Annoucements
Excited About Your Comments
Category: Annoucements

If you leave a comment on this news post you will now be greeted with your own smiling (or not) profile pic and a friendly speech bubble with your comment.  This is just one of the great changes with the new commenting system.  Other changes include:

Core Commenting – This means that all commenting systems (current and future ones) will have the same look, feel and functionality.

Comment Replies – Reply to other user comments in a nicely nested format, giving a new level of community interaction.

Easy to Read Smart Styling – The speech bubbles will always match your Spruz site colors.  They use the Alternate Row color for their style.

We have also added a brand new and very cool page element called the Discussion.  You can find it in the community elements group.  This allows you to add a discussion to anything so that people can comment.  Say you have a few pics on a page, maybe a video or some text.  Then you place a discussion element under the other content and you have a place for any user to comment.  Now you have an instant discussion!

This is just the start.  The new commenting system will allow even more awesome features to be deployed in the near future, so stay posted.

Have fun and let us know what you think.

grow yourself.™
Win a Custom Theme - Results
Category: Annoucements

A few weeks ago we gave all the upgraded community owners the chance to get a free custom theme designed specifically for them by Spruz (A $400+ Value) and a featured spot on Spruz for a week (Priceless). All we asked is that they write a compelling argument to convince us why their community needed a custom theme to help them grow.

Before we get to the details of the winners I would like to point out that there were several communities that could have won the custom themes but did not because they were not upgraded. Sorry guys, maybe next time around.

Now, without further ado, the communities that will be getting custom themes as well as featured spots on Spruz are (drum roll please) …

DirtyDiaperClub.com – We have seen a lot of effort being put into this community that is specifically for mothers and the struggles that they grow through.  If all of our mothers had a place to relax, let off some steam and get great advice from others I’m sure this world would be a much nicer place. So, Dirty Diaper Club, keep up the great work and we will be contacted soon with information about your new custom theme.

Thr33CityGamers.com – We were glad to see your enthusiasm and a solid plan for the future of your community.  There is a lot of energy here and with an inviting look and the power of the Spruz community platform we are sure this community will go far.  IGN watch out, Thr33 City Gamers has their eyes on your space!  You will be contacted as well regarding the custom design.

To everyone else that was in the running; there were many other great communities listed. And that made narrowing it down to the two above very hard, so keep an eye on the announcements for future contests. Just the fact that you have a Spruz community tells us that you are headed in the right direction, I’m sure we will see more great things from you all.

Spruz [heart] Email
Category: Annoucements

As we continue our push to offer the best website and community services, there tons of feature requests that we get every day. One very highly requested feature is e-mail. It seems all you users are just dying to get your hands on some sweet e-mails to go along with your other great community features.

Well, the wait is over. Spruz has released its first iteration of SpruzMail. Every user can now create an e-mail based on their user name and choose a domain that matches the parent domain of their community.

Creating a free e-mail account is super easy.  If you are creating a new Spruz ID account your e-mail should automatically be created at the same time. If you already have a Spruz ID then you can activate your SpruzMail by going to your account page and clicking the Setup SpruzMail link in the Account Tools section.

After you have your SpruzMail setup you can access your mail at www.spruzmail.com.  We have plans to make it more integrated with the onsite messaging system in the near future, so get things setup and you will be ready to go when we bring it all together.

Some details you should know about SpruzMail:

  • Completely Free
  • 500MB of Storage Space
  • Can Check Your Other Email Accounts
  • Contacts Management
  • Personal Calendar
  • Task Manager

Have fun, this is only the beginning of our plans for SpruzMail so stay tuned.

grow yourself.™
Holiday Goodies
Category: Annoucements

Spruz is well aware of your eagerly outstretched hands this holiday season (you know who you are); so we thought we would get things kicked off early.

Spruz just released two new classy and clean themes both of which you can find in the Modern theme category when creating your site or by going to the Theme Library of your existing site administration.

Softener theme Blue softener theme

Two, brand new, cool and functional Site Modifiers have also been released:

  • One of them is being used in the themes mentioned above and gives you a rounded and white top navigation that is centered on the page. This one can be found in the Navigation category of the Site Modifiers page in your site administration.
  • The other is modifier is in the Header category of your Site Modifiers and displays your header background image in banner style. This will make the header background that you set in the Design Editor centered and not repeating; as well as making the header height match the height of your background image so that you see your full banner.

Well, that should give you some things to play around with while you munch on your leftover turkey sandwich.

grow yourself.™

Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger - Communities
Category: Annoucements

In the culmination of months of planning, we have just released the first build of the new community page on Spruz.com.  It already has more information and is more flexible than before, but the best part is it’s fully extensible so you will be seeing more cool stuff on the page as the days progress.

Here’s a rundown of the changes to help you jump right in and start using it.

  • The search bar at the top allows you to search all the communities on the site.
  • The community browsing has been formatted into a smaller more dynamic tab structure.  All the categories and sub categories still exist; just hover over a top level category tab to have access to the categories under it.
  • Community highlights are just below the browsing tabs.  They show category specific information, such as “Fastest Growing Communities”, “Popular Forum Threads”, etc. They show information based on the category that is selected. (Very cool and fun to browse through)  We will be adding more highlight boxes that you can browse through with side to side arrows.
  • The browsing and search results have been reformatted to show the relevant information about that community more effectively; including member pictures of actual people in the community with links to their profiles.

All in all, some great tools to bring people and communities together.  And even more are coming in the future.

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