon include uploading files on your phone as attachments to posts, images to IP.Gallery, and camera shots directly to IP.Gallery. Future feature ideas include integration with IP.Nexus for on the go customer service, more push notification options, and more fun ideas!

Following on our previous blog entry about our enhancements to the IPS Community here at http://community.invisionpower.com ... A few more things to note that you may be interested in that we recently changed. These changes are related to us getting ready to release IP.Board 3.3 and generally our continual process of review and refinement of everything we do. Enhanced Access for Expired License Holders We have opened up previously restricted areas to expired license holders as mentioned in our previous blog entry. Expired license holders can also now read and post in our feedback forums and can now also have full access to the IPS Marketplace! We are sure that everyone will enjoy a larger user base with access to the IPS Marketplace from both clients and those that contribute to the IPS Marketplace while still ensuring that the security and trust-level is maintained in the IPS Marketplace by restricting access to known persons. Visitor and Guest Access Guests and Vistors (those with an account but who have never been a client) can also now read and post in our feedback forums. They can also now read (but not post) in the support forums. Note that sometimes feedback from non-clients could be moderated as we often get off the wall feedback from people who have never actually used our products. We even sometimes get feedback from people who think we run our clients' sites! It's hard to explain to someone who is confused that we provide the community software but don't run the community. Upcoming Documentation Improvements We are investing a lot of time and effort into our documentation section to go along with 3.3's launch. We admit and own the fact that right now our documentation is weak and really want to make this a key area of improvement. Rather than try to document every button and function in our software (which really is pointless and impossible) we will be doing a lot of tutorial based documentation. Yes, as if often requested, narrated video demos will be heavily used. We all know that a 30 second video can explain things better than pages of text. There are many obvious things we can document and once those obvious areas are finished under our new format we will be opening suggestions up to our community on what areas could use some more explanation. Also, once the core documents are done, we plan on merging in the community article sections so all the great knowledge in our client community can be harnessed. Our clients come up with unique solutions to specific situations that are sometime really fun to read. Finally, one area we think will benefit all in the long run is a greater link between development and documentation. Once we get into client feedback on documentation we are going to keep internal track of areas that, while they work just fine, cause our clients to have to stop and scratch their collective heads. I am sure you have all had to pause at times and say "ok now how do I do this?" when trying to customize your community. One of our long term goals that we started on with IP.Board 3.3 was making things more obvious and flow better. One could easily argue that if a feature needs documentation then we didn't make that feature very easy to use. That is an area we will continue to work on in future updates. Mobile Apps Yes we are in the process of making all new mobile apps. The iOS version will be out soon after IP.Board 3.3's release. No details yet (sorry!) but the app is shaping up very nicely. I personally cannot wait. So yes boring stuff and some future plans in this blog entry but I hope you all enjoy the overall approach we are taking. We are very proud of IP.Board 3.3 and want to be sure that all the other areas around a release (documentation, future planning, spotting client trends, etc.) are of the same quality and attention to detail you expect from IPS.

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 sales@invisionpower.com 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 mobileapps@invisionpower.com 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 jobs@invisionpower.com. 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.