Spruz Owners' Community For owners of websites powered by the Spruz Platform

It has been a very busy week for us at Spruz, today we rolled out the final stage of a string up updates this week that work to address site slow down issues and adds some additional functionality.

As most of your know we preformed a major change to how the platform handles user information, this in general has really helped the speed up the load time of pages. We are happy to report there have been very few issues reported related to that update.

Now for the goodies that this change offers up!

New Display Name Control

• You can now finally set a different display name for each website you are a member on.
• New Display Name Settings
  • Change if members can select a name already in use by someone else
  • Setup a restrictions list to control what members can use as their display name.
• On the Manage Members page Administrator can now change display names of members on the site.

Other improvements

Set the Event Pictures - When adding events you can now upload your own event photo thanks to our new anywhere upload component.

 New Default Photos Set - We have replaced the old Shadow style default photos with a new more simplistic look after one to many complaints about the old ones and we added a new generic no image photo as well that will be used on systems that ask for a photo but one is not inserted.

New View My Posts Forum option - Ever wanted to see everything a person has posted in the forums? Well now you can with our new My Posts option that has been added directly under the member photo of a topic reply in your forums.

As most of you know we are moving into a holiday weekend as Memorial Day is Monday. Our offices will be closed on Monday, but just like normal outside our office hours of 9am til 9pm M-F we still have staff on hand to respond to issues reported via support tickets.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.  ~Joseph Campbell

Enjoy the holiday weekend!

If you are using our chat room page you may notice it looks a little different today. We have decided to discontinue development on our own Chat room and instead use Tiny Chat for the chat room feature. Over all Tiny Chat has more features then the Spruz chat room. We have decided to do this so we can focus our development resources toward other areas of the platform that are extremely important to our users. Tiny Chat has all the same features of our built in chat room, plus it allows for video chat.

We also recommend Skysa (www.skysa.com) as another integrated Chat system. To add a Skysa bar to your website go to Manage Site > Settings > Member Bar and follow the instructions.

Email Broadcast Changes - Our Spam complaints have been going up due to the Email Broadcasts and improper usage. To help correct this we have added an automatic preview of your message before you send it and there is a limit on the number of email broadcasts you can send per week.

Member Questions Adjustments - We had added a preview option so you can directly view how the questions will look on your pages. You can also change the Field Set Label "About You"

Viewing Member Information - Viewing of email and ip address is no longer a premium only feature.

New Image Uploader - We have corrected a problem that would happen for IE users that if you uploaded one image to a comment or blog then tried to upload a second image you couldn't and the uploader will now properly response back the max size for a file upload if the image is too big.

We have a rather large update that will be released early Thursday morning that will help improve performance and add some much needed (Like unique display names) functionality to the platform. Sites may need to be taken down from 9am until 11am EDT on Thursday as part of the update.

It's time yet again for another Community Spotlight. I hope the weekend has been treating you all well.

Community of the Week

This week's Community of the Week is Black History Year Round Directory. It was created by Black History YRD as a central location where visitors could get information about the African American heritage.

We are pleased to announce a new standardized way to upload images throughout your site and your site administration area. The new upload tab will appear next to any input field that accepts an image URL.

One example is in the rich text editor you can see in the comment areas, forums and blogs; instead of having the Upload option as a main tab in the insert image dialog, you and your users can use the upload button right next to the field to input the image URL.

Using the option will be quite easy for you and your members: click the button, select the image you want to upload, and once it has uploaded the URL to your file is automatically inserted into the input field.

Follow-up addition to this feature will be site controls to set who can upload images, and the addition of uploading files to expand file sharing.

Additional Updates:

We have added the ability for site owners to resend confirmation e-mails to users that have not yet confirmed their e-mail address. This was always possible for the user to request a new confirmation e-mail, however site owners wished to be able to re-send the confirmation in some cases, so that has been added.

Style adjustments to the Rich Text Editor toolbar, now the buttons display much nicer when the editor is narrow, and has improved collapsing that gives the editor a better look in confined sections of your site such as the sides.

We fixed an issue that caused the Export Theme and Upload Favicon options to be hidden when the site theme was in full Custom CSS mode.

Plus as usual we have crushed a number of bugs reported by you!

As with all updates, if you encounter problems please open a support ticket. Commenting is for general feedback about an update.

We have published a new platform update today that brings new enhancements and answers some of our top requested items.

Forum Improvements

1. Editing Posts. We have improved the edit post option to load inline with the reply, this also fixes a problem that would happen when someone would copy in bad/broken HTML that would case the edit option to break. Now no matter what you should be able to edit a post that is broken.
2. Changing the Thread Topic. When you edit the first post in a thread you will have the option to edit the threads topic.
3. New Filter Added. If you are an moderator or forum administrator you have a new filter option called Pending Approval if you have. This will display if there are topics waiting your approval.
4. Post Counts. We made a change in how post counts are updated. This was done to improve the load time of forum pages, however some users may have a 0 post count until they post there next topic or reply in the forums.
5. Iphone/Ipad Compatibility.  We have added new functionality to our rich text editors that now allow users to post, edit or reply to topics in the forums using these devices.

Other key improvements

1. Performance. This is a key area we are continually working on as we finish adjusting to our huge influx of new Spruz site creators. We have made several improvements in the last 24 hours that should increase overall page load times and add stability to your website. We are continually making tweaks and adjustments in this area. We hope to have all stability issues resolved by early next week.
2. Comment Box Rich Text Editors. You can now enjoy rich text editors on all Comment boxes. Rich text editors make it easy to format text that appear in comments. We will have controls that will allow you to customize the options members have access to in the editors.
3. Broadcast Email Rich Text Editor. Next time you broadcast an email you will notice a full editor. This editor has been added to make it much easier to format the messages you send to your users.
4. Donation Element. We have changed the donations element to only show donations from the last 30 days.
5. Plus a range of bug fixes and issue solved thanks to your reports via support ticket.

Just a reminder about our commenting rules: if you encounter a problem, DO NOT COMMENT about it. Go straight to Spruz.com and click on Support to open a ticket and tell us about it. You will be surprised at how quickly we work to solve bugs reported.