Camoo

if you want something clean and simple I would go this routeand build the clothing brand around the suite's buttons but it totally depends on what your objective and target audience is. My guess is you need to do something edgy and original instead of a single logo or company name.

The size is probably not the best but you get the idea. I could go on a long marketing explanation as to why I believe this works better but I hope you guys are branding savvy enough to recognize the direction here

We were recently inspired to write up our own year end review of 2010 to go over the highlights of all the accomplishments our staff made during the year. It's also a great overview of the advancements IPS constantly makes for our customers. Here are the highlights:


December 2009

We began blogging about IP.Board 3.1 and IP.Content 1.2. Everyone was very excited to start revealing the upcoming changes to IP.Board and to further the maturing of the new IP.Content product.

January:

• IP.Chat 1.0.0 released as final. IP.Chat 5 user room provided for free to all customers with an active support contract.
  
• Blogged about expected updates to our addon applications
  
• Released public phpdoc documentation for developers
  
• IP.Downloads 2.1.0 released final. IP.Downloads 2.1.0 provides friendly URLs, upload progress bar, multiple files per record, interface updates, and more.
  
• IP.Content 1.2.0 released final. 1.2.0 provides WYSIWYG editors, better control over fields, and better support for attachments.
  
• Gallery 3.1.0 released final. 3.1.0 introduces album cover images, friendly URLs, sub albums, profile picture albums, friendly only albums, and fancy slideshow.
  
• IP.Blog 2.1.0 released final. 2.1.0 includes support for group blogs, Blog This!, RSS imports, resource improvements and more.
  
• Continued blogging about IP.Board 3.1 improvements

February:

• Improvements to spam monitoring service.
  
• Continued blogging about IP.Board 3.1.0 and addon application updates to be expected
  
• Extended our demo system to 48 hours (extended to 5 days later in the year).

March:

• IP.Board 3.1.0 revealed to the community via updated company forums. New features include profile customization, link sharing, status updates, twitter integration, reputation viewing, ad codes, notification system, soft deletions, and more.
  
• Continued blogging about expected application updates and IP.Board 3.1.0 changes.
  
• Skin Generator service launched for free to all active license holders.

April:

• Community Hosting improvements were made allowing for free 20 user chat rooms, IP.Content available for only $5/month, and a switch from generic metrics to user-based limits.
  
• Continued blogging about application updates, and released betas of the new versions for the community to begin testing.
  
• IPS Staff is excited to hear the news that Nakisha Thomas, our Director of Customer Service, welcomes the birth of her son.

May:

• iPhone app developed and released for free to the community.
  
• Skin generator service updated.
  
• Introduced IP.Nexus as our new business platform.

June:

• IP.Board 3.1.0, IP.Gallery 3.2.0, IP.Blog 2.2.0, IP.Downloads 2.2.0, IP.Content 2.0.0, and IP.Chat 1.1.0 released. Many great improvements for all products available to customers - check out the release topic for a full list. It's impressive!
  
• IP.Board 3.1.1, IP.Gallery 3.2.1, IP.Blog 2.2.1, IP.Downloads 2.2.1, IP.Content 2.0.1, IP.Chat 1.1.1 released. Quick bug fixes for the most notable issues in the newest version.
  
• iPhone app updated to support push notifications, amongst other features.
  
• Community directory launched to allow customers free exposure to anyone using the iPhone app or browsing our company forums for any site.
  
• New IPS web site launched.

July:

• IPS conducts a donation drive for Autism research, in part to test our newest upcoming product IP.Nexus, and in addition to raising $1000 via donations from our community, IPS donated a matching $1000 to AutismSpeaks.org.
  
• IP.Board 3.1.2, IP.Gallery 3.2.2, IP.Blog 2.2.2, IP.Downloads 2.2.2, IP.Content 2.0.2, and IP.Chat 1.1.2 released. In addition to important bug fixes, this release includes enhanced SQL error display, ACP live search improvements, SQL toolbox enhancements, improvements to partial member registrations, and more.
  
• Forum support launched allowing official support via our company forums.

August:

• Website improvements to make documentation searching easier and better documentation organization.
  
• Community hosting improvements implemented.

September:

Continued blogging about upcoming updates to our software. IPS does not release roadmaps as they are too easy to stray from and you end up making promises you cannot keep which we never want to do. Instead, we post blog entries when we complete a new feature so everyone knows it's not just a mockup or an unfulfilled hope.

October:

• IP.Board 3.1.3 released.
  
• Skin generator updated and improved.
  
• Release schedule for our products announced. The first and last time IPS has done this!

November:

• IP.Nexus 1.0.0 released.IP.Nexus is our powerful ecommerce solution that allows you to monetize your IP.Board easily.
  
