Matt

This week, the team have been discussing their very first computing memory. This will probably reveal a lot about the age of some of our team. We recently worked out that when Matt and Charles first met and started producing community software, some of the younger members of our team were still in primary school. What is your first computing memory? An easy question for tech-heads as we've all been toying with computers since our earliest days. Brandon (Senior tech support and development) We had a VIC20 and a Commodore128 growing up. In 6th grade I got into BASIC a little bit and wrote my own home-grown computer program for my school's science fair on the Commodore. It had a 'moon' and a rocket ship sprite, and the sprite flew around the screen and landed into the moon, ending with a quit or play again option. I won the science fair that year. Mark H (Tech support) My first "Computing Memory"...... that would be the mainframe I got to play with in 10th grade, one which some wealthy benefactor donated to my Junior High School, 1970. Magnetic core memory and drum memory, and not a transistor to be found within it.. Marc S (Tech Support) First memory of an actual computer, rather than just a games console, would be the Atari 65XE. My parents got me one for Christmas, along with a few different books and games. My parents were expecting me to hit the games the second I got it, and instead I was copying out the code for making the computer 'Do things'. I guess that was my introduction to programming at the time. Rhett (Cloud Support) "Learning "Basic" on an Apple II in College with 5 1/4 floppies! followed by building my first PC, a 386DX 40, then doing home banking via dial up and dos prompts" Matt (Senior Developer) The BBC Micro. It was a computer developed for the classroom to encourage a nation of coders. My dad brought one home along with a magazine and we spent all night typing in a Star Trek game from the magazine and debugged it together. I still have nightmares over my brother reading it out and calling a full colon "a double dot". I loved that machine and often tinkered with it between playing games and using it for homework. I remember writing a Naughts and Crosses (tic-tac-toe) game in school that my teacher did not understand and assumed I had cheated. Special shout out to "Elite" the space trading game that stole most of my youth. Ryan (Senior Developer) My first real computing memory was on a Packard Bell running Windows 3.11. I performed my first "echo" at the MS-DOS Command Line, and it was all downhill from there. Andy (Senior tech support and development) My first computing memory is probably playing Sim City on the BBC micro at school aged 6 or 7 but computers were a part of family life from before I was born so I must have had some interactions before this I can’t remember. My first Internet memories were getting home from school aged 10 helping dad build PC motherboards he designed from scratch. I would help place the components before they were soldered and then I would get to use the single machine set up in the corner which had the Mosaic browser and then later the first version of Netscape Navigator installed. I still have an original Internet Movie Database account from 1993. This was probably also my first “Job”. I’m still waiting for my first pay packet! Jennifer (Designer) My first really strong memory of computers in general was a Mac. It was Oregon Trails at school with those huge 5 1/2 floppy disks. I always remember how excited I would be to see that black and green screen with that 8 bit old west adventure. True facts. If there was a modern like Conan Exiles survival game that was Oregon Trail based I would most probably get it. If it exists don't tell me about it! Daniel (Senior tech support and development) My first coding experience was in the school with really, really old DOS computers.. No Basic, No Pascal ... it was the famous TURTLE aka LOGO! Stuart (Senior tech support and development) My first real computer related memory was having a Commodore 64 and an early Amiga with Theme Park. For some reason we also had an external drive for the Amiga that meant we could copy games. After that it was a steady progression of Windows based PCs and now I've got a "large" Laptop that everyone at IPS loves to joke about.

Welcome to the first of a new regular series we're calling "Question of the week". Each week, we'll ask our team a question and share the replies. To kick things off, we posed a very simple question: What is your favorite TV show right now? We may have over-estimated how much TV the average geek watches. Here's what our team said. Brandon (Senior tech support and development) How do I answer this without writing an essay?! I really don't watch too many TV shows personally, and I definitely don't have any that I watch religiously. I'd say my favorite is probably Fixer Upper as I tend to like to have those sorts of home repair shows on in the background, and Chip and Joanna Gaines are just too hard not to love. Mark H (Tech support) Nova, on our PBS station, because it is not filled with speculation, half-truths, and fake news. Marc S (Tech Support) Have been watching misfits. It just seems to be its the more likely scenario around someone getting superpowers. Lets be honest, superman/spiderman etc just isn't what you would realistically do? Rhett (Cloud Support) "The Blacklist" James Spader is excellent in this series! I've been hooked since it started in 2013. Matt (Senior Developer) I’m in Game of Thrones hibernation along with most of the world at the moment. I’ve just finished season two of Preacher which I really enjoyed. I found Eugene’s journey through Hell to be a highlight and enjoyed how a small character in season one was fleshed out some more. Also, who cannot love watching Hitler order plum cakes? Mark W (Senior Developer) RuPaul's Drag Race. Because I'm what? Sickening. Ryan (Senior Developer) I don't really watch a lot of TV - there isn't anything that really catches my eye nowadays, so I mostly just stick to watching my local sports teams with friends (Cincinnati Reds [baseball] and Cincinnati Bengals [football]). That being said, though, I saw a commercial for the Big Bang Theory spin-off "Sheldon" the other day, and I might get hooked into that. It looked pretty good. Andy (Senior tech support and development) I'm looking forward to the next series of Stranger Things on Netflix Jennifer (Designer) I'm personally in between shows at the moment. I just finished The Walking Dead Season 7 and I'm watching some Anime with the family. I'm the sort of person that bounces around binge watching TV shows and movies. I can say that I am really looking forward to the next season of Santa Clarita Diet though because a zombie housewife is just funny to watch the misadventures of. Daniel (Senior tech support and development) I've started watching Dexter. Stuart (Senior tech support and development) Star Trek TNG, Just because of Jean-Luc Picard! Drop us a line and let us know what your favorite show is. If you have any questions for the team that you'd like to be featured, let us know and we'll queue them up!

