Update for March 20th, 2009

Well, I forgot to do an entry last week, but I promise this week's entry will be a good one.

A lot has happened since our last entry, though not necessarily in the direction that I was hoping. What I wanted to be working on was finishing up the upgrade of my Tutorials mod for IP.Board 3.0. Unfortunately, since beta 4 has been released, I have had very little time to really look at it; I'm not even sure if I've finished installing it on my localhost development board. As I recently tweeted about (yes, I tweet occasionally), IP.Board 3's new applications system is very robust, but it is quite different from the components system we're used to. But I am assured that it will be easier than the components system once we get more familiar with it.

Since last update, we have polished our system that checks for unsupported modifications. Now all resources here for IP.Board versions that have been phased out should indicate that they are unsupported. In addition, resources where the author has not been here for 90 days will get this flagged as well, so that when an author just submits a resource here and then doesn't return to answer questions about it, you will know that the resource is essentially unsupported by the author. A big thanks to m4rtin for coming up with a task to deal with this automatically for us.

The other big thing we've done is started to try and purge as many software pirates as we can from this site. It's never been a secret that we don't like software piracy here. These guys just started off by just going after the big guys, distributing software from huge companies that won't miss a small percentage of their profits, but then this attitude evolved to where they feel they are entitled to rip off everyone's products for free, including the little guys like us who will definitely feel the impact of lost sales.

To this end we have developed a system whereby all registered members are now required to enter their IP.Board forum URL into their profiles. I'm sure most of you have either seen the announcement about this or have been nagged by the board to fill this out. This lets us see very quickly whether the site is either running on, or is being used to distribute, pirated software. We can then quickly ban this person if need be, and report them to IPS's piracy department, or flag the report as an OK site. This tool we've created for this has continued to evolve since we created it, but we do hope to eventually put it up for sale here to other interested parties soon enough, once it is nice and polished.

Just in case anyone is interested, here are some numbers from this system to show how many of these logged changes to the IP.Board forum URL part of the profile have been for good sites and how many have not:

Member was banned: 195
Member was warned for putting in a bogus URL: 135
Nothing wrong with their forum URL: 346

Finally, a week from today is going to be our fifth anniversary of this site's opening. To celebrate that, and with IP.Board 3.0 looming, I am planning on slashing prices on all of my existing mods that are available for sale by 50%. So if there is a mod that you've been wanting to get but thought the price was just too high, wait until next week and you can pick it up for half price. The original sale price will still count as what you paid for it in regards to purchasing an upgraded copy of the mod for a future IP.Board version. For example, say you want to purchase the Ban Addon mod. It's current sale price is $25, which means if you bought it and wanted to then purchase it again for IP.Board 3.0 you'd need to pay $10. With the sale starting next week, it's sale price will drop to $12.50, but upgrading it to IP.Board 3.0 will still cost the $10 it would have without the sale. Hopefully this isn't too confusing, please ask if you have any questions.

Think that's about it for this week, as always feel free to ask questions or give feedback about this update either in the blog comments section or on the forum.

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