Administrator

IP.Board has for a long time allowed administrators to send bulk mails to members, including the ability to filter recipients and use variables to customise the message sent to each member. This is an important tool for communicating with the members of your community and in 3.4 we've made it even better. The problem with bulk mail Sending vast amounts of email through your own server is troublesome. Firstly, it takes a long time (you can't just send out thousands of emails in one go) and due to the way PHP works, you need to have activity on your community to initiate the sending of each batch of emails (you could set up a cron, but you'd probably only want it running when you actually have a bulk mail sending, and they're fiddly to set up). Secondly, if you're on shared hosting, other sites on the same server may have given your server a bad reputation and caused it to be placed on blacklists, this causes the emails you send to be more likely to be marked as junk. Thirdly, sending vast amounts of email through your own server is an expensive task - most communities we see use the same server for sending emails as hosting the community itself, meaning resources are being used for the sending of those emails and not serving your users. Fortunately, these problems are well-known throughout the internet and a number of companies offer services to send mail for you, through their servers to alleviate these problems. In addition, these services provide web applications where you can view statistics, and track how many of your emails have been opened, rejected, etc. We're really pleased to announce that in IP.Board 3.4 we've built in integration with Mandrill, a service of well-known and respected MailChimp. How it works Setting up integration with Mandrill is really easy. In the new "Community Enhancements" section of the Admin CP (which we've mentioned in earlier blog entries), there will be an option for Mandrill: After creating an account on their site, all you do is enter your account details: IP.Board will from then on send all bulk mails through the Mandrill service. And it's not just bulk mails. You can even configure IP.Board's normal email settings to send all outgoing emails via Mandrill's SMTP server. Sending bulk mails As part of our improvements, we've also: Tidied up the interface for sending bulk mails Improved the unsubscribe link sent in emails to be a one-click link (rather than requiring users sign in and uncheck the box) Built extension capabilities the filter options available when composing a bulk mail, meaning 3rd party applications can add their own filter options (we'll use this for example, in a future version of IP.Nexus to allow you to send bulk mails to anyone who's purchased a particular item). Added a tab on the confirmation screen to allow you to view the list of recipients before actually sending the bulk mail. All these improvements are present even if you choose not to use the new Mandrill integration. Statistics and Tracking You can view statistics via the Mandrill web application. Emails sent from IP.Board's bulk mail system automatically enable tracking for opens and clicks. They even have iPhone and Android apps available. Pricing Full pricing details are available from Mandrill - for up to 12,000 emails per month though, the service is completely free. View the full article. View the full article

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Downloads 2.5.2. IP.Downloads 2.5.2 Integrated download management for IP.Board allowing you and your members to upload files for sharing in an organized category listing with permissions, version control, and more This release resolves issues reported since the release of IP.Downloads 2.5.1. A list of bugs reported in 2.5.1 and fixed in 2.5.2 can be seen in our tracker. In addition to the bug fixes included in this release, 2.5.2 includes the following notable changes: New setting: "Members must download to rate". Allows the administrator to restrict ratings to only files that users have downloaded. New setting: "Allow submitter to view who downloaded". Allows submitters to see who has downloaded their files (but no one else, unless the per-group option is enabled). The last downloaded date has been added to the "who downloaded" popup You can now purchase additional licenses for a file (if using the IP.Nexus integration). If you have purchased a file in the past the button would change to "download" with no way to purchase another copy. Now, a "buy another" button is available to purchase additional copies. On the IP.Downloads portal index, you can now filter top free files, top paid files and top authors by all time, weekly, monthly and yearly. The scrollable div for the download confirmation has been changed to show the entire download disclaimer on the page. A new search ordering option is available "Order by relevancy". This uses the MySQL fulltext relevancy options for searching. Requirements / Notes IP.Downloads 2.5.2 requires IP.Board version 3.3.x. Installing / Upgrading For further assistance on installing these updates please refer to this document and for upgrading please refer to this document View the full article

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Gallery 5.0.2. IP.Gallery 5.0.2 IP.Gallery is a fully-featured photo and multimedia sharing app for the IPS Community Suite. Create albums, upload photos, discuss the hottest shots and much more. This release resolves issues reported since the release of IP.Gallery 5.0.1. A list of bugs reported in 5.0.1 and fixed in 5.0.2 can be seen in our tracker. View the full article

