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.

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.

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.

It's time for another Community Spotlight, and after the changes we've made I think it's fitting to jump right in...

Community of the Week

We're happy to announce 56th D Battery Milligoons as the first site to be featured as the Community of the Week! The site is owned an operated by Kanoobi, a long time member on the community.

When I first visited the site it was obvious to me that a lot of time had been put into creating it. The home page makes great use of custom coding and images, which together make the rest of the site very inviting and provide you with great feel for why the site was created. Even though there are a lot of different elements used, the design and positioning of those elements ensures that browsing doesn't feel like work.

Kanoobi's description of the site's purpose is as follows: "To provide a platform where myself and my friends could meet up and discuss our hobby of PC gaming,  and to also provide useful tools such as Server Statistics and Ventrilo Server Status." By browsing through the forums you realize that there's a dedicated and close knit group within the site's pages, which is always great to see.

Congratulations to Kanoobi and all the members of the 56th D Battery Milligoons. Feel free to stop by the site's introduction if you haven't done so already.

Remember that we have seven more sites to be featured for the first Spruz Community Competition announced last week. 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 is short and sweet. AareuZ suggested that administrators be allowed to lock a member's account for a specific amount of time, which would be unlocked automatically once the time period has passed. He brings up the point that it can be difficult for site moderators to keep up with those they want to ban for a short period of time among everything else that's necessary to run a website.

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

Did you know that it's possible to change the image used for both the poll element and forum polls? Read this forum topic to learn more about it!

We're still planning to add the element that displays a random tip on the home page, but it's not quite ready yet. We'll be adding it this weekend for sure. If there's a tip you think other site owners would find helpful please post it in this topic.

Read on for a more thorough description of each, as well as a brand new competition we're starting!

Community of the Week and Competition

The Spruz platform is used by an amazingly wide range of websites, and up until now there hasn't been a way for us to showcase them. We will be highlighting one site a week from our community that we believe represents the Spruz platform well, providing the members of the community with a description of the site and a chance to see what other site owners have done with their website.

Once eight communities have been highlighted we will allow you, the members of this community, to vote on which of the eight you like the most. Voting will last for five days, at which point a winner will be announced. The winner will receive the following from the Spruz team:

• Six month upgrade for their site of up to $20 a month
• A featured spot on the Spruz homepage with a link to their site for two months
• Name announced to all website owners on the Spruz platform with a link to their site
• Spruz t-shirt

In order to be eligible you must create an introduction of your site using the format we've provided in the Introduce Your Website forum category. We will be reviewing each site that posts an introduction, so it's important to make a good first impression!

Suggestion of the Week

The Spruz development team has always taken great interest in what the members of this community want to see improved or added to the Spruz platform, and that's certainly not going to change! We will be featuring one suggestion that we'd like more feedback on, consisting of a short description of the idea, credit to the original poster and a link to the topic in the forum. The more people that support an idea, the more likely it'll be added!

Tip of the Week

As mentioned at the beginning of the news post, we want to do everything we can to help you improve your site. Each week we'll provide you with at least one thing you can do to create a better experience for your users that you might not have known about before. If there's something you think other site owners would find helpful please post it in this topic.

Each tip will be added to a brand new element we'll be adding to the home page this week which will display a random tip. Our goal is that you learn something new each time you visit the community.

In Conclusion

We hope you'll enjoy the changes we've made to the Community Spotlight. Since this is such a big change we'll be keeping a close eye on how it all works out and make adjustments as we feel they are needed. As always we're open to any suggestions you have. This is your community!

Site Management Changes

Our business depends on keeping as many new users as possible, we collect a ton of feedback from people that choose to no longer use our solution for a range of reasons. To improve this retention, a key issue we needed to address, we made changes to make customizing the website a little more intuitive.

On the management bar we have removed the "Members" drop down and Changed the name of "Site" to "Your Site". "Your Site" is more centric to managing the most common website features, view and manage your website members, see site activity, control your advertisements, member subscription module and access the file systems. We have also renamed the New Page and Manage Tabs & Pages. New Page is Now "Add Page or Feature" and "Manage Tabs & Pages" is now "Manage Pages & Links".

The "This Page" Menu option has been replaced with a new floating Page Tools box. This box will display on pages that can be customized and give options to add page elements, widgets,  change the page layout, delete the page, and add a new page. The new tool box can be positioned and you can change it's display format.

The "Settings" Menu option still has the options to change your Site Settings, Profile Settings, and Edit Custom Scripting. We have moved Site Intro, Word Filter Management, and Favicon uploading to this section. You will also notice a the IM settings has been removed and a new Skysa Bar option has been added.