• IP.Content 2.1.0 released. Features include external widgets, redesigned default interface, block variable help, admin interface improvements, better forum integration, template import/export, and more.
  
• IP.Nexus 1.0.1 released. As part of our commitment to maintain and update Nexus regularly, we release our first update for Nexus only 10 days after initial release of 1.0.0.
  
• IP.Content 2.1.1 released. Resolves bugs reported since the release of 2.1.0.
  
• IP.Board 3.1.4 released. This release includes new like and comment functionality which our other application updates will be making use of.
  
• IPS Marketplace goes live. The Marketplace allows developers to sell their IPS product addons directly through our site, reaching more customers with less hassle.
  
• IP.Nexus 1.0.2 released. This release is part of our continuing effort to ensure any issues affecting your ability to monetize your site using IP.Nexus are promptly addressed.
  
• New release and quality assurance testing two-stage procedure implemented to help enhance quality assurance of releases, and to give customers a chance to test and use the software prior to actual release.
  
• IPS Staff is excited to hear the news that Lindy Throgmartin, our CEO, welcomes the birth of his son.

December

• In just a couple weeks of activity already paid out over two thousand dollars to Marketplace contributors.
  
• IP.Blog 2.3.0 released. 2.3.0 includes new like and commenting systems, Facebook like buttons on entries, tweet entry button on entries, a redesigned portal interface, improved notifications, new interfaces, and more.
  
• IP.Downloads 2.3.0 released. 2.3.0 includes IP.Nexus integration for selling downloads, an overhauled user interface, improved notifications, new like and comment system integration, and much more.
  
• IP.Nexus 1.0.3 released.

Still to come: Maintenance releases, new IP.Chat version, and IP.Gallery 4.0 reveal!



We are all looking forward to a productive 2011 and will continue to bring you the best community software around!

You can see your version but you don't know if your version is up to date.

bfarber, on 01 October 2010 - 06:57 PM, said:

Just changed your Post to the real facts. You can still talk it nice, but its not nice. The navigation (and some more other stuff like configuration entrys stored in the database) are very important stuff for users who cant speak/read english. When you look into a ACP (and cant speak/read english) and see the navigation and almost all configuration entrys in english, you must stop work (or you need help). And yes, there are a lot of people who cant speak/read english and thats a fact (why they dont buy IP.Board).

I know your hard work on the "new ACP" (translatability), Brandon. But absolutely no understanding why you put so important things to .xml-Files or databases. When you (or someone else) develope a "new" Feature (or Software) you should (must) be careful with those things. I dont know the reason why you do that (not much time should be no reason, because now you have more work to change it). I can only suspect that there is a mistake/bug in development and it was not just observed to put all (important) things to languagefiles.

Same with some other stuff you still put in the database (like Board Guidelines, Registration Terms & Rules, Login Page Information, Registration Form Inforegister informations). When you support a international community, you must say to all users "please go there, go there, go there, ... and change the textarea content to the german translation to have all translated. ALL users ask know: "Why (it is so complicated) to change all things to german?". And yes, i can understand them. When i install a "new" language to some other softwares (not only communitysoftwares) all is translatable. You must not go and search for all areas in the ACP to make your installation fully translated.

All of that is a basic problem by IPS: You say, there are not enough people (customers) who need those things, and i say: OK, i can understand it. Why? When you make so big mistakes (for you and other only english speaking people not a big problem) a international (new) customer think about to buy IP.Board - and at the end the (new) customer buy a other (fully translatable and supported) product in his native language. Thats a big customer base you loose from the beginning. And when you still and over and over again say "Its not a Problem" or "There are not many customer who need those things" you cant become more customer (who need those things).

YOU (IPS) must begin to add more internationalized features and make it "easier" for german and other international (new) customers to think "Yes, i will buy IP.Board". And i know, you can do it - when you will.

Sooo.... I read this topic finally and I've come to a decision.

You are all nerds. >_>

As such I have an idea that I will post eventually. >_>

Here you go:





Had to add to this because I forgot the TM. >_>

Charles asked me once to be sure to contact him if I ever saw anything wrong with how IPS treats me as a customer.  He's still waiting.

I recently had someone associated with another forum script call me an IPB fanboy, because I always speak so positively about IPS.  I guess if being honest makes me a fanboy, I need to get used to the moniker.  The people that make up IPS are worth every dime of the license costs.  And the software that comes along with the package is nothing short of incredible.

We gripe when people give us poor service or poor products.  So I always like to remind the people that go the extra mile how pleased I am to deal with them.

One aspect I really enjoy is how everyone associated with IPS has taken interest in seeing my sites succeed.  How can you put a price on that kind of customer service?  The sad part is something like that is intangible and prospective customers don't actually see that beforehand.  So threads like this are good, because it lets those people see how pleased IPS customers are with the company.