The Admin Control Panel (ACP) is a very comprehensive section of your IP.Board. The ACP is used for everything from managing members, creating forums to dealing with support tickets from within our IP.Nexus application. Indeed, the ACP has grown so large that it can be a little bewildering remembering where pages are and you may find that there are areas of the ACP you rarely use and would like to tuck out of the way. Happily, we've made significant improvements in these areas for IP.Board 3.4. Bookmarks You probably use a handful of ACP pages numerous times a day and navigating to those pages may be a little cumbersome or you may find a really useful settings page but struggle a few days later to remember where it was. The brand new bookmarks feature solves these problems. The new bookmark system is available by the bookmark icon to the left of the tab bar. Clicking this will allow you to add a new bookmark for the page you're on while hovering over the icon opens the menu. You can make the current bookmark your 'home' page. This means that after you log in, it'll take you to this page directly instead of showing the dashboard. You can also drag and drop items to move them if you prefer more useful links at the top of the list. Tab Preferences Another common feature request has been the ability to re-order the tabs within the Admin CP. This functionality is now available. You may wish to give greater priority to a specific application or just clean up your tab bar by removing some of the pre-set tabs such as "Look & Feel". Clicking the "Edit Tabs" link at the far right of the tab bar opens the preferences page. You simply drag and drop the tabs from the Main Tab Bar onto the 'Other Apps' menu or vice-versa. Here you can see that I've moved everything except the Nexus tab to the 'Other Apps' menu. This is ideal if you spend most of your time within IP.Nexus and want quick access to it. We hope you enjoy these additional features to the Admin CP and we really believe they'll speed up your day to day tasks! View the full article View the full article

We're always amazed at how diverse our customer base is and how many different uses customers find for their IP.Board. Many customers, ourselves included often have a forum that invites questions such as pre-sales or support forums. These forums often generate a lot of topics with many replies and it can often be confusing for other readers to know which reply definitively answered the original question. The Best Answer Feature IP.Board comes with a brand new 'best answer' feature. This enables the topic starter (when allowed), moderators (where allowed) and super moderators/admins to mark a post as the best answer. This screen shot shows a typical question topic and the best answer has been flagged. You'll also notice that at the top, a small excerpt of the post is shown with a button to go and read the full post. This is useful for when the best answer may be on a different page to the one you're viewing. Looking at the forum view, you'll see that the answered topic has a badge that when clicked takes you to the flagged post. You can also quickly filter the forum list to remove answered or unanswered topics. This will be handy for forums that have staff answering questions! As you'd expect, this can be enabled on a per-forum basis and you can choose whether the topic starter can flag a topic or not on a per-forum basis. There is also a moderator toggle to empower moderators to flag a topic as the best answer. This enables you to retain as much control over this feature as you need. We hope you enjoy this feature new to IP.Board 3.4. We know that it's been requested many times and we're very pleased at being able to include it! View the full article View the full article

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Gallery 5.0.1. IP.Gallery 5.0.1 IP.Gallery is a fully-featured photo and multimedia sharing app for the IPS Community Suite. Create albums, upload photos, discuss the hottest shots and much more. This release resolves issues reported since the release of IP.Gallery 5.0.0. A list of bugs reported in 5.0.0 and fixed in 5.0.1 can be seen in our tracker. View the full article

