Dan Whitehouse

We are pleased to announce Invision Power Board 3.0.4 has been released.

This is a maintenance release for IP.Board 3 and addresses various bugs and adds in some enhancements to existing features along with performance improvements. Also, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, and IP.Downloads have received a maintenance update.

Major Changes Since 3.0.3

Among many dozens of smaller bugs fixed, the following large changes and fixes have been made in the 3.0.4 release:

• IP.Board: RTE support in Safari and Chrome
  
• IP.Downloads: Option to not check filetype for linked files

Downloading

You can download IP.Board 3.0.4 and any applications you have an active license for in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.

I am not sure what you expect us to do. By your own statement the account is not in your name it's in the name of the Scott you mentioned. Scott is the client of record. He could certainly login and change that information but that is up to him - we will certainly not go changing client login information just because someone claims to have purchased the license from a third-party site. Can you imagine the chaos that would cause?

We are pleased to announce Invision Power Board 3.0.3 has been released.

This is a maintenance release for IP.Board 3 and addresses various bugs and adds in some enhancements to existing features. Also, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery, and IP.Downloads have received a maintenance update.

Major Changes Since 3.0.2

Among many dozens of smaller bugs fixed, the following large changes and fixes have been made in the 3.0.3 release:

• New option for dealing with members marked as spam: Unapprove posts, clear profile data and ban user
  
• Ability to mark members as spammers from the Manage Validating Queue in the ACP
  
• Added ability to edit status and about me information from moderator edit member page
  
• Profile screen now displays member's email address if viewer is an administrator
  
• OpenID now supports PHP 5.3.0

Subscriptions Manager

Subscriptions Manager RC 2 is now available in the client area.

MS-SQL Database Driver

MSSQL Driver RC 1 released for IP.Board, IP.Blog, IP.Gallery and IP.Downloads. Includes ability to upgrade from 2.3.6

CleanCut Skin

The new CleanCut skin will be made available as a separate download soon. A blog entry will be posted with information when it is available.

IP.Converge 1.1.1 Released

This is a maintenance update to IP.Converge to address reported issues.




Downloading

You can download IP.Board 3.0.3 and any applications you have an active license for in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.

Manual Instructions
For power users who wish to manually patch their installations. Most users can ignore this information.


File: admin/sources/loginauth/openid/auth.php
Line: 371

if( $check['email'] )
		{
			$this->member_data = IPSMember::load( $check['email'], 'extendedProfile,groups' );
		}
		else
		{
			$this->member_data = array( 'member_id' => 0 );
		}

OpenID Security Update for IP.Board 3.0.2

We are investigating issues related to OpenID not completely authenticating data which can result in the security of your community being compromised. This issue can only impact your community if you have enabled OpenID logins as the OpenID is disabled when IPS ships IP.Board releases.

Protecting Your IP.Board

There are two methods to protect your community.

Method 1: Disable OpenID

The easiest fix is to simply disable OpenID logins. These login systems are disabled by default in IP.Board so unless you have specifically turned on OpenID you are already protected. This screen shot shows you what to look for in your AdminCP:

• Click "Log In Management" in the AdminCP
  
• Look for OpenID in the list. If there is already a red "X" then OpenID is disabled and your community is safe from this issue.
  
• If you see a green check: disable OpenID by clicking the drop-down menu to the right, edit details, and set "Log In Enabled" to "No"

If OpenID is disabled and you do not use/need this login method you do not need to do anything further.


Method 2: Upload Source File

If OpenID is in use in your community and you need to keep it enabled simply upload the attached file to your forums directory. The path is included in the zip file and it is just one file.

 260809.zip   5.17K   5430 downloads





Support services note: as this update is a single-file update or the issue can be eliminated by simply disabling OpenID in the AdminCP we do request that clients apply either the setting or file fix themselves if possible. The 3.0.2 download has been updated as of the time of this announcement.

I would like to suggest the searchPlugin not only search page titles and body content but also the "Meta keywords".  I think that could definitely enhance the returned search results. Especially if you are making full use of the blocks system on a page.

We are pleased to announce Community Content System 1.0.1 has been released.

