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

Spruz offers premium site packages that give many added advantages over our free websites. Upgrading to our premium site packages is very easy and you can switch back to a free site at anytime without losing any information.

Some of the features you will enjoy with Spruz Premium include;

·         Removes advertisements and gives full control over your own Ad Space. You can place your own advertisements to make money from your site or decide to not to display ads at all.

·         Ability to export your members and their emails to excel for use with your favorite email marketing software.

·         More file space, up to 20GB

·         Unlimited Bandwidth

·         Unlimited site modifiers

·         Unlimited Support Tickets

·         Unlimited Phone Support

·        

What a week for everyone on the Spruz platform. We have rolled out a lot of changes this week with the forums and other additions. Again I want to thank everyone for helping us by reporting problems and issues you have seen with our latest update 1.99.

Along with what has already been mentioned in our previous posts I want to point out a few cool additions and fixes that have not been mentioned.

• On the forums
  • Added new quick reply box. There will be a forum option to turn this off
  • Added the ability to copy and paste YouTube embed codes into the forum posts, you can even resize it. We will have an option to turn this off.
  • Added setting that allows you to decided if members are required to log in, in order to view the whole forums or just a single forum.
  • Fixed an issue with moving topics, topics are now moveable.
  • Added a new forum element that will display forum activity.
  • Improved the look of the main forum view based on the feedback we received. Thanks for that!
• Other Areas
  • Pay customers can now export member data to excel, this includes names, emails, etc. This is great for dumping into a email program to send out newsletters.
  • Tons of fixes and performance improvements.
• Coming by the end of next week!
  • More options for the forums to give even more control and freedom of choice.
  • New PayPal supported shopping cart with full category support for pay customers.
  • Friendlier Error messages when the occasional error pops up that has expanded functionally to expand on the error that occurs to a user so that we can be more effective with troubleshooting issues within the platform.

"Where are my posts?" All forum post data is there, forum post counts update when someone posts and topic or reply. Your counts will return based on forum activity. If you want to hurry the process make a new post in each forum to have your counts update.

"My forums look centered" This is a rare issue but if it occurs, click on the link forum options then click on reset forum theme/css link in the forum security block.

Remember forum and comment rules are enforce. To get a refresher you can go to http://www.spruz.com/?cmd=blog&nid=252875

To keep up to date with new updates for your website subscribe to our RSS feed at http://www.spruz.com/user/67429/rss_feed/6697.xml

I want to first thank those of you that have made us aware of issues within the new update V1.99 that primarily consisted of an update to the Forums. We have been working hard to address problems and I am sure many of you have noticed that when we are contacted with quality details about a problem they are fixed quickly.

We have incorporated some really great stuff into the new forums. For example you now have full access to all your Icons and Smilies on the forum. This means you can upload your own images and smilies. When it comes to the look we have included access to the CSS file that controls the appearance of the forums or the forums will take on the color scheme of the rest of your website.

In the past 24 hours we have fixed the follow problems:

• Fixed problems with the styles and images being copied to the sites local files.
• Corrected the rating buttons so that will rate posts.
• Corrected a number of styling issues that did effect the appearance on some sites.
• Forum conflicts with site modifiers.
• Improved the font size on the forum view.
• Corrected a problem when Deleting Threads and Replies. Replies would be removed but the thread/topic would stay
• Added a link in forum options so that if the Style Sheet is not copied correctly or is damaged you can reset the theme and file structure.
• Fixed alternating row colors
• Fixed forum ad spot

New additions in the last 24 hours

• Added Forum option: You can set the option to require login for users to view the forums as a whole
• Added Forum option: You can set the option to require login for users to view forums based on the forum.

We are still aware of some page load time issues. If you are effected with page load issues please let us know in a support ticket.

Advisories

I wanted to address some of the most common questions:

"Forums do not show Topic or Replies" Forum counts update when a new topic or reply is added. Thus if you have a forum with posts in it, post a quick topic or wait until someone posts. At that point the counts will update.

"My forums are all centered" This is a problem with files not being copied correctly. Go to Forum options and click on the link to reset theme CSS and images. It is possible that you would see a cached version of the page. Delete your history and temp files if you see not change.

"We want the old forums back!" This brings me to a quote I remember “…people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.” - Terry Pratchett

Comment and Forum Rules

I wanted to let you know I am very disappointed in how some people post comments, on every major update. I have see so many immature posts that I have had no choice but to delete them. We are still beta, because we are still improving and rolling out features that may be largely untested. We give the opportunity to use Spruz completely free, Spruz is one of the few places where, you will see the founders taking there time to personally answer user questions.

Do not post comments that directly insult the creators or staff of Spruz. This includes cursing, name calling, etc. Spruz is developed completely in the US by a very small team. We take Spruz very ser

We have completed our v1.99 update that includes and completely redesigned forums. This makes way for our new page builder. Our new page builder will make it easier to design and layout your pages throughout your website. This is not part of the design editor that handles the theme of a website.

With the forums, like anything new and improved there may be unforeseen problems, issues and bugs. As such your feedback and support on helping to ensure the forums shape up to be as problem free as possible is very important. Please use the support area on your website to report bugs you encounter. Tickets that are not very descriptive will be closed without investigation.

The forums where designed to make it easier for us to expand. The forums will be one area that will see additional advancement over the next several months. If you have ideas or suggestions please post them in our forums at http://www.spruz.com/forums.

Some new features of the forums you will enjoy:

·         New rapid topic and replies posting. Fast loading reply and post editor.

·         New questions post types. This allows for the creation of forums that will allow people to post problems and have other users solve those issues.

·         More control over post types allowed in the forums. You can limit access to discussions, polls and questions by the forum.

·         Ability to approve new topics before they are posted publicly

·         Full control over the Simleys and icons in your forum. Forum icons will be accessible in yo

There have been some changes with the release of the Forums and Page builder or shall I say the 2.0 update. Due to some delays and critical system changes required for the deployment of the new and improved page builder we have decided it would be best to wait release 2.0. We hope to have version 2.0 released by the end of this month.

While this has delayed the Page Builder we have decided to release the new forums with v1.99. As such we want to let you know this is a major update and required a full rewrite of the forums to give it the flexibility and expandability that it deserves. Do not worry, all forum topics, and categories will be carried over.

 Like anything new there will be problems, bugs, and anomalies. We will have a special issue type in the support that reads New Forums, if you have an issue please report it under that issue type.

We will post full details about some of the special highlights with the new forums in a post tomorrow afternoon.

BTW I waited to tell you about the forums to keep the suspense :D