On pages that are feature pages (Videos, Blog, Etc) some use a core "Feature" element for the main component for these sections. Many times a user will delete or move the core element then wonder why it does not work correctly and understanding how to edit the settings such as who can post was hard to find because it used the same edit option that is on all elements. To correct these issues now on elements that are critical to a feature, you can not delete the element and we changed edit to Feature Settings on hovering over that element.

Customizable Login Menu and Member Settings Change

Thanks to our new update you can now fully customize the Login Menu. This is the menu that has the Login and Register links, and displays Your Home, Inbox and so on when logged into the website. This is an advanced feature and only recommend for users that understand HTML. To customize your login menus go to the Site Settings Page and click on "Edit Login Menu Templates". View our last Blog Entry that highlights the potential of this update.

You will notice that member settings has been moved from the profile page to the Login Menu. This was done for several reasons, one it was hard for users to find where they can change their email and password.

Removal of the Spruz IM Bar

While the IM bar was a new feature (Launched last October), it came with a great deal of overhead and maintenance. Last month we posted about the removal of the IM bar feature and the day has come for it to be phased out. However you can still have an IM bar for your website using Skysa, as many of you know Skysa is developed by the Founders of Spruz and is a new service offering that can be used with any website or blog. Skysa has additional Apps that carry special integration with Spruz powered websites.

Coming Soon...

We do go through topics in idea room regularly, we have several new improvements and features coming soon that will bring added value to your Spruz powered website.

We hope our website owners will like the changes within this update, we know some of you may not. But change is an important part of growth and while some of you may not understand the reasons behind some of our updates, it is all to help move the platform forward. If these changes cause you inconvenience because of the management area changes, we hope you understand and take a few moments to relearn where things are located.

Because of the changes within this update, I want to remind you to keep comments constructive. If you have an issue or problem please open a bug report ticket.

Before we get started I'd like to inform everyone of a major change we've made to the "Introduce Your Site" forum category. This link will take you to a topic where we've posted a format for any website introductions. We ask that you copy and paste the format into a new thread and fill in all the questions asked. This is a necessary change that paves the way for some exciting things we have planned for the Owner's Community. All future introductions must use the new format; those that do not will not be approved. We encourage those that have already posted an introduction to revise it using the new format.

When logged into www.spruz.com you will now see just Account and Support Ticket Links in the login area at the top of the page rather then Your Home, Inbox, Etc. Clicking on Account takes you to a new website information page that list the websites you own, presents options to automatically load your manager, access support tickets or delete the website if needed.

We were able to customize the login menu area thanks to a new customization feature we have added, this new feature will be available on your website soon.

Our new login area customization has templates for Vistor (Login/Register), Invite Only websites and Logged in Member. Remember Spruz.com uses the same platform that you are using for your website, thus we have the same tools to customize our website as you. It has always been our goal to provide the most customizable, and robust, hosted social website solution on the net. When login menu customization is publicly released, you can do all sorts of cool things like make your own member account page. We hope to have this feature open for all in the next month or so.

Because this is so new there may be changes to how it works in the future. For the time being you'll find the forum topic's name with a link back to the topic, along with a few of the main points brought up by either the original poster or other members. Feel free to stop by these topics and voice your opinion as well. If you have any suggestions for the Owners' Community website remember that you can post them in this thread.

Have a great weekend everyone!
 

Disclaimer 1: Just because an idea appears on this list does NOT mean that the developers will be working on it. This list is provided just to help them chart out possible future updates and to get a general overview of what the members are saying. Spruz maintains the right to plan updates as they see fit.

Disclaimer 2: Only threads that had at least one community member other than the original poster are featured in this list.

'Reply' option on [profile] comments

• Tainted_Zeal: It would be nice for us to have the ability to reply to comments left on our profiles like we're able to with blogs. This could also be added to pictures.
• Four other members stopped by to give their support.

Move pics in Collections & Choose cover pic

• Tainted_Zeal: It would be helpful to move pictures in albums, as well as select what picture we want to be the cover of the album.
• jay314431: Spent a long time naming and organizing their pictures before uploading, only to have them to upload in a different order. Wanted to upload them as a timeline so the reordering ruined their plans.

Users can rate the Blog Posts

• The Angry Movie Dork: Give users the ability to rate blog posts on a scale from 1-5 if they're logged in.
• Josh Soderling: It should be made a "standard" for all releases Spruz makes.
• randya: It shouldn't stop with blogs. Photos, forums, profiles and all the other systems should have this built into it. The ratings would all tie in together to give each user an individual rating to reflect their contribution to the site.
• Edvard D: Combining it with the future "Points System" might be a good idea as well.
• The Angry Movie Dork: The expanded ideas are good, but not everyone would want to use it. People should have a choice as to what systems are included. Why would we want to rate users?
• Edvard D: People wouldn't rate users directly, they would just rate the content they post. This encourages everyone to improve the quality of what they're sharing on your website.
• meuslix: There needs to be elements added to the system to show the rating.