The new IPS Backup Service is our latest addition to our Community Enhancements services being introduced in IP.Board 3.4. This service allows for remote-backups of your community database processed constantly without any work on your part. How it Works The service works by logging all "write" queries to your database that are processed by the IPS Community Suite. What this means is that any time a database entry is inserted, updated, or deleted a log of that action is created. We ignore what we call transactional tables like sessions and topic markers that are updated often but if you were to lose those tables it does not really matter to your community. When you first activate the service it populates an entry in this log table for all existing items in your database to start the process fresh. The Suite then takes these logged queries and, every so often on a task, will collect a certain amount of the oldest queries and send them to the IPS Backup Service servers (over a secure connection of course). It limits how many it sends per-cycle to ensure we don't run out of memory or reach any post limits. Once those queries are successfully sent to the remote server it will delete them from the log. Using this method we do not have to create huge database dumps of your community which can cause all sorts of issues with timeouts, disk space, bandwidth requirements, and general hosting problems. Security and Protection When your data is sent to our servers it is stored on what we call our Internet gateway server. This server is a sort of dumb system that just accepts the incoming data and temporarily stores it for later processing. The "real" storage servers that permanently process and store your data are not even connected to the Internet. Of course we also implement other security measures that we will not get into but by starting with this very basic approach of not even being on the public Internet you can imagine that we take security seriously. Your data is stored in three states: active, archive, and snapshot. Active is your database that exists as it processes the incoming data. It's always the most recent copy. Of course the problem with this is if someone were to get into your community and prune all your posts that prune action is also sent to our backup servers meaning that your remote backup would also be pruned. Obviously that's an issue. To mitigate such risks we also automatically take a weekly archive of the active backup. We keep two of these archive backups (two weeks) at a time. This means that if someone were to do a prune of your topics or, for example, actually just shut off the backup services in your AdminCP you would still have a recent archive on our systems. The snapshot state is basically the same as an archive but it's one that you can manually request in the Client Area that's taken when you tell us. Failure Support At any time various things can happen that might make your remote backup no longer be of any use to you. Maybe there was an issue in your IPS Community Suite that caused an important query to not be logged. Perhaps you manually ran a query outside of the Suite. Maybe our remote servers suffered an issue. You never really know and that's why the system has two-way failure support. If the backup processing on your install has issues, or you manually do something, you can request a reset of the service in the AdminCP. This will basically start you from scratch and empty your remote backup to start from the beginning (note that archives are kept to keep this from being used maliciously). On the other hand, if our backup service has a fault (or it detects that there is some mis-match with your data) the service will do the reverse and self-delete then tell your Suite to restart from scratch. The idea here is to think ahead and recognize faults can happen and have the ability to both manually and automatically refresh a backup as needed. Accessing Data The last step in the process is of course accessing your backed up data whenever you may need it. We employ a dual authentication process to protect you: When you first activate the IPS Backup Service your current client area email address is stored. Later when you might request to access your backup an email is first sent to the stored email address in step 1 with a download key. Once the backup is ready a second email is sent to the current email address on record on your client account with a download link. You need both the download key and the download link to access. So why do all that? The scenario we are concerned about is if someone were to gain access to your client area account on our site and change your email address to their email address. In that case they could download your whole database through our system. However, since we store your old email address that cannot be edited this makes it so they cannot access as they need to be able to check that email account too. If you lose access to one or both email addresses we will have alternate procedures in place. Of course this is not a 100% solution, nothing really is when dealing with account security, but we think it's a great extra level of protection for you.Pricing and Service As you can imagine this sort of service will require a lot of fine-tuning and will also become a mission-critical component of your community so we want to be sure we get it right. Therefore, we will initially be launching the IPS Backup Service as a beta service and there will be no cost to use it. The service will improve over time while in beta based on your feedback and, once we are comfortable that we can stand behind it and you can trust it, we will be able to announce pricing and full support. During the beta stage will be engaging our clients who are comfortable with database management to simulate failures and restores to confirm the viability of a backup. This service is very important so it's also important we check every angle possible. We are very excited and hopeful that the IPS Backup Service will be a welcomed addition to the IPS Community Suite. The service was created because of the sometimes heartbreaking situations we see in technical support from people who lose years of community data because their host fails. We really hope that this service will help people out in those horrible situations. Note that if you host your community with IPS we already perform backups for you. View the full article View the full article

