Invision Plus Blog

I just wanted to make sure and thank everyone who has been helping us with the development of the IP Profile Tool.  Thank you!  We know that this will create another great way for our communities to connect.  As of know were are definitely going to have these profiles:

1. Personal
2. Academic
3. Work
4. Current Project
5. Political
6. My Charity
7. Wishlist (great for holidays or birthdays)

Are there any others that you think could work well within IP.  Obviously none of the profile are mandatory, so people only share the info that they want.

Recent article by Chris Crum on DreamTeamMoney discusses the role forums play in today’s growing world of social media.  A huge aspect–Google’s searchability!

Many of my friends assume that because of the growing popularity of social media, the time tested, old-school forums like Invision Plus will fade.  Realistically though, forums offer an entirely different experience than social media, and because of this they will both continue to exist, and grow.  We all know the benefits of the connectivity that are realized with social media.  But, intrinsic in that connectivity is a focus on one’s self, one’s brand or one’s company.  Forums, on the other hand, allow users to focus on the content, discussion and dialogue that is developed.  The utility of this becomes obvious when you search for a topic in Google and your results are peppered with forums discussing the topic.  Social media groups and pages are, again, great for connecting, but they weight their focus on the participant, more than facilitating the dialogue itself.

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!

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

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.

Some Hotmail & Yahoo users have reported that their signup emails do not seem to be delivering correctly. In our tests, it took a day for a password retrival form to arrive in our mailbox. Please try to use another email provider if possible.

Get your domain on the web

Registration of free forums at Invision Plus.net is now reopened! Please sign up for your free forum now and tell all your friends! We are now offering free subdomains for the first time. Your subdomain is your board access name. You can also access your forum through the old URL too, if you wish.
These forums will be hosted an an amazingly fast and reliable server while at the same time providing all of the features of Invision Power Board.

New Feature: Image Uploading
Upload your pictures, photos, drawings and more

Here are the steps to enable image uploading on your account.

1) Log in your administrator account
2) Click Admin CP and log in the admin panel
3) Click Forum Control on the left side
4) Click Manage Forums in the submenu
5) Click Permissions next to the forum you wish to enable uploading on
6) Enable Upload for the types of users you want to allow uploading for