This is a maintenance release for Community Content System to fix bugs reported from the 1.0.0 release. There are no new features in this release. New features will be introduced based on client feedback in the next release cycle.


Downloading

You can download CCS 1.0.1 if you have an active license in the client area. As always, make a backup of your community before proceeding.




Pricing

The introductory price of $35 is still valid for this release. Act now to secure this lower pricing. The price will go up in future releases with enhanced feature sets.

More Information

See the original announcement for more information on CCS.

Let's start creating a list of pages from users who has published their site here in the forum... if you don't want it to appear here, tell me and I will delete as quick as possible...

First there is a link to the Profile's author, second the link to the site and third a short comment of what I've seen...

http://invisionpower.com
Obviously the first one... made only in one day, replacing the old one

Lee
http://www.helpmindsheal.com/
This a very beautiful page done using CCS

Dan Whitehouse
http://darkresistance.net/index.php
A Clan site --> well done!


If you have any site you want I add to the list, please answer this message and I'll add the link to the CCS pages of your site...  

We are pleased to announce our new Spam Monitoring Service

Our new Spam Monitoring Service will assist with the ever-growing problem of spam account registrations on communities across the web. This service will use a central database, hosted by IPS, to track those that may try to register an account on your IP.Board-powered community and stop them from registering.


How it Works

Each time a user tries to register, your IP.Board will contact the service and report the IP address and email address attempting to register. The service will scan a list of known spammers and give the account a score of 1 - 4. There are various options you can configure to control what behavior happens based on the score such as banning the account, letting it through normally, or queuing it for approval.

By harnessing the power of the many thousands of IP.Board communities, the service can "learn" over time what accounts are spammers. For example, a real human could never register on 5 IP.Board communities in just one minute so the service would see that account as a probable spam account.

The service will also monitor the "mark as spam" feature now included in IP.Board. This means that, as you and your moderators manually mark an account as a spammer, the information is reported back to the service to help stop those accounts on your community and other IP.Board communities as well!

Through these methods we are creating a service that learns from the collective data gathered from all IP.Board communities who choose to participate in the Spam Monitoring Service.



Privacy

IPS will collect various registration information to track and catch spam accounts. Information that is not from a spammer is only kept temporarily (to detect trends so we can catch spam accounts) then deleted. The only information permanently kept is for those known to be spammers. The service is completely optional and no IP.Board is required to participate.

Activating the Service

The Spam Monitoring Service will be available in IP.Board 3.0.2 and is already being tested here on the IPS company forums. Once you have IP.Board 3.0.2, simply login to the IPS client area and activate a special key used for the service and put that key on your IP.Board AdminCP.


Pricing

To further our continuing efforts to not only enhance the products we offer but also the services around those products: this service will be offered at no additional charge to those with an active support and service license for IP.Board and for IPS hosting customers!

My 2 cents:

• Tags! (Tags for forums, topics, posts, members, groups, apps, etc.).
• Activity Stream! (Activity stream from the members I added as friends on my profile).
• To publish my personal IPB activities stream on my Facebook's profile! (optional, of course).
• RSS for Topics! (RSS for threads; not just for forums).

Introducing Community Content System

Many clients have expressed interest in tools that would allow them to extend IP.Board's traditional forum community functionality by providing methods of creating new pages within the IP.Board framework.  Uses for such a system span from a simple custom portal all the way through to a complete website built utilizing IP.Board's powerful backend codebase.  When your community and site systems are truly integrated, single sign on and a matching website/forum theme become much easier.

Our new Community Content System lets you do all of this and more. CCS is a new application that allows you to create content for your site. Blog entries over the next several days will discuss some of its powerful features in more detail along with examples showing you just how easy it is to create website pages and other content just by clicking through the admin control panel. For now in this introduction, here is a brief overview of its main features:

• Page Templates
  If you are creating many pages for your website you will find that they generally follow a similar structure each time.  By utilizing page templates, you can create templates complete with the full functionality of our skin system, including use of template conditionals and plugins. You can create the HTML structure once, and reuse it for some or all of your pages. Novice users can type in normal HTML code or power users can choose to use the powerful skin tags.
  
