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You weren't kidding!

 

I know..lol
They seem to come in groups as well.

Better then no updates at all I guess

 

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!

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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...

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No matter what, they can't get me to switch.

 

Out of curiosity, why? What do you prefer about vBulletin 4 to Invision Power Board?

 

I like IPS but it is to expensive for me, by the time I buy everything, then pay the renewal it just doesn't interest me.

 

I'm not a "fan" of IPS, but I do admire their marketing skills. They were able to take the most notable criticisms of their competitors and display it as their strengths. At the very least they got me curious to see what's going on over at IPS.

 

Isn't IPS cheaper than Vbulletin once you add all the stuff in. I know you have to update every 6 months or whatever, but it's not MANDATORY to do it and you still save money on it vs vbulletin which is pretty expensive.

I personally am excited for 3.4

 

You kind of need to if you want to keep up with the features and that. It would cost me for what I want $320- then $70 every 6 months to update because I couldn't live without being uptodate with software I don't know. It is way to expensive imo.

 

The whole software. I used IPS in the past and I wasn't pleased.

 

Ah tricky title IPB, I saw this from my phone and on Twitter but never looked, I didn't know it was one of their RSS feeds.

On a side note, I'm getting affiliate programs lined up and apparently IPB doesn't have a working program ATM, Charles said it should be working in a few weeks.

I've made several sales for IPB and vB in the past, I'm hoping to start that up again.

 

Which means, you'll be using your blog a lot more, or promoting the affiliate links via social networking?

 

I have 2 blogs I'm building up ATM that will also help build AT up once they gain a bit more traffic. Most the banners and links will be on those sites, I have added a sig link to buy IPB and vB. I don't have any ads on this site yet, I will get some Adsense up to guest at some point and would like to put a few hosting banners up somewhere. I'll likely setup a openX channel for this forum and the blogs so I can manage everything from one spot.

That's all a few weeks down the road still.

 

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.

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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.

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That backup thing is pretty interesting.

 

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!

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I like this! vB should be adding stuff like this!

 

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!

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