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

We’ve been making some improvements recently to the Spruz.com website to better reflect our comitment to our site owners.

With the addition of a Featured Websites section on the Spruz home page, we are able to shocase Spruz Pro websites. This area will bring more traffic and exposure for your community.

Another change that we have made is an overhaul of the Spruz forums.  We now have a better organization structure for you to suggest feature improvments and knock ideas around with us. This is part of a bigger thrust on our part to connect even more with our users and invest resources into the features that you want most.

We have added 2 new elements that tie into the forum information. These elements include a recent posts that will display posts from all forums based on the person viewing the list and there set Access Level and we have added a top forum posters element so you can display the top people based by post values.

You can see some examples of these new elements that I have added to a page on Spruz:

Get ready people, we have many new updates and elements coming to you on a weekly basis.

Tell us what you want to see updated or added!

What do you think about: a classifieds listing component, or a component that allows you or your users to post How-To?

All other feedback please post in our suggestion forum at http://www.spruz.com/forums/?page=t&fid=124481

How does $24/year sound?  Let me explain..

The Spruz community is very close to our hearts; as evidenced by the past few years of blood, sweat and tears that we have poored into it. Because of all that we have sacrificed to build the platform and grow our community it was an extremely difficult decision that we made recently to go to a pay only solution, but it was also the needed one. You see, over the last 6 months we have witnessed Spruz growing in a way that would soon cause it to collapse under its own weight. Because of the unrestrictive and user oriented expirince we have been dedicated to provide for our members, we were not able to make enough off of the advertising to cover even our hardware costs.

Already, with less than a week into the change, we have been able to provide much better proformance than was possible with the old model. We have also been able to make improvments to our already industry leading custormer service and support as well. These are huge triumphs and are just the beginning of the premium quality service that we are dedicated to provide to our customers.

Although we know that the change was something that we HAD to do, we strongly empathise with the financial position of some of our current users. Over the past few days we have worked closely with several of our users to create a limited version of Spruz that provides the features required by the majority of the existing site owners. We have worked it down to a price point that is within budget for all the site owners that we have been in cantact with, only $24/year. So now for the price of one redbull a month, you and your site members can take advantage of what Spruz has to offer.

To see a great comparison of how the packages, Spruz Lite and Spruz Pro, stack up take a look at our plans page.

To purchase the new Spruz Lite package or any of the other upgardes we provide (such as adding your own .com) you can go to the upgrade page.

Now that we have tackled the huge updates, infact total rewrites, of the Content management system and the forums; we are going full force into our next big area users are requesting improvement: Themes and Design

I’m not going to devulge all that we have planed for this update, but will instead go over some of the effects that it will have.

• Higher quality and much more variety of themes, both free and premium.
• Easier installation of purchased or shared themes.
• All existing themes will work smoothly, so no worries that this update will break your existing look.
• Streamlined premium theme purchases.

We are working hard on this update, but it will take some time to get it ready for release.  While you wait, I suggest heading over to Game Site Templates' Spruz themes page. They do some great work and are very affordable. Also they have released a sweet new premium theme completely free; you can check it out here.

As a side note: what do you guys think of the re-designed Spruz home page? It’s pretty minimal at the moment, but we do plan on soon adding a section on the new home page where we will showcase popular and intresting communites from the Spruz network.

We have expanded our support options for you!

We have removed the limitation on support tickets due to the move to premium services. This allows you to request help without having to worry about running out of ticket requests and we are trying out a new live chat program for Sales and Support requests. If all goes well you will be able to count on live chat for your quick questions about your site, or upgrading, we are also looking for volunteers to help with live chat in exchange for free service. To inquire about this email jobs [at] spruz.com

We are happy to report we have fixed an issue with the forum thread view that has greatly increased the speed of the thread view. We have brought the daily average load time from 7.5 seconds down to 1.1 seconds based on our reporting.

On our own forums we have reset most forums due to the start of our new premium only offering. You can visit our forums at http://www.spruz.com/forums to post about your site, help requests, or just to say hi. We also have a suggestion forum that we will be looking at weekly for new additions we can make to our platform.