Invision Plus Blog

For those who have been around here using our free forum hosting, we greatly thank you for your support and contributions to our community. We constantly consider the feedback, suggestions and evolving needs of both basic and advanced message board users and hope that we can continue to meet and even exceed expectations.

We have been growing, which is always good news, but growth inevitably creates challenges…like slow load times and increased data management responsibilities. We are proud to announce that the site migration is complete and things are running great!

For months we have made site performance a top issue around here, though we kept a lid on things until we saw light at the end of the tunnel. We still have a VERY small number of sites that we are working to restore, but over 99% of the sites are online and working great and we will continue to restore the remaining few while rolling out many new updates and exciting initiatives.

Here is a summary of what we have been up to:
1st) We purchased several NEW top of the line servers and upgraded our entire site

2nd) We rewrote thousands of lines of code to make sites run faster, more efficiently and provide room for a lot more growth (if we are so lucky to continue growing)

3rd) We implemented memcache, a highly effective tool for helping websites scale effectively

4th) We are testing and rolling out several new features, including SPAM FIGHTING tools, stuff to improve search, advanced global directory upgrades and MANY other additions that we will be announcing soon.

Thanks for creating and joining some great conversations around here…we look forward to a great 2008!

We are aware of the connection issue and are working on solving it right now. The site is nearly transferred, things have been running very fast and smoothly for a few days…but it looks like there is hopefully 1 last issue related to the migration that we need to get ironed out.

UPDATE:  The connection issue was fixed a reasonably short time after it occurred, and also the migration is complete except for a very small number of sites (we are still working on those).

After today’s brief downtime, we’ve gotten the MySQL server online again. I will continue to press our web host for more information about this outage. If you have any suggestions, please contact me.

Thanks,
Elliot
Invision Plus Staff

November 5, 2007
Our database server is down. We don’t know exactly why yet, but I will keep you updated right here as soon as we know more. If you have any suggestions for server providers, let me know.

Update 12:22 AM PST
All systems are go. Please contact us if you continue to see any issues. Thank you!

Hello,

Our database server is currently down due to a bad restart. It’s currently running fsck (file system check), and we don’t know how long this will take. I’m actively searching for alternatives, but it seems that we have no choice but to wait for the fsck to complete.

If you have any suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Thanks,
Elliot
InvisionPlus Staff

Today we’re proud to introduce a new feature called the Promote Panel. It ties in with the new Invision Plus Directory, and is a way for you to get extra exposure in the Directory by getting your visitors to vote for your Board. Here’s what it looks like:

With a little luck, you’ll be seeing it appear on your own Board shortly!

This will also help the better boards rank better in the Directory, so visitors to InvisionPlus can more easily find the best board to join.

If you want, you can Disable the Promote Panel in your Admin CP under System Settings -> General Configuration.

Elliot
Invision Plus Staff

Here’s a safety guide for everyone, but especially for board owners.

The biggest problem board owners have is another Admin demoting or deleting them and taking the board for themselves. Here’s how to solve this:

Administrator Issues

Instead of having just one Administrator group on the board, have at least one more. By having another Administrator group that does not have ROOT Admin access, the people in that group will not be able to demote you.

This is just a way of making it less likely that you may get demoted by another Administrator on your board because of them having ROOT access.

This may sound a bit obvious, but only give access to people that YOU TRUST! This is something that everyone should be careful about. Be especially cautious about giving others Administrator access to help fix something, set-up the board, etc. These people are not necessarily trustworthy. ROOT or not, they can still damage the board.

Cracking, Keylogging, etc.

This is generally a very rare occurrence on InvisionPlus.

Make sure the passwords to your InvisionPlus account and email account are safe. When a user’s account is stolen, it’s usually because one or both of these passwords were insecure. Use numbers, symbols, and capital letters in your password.

The use of keyloggers happens very rarely.

If necessary, write your password down to ensure you remember it, but make sure that paper is safe.

Always keep a virus scanner handy, just in case. One option is AVG Anti-Virus from Grisoft.com.

Any software can be a keylogger. For example, it could be a friend’s simple C++ console game, yet stealthily install a backdoor or keylogger without your knowledge at all. If you suspect this, you can open a Command Prompt and type:

netstat -n

… to see if there are any suspicious port numbers or IP addresses. Make sure your software comes from a reliable source.

Keep your anti-virus software updated, and you should be safe from most keyloggers.

Sidenotes and Conclusion

If you have had your board cracked, report it on the Support Board and we will see what we can do.

If an Administrator does something to your site, we can’t help with that. You need to make sure that your Administrators are trustworthy before giving them access.

With new secure measures in place at InvisionPlus today, a second administrator (even if they are in the root group) cannot demote, edit, change password, delete or harm the initial root admin in any way.

However, there are still two things to be aware of:
1) You can edit yourself, so you could accidentally or intentionally demote yourself. However, you cannot delete yourself.
2) If your password is cracked and the cracker demotes you, we may not be able to do anything - so keep your password secure. Here’s one site for testing the strength of your password: SecurityStats.com

That’s it! If you keep in mind these guidelines, you’ll be safe and secure during your stay here on InvisionPlus.

Thanks!

Elliot
InvisionPlus Staff

This guide contains contributions from InvisionPlus Staff members Exode, Alan, and HAL.

Every now and then, I browse through some of the many wonderful forums on Invision Plus and select one for the Elliot’s Choice Award. It’s a casual award, and serves simply to highlight an interesting forum that I’ve come across.

Today’s winner is a brand new board just created 9 hours ago, but it already has a customized skin and forums. The board is Medal of Honor. With 12 posts and 7 registered members already, it’s sure to become a hit.

Congratulations to Medal of Honor!

Elliot
Invision Plus Staff

We’ve got some new updates over here at InvisionPlus.

1) NEW Enhanced Directory: http://www.invisionplus.net/directory.php

3 features worth pointing out include include the ability to see which forums are most active, check out the forums that are ‘heating up’, and search with keywords! Technically, this task was pretty challenging as we are indexing daily activity from almost 30,000 forums and hundreds of thousands of members…something that takes 4-5 hours of constant server processing everyday!

Why did we do this? This is just the first step in a larger strategy to help promote forums that are thriving while also empowering users with the ability to search and discover new forums, exciting topics or like-minded individuals.

2) Automatic PM (Personal Message) for new members
Greet ALL new members with an automated personal message

Check out this great tutorial by Elliot (and also leave feedback):

Purpose: Saves time for the administrators & improves the user experience for new members! (over 90% of the users polled wanted this feature)

3) Search all InvisionPlus forums at once, using a custom search engine by Google

Oh yeah, we also redesigned the website…stay tuned for some more updates, and let us know how we are doing!

Scott
Invision Plus Staff

Please could I enforce again that hotmail accounts are not delivering signup emails. So PLEASE STOP USING HOTMAIL and make other arrangements. Alan has gmail invites if it helps. Thank you.

If you wish to delete your board you must send an email originating from the email address that you used to signup with. This is to make absolutely sure that it is the owner who is giving permission to delete their own board.

Please click the link below to send an email to us (please include your board address!):
Click to request removal of your board

Thanks
P.S. Please be aware that if your email is suspected to be fraud by management, you will not recieve a reply.