This is an entry about our IPS Community Suite 4.2 release. When you have a diverse range of topics within your community, it makes good sense to separate topics within forums and categories. This will ensure that the viewer can find relevant content by scanning the list of forums first. If you have a more focused community with fewer forums, presenting your community with a list of them can be daunting. This is especially true for less experienced visitors raised on social media. Fluid forum view allows your visitors to get right to the meat of your community; the topics. A fan site for a band is a good example of a community that will benefit with fluid view. There will likely be forums for album reviews, tour dates, general discussion and so on. Even though there are many forums, the common topic is the band. This makes fluid view ideal as your members can see all those related topics in one view. If your members wanted more specific topics, they could select a single forum to view. Let us take a look at fluid view in action. We will then break it down and explain how it works in more detail. The video shows the topic list and the forum filter box. As you can see, it is easy to change the topic list by changing the selected forums. This view replaces the traditional list of categories and forums. Of course, you can permit your members to change the view to better suit their way of working. You will notice a "grid" option. We have moved the grid forum theme setting into the main forum settings. This makes it an option for your members to choose, if the administrator permits it. You have full control over the display options. This screenshot shows that the control panel option to choose the default view. There is also an option to control which views your members can select. You may also decide to not allow your members to switch views at all. This will ensure that they all use the view you choose. You may have spotted that forum names have a colored background in some screenshots. We added the ability to define a feature color per forum. This feature color helps the forum stand out in a more visual way. This is especially useful when you select many forums in a single view. This feature color also works on the table view. We added a feature color hint to topic view to enforce the association between the forum and its color. This screenshot also shows the removal of the forum breadcrumb in fluid view mode. Fluid view remembers your last forum selection so you don't lose your place when you go back to the listing. The benefit of this feature is easy to see. It removes a potential barrier of entry for your audience. It puts the spotlight on topics themselves, and not the hierarchical forum structure. Your members will enjoy viewing many forums at once and switching between them without leaving the page. We hope that fluid view is an asset to your community and your members enjoy this new functionality. Technical notes. The database stores the members' view choice. This remembers the selection across devices. Guests are not permitted to change between views.

There are many strategies for growing your community, such as newsletters, mailing lists and advertising on other sites. IPS Community Suite 4.2 puts a new tool at your disposal: promotions. There’s no denying the popularity of social media. Worldwide, Facebook has 1.86 billion users active monthly. Every day, millions of people are using Facebook to speak with friends, to talk about their interests and to find new people to connect with. Of that 1.86 billion people, a good portion of those are actively discussing topics your forum covers. There is a huge opportunity to tap into social media to join in the discussion and to promote your community and provide a venue to carry on the discussion. For a while, we’ve had social media log in extensions, which means that your users can sign into your community simply by clicking a relevant button. We’ve also had the ability to share things to a personal Facebook account. These tools are great for your users, but how do they help you, forum owner? IPS Community Suite 4.2 introduces a way to promote your content directly to your brand’s Facebook page and your brand’s Twitter account. You can curate fun and engaging topics and share them. The workflow is simple. Simply browse your community and queue up interesting topics, comments, gallery items, blog posts or database articles for posting throughout the day to your brand’s social media accounts. You choose the schedule, the hashtags and the wording to send. Let’s look at the feature set in more detail. Your first stop is to set up the feature from the admin panel. The system will guide you through the necessary steps of connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Once Facebook has been set up, you can select any page that you are an administrator of on Facebook. The admin panel also offers scheduling options and permissions. You can pre-set the times for when content will be posted. Facebook and Twitter both have analytic tools to determine when your visitors are most frequently online. A good tip here is to set the time to a slightly odd number, so 11:45am is better than 12:00pm as you are likely to catch the attention of someone waiting for lunch, or a lunchtime meeting. You have full control over who can promote items to your social media accounts. You can specify by group or pick individual members who may not be in those groups. Now that you’ve set up the backend, we can get promoting. Each item, that is a topic, gallery album, blog entry or article has its own Promote button. Each post and comment can also be shared individually, which is an easy way to share great content your visitors add to existing conversations. Clicking this brings up the sharer. This is where you can customize the text that is sent out to each social media channel. You’ll also notice space to promote this item within your own community in addition (or instead of) Facebook or Twitter, we will explore that shortly. The sharer is smart enough to pull attachments already added in the post, and you can upload your own images to be sent. Generally, shared items that have an image get better organic reach than just text alone so you’ll almost always want to choose or add an image. Twitter can use up to 4 images, and Facebook allows 1000 pictures per album, but you’ll never want to upload that many! Once you’ve filled out your content and picked your images, you can schedule the promotion. Generally, you’ll want to use the auto schedule option as this allows you to just stack up multiple items and let the auto scheduler post the items according to your pre-set schedule. You can also set a specific date and time if you are looking to run a promotion or other time sensitive event. The promoted content viewed in Facebook and Twitter It’s easy to see the status of your queued and sent items from the moderator view. This area allows you to see previous promotions and modify pending promotions. Earlier, we mentioned that the system has the ability to promote content internally. Promoting items to your own community lets you, the community manager, curate interesting items and comments and present this to your community. This is a great way to allow your visitors to explore content you think they’d enjoy. Promoting content to your community via Our Picks also allow you to promote content if you cannot or choose not to use social networks. It has the advantage that social networks do not have over a community platform like IPS Community Suite: consistency. The content on your community is always there whereas a social network is all about right here right now. Miss it and you miss out. On your community you can engage and re-engage a subject all you want. Of course, we’ve built a widget that you can drag and drop to most pages to make this curated list more visible. IPS Community Suite 4.2 gives you, the site owner and community manager the tools you need to reach out and engage new users already discussing the topics on social media your community covers. With single click sign in and the built in retention functionality the suite offers, you’ll have a powerful way of growing your user base. It furthers that goal by created a list of that promoted content for continual reference and promotion for visitors already on your site. We’ve got lots more to discuss on this subject, and in the coming months we’ll be putting together some guides on social media best practices and how to leverage Facebook’s excellent post promotion / pay per click tools to further boost your site’s visibility to social media users. We’re here to help you make a success of your community and to give social media users a venue for when they outgrow Facebook.

Version 4.1.19 is now available in the client area! This release focuses on bug fixes and performance along with some new key features. Ability for members to lock and unlock their own content We've added a new group level option to allow members to lock and unlock their own content. This is disabled by default. Messenger Quota Display To help diagnose issues your members may find, we now display their personal message quota in the ACP. Default view for Activity Stream When creating a new activity stream, you can specify either expanded or condensed as the default view. This is especially handy for streams you wish to share with other members. Other key changes include: Performance and speed improvements. A new moderator setting to restrict users from ignoring moderators. A new group setting to hide a group from filters in search. When moving content moderators are now prompted for where you want to be redirected after the action. An email is now sent when an account is locked for too many bad login attempts. Check out the Release Notes for a full list of changes.

