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

I'm a strong believer in cutting through the clutter and getting to the point of things. Sadly I made you read these introduction lines, which only delayed getting into all the great stuff we have in our Community Spotlight.

Today we have applied an update that no longer requires someone to pick a unique display name. The Spruz platform uses a global member system, so that when someone joins any website in our network they can easily join another website on the platform without having to register all over again. This has its advantages and some disadvantages such as our requirement to having picking a unique name that was not already in use on the platform by someone else.

So just like in real life where there is more then one John Smith in the world, so is the case on the Spruz Platform from this day forward. I am sure many of you will welcome this change as it has been, a bit of a problem for people that feel they should be able to select a name that was already taken.

 We are hoping in the future to have a feature where display names can be unique to just the website a member is on. But without major changes and a good chance of breaking a few things, this feature is several months out.

This should improve the number of registrations since it reduces a friction point in the registration process.

This week's Community Spotlight is finally finished. My apologies for the delay, but sadly it was unavoidable.

Community of the Week

It's my honor to announce that Growing Forward is the Community of the Week! The site is owned an operated by IanDigs, a forum regular that I'm sure many of you have interacted with.

Visitors are greeted with a welcome message that draws them in to the rest of the site by highlighting some of the main features that can be had there. As you scroll down the home page it soon becomes clear that community is central to the entire site. The community centric elements create a buzz around the entire website that makes you interested in what else is going on.

Something that really stuck out to me was how open the leadership seemed to be. Simple touches such as displaying the site moderators show potential members that they are there to help them and interact. One of the worst things a moderator can do is make themselves untouchable to the rest of the community. People need to know that the leadership is interested in hearing from and interacting with regular members.

Congratulations to IanDigs and all the members of Growing Forward. Feel free to stop by the site's introduction to learn more.

Remember that we have six more sites to be featured for the first Spruz Community Competition. If you'd like your site to be featured post an introduction that follows the guidelines we've provided. If you've already posted an introduction we wish you the best of luck!

Suggestion of the Week

This week's suggestion comes from PS3plus, who recommends that site administrators be allowed to make all member profiles on their site "friend only" viewing access. He suggests that this would make protecting the privacy of members easier for site admins, while being optional for those who want an "open" site. Stop by the topic to provide your feedback on the idea. 

Feel free to share your opinions on this idea, if you'd use it and any other suggestions you have to improve it.

Tip of the Week

Maintaining a website can be hard work, but creating an "Admin Page" can help. Learn more by reading this topic in the Tips and Tricks forum.

If there's a tip you think other site owners would find helpful please post it in this topic.

As the popularity of our website platform has increased so have the bots and over the last few years we have had a few different measures in place to prevent bots from registering accounts, then spamming members. Bot detection is a tricky area, people that use Bots to exploit registration systems to spam members or cause harm to the platform are nothing more then amateur hackers. Our goal with our original "passive Captcha (challenge-response) type system" was something you may have never been aware of. We used triggers to detect if a user was real or bot, this method also allowed us to avoid using the sometimes cryptic image Captcha systems for a long time. Unfortunately we have discovered that the bot makers have found a way around this system.

A few weeks ago we added an image Captcha system, this required people registering to enter a series of numbers and letters into box on registration page from an image with lines and static.

However this was soon bypassed as well because some bots have what is called OCR technology. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and that allows bots to read the Captcha Code, then enter it into the registration form. In order to resolve this new issue we had 2 choice; add more letters and number with more static and lines (Make it harder for bots and your members to register) or develop a brand new, never seen before Captcha Method that would really keep the bots at bay. To give you an idea of the problem, we track bot attempts and have an algorithm we developed to see if an account is a bot or not after the fact. This allows us to judge the problem and shift resource if/when needed to further combat the issue. In the last 7 day period over 10,000 attempts were made by Bots to register accounts on websites in our network, out of that number about 1500 accounts were registered and on Spruz.com about 400 websites were created as a direct result of bot registrations.

Today I am happy to announce we have in place a new Captcha System that we been developing in order to deploy a system that was easy to use for the user registering but impossible for Bots with newer and more advanced OCR technology to figure out.

This system works by displaying an image generated on the fly with 3 randomly placed picture icons placed within the image, then indicating to the member what images they must click on and in what order. Thus instead of your member having to read a cryptic message then type it out, they pick/click 2 of the icons in the order we set to verify they a real person and not a bot. Since deployment yesterday we have seen 0 registrations out of 1,500 bot registration attempt in the last 24 hours.

Keeping your personal, business, or group website/network secure and spam free is a very important part of why you use the Spruz Website Platform for your social space.

Like anything new, there is room for improvement, bugs that may popup, etc. Please report problems in a support ticket to us, this allows us to personally address your issue with you, and more then likely fixes a problem for many others that have not experienced the problem you are reporting yet.

We have gotten quite a bit of feedback in the suggestion box regarding more page layout options. (The way the sections are laid out on the page for you to drag elements into.) We read through each person’s suggestions. And based on that, we have put together two new page layouts that work well within the platform and will be the most beneficial to all our users. The new layouts are highlighted below: