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

You need to be aware that on Friday May 7th at 10AM EDT your website will be offline. Data Center Operations has alerted us to a power condition that could cause unexpected problems with our infrastructure and they must take down a large number of our servers in order to relocate them to a new part of the Data Center.

The downtime should not last longer than 1 hour.

This will effect all websites in our network, we are sorry we could not provide more warning, but this is an emergency condition.

Can Self-Funded Win Out Against Investor-Funded?

KNOXVILLE, TN, May 4, 2010 – The social platform industry was shaken up recently with Ning's announcement that it would be forcing its free sites to upgrade or leave. Almost immediately after the announcement former free Ning users who no longer had a home for their community started looking for alternatives. Comments left on news articles about Ning's announcement revealed an underlying fear many of them had about switching to another free service: if the industry leader wasn't able to make it, how could any of the alternatives?

While other companies have shied away from answering this question, Spruz -- a free social website platform much like Ning -- has provided a direct response to it. "The bottom-line difference between Spruz and Ning is that we are a self-funded company that is already profitable," stated Jay Roberts, founder of Spruz, who went on to say, "While Ning had $120 million in investment from outside sources, Spruz has always operated as a boot-strapped company. This has resulted in our business model being completely sustainable from the ground up, with free sites being an integral part of it."

Other mentioned alternatives to Ning include Grou.ps and SocialGo, both with substantial funding. Startups who accept funds from outside sources have the difficult task of turning a profit much larger than necessary to maintain the service they provide, as most investors are interested in the acquisition value of a company. Jay Roberts added that, "Spruz has already experienced tremendous growth since Ning's announcement, requiring us to increase our staff and deploy additional hardware. The fact that we are profitable and have no venture funding means we are able to grow to meet the demands of our users without fear of imploding. We're looking forward to welcoming anyone looking for a stable platform to move their community to."

So, self-funded or investor-funded? The fate of Ning may serve as a very telling answer.

Jay Roberts explains the How Spruz Freemium is sustainable in http://my.spruz.com/pt/How-is-Spruz-Freemium-Sustainable/blog.htm

Spruz launched in 2007 as a hosted social website solution that makes it easy to create your own public or private community website about anything.

The votes are in and your voices have been heard. The winner of our first Community of the Week competition is:

Mass Themes

They have won a $120 account credit to upgrade their website, a Spruz T-Shirt and will be placed on the Spruz home page for two months! We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all those that submitted an introduction and those that voted. We hope you all enjoyed this community event!

Unfortunately two sites had to be disqualified. We are in the process of notifying them as to the reason why.

Now as to the future of the Community Spotlight. We've learned a lot from these past few weeks, and are very pleased with the community interaction created as a result of the Community Spotlight. To help foster this even further we will be extending an invitation to the communities that were the runner ups during this past round of voting to join a committee that will be selecting the next eight communities. They will be contacted shortly with more details.

We'll be posting the next Community Spotlight this upcoming Saturday, where we'll once again highlight a Community of the Week, Suggestion of the Week and Tip of the Week. Once eight Community Spotlights have been posted we'll open up voting once again and allow you to choose your favorite.

The purpose of the Community of the Week competition has always been to highlight members that have put time and energy into making their community something special. We're looking forward to seeing an introduction for your site and possibly selecting it as the Community of the Week!

We have just completed our latest round of updates, at Spruz we work hard to receptive to your feedback and act upon it for the good of everyone.

New Site Activity Log has been added

The next time you are in you management mode click on Your Site, then Site Activity. We have added a new feature that is focused on showing site changes, not to be confused with Member Activity. The new site activity log is designed to show you when admin related functions are used. This was put in place to help sites that have more then one administrator. The log should show when a new page is added, elements deleted, forum topics are approved and so on. We hope this helps make it easier for you to track what Admins are making changes to what. This is a new feature will be improved on over time thanks to your future feedback, but keep in mind this feature is not designed to track member related actions.

Email Notifications Changes

This week we have been working hard on reworking our email notifications so your website communicates better with your members. Some areas we have improved in the first of our series of changes to email notifications;

• Forums Subscriptions - Now when a person posts a topic or reply to a topic in the forums they will be automatically subscribed to that forum thread. We have added the option to turn on and off the Auto Subscribe Feature
• Group Notices - Groups have a few new options this week. Members of groups can control email notices by the group. If the member has email notices is turned on for a specific group they will get email updates on things like new members, topic posts and replies, etc.
• We have fixed an issue when someone joins with an account already registered it would not send an email notice.

We still have more improvements that remain in this area that will be completed through next week.

Other changes include;

1. Fixed an issue with adding images with UPPER case file extensions in several areas of the Appearance tools. This should now work fine in all areas, as well as when you preview your theme changes, which used to also exclude any images that had their file extension in caps.
2. Fixed a problem with previewing theme background images added in modifiers or in CSS mode (and seeing that part of the theme when in manage mode at all) if the image url had quotes around it.
3. Corrected a bug with moving the position of some things in the appearance tools. Right Header Image and Login Menu had an error when you tried to move them in some browsers.
4. We added the ability to set your sharing method on the Blogs. Facebook Like is the default setting
5. When clicking on the comments link on blog entries it should scroll to the comments section.
6. The Shout box/Comment box on profiles has been changed to move the field for posting a comment to the top.
7. Corrected a display problem with our comments box on the downloads system. The box displayed at the top of the file information instead of below it.
8. Plus a number of other small adjustments.

We hope you enjoy these updates! As mentioned in our post The Ning Push! Updates are coming, we have more things on the way. Like with any major changes, please tell us about problems or bugs using our support tickets.

We're coming to the close of our first round of Community Spotlights, with voting ending this Friday at 11:59 pm (this was changed from the previously announced 7 am). The winner will be announced Saturday the 1st and will receive 6 months worth of free hosting with Spruz ($20 a month), a featured spot on www.Spruz.com, and a free Spruz t-shirt. Get your vote in as soon as possible!

At this point you may be wondering how we selected the eight sites and how you can have a chance at our next round of prizes; it's actually much easier than you might have thought!

Sites featured as the Community of the Week are selected based off of the introduction they post in the Introduce Your Website forum. All introductions must use our guidelines in order to be approved. If a site is selected it will appear as the Community of the Week in our weekly "Community Spotlight" article that is posted every Saturday, along with a Suggestion and Tip of the Week.

The end goal of the Community Spotlight and the Community of the Week is not to find the best sites within our platform, but rather to recognize website owners that have put forth effort to make their piece of the internet something special. We hope it will continue to bring this community of site owners together and provide you with inspiration as to what's possible with the Spruz platform.