This is a maintenance release to resolve the following issues: Permission matrix can show incorrect permissions when using the Member > Group permission tool. Using Authorize.Net Payment Gateway may result in an error. A logged in member without a valid timezone set will trigger exceptions any time another members age is checked. Where the upgrader can result in a fatal error due to an invalid class stored for a Pages record comment. An upgrade error where reports are loaded for Pages databases that no longer exist. Orphaned comments trigger an exception when search index is rebuilding. An exception can occur continued upgrades: DateTime::setTimestamp() expects parameter 1 to be long, object given. Recursion can occur if the core_log table doesn't exist yet (as happens during auto upgrade). An issue where importing a theme can break CSS. MySQL strict mode upgrade to 4.1.12 can fail. Installing a new plugin via the ACP can fail. As part of our ongoing internal security audit, this release also improves security in the following areas: Possible XSS in the "hovercard" system. Further hardening to the insecure file upload code.

We are releasing patches for IP.Board 3.3.x and IP.Board 3.4.x to address two issues recently reported to us. It has been brought to our attention that certain PHP configurations allow for a potential SQL injection vulnerability. Although this exploit requires some knowledge of your configuration and for certain files to be web-readable, we felt it important to release an update. Additionally, it has been brought to our attention that it may be possible to send attachments via the email classes which would ordinarily be removed. To apply the patch Simply download the attached zip for your IP.Board version and upload the files to your forum server. You do not need to run any scripts or the upgrade system. IP.Board 3.3.x 3_3_x_patch_nov_14.zip IP.Board 3.4.x 3_4_x_patch_nov_14.zip If you are an IPS Community in the Cloud client running IP.Board 3.3 or above, no further action is necessary as we have already automatically patched your account. If you are using a version older than IP.Board 3.3, you should contact support to upgrade. If you install or upgrade to IP.Board 3.4.7 after the date and time of this post, no further action is necessary as we have already updated the main download zips. We extend our thanks to Andrew Erb for notifying us of the email issue privately and promptly. patch12_5_2014 - 3.3.x.zip patch12_5_2014.zip

One of IPS Community Suite 4's main goals was to overhaul the user interface. We wanted to go further than just a few cosmetic changes to the theme, we wanted to examine each part of the user interface and see what could be improved. The community suite has a lot of functionality and there's a lot of tools that we all use regularly so we felt that any improvements on these common areas would be very welcomed. I'd like to focus on such a change in IP.Downloads. IP.Downloads has always had version control. Essentially, this allows you to upload new versions and keep a historical record of the older versions. You can read change logs and even download older versions where allowed. Let's take a look at how IP.Board 3 does it currently: Although there's nothing particularly wrong with this form, we can see that it mixes up the ability to upload a new version with the general file settings such as title and description. The end result is a bit confusing and a little intimidating the first few times you use it. The section to add your change log is a little lost in the file information block. Now lets take a look at how IPS Community Suite 4 handles this: The first step is to enable download revisions for this category inside the Admin CP. Now that this has been enabled, lets navigate to the "File Actions" menu to upload a new version. This loads the "Upload a new version form". As you can see, it's very clean, very easy to follow and isn't cluttered with settings and text fields that you aren't interested in editing. Once you've uploaded your new version, you can see what's new on the file listing page. You can even view previous change logs and the download link without leaving the page. Conclusion As this blog entry shows, IPS Community Suite 4 is really focused on making real improvements to everyday interfaces. We believe that these changes are very important to modernise the suite and to make it as easy to use as possible.

Please note that this entry may be a little technical, if you do have any questions, please post them in the comments below. A little history IP.Board was first released over ten years ago when the web landscape was very different. A lot of emerging technologies were still trying to define new standards. Very early versions of IP.Board allowed one to specify the document character set and had a default of "ISO-8559-1" which is useful for languages that use latin based characters. This meant, for example, that if you needed Chinese characters you would need to change the character set to something more suitable. This disparity between character sets creates many challenges when working with a single code base. UTF-8 Over the past handful of years there has been a push towards a single document character set; UTF-8. UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding that is able to show every character in the Unicode character set. This makes it suitable for latin and Chinese characters (and many many more!). Popular Javascript libraries such as jQuery require that data is sent and received with UTF-8 and many native PHP string functions prefer UTF-8. The future is very much UTF-8 and trying to keep our codebase working with any other character set is going to be more and more challenging. IPS 4.0 Even though IP.Board 3 introduced UTF-8 as the default character set for new installations, we're aware that we still have many clients that are not using UTF-8 currently. IPS 4.0 is going to be strictly UTF-8 only which means we need to convert the data before or as part of the upgrade process. Converting to UTF-8 isn't as simple as changing the database encoding. Merely doing this will simply corrupt the data you have in your database. We need to be a little smarter and use a script to do this work for us. The great news is that even if you choose to convert your data to UTF-8 today, your IP.Board 3.x will run just fine and you may even find it more efficient as it doesn't have to convert lots of data on the fly. The IPS UTF-8 Database Converter We've written a script that can safely convert your database to UTF-8. The script does not overwrite your data until you manually confirm that the conversion process has been successful. This means that there is no risk of corrupting your existing data. Of course, it is good practice to perform a full MySQL back-up before making any changes to the database as a precaution and we recommend that you do this. You can download the converter and its instructions here. How can I tell if I need to convert my database? When you first run the converter, it'll check your database and let you know if you need to convert or not. Even if you are running UTF-8, you may not be using the correct collation (utf8_unicode_ci) so you have the option of changing your collation which is a very fast procedure and does not need a full conversion to complete. If you first used IP.Board with IP.Board 3.0 then you may only need to change your database table collation. This isn't a required step and the IPS 4 upgrade process will perform this task if you'd prefer to wait until IPS 4.0 is released. Support Please note that while we're happy to provide some pointers within the client forums, this release is not officially supported by our technical support department. Beta Release As this is a beta release, please be aware that there may be bugs. If you do spot one, please post it to the IPS Extras bug tracker.

