Fishfish0001

We have all had these experiences when visting a community...

Rules and Regulations

I know I have visited communities where their rules, guidelines, terms, etc. are longer than most of their topics. I really do not like that approach as it's not very welcoming and, really, honestly at the end of the day no one reads or cares about the rules. People know what is proper and improper behavior and do not need to be told not to use profanity, make personal attacks, post in the wrong areas, etc. - written rules or not people will still be people and do that.

Take the rules here on the IPS Community:

Quote

I think that gets the point across. Don't be a disruption and you're good!

Way too many forums and sections

This is mostly true for new communities. You're starting a new community and are understandably excited so you create many categories, forums, and sub-forums. So many in fact that your home page scrolls and new members have no idea where to post. Not to mention the fact that your site looks like a ghost town with topics scattered about dozens of forums.

Having many sections makes sense once your community is established and you need organization to keep things easy to read. But when you are first starting try not to overwhelm your visitors with too many areas.

Too Wordy

Does your News forum really need a description that says "This is where we post news and information about updates to our site. I hope you read it and comment often as it's very important. Read this first!" ... I mean the title "News" kind of says all the same in one word. There's nothing wrong with description when needed but just because IP.Board has a "Forum Description" box there when creating a new forum does not mean you have to fill it out.

Ask yourself if a forum you're creating needs a ton of explanation perhaps it's not needed. And surely not every single forum needs description text - it just starts to clutter things up and creates a lot of scrolling to see the list of forums.

7SiN, on 14 October 2011 - 11:38 AM, said:

It's fine for social sites and microblogs, but it is worthless for forums imho.

#IP.Board is not #Twitter.  Reading #posts littered with #hashtags would drive #members #crazy.  It reduces #readability.

#Right, #let's #encourage #people #to #be #internet #morons

with the amount of time the IPS team have wasted on this topic just think of how many real bugs/problems they could have sorted.

This comes all the way back to one simple factor. If you don't like something don't buy it.

I'd like to clarify a few thoughts of mine on encoding and security.

Firstly, security is never about 'one thing'. It is taking all reasonable measures you can to protect yourself. Encoding the source isn't an iron defense against hackers. Neither is a strong password. And neither is SSL. Each one is just a barrier but surely the more barriers you have, the better? As I mentioned previously, we have a duty of care for our customers and we felt encoding this application was the best thing to do.

Secondly, there seems to be this notion that you can "decrypt" zend encoded files as easily as unzipping a zip archive. This is not true. I challenge anyone to bring me a "decrypted" copy of Nexus. Contrary to belief it is not a simple process. I do recall a few years ago someone *claimed* to be able to do this and had some proof of concept but it was never developed into a service where you uploaded a file and it gave it back to you as if it came from the programmer's computer. The proof of concept merely sat in the PHP interpreter and caught the byte code as it was being processed by PHP. It is a complex and difficult process.

Both Ioncube and Zend have radically improved their compression engines and both parties claim that decrypting is not possible. And to be frank, if someone spends a month trying to decompile it, then it's a month they're not attacking your site.

I cannot underestimate the importance of good security for Nexus. If someone hacks your Blog app then the worst they can do is post a blog entry as you which you can then quickly delete. If someone manages to get into Nexus then they're potentially playing with you and your customer's money.

It would be irresponsible of us not to take all acceptable measures.

IP.Board is also not open source software.  It is viewable-source, and there's a big difference.

What you've seen, places that offer free copyright removal, or nulled boards, are places that are engaged in illegal activity.  If you want to remove the copyright from your forum, and don't want to run the risk of getting sued, then you need to purchase copyright removal.  If you use a nulled board or free copyright removal, then you are acquiring commercial goods or services without paying for them, that is theft, and it is illegal.

Yes, Robotech is good at what he does.  A couple of us others will actually throw tickets at him if it seems like something that would be difficult (at best) to try to resolve.  You see, he has this stick which he uses to beat issues into submission.  Issue goes in fighting, then comes out limping on a crutch, crying and saying "Sorry, I didn't mean to be that much trouble."  Sometimes it's funny to look at the list of tickets and try to not blink, only to have your eyes give in and blink and when you do, a large number of tickets have vanished.  Of course, when wanting to work on tickets, you have to move quick or Robotech will fix it before you can even read it.

There's a recipe for progress, right there.

"Hey, Ugg, see this raw mammoth meat we're eating. What if we used that new fire thing and . . . "
"Shut up. If you don't like raw mammoth meat, go and eat grass."

Only telling you the way it is... If you're not happy, don't use it - it's as simple as.

Marcher Technologies, on 24 September 2011 - 10:22 AM, said:

Pardon the tangent but...isn't that where you'd want a horse to be? O.o

This topic is already spiraling out of control. To the OP, we recognize documentation could be improved and it is indeed an ongoing project. If you have specific documentation feedback - ie: "I'd like to see xyz" documented, please do feel free to let us know. Referring to the team as "retarded" and chastising other members is not a productive or acceptable way to get your point across.

Thank you.

7SiN, on 08 October 2011 - 06:04 AM, said:

That "retarded" person would be me, and I'm from the UK, where we all spell "customisations" thus. It's the correct way

Over the past couple of weeks, I took up a couple of strange issues with IPS, and I wanted to give a special thanks to Jason Hanna and Andrew Millne, who stuck with me through the tickets I opened until everything was resolved. Jason logged onto my community to diagnose a problem with IP.Chat that several of my members were having, and Andrew wrote a custom script to fix all the "corrupted" smilies in my database (which came from this issue).

No copy-pasted answers, quick response times, and the sheer professionalism of it all - for a license that costs only $50 a year to renew, I really couldn't have asked for better support. Apologies if I might've come off as a bit... demanding when asking for new features here on the feedback forums (post revisions come to mind ), but I want you all at IPS to know that I greatly value your software and the service you back it up with.

I remember being very hesitant to lay $150 down on forum software back in April having come from the phpBB world; but I didn't hesitate to grab a second license a few days ago for a new site I just launched, now knowing first-hand that I'm paying not only for a beautiful software package, but also for a wonderful support team that always goes the extra mile when I need it most.

Thank you Jason, Andrew, and everyone else who's helped me out in my tickets and is part of this wonderful company. As long as you keep up your awesome service, I'll be more than happy to keep renewing my license to support the future development of your software. I look forward to continuing to build a lasting relationship with IPS.

It's simple posted, reply and ask many times over from any type of reply from IPS staff and even the CEO of IPS stays post in the feedback form and it will be handled like all feedback (Refer to ticket for more information) .It was stated that there will be new and improve documentation coming (June 2011 from the person whom write them.) Currently that has not been much of any thing updated to the documentation area officially supporting any of the new features or understanding of the software. Xenforo, vBulletin, phpBB have updated information manuals on their own software making them more competitive and strengths their products. So far the most of the focus has been on improving IPS products and not strengthening what is currently there and offering the current customers a better understanding of a product that they have.

Other staff members months+years ago said if we want to improve the documentations stated it in that thread or even reply to the article that the read was reading for help on. That been done, but I have yet to see improvements. Even in the new posted about IP.Nexus by Marked he highlights news features, I major downfall that has been ask was speak in your videos, offer a connecting to your watchers tell them what your doing. But we silent. This been a theme through out IPS. If you want to improve on products start out by listen to the customers that are here and offer some help to them. Were not asking to post a note and get back to us in a ticket but outline in details, how things work so we can learn why we came to use IPS from the begin.

This post is not met to be a bash on IPS or it's Staff but to enlightened them on some several issues that still has bugs they haven't be fix yet.