Thanks to everyone at IPS!

So I was recently thinking, IPS has done a lot of stuff, put up with a lot of crap (especially mine), and still come through amazingly. I just wanted to give the whole development, management, and support team an Ego boost.

My thoughts on IPS:
1. They are EXTREMELY FRIENDLY. The support staff has always answered my questions, except for one, regardless of what it was. They gave quick, useful, and intelligent responses, and most of all, they were not sarcastic or senile about it. Thank you support staff!
2. The development team is EXTREMELY FAST. They put out updates in very good intervals. They don't wait two months to fix a major bug, instead they fix it, and release once they have fixed several. The products work as, or better than, expected, and they don't discourage modification. Thank you development team!
3. They encourage COMMUNITY SUPPORT. Unlike many other places I have gone, they want the community to be active in helping other members as well. They allow the community to give assistance, and they will make those topics explicitly visible. Thank you management!
4. They don't LEAVE SOMETHING UNFINISHED. Many other development teams will abandon a project halfway through, and go through more team changes in a version release than the rest of the staff. They follow most, if not all, of the code guidelines set by W3, as well as other places. Thank you development team!

All in all, I think that IPS is one of the most, if not the most, supportive forum community out there. They are always supportive, and try to help you the best they can. Keep up the good work!

Thanks,
EBrown

Yeah, these people need to have their own lives too.

@majdi: I would think that as a person who runs their own board, you would be one of the ones who understand it. Let's face it, I wish I could have a community that grew on its own without my intervention, so I could have the experience my regular members get. But, I have to control the site from the admin side of things. I need to update the site regularly with new additions, I need to search for new innovations from the modding & skinning community, check my daily 15 PM's and various emails. From all of this, and even barely spending time on anything in my life, I still find it difficult to keep up with every single thing. Sometimes I just click on the latest topic in X forum, so that I can check something out, and then get heading on my way to whatever in life I have going on. I will try to ensure that people and systems aren't being abused, and still read over posts here and there. I try to get involved as much as I can. I try to calm down a situation when it is necessary, and give positivity to a members ideas. And, yet, I still miss posts. People like contacting an admin, it's just how it is.

If you actually want to spend the time to deal with those who care by writing a lot in a message, or taking the time to contact you by email or PM; you won't have time to catch up with every problem. But, by showing that you care by responding to as many messages as you can, and responding to well-mannered posts, you at least show that you don't want to edge-on negativity. If you see a negative topic, why even bother replying, when all a troll will do is attempt to enrage you? While you have your own right to run your forum your own way, I try to base mine off of ethics. I try to keep the place calm, fun, and most importantly, a positive escape from the members day-to-day lives. I don't read chat logs, unless I'm trying to find a particular thing, or got an outstanding report of private chat abuse. I don't tell members they're worse than anybody else. I will tell them if I want them to improve on a certain skill, such as thinking before posting, or learning to read a post in a way that doesn't spark negativity. I try to help them understand to think about others, by doing so myself. And because people may not have time to get back to you seconds after contacting them, I respond to a message by explaining why I took so long to reply to them. Now, I just want you to notice that this board has nearly 150,000 members and 757,000 posts. The current forum is the 4th from the top of the page, and whether or not people intended it so, they generally are more likely to read from top to bottom if on the index. Just wanted you to get some insight into the fact that not everyone can be helped instantaneously. No offence is even intended towards you. People have their own lives, have their own jobs, and are busy with various things. If you need help bad enough, you can bring it to the attention of others in multiple ways. And, if it doesn't have to do with the product itself, but a mod, there are MANY communities out there with experienced members. It would only take a little amount of time to look. Chances are you'll find your solution before you even get a quick response. Please take my post with a grain of salt. it's not meant to be negative in any form whatsoever. However, if you do reply negatively, I'll just drop it, as I see no need for an argument.

Sorry for long post guys.

Keep in mind that making phone applications actually costs us money, and we do not charge or make money out of it.

We had the capability to produce an iPhone application because we had a developer available familiar with the platform.  Nobody here is/was familiar with other phone platforms, meaning we have to learn the language/environment from scratch.  An Android application is in the works, however a Blackberry application would be third on the list, and we do not have a time frame or definitive answer as to whether one will be released.

By all means, if you wish to develop a Blackberry app and turn it over to us so that we could finish it off for release, let me know.

A security issue has been discovered in IP.Board 3.1.x that could potentially allow a malicious user to insert JavaScript or other code into your community.

The damage this sort of attack can do is drastically mitigated by IP.Board's use of HTTP-only cookies and other security measures.

As part of our continued dedication to security enhancement, we are releasing a simple patch for IP.Board 3.1.2 to address this issue. If you are running IP.Board versions less than 3.1.2 simply upgrade your software version.