IP.Board 3.4 is approaching and will be released soon with all sorts of great enhancements such as SEO improvements, upgraded editor, login enhancements, core performance improvements, lots of minor changes from feedback, and more still to be announced. This is a great time to take a look at IPS if your community might still be running another software. Perhaps you have a friend or a site you visit frequently using another software and you want to encourage them to switch to the IPS Community Suite. By starting the switch process now you can have your community ready to go, be familiar with IPS software and services, and have any questions answered so when IP.Board 3.4 is released you can jump right on this new version! Advantages of IPS IPS prides itself on a few key points that have driven our success for over 10 years making community software. While there are many points these are the key factors: Our staff is engaged in the community We talk to clients, joke with clients, and listen to feedback. Sometimes we cannot implement every bit of feedback we receive (image the chaos if we tried!) so we try to spot trends to pick out what is clearly a must have change. We use our own software Both on our company forums and our own web site we use what we make. Nearly all of our staff comes from a background where they also ran their own community giving us a unique perspective as both creators and consumers of our services. Great customer service The technical support services we offer are second to none and any IPS client will tell you that we always do our best to help a client out with technical problems as quickly as we can. Active, responsive development Perhaps our biggest advantage and difference is our continual development and improvements. You will never see us sitting around idle. There is always something new in development or something old getting improved. Sometimes these are big changes and sometimes they're small but we are always doing something behind the scenes. We never abandon our clients and allow our software to stagnate. Switching to IPS If you are using another software provider and are ready to switch to IPS please check out our converter page on our site. We offer a free converter script that supports many existing packages. If yours is not listed please contact us and we will do our best to assist you. The converter script is very easy to use and makes a copy of your old data so you are free to try a few test conversions before going live. That's a great way to be sure all is well as switching software can be disruptive to your community so the more careful you are the better. Depending on what software you're switching from, our converter scripts can convert various data in your community. For many software packages we also offer 301 redirection scripts so your old URLs will automatically redirect to their new location. This allows for as minimal an impact as possible to your SEO and search engine exposure. Of course changing software will always have a short and medium term impact to your visibility but these scripts are a great way to help mitigate that. Ask Us or our Clients If you have any questions, need some advice, or want to get first hand experience just email sales and we will be happy to help. You might also consider posting in our pre-sales forum where you can get first-hand information directly from IPS clients. By talking to IPS clients directly you will get a realistic view of what's involved from others who have done it. There's no better way to decide if IPS is best for you than to talk to clients who use our software and services. Special Promotion We are running a special promotion now through 1 October 2012 for anyone wanting to switch to IPS Community Suite. Use the coupon code SWITCH at checkout to receive 10% off your entire order. This is in addition to the existing bundle discounts you get when purchasing multiple IPS apps! Take this great opportunity to have a look at IPS Community Suite. Tell a friend or convince a web site you visit to have a look. Try our free demo to experiment with our Suite for a few days. Ask our sales team questions or post in our pre-sales forum to get information from existing IPS clients. Our community and staff are welcoming and here to help! Current IPS clients can also use our SWITCH coupon code. It's a great time to get another license... View the full article View the full article

