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In addition to the great software that IPS offers in its Community Suite line, we offer many great benefits that go along with the products to enhance your community, make it easier to manage, and allow you to focus on your members rather than software management.

As the first supported release of IP.Board 3.1.0 and its applications is nearly here, we thought we would take this time to review all the great benefits you get along with the software suite itself.


Spam Monitoring Service [more info]

The Spam Monitoring Service is a great, free service for all active IP.Board license and IPS Community Hosting clients. The Spam Monitoring Service leverages the many thousands of IP.Board community installs all over the web to help track and catch those spammers attempting to register on your community. It works like this:

• Someone attempts to register on your community.
  
• Your local IP.Board install contacts IPS Spam Monitoring servers to see if that user registering is a known spammmer.
  
• If so, the service gives the account a score of the likelihood it is a spammer and your IP.Board can ban them or put them up for manual approval depending on your preferences.

The Spam Monitoring Service can "learn" from the thousands of communities reporting registration statistics to it and spot trends. For example, a real human would never be able to register on 50 communities in a matter of one minute but a spam bot could so the service learns from this and bans accounts it sees doing that sort of behavior.

For the privacy of you and your members registering, the service does not store any member information permanently.


Skin Generator [more info]

The free Skin Generator is a great tool to get you on your way to customizing the look and feel of your community to make it your own. For both novice and advanced skinners, the Skin Generator speeds up the process of creating a skin with custom colors, header, and other options. From there you can continue to edit it to further create your own, unique look for your community!


Community Projects [more info]

There are many great products that IPS itself doesn't have time to make. To fill those gaps, some of our great community of customers have come together to volunteer their time to create free products that work right with IP.Board as any other application. All are offered for free to active license holders and done for the fun of it by the volunteers. Be sure to thank them for their time and expertise!


Resources Section [more info]

We have some amazingly talented people in our customer community and many of them create great articles, tutorials, graphics, skins, and modifications to the IPS community suite. Many are free, some have a small fee, all can be useful enhancements to your community.

Take a look through the directory of articles for interesting tutorials and tips for your community. The Downloads section is full of graphics, skins, modifications, and more for your community. Finally, be sure to subscribe to receive updates (or the RSS feed) on the Resources Blog where our community of contributors can post updates on their latest creations!


iPhone App [more info]

Our new iPhone App for IP.Board has already been a great success and is free for both you and your members! Now your members can visit your community quickly and easily while on their mobile device. They can upload Gallery images and even update the status on your community and, if enabled, Facebook and Twitter all at once.

The iPhone App is brand new and we will continue to enhance it with your feedback. An Android platform app is on the way too!


Technical Support

Included with every IP.Board license and IPS Community Hosting account is great support. You can feel free to ask us a basic question, request we install or upgrade the community suite software for you, or query us on an advanced question. We are here to help your community grow and let you focus on your members rather than technical issues.


IP.Chat [more info]

Having Live Chat on your community adds a unique way for your members to interact. The IP.Chat service includes 5 online users for free with your suite and you can upgrade to higher levels for a very low yearly fee.

Your chat logs are available right in your AdminCP (with IP.Board 3.1) and you can easily kick, ban, or even privately chat with members by simply clicking their name right in the chat room.


Community Directory [more info]

The new Community Directory allows any IP.Board community to be listed right on your site. Show off your community and get more traffic! The Directory is brand new so be one of the first to list your community. Also, for even greater exposure, a future version of our iPhone App will include mobile access to the Directory.



We hope you enjoy all these benefits to using the IPS Community Suite! We will continue to innovate and add more benefits all the time. Everyone at IPS is looking forward to the release of the first supported version of  IP.Board 3.1.0 on the afternoon of June 1 (Eastern time). Thank you for your support!

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!