Would you want to see the word "post" instead of "save" when you publish a comment/reply?

• kanoobi: It should say "post" when you make the initial post, and "save" when you edit it.
• Kirumiri: You get used to it after a while, but it's still awkward when you post something.
• The thread has received 16 votes for it to be changed.

File Manager Update

• AdamThiele: A major problem with the file manager is that it's impossible to move files around.
• kanoobi: Good point but may be difficult to add. Right now we have to re upload them to the correct file.
   

More topics coming next week! In the future we plan to expand the selection of forum topics covered beyond just the Idea Room, but we're going to take it slow to ensure everything's done correctly. This week's list is more or less a "test" to see what things we need to change in the future. Let us know what you think and what topics you thought should have been added to the list!

One other part of this update included some changes to your member management page. We have renamed the link Member List to Manage Members in your management mode and added some new functionality.

On your Member Management page you will see the green edit icon has been replaced with an eye glass icon that now launches a micro profile with some improvements. When managing your member you can now view the files and file space that member is using, upload a profile pick for them, and if you are a premium member you will see their Email address and IP Address.

Thank you for your patience during this period as there were some unplanned issues that had popped up. But we worked them out and everything should be working good now. Remember if you see problems (BUGS) report them in a support ticket. Posting in the comments or forums will not resolve bugs.

Skysa is a website App Footer bar you can add to your Spruz powered website that features many different apps including live chat, IM, commenting, Facebook and much more. In addition Skysa will soon have a friends online messaging App just like the one that is currently on our IM bar. If you have a premium account before Feb 1st you can request a 1 year free branding removal from Skysa by emailing help@skysa.com with your account email address.

The reason for this is this allows us to focus development resources that would be spent on improving the current integrated IM bar and IM features on other features and improvements within the Spruz platform. In addition since we develop the Skysa bar, this makes it easier for us to centralized development resources.

RPX now (www.rpxnow.com) allows you to offer alternate signup methods to future members of your website. For more info on Adding Single Sign on to your website please read our knowledge base article.

We have also corrected a problem pointing out that allowed people to post CSS into the shout box on profiles. This problem was corrected. The Member Shout box no longer allows any HTML to be posted when posting a shout.

Please remember, when you report problems to use, you not only help solve an issue you might be experiencing but you help others that use our platform as well. The proper way to report problem is via a support ticket. Support tickets allow us to properly track and resolve issues. Report all bugs in a support ticket.

On thing that is cool about Skysa is some of their apps are member orientated and require login, such as the Chat or Commenting apps. But, when using the bar on your Spruz powered website if your member is logged in they will be able to use the member related features of the Skysa bar without having to create an account with Skysa as well.

You can add Skysa to your website by going to www.skysa.com. You will notice we have added the Skysa bar to the owners community as well.

To add the chat room, enter your website management mode, then click on Site> New page and select Chat Room from the features list.

Fixes and Improvements Applied:

• The white box bug for IE7 users has been fixed. This corrects and issue where a large white box would appear at the page footer of your website.
• We have increased the idle timer on the live features like IM and Whos Online Tracking to 10 minutes from 5 minutes. This feature places a user offline if they have not moved their mouse or typed a key after a length of time. This is done to reduce page load since once a user leaves there computer the page still polls for activity. This action is has the highest resource demands on our servers. Our goal over the next few months is to achieve an idle timeout of 30 minutes, as long as performance holds.
• Fixed the IM and chat room time stamp to reflect the correct time based on the viewers location.
• An issue has been corrected with Alerts in the Management bar that prevented you from seeing all older alerts, thus preventing you from reading them so they can be flagged as read.

We hope you will enjoy the new chat room, please free free to give us your feedback, so we can see what improvements you and other members would like to see first in the future.

Happy Holidays,
The Spruz Team

• A new improvement has been added to the new IM bar, when viewing your friends list you now have an Arrow that when clicked will take you to the page your friend is currently viewing
• We corrected a problem with forum topic subscriptions. In some cases when subscribed to a forum topic email notices were not getting sent when a new reply is posted.
• On Videos Box element when changing the display type it now now properly changes the item formatting
• Custom Smiles are back! You should now see your custom smiles when clicking on the smile button on any editor that has the smile option.
• We fixed a few typos that were pointed out to us on the new IM bar

Coming Soon... "next 1-6 weeks"

• Chat Room is almost ready for release, should be by the end of this week!
• Spruz home page revamp
• A couple new elements for site photos, and the link directory
• Plus we have been working hard on several other new additions such as the Wiki/Content Page system finished and a new audio type gallery with player.

If you do not see a new feature that we mention, you may need to clear your browser cache and refresh your site. Remember as you report bugs or usability issues to us using support tickets not only helps you with your issue but improves our website platform for everyone.