  
• Page Manager
  The core of CCS: this tool allows you to create pages, plain and simple. No fancy terminology or new methods to learn. A wizard will guide you through creating your pages, and allow you to configure things like permissions for who can view the page, which page template to use, and more. Pages can be edited as raw HTML, raw PHP, or through our traditional WYSIWYG editor using BBCode. You can also set page-types as JavaScript or CSS and the system will automatically detect those special types.
  
  
• Media Manager
  A tool to allow you to manage images and other media for your site.  You can define the root path to your file storage directory, and then create folders and upload image files within that directory via the ACP.  You can move and delete files and folders from the ACP as well.
  
  
• Block Manager
  An extremely powerful tool that allows you to create "blocks" for your pages. Blocks are inserted utilizing template plugins so you can insert blocks anywhere in the CCS content or even anywhere in your forum community using the skin manager in the admin control panel. This means that content blocks you create in CCS are not just limited to that application!  There are three types of blocks you will work with:
  
  
  • Custom - create blocks by editing BBCode (using our WYSIWYG editor), raw HTML, or raw PHP. Input any information you like.
    
  • Plugins - some blocks require code to execute in order to determine what should be shown.  For instance, you may wish to show a mini-calendar on one of your pages or a login box so users can login right from your home page.  Plugin blocks allow developers to create blocks that can easily plugin to the system without having to create code modifications.
    
  • Feeds - not just limited to RSS.  You can create "feeds" of almost any type of data - forums, topics, replies, calendar events, blog entries, gallery images, download manager files, and of course traditional RSS imports.  A wizard will guide you through creating these feeds, allowing you to specify how the feed should be pulled (do you want to show the last 5 gallery images?  what about a random sampling of forum topics? how about all topics from the visitor's friends list since their last visit?) to make it simpler for you to define the block.

The system is very flexible, allowing you to do nearly anything you want, while at the same time providing a simple user interface and wizard-based approach for creating content to keep things easy for newer users. Power users can ignore all the special features and just type in raw-PHP if they prefer. The choice is up to the administrator.

The CCS supports friendly urls (you define the folders and page names while creating pages), and does not require the page output to be accessed through your forum directory. This means you can have your community at example.com/forums but your main web site can show under just example.com easily. You can use IP.Board's skin system (inheriting the forum skin) or you can elect to create raw pages without inheriting any CSS, wrapper, or JavaScript from IP.Board.


Pricing and Availability

The CCS was developed completely separately from the IPB3 and applications process allowing us to develop CCS without any delay in IPB3's development time. As such, we are happy to say we will be able to release CCS about two weeks after IPB3's first supported release! Pricing will be announced at that time.


We are sure there will be many questions about the CCS and we welcome them. Over the next several days there will be blog entries on our company blog going into greater detail on each of the core features of CCS. Hopefully all of your detailed questions will be answered then. Please accept our apologies if we may sometimes ask you to wait for the next blog update before answering your questions. Thank you!

[font size='3']PM Flood Control Patch for Invision Power Board 2.3.6 Released[/font]

We have received numerous reports from clients regarding spamming on the Personal Message (PM) system in IP.Board 2.3.6 and below. After consulting with reCaptcha (the provider of the captcha system in 2.3.6) we believe that humans are being used to bypass the captcha and then the newly created account is given to an automated script which sends PMs in huge quantities to your members.

The patch we have released today introduces a flood control setting to the PM system in IP.Board 2.3.6. This will limit how fast a member can send PMs thereby giving you and your moderators time to ban the offending account.

The download of 2.3.6 in the client area has been updated with this patch. If you already have 2.3.6 installed, you can download the patch along with instructions right in this topic. Applying the patch is quite easy but if you have questions feel free to contact support. If you would like support to apply the patch for you be sure to include your admin username and password, and if you are not an IPS hosting customer, your FTP details.


Upcoming IP.Board 3.0.0

IP.Board 3.0.0 contains this update already and new spam mitigation tools such as timed user group promotion. We are also exploring new centralized spam identification and banning services which we hope to have updates for you very soon!