A few years ago we revolutionised theme editing in IP.Board with the addition of the "Visual Skin Editor". This tool quickly became a popular way of making broad color changes to new themes to match in with an existing site or existing branding. For the first time, you could instantly view the changes you were making. Goodbye Visual Skin Editor, hello Easy Mode Editor. We have rewritten this tool from the ground up in IPS Suite 4.0 and renamed it the Easy Mode Editor now that it's a fully integrated part of the suite and not just a license add-on. It retains all the features you love and has a much better interface, more control and fully supports gradients. Let's take a look! When you create a new theme, you have the option of creating an "Easy Mode" theme or a "Manual Mode" theme. As you would expect, the manual mode allows full editing of CSS and HTML. Easy mode allows you to edit the theme with an instant preview. Once the new theme has been added you can launch it from the Theme list inside the administrator's control panel by clicking the wand button. You can still edit the HTML templates and custom CSS as normal should you need to. The easy mode editor launches in a new browser tab or window (depending on your browser's settings). The floating palette overlay in IP.Board 3 was a little cumbersome as it took up a fair amount of room and you had to move it out of the way to view your changes. In IPS 4, we've made this a fixed sidebar which means that it doesn't have to reload when you navigate through the suite. I've cropped out most of the public display as we're not quite ready to reveal that yet! You can quickly colorise your new theme with the Colorize option. This chromatically changes the main colors of the suite quickly and easily. A limitation of the Visual Skin Editor in IP.Board 3 was that it couldn't manage gradients so themes had those gradients removed and flat color applied. We now support gradients in IPS 4.0 from the Easy Mode Editor's color editing panel. We previously blogged about the fantastic new theme settings feature in IPS 4.0. Some of these settings are now available to editing in the settings panel. This is a really quick and convenient way to change these settings. Although the new Easy Mode Editor allows you to change most of the colors within the suite, there may be times when you want to write a few lines of custom CSS to tweak the theme a little more to your liking. We've got that covered too. You can leave the theme as an Easy Mode theme for as long as you want. However, you may decide that you want a little more control and need to edit some of the framework CSS that underpins the suite. That's easy to do. Just choose the option to convert it to a Manual Mode theme and you are all set. Never before has theming been so simple! This re-invented tool allows you to quickly edit your theme without fuss and you can instantly see the changes as you make them. We can't wait to see what you do with it!

In a recent blog entry, we talked about theming in IPS Social Suite 4. More often than not, you'll want to upload a new logo, tweak a few colours, add some custom HTML or work on the global template to incorporate your existing site wrapper. For this blog entry, I want to talk about the tools we have for more in-depth theming that professional themers will want to use to create downloadable themes for others to use. Custom Settings In 3.x, we have a number of system settings throughout the suite that control design decisions, such as displaying sidebars, or controlling the layout of items on a page. This isn't ideal, because we're limiting what themes can do themselves (and of course enforcing what they must support too). Instead, it would be better if these design decisions could be controlled by each individual theme, giving theme designers the freedom to be creative and display content in entirely new ways. In IPS Social Suite 4, we've added per-theme custom settings. This enables you to create settings that are configurable by administrators when editing a theme. Even if you're not creating a theme to sell, you may want to add settings to control areas of your theme that are managed without making template edits each time you wish to make a change. For example, the default theme will have an option to add a rounded border effect to user photos. This is something that would be unnecessary as a system setting, but makes sense as a custom theme setting. Or you might want to add a setting that allows admins to toggle between showing and hiding a sidebar. There are a lot of possibilities here that would have required extensive custom code in 3.x. When creating settings, you can choose which tab that they'll show in when editing a theme. This means you can group your settings by specific criteria such as "Colors", "Layout", etc. Once you have created a custom setting, you're then able to use it in a HTML template or CSS file simply by using the following syntax: {{if theme.rounded_photos}} .ipsUserPhoto { border-radius: 100px } {{endif}} Or, if you want to use it without an IF clause, then you can simple use this: <div> {theme="rounded_photos"} </div> You can manage the custom settings from the theme edit form. In this screen shot, the tabs "Custom" and "Colors" are theme setting tabs. Version Check We've added the ability for theme creators to include a URL that is checked multiple times a day. All you as the theme creator needs to do is return a simple JSON object like this example: { "version": "4.0.1", "longversion": 40001, "released": 1377688587, "updateurl": "http://www.exampleurl.com/announcement.php?theme=xeonblue" } This is a great way to notify your customers about updates to your themes. More information is displayed when you mouse over the "Update available" badge. Designer's Mode There are times when you want to change many template bits and CSS files using your own development tools. The new ACP template and CSS editor is great for making edits now that it supports full syntax highlighting but for more advanced work you'll want to work with your favourite IDE and make use of its tools such as file compare and searching. In IP.Board 3 we have the WebDav interface which allows you to work with plain .html and .css files but because it's sent over HTTP and each item needs recompiling to show changes, it's often a little sluggish and can be frustrating to work with if connection speeds start to suffer. In IPS Social Suite 4 you can work with plain .html and .css files locally; there's no need to fire up a WebDav client. You enable designer's mode by adding a constant into constants.php. This will automatically write out the HTML and CSS files into a directory called "themes" right in your suite's root folder. You can edit these files and the changes are instantly applied to the suite making working very fast indeed. Once you're done working in designer's mode, simply sync back the changes using the menu item on the theme's row and remove the constant. This will copy the changes back to the database and remove any stale compiled templates and CSS files. Diff It's often very useful after upgrading to see which template bits have changed. The new "diff" tool instantly provides a list of changed, deleted or added template bits and CSS files. You can even download a copy as a stand-alone HTML file to distribute with your theme sets. These advanced tools will make creating themes for IPS Social Suite 4 easier than ever before. We look forward to seeing what you create with them!

IPS Social Suite 4 is a modernization of our software line and rather than just refactor existing work, we are rewriting the code from scratch which gives us a chance to really evaluate the interface elements and labels. We felt that "themes" was a much more modern and better understood term than "skins". Of course, the name is just the start, here are some of the other improvements: Managing Themes in IPS Social Suite 4 As you would expect, the interface has been completely overhauled in IP.Social Suite 4. All the familiar elements are there but we've simplified areas and made it easier to manage your themes. As you can see from this screen shot, theme authors can now inform customers when they have an update available for them. The interface makes use of the new IPS Social Suite 4 Trees model which means you can quickly search for theme names and re-order themes. In IP.Board 3, you could change the logo of the suite. We've made this even easier in IP.Social Suite 4. The upload fields are easily accessible on the edit theme form. You can even upload a Facebook sharer image and favicon! Downloading and Uploading Themes In IPS Social Suite 4, downloading and uploading a new version of a theme could not be easier. Just select the menu item and it's done. You no longer need to navigate to separate areas of the Admin CP to do this. Conflict Management What happens if you upload a new version of a theme but it contains changes to templates you have also changed? You'll get a chance to review these changes and select which version to use on the conflict management page. Editing templates and CSS The template and CSS editor should be familiar for any existing customers. The editor is now fully syntax highlighted which will make writing and editing code so much easier. The template syntax is now much more compact as you can see from the above screen shot. We've also added a few things to reduce the amount of template logic required. A common need is to load a template if a condition is matched: {{if member.isAdmin()}} {template="admin_bar"} {{endif}} You can now put the conditional inside the template tag like so: {template="admin_bar" if="member.isAdmin()"} This is much easier to read and reduces a lot of visual clutter. The combination of the better template syntax and HTML 5 mark-up results in a dramatic reduction in size and complexity of often edited templates such as the globalTemplate which is commonly used to add your own site chrome. The screenshot below shows all of the IPS Social Suite 4 globalTemplate and for comparison, part of the IP.Board 3.4 globalTemplate which is over 340 lines long! The CSS framework much like the javascript framework has been completely rewritten and is now modular. This means that most CSS files are very small which makes looking for specific selectors much easier. In addition, upgrades are less destructive to your themes. If you made edits to the button styles, then only that one style sheet is altered leaving the rest as default. Of course, IPS Social Suite combines and minifies these separate CSS into fewer files when saved. This blog entry is just an overview of the theme section in the Admin CP. We'll go into more detail in a later entry on the new tools available designed to make theme creation and management a breeze for theme authors. We know you will have a ton of questions but please be patient with us if we keep saying "wait for next blog entry" :smile:

We've just rebuilt IP.Board 3.4.4 for further beta testing. Thanks to everyone who has tested this release so far and for reporting the bugs you've found. We've fixed a good portion of these and would like for you to update your test installations with the latest release. All customers with an active IP.Board license can download the beta at: http://community.inv...ower.com/qa.php Once you've uploaded all the files to your server, there's no need to run the upgrade system as the version numbers haven't changed. You will need to rebuild your languages and skins. There's instructions here on how to do that. As always, please report any bugs you find with the beta to our bug tracker. Please pay particular attention to using the editor with IP.Board 3.4.4. A very large focus was placed on resolving some of the outstanding bugs and complaints with the editor, and we would appreciate any testing you can perform in this area. Create new posts, edit existing posts, toggle between the editor modes - if you find any bugs, let us know. As with all beta releases from IPS, IP.Board 3.4.4 is not supported by our technicians until it has been officially publicly released. Please do not upgrade your live installation using this beta, as you may find no path between this build and the final release that we put out. We recommended, instead, to create a copy of your live board as a test installation, and upgrade your test installation instead. Thanks!

The eagle eyed among you may have spotted that we've just upgraded our company forums to IP.Board 3.4.4. We routinely do this during a development cycle so that we can get some extended testing prior to a beta release. When we write new features and fix bugs we do test ourselves but of course we can't replicate the testing hundreds of active users with all the different browser and operating system combinations can offer. The focus of 3.4.4 has been to further stabilise the editor. We've made great improvements since the initial release of 3.4.0 but we're aware that there are a handful of issues remaining which we want to get licked for this release. If you have a few moments spare, we'd appreciate it if you could test out the editor, either by creating a post in the test forum or just by being more aware of any quirks or issues when making posts normally. Anything you spot, can you please report into our bug tracker with as much detail as you can. Thanks!

It's an unfortunate fact that when you run a successful site, you attract unwanted users posting spam on your site. IP.Board has always been incredibly pro-active in preventing spam users from signing up by making use of built in tools such as the question and answer challenge, spam monitoring service and CAPTCHA systems. I'd like to take a moment to talk about some enhancements we've made in IP.Board 3.4.0 to help prevent unwanted posts and spam. Spam Monitoring Improvements We've further enhanced the spam monitoring service in IP.Board 3.4.0 by adding a new option: "Do not permit the user to register an account". This reduces the amount of clean up you need to do after a new wave of attempted spam user sign-ups. Furthermore, the "flag a member as a spammer" tool optionally deletes posted content rather than simply hiding them further reducing the amount of work needed to maintain your community. We have also totally reworked our spammer-detection logic behind the scenes to make the spam monitoring service detect spammers more quickly. In addition to internal changes, we are also looking at direct integration with services like Project Honey Pot and others. The great thing about the spam monitoring service is that we can make improvements on our side that are instantly beneficial to your community. keyCAPTCHA Integration IP.Board has made good use of the popular reCAPTCHA service to limit the number of "bots" that sign up to your forum with the intent of posting spam. The idea being that a slightly jumbled selection of letters is easy enough for a human to read but more difficult for a computer program. However, some do find that the CAPTCHA images are becoming increasingly complex to keep up with more intelligently written programs to defeat them. KeyCAPTCHA takes a novel approach to this problem by using images instead of letters and numbers. You simply arrange a few large pieces of a very simple puzzle to complete an image. You don't need to be completely accurate when building the image, either. This is now an option in the IP.Board Admin CP. Should you wish to enable it, you'll need to register an account with keyCAPTCHA. The link for this is contained in the setting form and is very straight forward. As always, we look for new ways to help make running your community a little easier and we look forward to helping you keep those spammers at bay!

The Admin Control Panel (ACP) is a very comprehensive section of your IP.Board. The ACP is used for everything from managing members, creating forums to dealing with support tickets from within our IP.Nexus application. Indeed, the ACP has grown so large that it can be a little bewildering remembering where pages are and you may find that there are areas of the ACP you rarely use and would like to tuck out of the way. Happily, we've made significant improvements in these areas for IP.Board 3.4. Bookmarks You probably use a handful of ACP pages numerous times a day and navigating to those pages may be a little cumbersome or you may find a really useful settings page but struggle a few days later to remember where it was. The brand new bookmarks feature solves these problems. The new bookmark system is available by the bookmark icon to the left of the tab bar. Clicking this will allow you to add a new bookmark for the page you're on while hovering over the icon opens the menu. You can make the current bookmark your 'home' page. This means that after you log in, it'll take you to this page directly instead of showing the dashboard. You can also drag and drop items to move them if you prefer more useful links at the top of the list. Tab Preferences Another common feature request has been the ability to re-order the tabs within the Admin CP. This functionality is now available. You may wish to give greater priority to a specific application or just clean up your tab bar by removing some of the pre-set tabs such as "Look & Feel". Clicking the "Edit Tabs" link at the far right of the tab bar opens the preferences page. You simply drag and drop the tabs from the Main Tab Bar onto the 'Other Apps' menu or vice-versa. Here you can see that I've moved everything except the Nexus tab to the 'Other Apps' menu. This is ideal if you spend most of your time within IP.Nexus and want quick access to it. We hope you enjoy these additional features to the Admin CP and we really believe they'll speed up your day to day tasks!

