Update for February 25th, 2009

It's only Wednesday, but I wanted to post here because I'm not going to get a chance this Friday.

In case you missed the calendar event, Nichole and I are going on vacation tomorrow for a week.  She and I, along with her sister, are going to Key West for our first real vacation together in the 7+ years we've been a couple.  We've gone to her folks up in Minnesota a few times, but that's not really a vacation per se, as we mostly just spend our time visiting with them.

I don't believe I'll be online that whole time, but we'll see.  If I am not online, that means that of course I won't be here to do the things I typically do, like deliver mods people purchase, deal with administrative issues, help folks, build mods, etc.  Now while the rest of the staff can take care of most of this without me, they don't have copies of my commercial mods to deliver them to people who buy them, nor do they have access to the PayPal account to verify the transaction.  So any sales made during this next week are almost certainly not going to be delivered until I get back.  You can buy stuff during then if you want, but just don't complain that it wasn't announced that you wouldn't be getting it.  I will send out all pending sales I currently have prior to their 72 hour hold time before I leave tonight.

Next, I wanted to talk a little bit about what I've been working on with IPB3.  I have been continuing to work with the hooks system and learning how to make my mods even better.  Recently I updated the few 3.0 mods I have released so far with some tweaks to them.  The version checking code is in place and seems to be working well, although it does appear to me that is slows down the page a bit.  That may be an issue for folks who install a lot of mods.  We'll have to see what impact it has as we get more and more 3.0 mods to play with.

I will probably try and release a new update for a couple mods too to deal with some un-needed settings they have.  In 2.x, I often added a global 'on/off' setting to mods in their settings pages so that you could quickly toggle the mod on or off.  Because in 3.0 you can disable hooks/applications and it works like expected, the need for this setting doesn't exist anymore.  But since I converted the mods as straightly as possible, those old settings carried over.  I'll need to adjust them to no longer have these.

Currently I'm working on updating the Group Name Indicator mod.  I'm planning on making a fancy ajax effect where you can reorder the names just like you do on the applications/hooks pages, by dragging and dropping the item in the order you want.  I have found that adding the actual list of group names to the board index is quite easy, I don't even need to build a new cache like the 2.x series used.  But it is looking like I will have to drop the option to sort member names by the order of the groups.  There doesn't appear to be any good way to hook into that area to do the reordering without having to just overload the whole class/function and re-do much of its work.  I'm hoping there's no backlash from this decision, the really important part of the mod is just the group name list, though.

Finally I want to touch on the issue of software piracy again.  As I have often stated, I don't have any patience for this.  I am a busy man, and I do IP.Board work as a hobby when I should be doing other things.  But I enjoy what I do, and I have been a paying customer of the folks who make the software to show my support.  But I do not want to spend my time helping those folks who, for whatever reason, feel they are entitled to use the software for free.  You guys have an issue with the cost of the software?  You stealing it is part of that problem, software companies have to charge more because it doesn't sell as many as it should since so many people steal it.

I have often kicked around the idea of requiring people to give their forum URL in order to have full access to this site, but I have always dismissed the idea after contemplating how much work would be involved to maintain that.  It would mean a lot of manual verifying of accounts, and with the 20-50 new registrations we get a day that is a lot of extra work for us.

So please, if you are running your forum on software you didn't legally purchase, or you are using your site to redistribute stolen software, please just look elsewhere for your IP.Board support.  There are other sites out there that don't give two shakes about the legality of your site, go ask them for help.  Or better yet, purchase a license and help the folks who make the software you use make more money to increase their ability to stay in business.

Think that about sums up the points I wanted to make, see you guys in a week, if not sooner.