A Content Delivery Network, or CDN is a distributed system of servers to provide high-availablity and high-performance. For example, rather than serving your CSS, images and Javascript from the same webserver that PHP and the rest of your community runs on, these are loaded from a network of servers, improving performance and reducing load on your server. Having a CDN can improve your community's quality, reliability and scalability, as well as reduce your hosting costs. By offloading the serving of images, CSS, Javascript, etc. you free up your system resources to serve the real content which makes for a better experience. Some say that there are also SEO advantages to CDN use. The IPS Community Suite has supported Content Delivery Networks for some time. However, they can be expensive and difficult to set up. Many clients want a CDN but do not know where to go and we hope to help them out. We are pleased to announce a new service, IPS CDN, which will allow you to quickly, easily and inexpensively start using this important technology on your community. How does it work? The IPS CDN service will be supported in IP.Board 3.4. After upgrading, you'll notice a new section of the Admin Control Panel called "Community Enhancements" - one of the options available here is "IPS CDN". On this page you'll be able to enable the CDN, which will take you to a new page in the client area where you can purchase credits: Note that the packages shown in this screenshot are examples only. As you will notice from that screenshot, you can purchase credits for your CDN account as and when you want, and optionally set up your account to automatically top-up as you run low on credit. Once this is done, your community will automatically start using the CDN service. If you do not set up automatic top-up, we'll send you an email when your account is running low on credit (when you go below 10GB, 5GB and 1GB). If your credit runs out without you topping up, your community will automatically stop using the CDN service - there will be no interruption to the running of your community, it will automatically notice there's no credit remaining and go back to serving resources locally. If you top up again, it will automatically enable itself again. One problem of using the IPS Community Suite (or indeed any application) with a CDN is that when a resource is changed locally, the CDN needs to be recached to notice the new changes. Unless the CDN is notified of a change it will keep serving the old copy of the file - sometimes for up to 24 hours. This can cause much confusion to you and your visitors. To remedy that problem: since editing skins and the CSS is done from the Admin CP, the system will automatically call the CDN service to recache resources as and when you change them, so you don't need to worry about this. You can keep track of your usage in the Admin CP, where you'll be able to see a graph with your usage over the last 7 days. You'll also be able to buy more credits, disable the system, and manually recache. How much does it cost? The service will be based on "Pay As You Go" pricing. Meaning there's no minimum sign up fee - you simply purchase credit on your account and that credit is good for an amount of data transferred through the service. As you use the CDN, your credit will decrease and you can top up with more. The base price for the CDN will be at or around $0.07 per GB of bandwidth served through the CDN and may drop as you reach higher levels. We realize this is rather unspecific right now but we are negotiating with CDN providers to get the best bulk pricing. It will be our goal to pass any volume savings we receive on to our clients as we look at this service is a great way to enhance our client's experience and want to encourage its use. Everyone will however be offered their first Gigabyte for free to try out the service before purchase. Of course if you do not want to use the IPS CDN service and want to use another provider you can certainly do that. We believe the click and go setup for the IPS CDN service will encourage usage and benefit all IPS Community Suite users. Future CDN Integration Right now the CDN is a basic "pull" implementation whereby it simply pulls data from your live server then serves it via its cache. In the future we hope to implement storage services. This would mean that uploaded files would be stored on the CDN rather than your local computer. This is great to reduce storage costs on your hosting and also means that, other than the actual processing of data, your community's files are geographically distributed. For our power users this would also mean even easier cluster/cloud hosting. Storage and other CDN integrations will come in future versions of the IPS Community Suite so for now enjoy the current features while we work on even more great additions! View the full article View the full article

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Gallery 5.0.0 and IP.Blog 2.6.0! This newest version of IP.Gallery adds many features and fixes reported issues to enhance your community gallery. We have reviewed all of the feedback provided for IP.Gallery 4 and have improved the gallery software to better meet our clients' needs. The latest release of IP.Blog adds many consistency updates and minor functionality improvements to enhance your community blog experience. IP.Gallery 5.0.0 IP.Gallery is a fully-featured photo and multimedia sharing app for the IPS Community Suite. Create albums, upload photos, discuss the hottest shots and much more. IP.Blog 2.6.0 IP.Blog enables users to create and maintain their own individual or group blogs right from within your community, to share ideas & thoughts. Release NotesIP.Gallery 5.0.0 requires IP.Board 3.3.x. IP.Blog 2.6.0 requires IP.Board 3.3.x. IP.Gallery 5.0.0 requires IP.Blog 2.6.0 (if IP.Blog is installed) What's New for IP.Gallery In addition to many fixes for reported issues, the following changes have been made: Redesigned NavigationWe have redesigned the navigation and structure of Gallery to provide a more traditional navigational approach, while retaining a more social approach for those who desire it. Global albums have been changed to "categories". More Administrator ControlAdministrators now have better and more fine-grained control over moderators, albums and images. Miscellaneous Features and EnhancementspInterest integration; improved shared media image presentation; set as profile photo expanded Gallery-wide; hidden and unapproved ambiguity improvement; SEO improvements Navigational ChangesChanges to albums and ability to list members, albums or images in the special member albums category More Miscellaneous ImprovementsRSS feed enhancements; notification improvements; homepage enhancements based on client feedback We would also like to extend a special thank you to certain members who agreed to help provide feedback during the initial planning and alpha stages, helping us shape the direction of IP.Gallery 5 and ensuring that client feedback would not be missed. While we obviously cannot make every suggested change in any given release, our Gallery 5 Focus Group helped ensure that useful common feedback was discussed, reviewed and considered in this release.What's New for IP.Blog SEO and Microformat ImprovementsImprovements have been made to better optimize IP.Blog for search engines, and implement relevant microformat meta data. PromotionAbility to auto-share to Facebook/Twitter on entry creation; better image handling for sharing to Facebook; ability to auto-follow entry on creation; reputation integration in user profiles; integration with quick navigation panel Moderation and Miscellaneous ImprovementsConsistency improvements; custom block improvements; inline moderation enhancements; better category management View the full article