Download Patch

Simply upload the attached file to: admin/sources/classes/bbcode/custom/defaults.php

 312_sept_patch.zip   11.15K   3017 downloads

The main download zip has been updated at the time of this post.

Lee, on 22 August 2010 - 08:43 AM, said:

Would you rather us work on the issue or spend our time typing up and providing information? I do understand the frustration in terms of information not being forthcoming, but the number one priority at hand was to restore service and stability. Now we have time to share information.

I do sincerely apologize for the issues that have plagued the chat service. Please understand it is a new, free to inexpensive service and has experienced growing pains due to popularity. Here's the scoop.... part of these issues have been related to exploding demand, to the point, we couldn't add capacity fast enough to compensate. We've addressed this by migrating to a cloud-based technology that will allow us to quickly scale and deploy additional resources as needed, with minimal impact to end-users. Yesterday's issues were caused by a logging issue. Logs are supposed to be pruned regularly and transferred to the local server for archival. This was not occurring and the logging database server accumulated tens of millions of rows, causing a backlog of queries and the obvious inability for new clients to connect. This has now been resolved and as far as I'm aware, there are no other current chat issues.

To answer other questions:

IPSHosting.net Integration
Yes, that's a good idea. We'll get status updates for the chat services added to that page shortly and hope that we won't need them!

Self-hosted
As has been explained many times, IP.Chat requires a rather complex environment (we're not going to get into the nuts and bolts of it here though.) We designed it specifically for our own environment and put simply, it would absolutely not function on your server(s) without extensive server configuration modifications. To be completely honest, chat was never intended to be nor is it a moneymaker. It's a free or inexpensive chat solution that integrates with your community. We don't feel further development resources to split this to a standalone service is warranted now or in the foreseeable future. If you'd like a self-hosted chatroom, there are plenty available.



If there's any other questions, please do let us know. Again, our apologies for the growing pains -- hopefully we're on our way to stabilizing the system. Thanks for your patience.

hawksfan, on 20 August 2010 - 12:59 PM, said:

I agree, but then again we can't require our customers to do this either.  Because it's new(ish) and people are still learning it, I think more people are experimenting on their own still and not ready to help other users, compared to our products that have been out for years (and people know them like the back of their hand and are willing to answer some questions).  I think this will ease over time.

MissNinja, on 20 August 2010 - 07:32 PM, said:

This mirrors my opinion.

Everyone wants something different, which is why IP.Content doesn't force people into working in a particular manner.  This, I think, is where a lot of people begin to get lost.  They expect to see some checkboxes to enable or disable things, and some quick forms to fill in and off they go.  However, this is oversimplifying the process of making a webpage greatly, and is rather difficult to do in a manner that would please everyone.

We also can't remove functionality just to make it easier.  The trick is finding a way to present the interface in a way that isn't confusing, but still retains it's power.

And no, IP.Content is not failing at all, at least from a business perspective.  And we are continuing to actively develop and support it, of course.  Saying that it is "failing" is misleading, but also an opinion, so I won't really argue about it.

Miss Moiraine, on 21 August 2010 - 09:45 AM, said:

Anytime you integrate two separate PHP scripts there exists potential for conflict.  Looking at your code, you need to remove the <?php but otherwise I don't see anything specifically wrong.  What were you having trouble with exactly?  Errors?  Just didn't show up?

rastaX, on 22 August 2010 - 03:29 PM, said:

glorify, on 22 August 2010 - 04:37 PM, said:

I agree - I lol'd when I read that.  Seeing the buttons to do actions on the page indeed would make it a touch easier to do those actions.

Booth, on 21 August 2010 - 07:41 AM, said:

That's fricking funny dude lol.

After several weeks and many headaches, we have finally launched our new site that uses only IPS Products. Originally we used Wordpress for the front page, but decided that while it was easy to use out of the box - it simply could not function the way we needed it to function. The new system using IP Content was much more difficult to set up - but we are very pleased and excited about the end result. Hope you check it out and give us some feedback.

We are a gaming website that offers free strategy guides to the community. The way we set up the site was Wiki style where members can go in and help add content to the strategy guides. After we approve the additions then they go live. We have also been able to implement a review system and many other features in the site.

Want to thank the countless people who have taken the time to reply to our threads with answers to our countless questions. - And I am sure there are plenty more to come. We hope to pay the community back and return the favor with the knowledge we have gained during this process. Also want to thank the IPS Staff for the great work they do with updates and helping out complete noobs like us.

http://www.BattleStrats.com

I really wouldn't say it's failing. It's one of our most successful applications actually

One must keep in mind IP.Content isn't even a year old. It's still being matured and refined as we get feedback. The next version is already in the works and we will start blogging about the enhancements in the next few weeks