austinreefclub

Coming from a long time vB user (about 5 years) I just wanted to jump in and give props to the IPB staff.  I have never had better customer service then IPB here!  Hats off to you all!  If your a vBulletin user trying to decide if you want to make the switch.... just take my word for it.  Switching to Invision has given me more flexibility to do what I want with my board then vb ever could and the support is just an added bonus!

Good work on the advertisement integration but PLEASE consider adding a tenancy option.

I've never had any luck selling advertising by the "click" or "impression".
My customers view a banner ad slot much like a digital billboard along a highway, which doesn't count how many cars that pass, or count how many actually looked up to view the billboard.

Also a tenancy (or monthly rental, for example) allows admins to establish some sort of a dependable revenue, as I've had advertisers rent a slot monthly, for years and they don't have to worry about impressions running out, and are less likely to complain about poor click ratio if they know their ad will run for a predetermined time, they kinda view it as a monthly business bill instead of having to keep track of stats like we do with cellphone minutes.

The general structure is already in nexus under the "Add Advertisement Package" form.
where "expire" can contain x days,weeks,months,years...just have to add the logic to keep track of time, which seems easy enough......integration with paypal recurring subscriptions would be icing on the cake so advertisers can subscribe and forget about it.

Anyone else see a benefit in this?

Thank you for a great piece of code.

Checking to see if roadmap plans to allow our members to purchase a banner ad spot, upload the banner and upon approval of ad, provide tracking stats to buyer?

If so this is a GREAT feature, it will allow me to break away from OpenX which is great in itself, but doesnt integrate with the forum memberbase, so as-is I have to request each banner, upload it, and pass out a separate (2nd.) login to advertising members.

Thanks!!!

It can be productive.

VB had a mod called "pay per topic".

Sellers paid for posting credits in a particular forum.
We used it in a subforum entitled "classifieds"..... .99 for trades and 1.99 per  classified topic. made @ 40-50$ daily in a relatively small community (10,000) until we switched to IPB.

As compared to offering free classified postings, It lessened the effect for tangible fulfillment fraud by our members/sellers, as the "seller"  had a connected paypal account we could report them to.

Please please please can I request the ability to make a gallery a competition section.
By using voting instead of rating a member can vote for 1 image in that given album (disable ability to vote for own image)
The ability for an admin to turn voting on and off (over a given time frame would be nice)
Votes to be hidden prior to member making a vote (null vote if viewed)
Votes to be public or private (as long as admin can see who has voted for what)

Trevor Brandt, on 16 December 2009 - 06:49 AM, said:

We are offering the first level package for free. That is - completely free. You don't need to pay for the software OR the service. I'm not sure how one can complain about something they're not even paying for.

That said, I've seen some potential price figures for the service for higher levels, and I can assure you that the prices are quite reasonable. I wouldn't worry too much about it at this time.

Fun fact: The only chat room I've seen, to date, go over 5 active online users is here on our own forums, and that's only been (1) when we first opened the service (everyone wanted to check it out) and (2) when I specifically posted a topic asking people to join.

Why not try it out and see if you even get to 5 online chatters before worrying if that level is too low. I haven't seen any one customer get that high yet myself.

emm1, on 16 December 2009 - 08:29 AM, said:

The backend is extremely scalable. You should let us worry about the load. That said, it does cost money (bandwidth and servers) and to allow free reign without recouping any costs would simply be unsustainable. This is why we are allowing a smaller package for free, but allowing users to upgrade the package if they wish.

Our servers have been specially optimized to handle the specific type and frequency of traffic we expect with the the chat service. The backend is designed so that we can literally drop in a new server, add it's hostname to a database table, and instantly it's available to use for everyone. Clustering is all supported basically, so as traffic and usage increases, it's easy for us to just drop in new servers as needed. The type and frequency of traffic, however, would not work well under most shared hosting plans, so we have decided for a hosted-only version of the service at this time.

Let's not turn this topic into another "can we host this ourself" request.

Adriano Faria, on 16 December 2009 - 08:30 AM, said:

Not sure what you're asking. There's no support for multiple rooms at this time, however you can certainly restrict access to the chat room based on group permissions if you want (turn it offline, and only give the groups you want to have access permission to access while offline).

Mat (FDNZ), on 03 December 2009 - 12:37 AM, said:

Actually, you're incorrect. IP.Shoutbox is an official IPS release and it's released by IPS Resources. Check out the information at IPS Resources. I'm just not bothering with either of these releases because of the problems I'm having with their installs. It's really bothersome that I've had these problems with installing these addons.

Ändrew, on 28 July 2009 - 03:27 PM, said:

Yea, here it is running on the iphone (only).

Some customers are reporting various functionality in IP.Board not working since upgrading to version 3.0.2. We have narrowed down most of these causes to one root issue which came up as we tightened security for certain functions. If you are experiencing issues with 3.0.2, please download the attached file and upload the new files. If you are not experiencing any issues (or you have not already upgraded to 3.0.2) there is no need to upload these files. Also, if you download version 3.0.2 after the time of this post you already have the updates in your download zip file.

Our apologies for the frustration this has caused some customers. We do quality assurance testing before releasing maintenance versions but these specific issues do not present themselves except under special circumstances.

Apply new files if you see any of these issues in 3.0.2:

• Emoticons and some other JavaScript functions not functioning
  
• Rich text editor disabled in some browsers
  
• Spam service database table not being created properly
  
• Error when deleting a post
  
• Users with certain character sets seeing debug information on upgrade

If you experience any other issues or need help feel free to submit a support ticket for assistance.

I felt like smacking someone when I saw this thread's title.

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!

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!

I'd like to request something similar like settings evalPHP for applications.
As it is now, all apps with a public title is shown, no matter if the user has access to it or not. A field for raw PHP code could "solve" that.

$show = 1;
if ( ! in_array( $this->memberData['member_group_id'], explode( ',', $this->settings['theseHaveAccessToIt'] ) )
{
	$show = 0;
}

And, a checkbox to completely hide the application from the main navigation, allowing us to make UCP-only applications, and similar.

JayX, on 18 May 2009 - 01:02 PM, said:

Its a bit different, but I'm working on one for neowin.net. I'll most likely end up releasing it (with different graphics) after ipb3 final comes out.

http://qkpic.com/d8702 http://qkpic.com/8073c

Currently, in order to edit a hook to change something like which template it hooks into, you have to turn on IN_DEV mode.  This is bad because it puts the whole site into developers mode.  We should be able to edit a hook's properties without having to enable IN_DEV.