VigLink is a service which works with a number of affiliates to provide you commission when a user visits the affiliate from your website. So, as an example, let's say someone posts a link to an Amazon item on your community, with VigLink integration, you'll be provided with compensation every time a user purchases that item if they bought it after following the link from your site. VigLink, and services like it, have been a popular addition for many of our clients and we have received requests for built in integration. Monetizing your community is something IPS has been working to enhance support for over the recent years. From ad code integration spots to our full commerce system IP.Nexus our clients who are interested in monetizing their community have benefited greatly. The addition of VigLink enhances those offerings. This video provides more information on how VigLink works: We've been working closely with VigLink to provide direct integration with this service in IP.Board 3.4. Setting it up couldn't be easier - we've built a new page in the Admin CP called "Community Enhancements" which lists all of the services we integrate with. You simply click on "VigLink" in this page and you'll be taken to the VigLink site where you can either sign up, or log in with your existing VigLink account, if you have one: Once that's done - you're all setup. You don't need to copy and paste any code - the integration will be enabled for you, and you can now track your usage through your VigLink account. There's a number of settings you can configure for finer control over how the system works. You can set which users VigLink applies to (both in terms of who gets redirected through them and whose posts get VigLink enabled) and you can disable the system on a per-forum basis: We'll also be releasing an update to our iOS app around the 3.4 release to support this integration too. IPS benefits financially through a reciprocal marketing agreement when someone uses VigLink through our software however we do not take any cut of the commission offered from VigLink to you. Anyone familiar with IPS knows that taking a cut is not how we would operate :smile: Community Enhancements Section Mentioned earlier in this entry, the AdminCP has a new section called Community Enhancements. This area contains all the various external services that your IPS Community Suite can use to enhance your community. It's not all new though: we have moved services like our Spam Monitoring Service to this section as that too is an external enhancement to your community. We are also introducing some new services that will integrate with your community in this section! Certain services are from external partners, like VigLink, that clients may opt to use and some are new IPS-created services. Some services are free and some carry a small cost depending on the nature of what's being offered. They are all of course optional and if you do not enable them they do not execute or engage any resources in the Suite. Keep an eye out for future blog entries introducing these new Community Enhancements! View the full article View the full article

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Nexus 1.5.3. IP.Nexus 1.5.3 Fully featured commerce system to sell products, membership access, advertising, digital downloads, and more. Includes tools like a support desk to help manage your clients. This release resolves issues reported since the release of IP.Nexus 1.5.2. View the full article

As part of our regular SEO round-up when developing a major new release, I'm happy to run through the latest SEO changes we've made for IP.Board 3.4. Friendly URL Changes After much research and discussion with other SEO focused forum owners, I decided to revamp the FURL structure when handling additional page parameters. The existing format uses the following structure: board.com/topic/123-title/page__foo__bar This is then parsed as foo=bar when converted to a normal query string. The problem with this is that it confuses search engines because it looks like another page rather than just a variant of a single page. We have a canonical tag which helps to reduce confusion but it's still not perfect from an SEO perspective. With that in mind, the new format is: board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=bar Now humans and search engines can quickly see that these are additional parameters of a single page. The canonical tag now backs this up and there is absolutely no confusion! New page parameters Another item that often came up when discussing URL structures and best practises was the current pagination method which is: board.com/topic/123-title/page__st__30 This is then parsed as st=30 when converted to a normal query string. This tells IP.Board to start from the 30th post in that topic, which is page two if we have 30 posts per page. This was less than optimal because some search engines had trouble understanding this was an additional page of the same topic. I've made this more explicit by making use of a special page parameter: board.com/topic/123-title/page-2board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar The eagle eyed will notice that there no additional slash after page-2. This means that search engines (and humans!) will identify the root page, a page with parameters and a page of a topic: board.com/topic/123-title/board.com/topic/123-title/?foo=barboard.com/topic/123-title/page-2board.com/topic/123-title/page-2?foo=bar In this case 'board.com/topic/123-title/' is the root page. Of course, IP.Board will happily 301 redirect visitors using the old st=x method or the old page__x method. Unread Topics In IP.Board 3.3, there was a special 'unread' folder added to topic links on the board index. This was often confusing as it seemed like yet another page from the root topic. In 3.4 we're using: board.com/topic/123-title/?view=getnewpost This explicitly states that it is simply another way of viewing that single topic. Statuses In IP.Board 3.3, each status update from a member was given a new page, like so: board.com/statuses/id/12345 During Google's Panda update, websites with 'thin' content could be penalised. It could be determined that these status update pages are very thin and a moderately busy board could generated thousands of them. In IP.Board 3.4, we use the new FURL format: board.com/status/user/1-matt/?status_id=12345 As you'd expect: board.com/status/user/1-matt/This URL shows all of the user's status updates.Multiple SEO Titles I've improved the SEO URL builder to allow for multiple 'seoTitles'. Right now, IP.Board 3.3 is limited to just one, so you can only create FURLs like so: board.com/topic/123-#{title}/ Multiple titles will allow you to create complex titles like so: board.com/#{title-1}/123-#{title-2}/ In addition to the bundled inclusion of the old IP.SEO, this wraps up most of the big SEO changes coming in 3.4. I'm confident that the new pagination and new FURL structures will clarify your site's structure to search engines making it easier to spider and associate content without being penalised for thin content. Of course we're always open to well-constructed feedback on SEO improvements. Everything you see in this blog entry was implemented from feedback. Please start a topic in our feedback forums if you have SEO suggestions not directly related to the content of this blog entry. View the full article View the full article

