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

First we want to thank everyone for your patience during our maintenance period, our datacenter maintenance took longer then planned. This maintenance was enforced by our datacenter due to an power related issue, thus causing them to have to move over half of our hardware to a new floor in the building. If we left this unchecked we would have had some major unplanned outage issues.

We want to take this time to address some common questions about downtime.

1. How often does this happen? The last time we had downtime that lasted more then 30 minutes was about 6 months ago and was an unplanned outage. No matter how you try or how much redundancy you have in place, things fail.
2. Do you give notice? We do when we have advance warning of a problem or repair, we issue notices within our with Newsletters, and admin announcements in your Admin Alerts on your site. We do this so you can pass the word to your people. We ask you to make sure you have Spruz.com set as a safe sender so our mail does not get flagged as spam.
3. Do you give credit for downtime? If you are a paying enterprise client we do credit in relation to downtime you experience. We use the following formula: 1 day credit for each 30 minutes of network downtime. By having this type of penalty in place keeps us in check with complete network downtime

Once again we thank you for your support and patience. Should be smooth sailing from here on out!

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.

Today we completed our update that brings new expanded customization to profile questions. While we hoped this update would go smoothly we had to take down the networks for about 30 minutes today in order to free up data resources to update accounts with a new data structure.

On your website you can add custom questions that people can fill out as part of the registration process and/or customize on their profile page. To customize this improved feature go to your Site Settings > Manage Settings > Member Questions.

Highlights of the improvements;

1. 3 new field types (Check Boxes, Calendar, and Web Address)
2. New Options to set if a question is Publicly displayed on a persons profile, Required, And Ask at Registration
3. Ask as registration is a new feature that replaced the old system of Custom Registration Questions. Now information you ask at registration can be displayed publicly on a persons profile or viewed by Admins only for referencing additional details.
4. Custom Questions are exportable when exporting members
5. We have improved the over all data storage structure for the custom questions. You can now freely change questions without the possibility of resetting everyone's answered questions.

We hope you enjoy this feature improvement. As mentioned in previous posts much more is on the way!

As a reminder, posting problems in comments will not fix an issue. Please report problems you encounter in a support ticket so we can fix the problem for you and everyone eles.

We have just released a large update that includes improvements based on a lot of feedback we have been receiving. Here’s the breakdown:

Groups Discussion - We have added edit and delete options to group discussion threads, as well as a full structure re-design to make it easier to use. We have also added a paging system to the discussion topics as well, so you can view all topics on posted in the groups discussions. Along with this we have also updated the style and structure on the profile shout box to have the same look and feel as the new group discussions.

Commenting - All plain text commenting sections have been updated so that they auto-link URLs and turn image and YouTube URLs into Thumbnail Images and Playable Videos.

Design – We‘ve added some new design controls allowing you to change the position of the Welcome/Login line at the top of your site, and change the font and font size of element headers. If you change these options and you don’t see any change you may have a design modifier that is controlling the setting on your theme. To manage modifiers you can go to Appearance > Customize > Theme Modifiers on your site manage bar.

Additionally, we have updated the rich text editor used throughout the sites. The update includes a large number of functionality tweaks and bug fixes.

Other fixes and improvements include:

• Fixed an issue with setting the member start page.
• Fixed an issue that caused the e-mail not to get sent notifying of members waiting for approval.
• Added a more helpful and friendly message for users that tried to register that already had an account. (giving them an easy route to login)

Tomorrow we should have out updated completed regarding the new member registration and profile questions customization system.

As always, if you encounter problems please let us know by opening up a support ticket. We welcome your throughts, suggestions and feedback!

At Spruz we are thrilled that so many people from Ning are making Spruz their top choice for a platform to switch to. We want you all to know we have a whole list of improvements we are working on right now! We are rolling out updates daily to the platform to address issues, add new functions, make things easier and improve old features.

Updates we completed over the last few days include;

1. New Member Invite Page. We added importing from your favorite email programs like Gmail and Yahoo, a new invite link you can share with other, and made the page much easier to understand
2. Group Improvements. Group featuring was implemented, group admin options now display under the group description, and the Groups Element now has an option to change the default sorting of groups. But it doesn't end there, we are working on several other things involving the Groups system.
3. New Member Photos & Seach Page was added. This page lists member collections, searching photos and allows for photo featuring. To add this page click on New Page > Members Photos page.
4. Plus we have smashed a number of small bugs, and made some performance tweaks.

Here is a quick peak of  major updates in development right now and should be rolled out to the community over the next 6 weeks.

1. Customizing System Text. This feature will allow you to customize system text on elements, pages and other systems, you will also be able to share your System Templates. This should help open up the platform for other languages as well.
2. New Custom Registration Questions/Profile Questions. This is a replacement to the current system of custom registration questions. You will be able to make questions public or private and they will all be exporting.
3. Member Featuring. Will allow you to feature your best members
4. Web Ring. This is a new element that allows you to automatically trade links with other networks on the Spruz platform.
5. Admin Log. This will display activity like when a page is changed or something is removed by an admin.
6. Email Notification Improvements. Based on feedback from our new new friends coming over from Ning, we are making corrections to some things missing with email notifications on the that we are working on improving.

Coming from Ning? Do you have suggestion for us that could make something easier for you, or maybe a feature you miss? Let us know in our Idea Room forum.