We're always amazed at how diverse our customer base is and how many different uses customers find for their IP.Board. Many customers, ourselves included often have a forum that invites questions such as pre-sales or support forums. These forums often generate a lot of topics with many replies and it can often be confusing for other readers to know which reply definitively answered the original question. The Best Answer Feature IP.Board comes with a brand new 'best answer' feature. This enables the topic starter (when allowed), moderators (where allowed) and super moderators/admins to mark a post as the best answer. This screen shot shows a typical question topic and the best answer has been flagged. You'll also notice that at the top, a small excerpt of the post is shown with a button to go and read the full post. This is useful for when the best answer may be on a different page to the one you're viewing. Looking at the forum view, you'll see that the answered topic has a badge that when clicked takes you to the flagged post. You can also quickly filter the forum list to remove answered or unanswered topics. This will be handy for forums that have staff answering questions! As you'd expect, this can be enabled on a per-forum basis and you can choose whether the topic starter can flag a topic or not on a per-forum basis. There is also a moderator toggle to empower moderators to flag a topic as the best answer. This enables you to retain as much control over this feature as you need. We hope you enjoy this feature new to IP.Board 3.4. We know that it's been requested many times and we're very pleased at being able to include it!

As part of our regular SEO round-up when developing a major new release, I'm happy to run through the latest SEO changes we've made for IP.Board 3.4. Friendly URL Changes After much research and discussion with other SEO focused forum owners, I decided to revamp the FURL structure when handling additional page parameters. The existing format uses the following structure: board.com/topic/123-title/page__foo__bar This is then parsed as foo=bar when converted to a normal query string. The problem with this is that it confuses search engines because it looks like another page rather than just a variant of a single page. We have a canonical tag which helps to reduce confusion but it's still not perfect from an SEO perspective. With that in mind, the new format is: board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=bar Now humans and search engines can quickly see that these are additional parameters of a single page. The canonical tag now backs this up and there is absolutely no confusion! New page parameters Another item that often came up when discussing URL structures and best practises was the current pagination method which is: board.com/topic/123-title/page__st__30 This is then parsed as st=30 when converted to a normal query string. This tells IP.Board to start from the 30th post in that topic, which is page two if we have 30 posts per page. This was less than optimal because some search engines had trouble understanding this was an additional page of the same topic. I've made this more explicit by making use of a special page parameter: board.com/topic/123-title/page-2 board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar The eagle eyed will notice that there no additional slash after page-2. This means that search engines (and humans!) will identify the root page, a page with parameters and a page of a topic: board.com/topic/123-title/ board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=bar board.com/topic/123-title/page-2 board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar In this case 'board.com/topic/123-title/' is the root page. Of course, IP.Board will happily 301 redirect visitors using the old st=x method or the old page__x method. Unread Topics In IP.Board 3.3, there was a special 'unread' folder added to topic links on the board index. This was often confusing as it seemed like yet another page from the root topic. In 3.4 we're using: board.com/topic/123-title/?view=getnewpost This explicitly states that it is simply another way of viewing that single topic. Statuses In IP.Board 3.3, each status update from a member was given a new page, like so: board.com/statuses/id/12345 During Google's Panda update, websites with 'thin' content could be penalised. It could be determined that these status update pages are very thin and a moderately busy board could generated thousands of them. In IP.Board 3.4, we use the new FURL format: board.com/status/user/1-matt/?status_id=12345 As you'd expect: board.com/status/user/1-matt/ This URL shows all of the user's status updates. Multiple SEO Titles I've improved the SEO URL builder to allow for multiple 'seoTitles'. Right now, IP.Board 3.3 is limited to just one, so you can only create FURLs like so: board.com/topic/123-#{title}/ Multiple titles will allow you to create complex titles like so: board.com/#{title-1}/123-#{title-2}/ In addition to the bundled inclusion of the old IP.SEO, this wraps up most of the big SEO changes coming in 3.4. I'm confident that the new pagination and new FURL structures will clarify your site's structure to search engines making it easier to spider and associate content without being penalised for thin content. Of course we're always open to well-constructed feedback on SEO improvements. Everything you see in this blog entry was implemented from feedback. Please start a topic in our feedback forums if you have SEO suggestions not directly related to the content of this blog entry.

With a product history of over ten years, it's quite often a challenge keeping the product right on trend. Old technologies go and we make provisions to remove them and likewise, we make provisions to incorporate new technologies. For example, IP.Board was the first bulletin board to incorporate Ajax functionality all the way back in IP.Board 2.1 back in 2005. We were also one of the first boards to add in 'WYSIWYG' editing to make constructing styled posts much easier. Of course, this was long before jQuery and Prototype frameworks make writing javascript easier so we hand-rolled our own editor. This was eventually replaced in February 2011 with the arrival of IP.Board 3.2 in which we used CKEditor. However, the underpinnings of the editor remained unchanged which lead to some challenges. For example, the actual post was saved as BBCode in the database. This meant that the post had to be converted into BBCode before saving and then converted back into HTML before editing or showing the post. This lead to some frustrating due to inconsistencies with this process. Happily, the underpinnings to our editor have now been completely rewritten to increase stability and to remove these inconsistencies. Now, the post is actually saved as cleaned HTML (via the excellent HTMLPurify) which means it does not have to be converted between states. You can still edit the BBCode manually if you wish, but this is handled by a single BBCode plug-in for CKEditor. This is very exciting because it frees up IP.Board from having to deal with BBCode manually saving hundreds of lines of code. Of course, your custom BBCode will work normally and because of built-in legacy functionality you won't need to convert your posts to the new format as this is handled 'on-the-fly'. We've also taken the time to improve several other elements within the editor: Code Boxes The code box has been improved to allow you to select the code format (HTML, Javascript, PHP, etc) and a starting line number. Tabs and spaces are also preserved correctly. Live Previews When adding quote and code boxes, the editor will preview them live, like so: The code box when rendered fully contains striping and line numbers which makes it easier to read the code: We're confident that by rewriting the editor and parsing engines, the editor in IP.Board 3.4 will be much more stable and reduce those annoyances which can sometimes crop up when writing complex posts.

We released IP.Board 3.3.0 as beta yesterday to our clients and I wanted to just round-up some of the very latest SEO changes we've made this week. We've invested a lot of effort into making sensible non-invasive changes to IP.Board to encourage search engines to spider pages we want them to spider and to remove extraneous links, potential crawler errors and non-desirable keywords. We routinely check progress on this forum in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools to identify any areas that need further work. I spotted a few things which I've fixed which include the following. Tags We added tags back in 3.2 and we've continued to make improvements including adding 'other items tagged' which is now an option when viewing a topic. However, guest and search engine access to tags was largely blocked and the URL to fetch a list of matching items wasn't very friendly. This has now been changed. The old format URL was 'index.php?app=core&module=search&do=search&search_app=forums&search_tag=tagName'. It's now a much snappier '/tags/forums/tagName/'. Search engine bots now have access to the tag results page within the search engine so they can spider the results of specific tags. This should increase good keyword density. Guests and 'unread' links The default setting in 3.3.0 is to disallow topic tracking for guests. This means this setting applies to search engines too. However, the 'last topic' link when viewing a list of forums still retained the '/unread/' parameter. This is fine as it sends a soft redirect header which Google correctly picks up. That said, it is an unnecessary hoop for Google to jump through and as topic marking is disabled, there is no benefit to this parameter. This has now been removed in 3.3.0. Title tags We've also gone through and removed some more unnecessary title attributes from links such as the 'Go to latest unread' which preceded almost every 'last topic' link when viewing a forum, search results and sub-forums. This further reduces undesirable keywords. Soft 404s On reviewing the crawler errors listed within Google Webmaster Tools, I noticed a lot of largely irrelevant pages were listed as being 'soft 404s'. Google declares a page a soft 404 if it sends a standard OK header (200) but it seems to contain no valuable data such as a generic 'No data to show' message within a table. This occurred with regularity with the 'Who Posted' feature as well as the 'Display Name History' button on user's profiles. I've now removed both links to Guests as arguably they serve little purpose to a non-member. Ratings I've added schema data to the IP.Board topic rating system so Google will detect and show the relevant rating with the search result. These are all fairly little changes but they'll further improve your forum's SEO which can only be a good thing! We're looking forward to seeing these new changes and features in action on your forums.

IP.Board has made use of micro formats and schema data since IP.Board 3.0. We added to this in 3.2 to include breadcrumb data in our navigation. This enabled Google to display our navigation links within search results. The schema data has been read from our page which enables the green navigation links and post/author data. We've further extended the schema data for 3.3 which is great news for SEO: Topics and posts At the head of each topic, we've added schema information to the title and author details. This will help search engines locate the title of the topic. We've also tagged up the posts to help search engines extract relevant information. As we can see, Google can read this schema data very easily and quickly locates the data we want it to focus on. Forum View We've added schema data to the forum view also. This will help search engines locate relevant data. The screen shot below shows the data Google extracted from the forum view page. As you can see, there is a row for each topic in the forum. Events We've added schema data to calendar events and even the sidebar 'Forthcoming Calendar Events' block so they display correctly when your site is searched. Here's the result of Google's rich snippets tool preview. Note the 'Meeting!' event underneath. These unobtrusive changes should greatly assist search engines in locating relevant content which is good news for everyone!

IP.Board was one of the first commercial products to make use of Facebook integration to allow logged in Facebook users instant membership. We extended this in subsequent releases to include the ability to share status updates and links from the board such as topics. During this time, we also added Twitter as an authentication system and the ability to tweet out links and status updates. You don't have to be an active Facebook or Twitter user yourself to appreciate the advantages of tapping into the millions of users these sites receive daily. It's a great way of driving more traffic to your site and to encourage activity. Auto Sharing In the current version of IP.Board, you can quickly share and 'like' content such as topics, gallery images and blog entries when you read them. In IP.Board 3.3.0, we've taken this a step further and added the ability to auto-share content during creation. You simply check the boxes for the services you want to share with and it'll share the content as soon as its been saved. You can even make the current preferences default so you don't have to remember to check them each time. Of course, these buttons don't show if you've disabled sharing for that forum and you can optionally disable the entire feature from the Admin CP. Authentication Flow In the current version of IP.Board, you have to be connected to Facebook before you can share status updates and links. This means you'd have either registered with a Facebook account of you'd have linked them via your UserCP. Not everyone will be aware of this functionality so there's a chance that some of your members will never make use of those features. In IP.Board 3.3, we've utilised the Facebook Javascript SDK into our own code so you can connect to your Facebook account without leaving the page. The Facebook auto-share button is visible even if you're not currently connected (assuming of course that the feature is enabled and you've set up Facebook via the Admin CP). When you click the checkbox, if you're not connected, the request for permission dialogue loads automatically. Once allowed, the connection is finished in the background and you're all set up ready to share without leaving the page. This drastically reduces the barrier for connecting your Facebook accounts with IP.Board and further encourages sharing. Changes to meta data When you share a link, Facebook checks the page for specific Open Graph meta tags. Once of these determines the image that is shown next to the link. By default this is the IP.Board logo. In IP.Board 3.3 when you attach images to a post, these are used as the shared image bringing context to the link. These changes will no doubt increase the number of topics shared with Facebook which in return will increase visitors to your forum for those that embrace social media as a way to drive traffic.

Our core goals for IP.Board 3.3 where to clear up the moderator tools, make IP.Board more efficient for larger communities and improve SEO. We've already blogged twice on our SEO improvements outlining tweaks to improve good keyword density, reduce crawl errors and improve good keyword placement. Our own company forums are very busy and get a lot of traffic and we monitor the data via Google's Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. As we upgraded to IP.Board 3.3.0 last week, I was curious to see how the data looked even though it's too early to really spot any differences, a few things did become obvious. Duplicate TITLE tags I noticed that Google had recorded thousands of 'duplicate title tags'. This is where separate content shares the same <title> tag in the HTML document. This can weaken the impact of the page within its algorithms so it made sense to clean that up. There were three very common areas that accounted for nearly 99% of all these errors: Profile Tabs When viewing a user's profile in IP.Board, you can click the side-bar tabs to view recent topics, posts, gallery images and more. This is handled by javascript where available with a linked back-up. Google naturally selects the linked back-up which has the correct content, but the actual document title still says "Viewing Profile {name}" hence the duplicate title tags warning. The simple fix is to add the tab name in the title 'Viewing Profile: Topics {name}'. Skin Selector and Language Selector At the footer of each page is a skin and language drop down selector. When you have more than one visible skin, the drop down is visible allowing you to move between them. This is completely lost on search engines and they crawl the links leading to more duplicate content. As of IP.Board 3.3.0, they are no longer shown for search engines. Direct post links Each post in a topic has its own post number and this is a link to that particular post. Currently, this is a unique link (page__findpost__12345) which flags up as a warning because it is not unique content. The easy solution is to simply use a standard HTML anchor tag. This doesn't flag up as a warning as it is using basic HTML as intended. As an addition, I removed the generic "Link to post" title attribute to something more suitable. An interesting topic was started a few days ago about a possible SEO pagination issue. The author feels that our pagination method could do with a few more links in to encourage Google to crawl deeper into your forum. While I feel the user/search engine trade off wasn't worth it, I make it simple enough to change. As of IP.Board 3.3, simply add: $INFO['show_x_page_link'] = 9; into your conf_global.php file to tailor how many pagination links are shown so you can find the best balance for your needs. These changes will help reduce crawl errors and strengthen your ranking. It's the little additions like these that really add up over time.