IPS is introducing a program whereby we nominate a charity to receive our attention and support. These nominated charities are chosen by IPS for the work they do and how they might impact us personally. The first nominated charity is Autism Speaks. You can find out more information on our charity... View the full article View the full article

The IPS Community Suite provides a fantastic community solution for all kinds of websites. For many of our customers, the community is just one component of their site. Many of these customers utilise single sign-on systems for integrating the community with the other areas. At IPS, we get requests for this on a regular basis, and over the years, I've... View the full article View the full article

Custom Sidebar Blocks and Profile Photos Since the IP.Board 3.2 update, the look & feel of content blocks and sidebar widgets has been somewhat left behind in IP.Blog. Inconsistent avatar image sizes and design decisions that were made for IP.Board 3.1 have left some areas of IP.Blog looking dated and disconnected from the rest of the suite. For... View the full article View the full article

The license changes that we blogged about back in May are now live! License Structure Changes The main change is that IP.Board is no longer be the "root" license item. You now have a license to the IPS Community Suite and will then have the various applications as additions under that root license. Anyone with a... View the full article View the full article

With a product history of over ten years, it's quite often a challenge keeping the product right on trend. Old technologies go and we make provisions to remove them and likewise, we make provisions to incorporate new technologies. For example, IP.Board was the first bulletin board to incorporate Ajax functionality all the way back in IP.Board 2.1 back... View the full article View the full article

Another of the goals for IP.Blog 2.6 development was to increase the level of user engagement, both from existing on-site users and from elsewhere. Auto Share on Content Creation To complement the existing share links which appear alongside blog entries, it is now possible to automatically share Blog content with Facebook and Twitter at the time of... View the full article View the full article

With the recent IP.Board 3.3 update much emphasis was placed on search engine optimization. Many areas were found where a small change would make a big difference in preventing duplicate content, reducing crawl errors and ultimately resulting in better rankings. One of the goals for IP.Blog 2.6 was to continue this trend and identify potential... View the full article View the full article

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Nexus 1.5.2. IP.Nexus 1.5.2 Fully featured commerce system to sell products, membership access, advertising, digital downloads, and more. Includes tools like a support desk to help manage your clients. This release resolves issues reported since the release of IP.Nexus 1.5.1 View the full article

IP.SEO is a popular free add-on for IP.Board which provides many additional SEO features for your community. IP.SEO has proved so popular since it's introduction that as of IP.Board 3.4, we're going to be moving it's features into the core of IP.Board meaning that a separate... View the full article View the full article

Development of IP.Gallery 5 continues, and today we wanted to blog about some additional changes you can expect to see in the next release. These changes are unrelated to one another, however they collectively will improve the functionality and capabilities of IP.Gallery 5.0. Note that these changes were derived as a direct result of client feedback, so... View the full article View the full article