During each release cycle we often take some time out to assess performance and look at ways to improve in this area. We're also in a unique position to have first hand experience at hosting tens of thousands of IP.Board installations via our own hosting network. We also work closely with our clients who constantly give us feedback on how IP.Board is performing and let us know about any areas that need further examination. All of this data is very useful when it comes to profiling and testing IP.Board and making performance improvements for the next major version. In this this blog entry, I'd like to discuss some of the improvements we've made for IP.Board 3.3. Topic Markers IP.Board has had a centralised database drive topic marking system since 3.0. As IP.Board is only part of the suite, we wrote the system to be extensible and flexible so that our own apps and apps written by others can use the system without maintaining their own tracking databases. We wrote the system to use two tables. One of which can be considered a 'deep storage' table. This contains permanent tracking data in the format of one row per member per parent. So this means that if you had 200 forums, each member would take up 200 rows. The second table can be considered the 'active' table. When a member is loaded from the database and no 'active' row is found, the markers are pulled from deep storage and written in a serialised form to the 'active' table. When the member is no longer active, the data is removed from the 'active' table and written back to the 'deep storage' table ready for the next time they visit. In theory, this is the perfect solution. You only have to read and write to a smaller table which should make the system more efficient. However, we discovered that trying to keep the tables synchronised when you have a very busy site negated the benefit. The sheer number of SQL inserts and deletes often caused bottlenecks affecting the whole board. Another downside was that all the marking data had to be loaded when the member was loaded. This could be up to 200k of marking data - most of which wouldn't be needed. If the member was viewing a topic, they wouldn't need marking data for Blog, for example. We've tweaked the system to remove this SQL bottleneck. We've removed the 'active' table and simply write to the main tracker table. Now we don't have tables to synchronise, we can simply write back to the 1 row that needs updating and not have to periodically update all 200 rows. Furthermore, we've removed the need to load all markers at once. A new function in 'coreExtensions.php' dictates which markers to load. You can still load all as this may be more efficient (as is in the case of the board index when you have a lot of sidebar hooks) If you choose not to load the marker data on member initiation, you can use the new built in JOIN methods to fetch the marking data along with your dataset. In testing, this has dramatically reduced write overhead and the memory footprint required per page view by up to 150k. We're testing this out right now on our company forums and many people have already commented that 3.3 is seriously faster. Post Table Access The largest table in your database is almost certainly the post table. We have clients with millions of rows in this one table alone. It makes good sense to keep reads to a minimum where possible. In older versions of IP.Board, we had different views such as 'threaded'. These were removed in 3.2 as these older legacy views were rarely used and not really applicable in a modern context. However, some of the older code remained which meant that the post table was being queried twice per topic view. Once to fetch a list of post IDs and again to fetch the data. We've rewritten this bit of code to use a new API and now we only query the table once. This alone will drop read access to your post table by almost 50% in normal daily use. This is a significant change. Today's Top Posters This fairly innocuous feature is accessible via a link in the board footer and on most boards doesn't get a deal of traffic. However, we've found that clients with larger boards notice a significant slow down when this feature is used which can cause another SQL bottleneck. This is because the query is fairly complex due to the flexible permission IP.Board offers. The query causes the creation of a temporary table to sort the data which isn't desirable for larger boards. We've added a new caching table which caches recent post IDs. This makes this feature much quicker (over a second in SQL terms in testing) and as an added plus, it doesn't have to query the post table to generate the list which again saves read access on that large table. Conclusion There are many other, smaller changes in additions to those listed here. Some of these changes may seem trivial but they quickly stack up. It only takes one or two slow queries to bring a site to a crawl while SQL catches up with queued queries. These changes will make a significant different to everyone but especially those working with large databases. Your IP.Board will be faster, consume less memory and be more SQL efficient. Those are changes we can all appreciate!

Anyone that runs a lively and thriving community knows that now and again you have to make the hard decision to ban a member. IP.Board has a powerful set of tools built in to manage this for you and you can ban a member for a set number of days or permanently with a few clicks via the warning system or the ACP member management system. Currently, there are two ways to ban a member. One is to flag them as banned and the other is to move them into the pre-defined banned group. They both act very similarly and there's a lot of overlap which leads to some confusion as to what the differences are. Flagging a member as banned will prevent them from viewing the board and contributing to the community. Moving a member to the banned group does the same but at a group level and also removes the member from the member list. This isn't immediately apparent and we do find some administrators get confused. "Do we have to flag as banned and move to the banned group?". We've simplified this in 3.3 by removing the pre-set banned group for new installations. Now when you flag a member as banned, they are removed from the member list and any friends lists they may be on. Additionally, only super moderators and admins can then view their profile. I've also ensured that spammers are treated in the same way. When you flag a member as a spammer, they are removed from the member list and any friends lists they may be on. It's worth noting that existing installations do not get their banned group removed, but any members in the banned group are automatically flagged as banned. You can, if you choose, remove the banned group yourself. I've taken this a step further to consider the impact on SEO when you flag a member as a spammer or ban a member. You don't really want your members and search engines following profile links that lead to an error, so I've removed the hyperlink for banned members and spammers for anyone that is not a super moderator or admin. This means fewer crawler errors and more importantly less keyword pollution. We all know that most spammers choose keyword rich user names that you don't want associated with your community! The new warning tools have been updated to allow you to move banned members into a group of your own choosing if you'd like to keep group-level organisation. I'd like to wrap up this entry with a quick mention on some other SEO tweaks. I read a great little entry by Enkidu yesterday on his blog. He suggested some quick tweaks to remove unimportant keywords like 'category' and 'forum'. I've gone ahead and implemented his suggestions. This will help reduce keyword noise and increase keyword density for keywords you want to focus on. The screenshot below shows the changes in action. Note how many times the category name is now repeated: These changes and updates further our goals to increase SEO, improve moderator tools and clean up interface elements in IP.Board 3.3.0!