Decado
Huge update & Lite Live Feed & User Wall , vBAnalytics Closed Beta, MOTM & updates
by , 18th February 2012 at 03:21 (880 Views)
DBTech News
A number of announcements this week:
Forum Live Feed & User Wall Beta is now v1.1 adding a bunch of new features - the biggest of which is likely the "comments" system. This works much the same as on facebook, allowing your users to comment on anything in the live feed, or on the user walls. Also added was a new forum block with updates, and the ability to post Status Updates directly to the wall. You can read all about it here A Lite version is also available for v1.1!
We are going to be launching a private Beta of @Pandemikk 's new mod vBAnalytics over the next few days. The mod is designed to let you easily see stats on how your forum is being used to better shape it to suit your users - you can see what people search for on your forum most, where they end up going after searches, the performance of your forum over time and more. If you're interested in participating in the closed beta either send me a PM or leave a comment here on the blog. There are limited spots and they'll be issued based on who we think will do the best job testing the mod so long time customers, people who have participated in our beta tests before etc are more likely to be chosen. Testing during the private beta will be free, and testers will receive a discount on the mod when it goes gold.
vBSlider has been nominated for February's Mod of the Month contest over at vBulletin.org - a huge congrats to Brad at pulling this off. As ever we kindly ask that you use your vote for Mod of the Month, even if it's not for our mod - it gives coders recognition and motivation and encourages them to do more updates etc on the mod. You know it's the right thing to do! You don't have to have tried/used any of the mods nominated to vote for them by the way, many people don't! You can vote here.
Updates have been released for Staff Only Hidden Posts and vBNavTabs as well
What's Going On
@Belazor is working on an update/gold for User Wall as well as starting preliminary work on a new mod due out at the end of the month.
@Dylan is working on an update/gold for vBNominate.
@Darkwaltz4 is working on vBArcade and a new modification still.
@Ozzy47 is working on his new (unnamed) project.
@bszopi is working on a new secret project that's likely to be quite long
@Pandemikk is going to be working with his Beta Testers on vBAnalytics in preparation for the public release.
Coming Soon
vBAnalytics will be in public beta in the next 1-2 weeks also.
vBNominate will be receiving a largish beta update next week
Forum & User wall will be going gold in the next few weeks
An as-yet unannounced project should be released into public beta in 2 weeks.
Decado's Corner
An interesting figure I discovered a couple of weeks ago that I meant to post here in the blogs is the usage stats between vB3 and vB4 in terms of our mods - Our mods that are available for both vb3 AND vb4 show that we make slightly over 5 times as much from the v4 mods (so for every $1 we make from the vb3 version, we make $5 from the vb4 version). This more or less matches up with the figures I got from the guys at vBulletin in terms of vB4 active userbase vs vB3. The NUMBER of sales we get is also roughly 5-1 in favour of vB4. vB3 is dying off quickly - if you're still using it now is a good time to update, most of our mods going forward are likely to be vB4 only, especially as we look to move into new platforms.
Speaking of new platforms, those of you interested in XenForo might be pleased to know that the plan is to have @Belazor take another look at XF mid-march. We have an opportunity to try to port some work over without negatively impacting on our vBulletin customers at that point and we hope that by releasing a few mods we can attract a talented XenForo coder over to become a permanent part of the team. If not we will look at having training in-house to get one or more of our current coders working on XF as well as vB.
On another note (and this is a personal plea) if you are on vbulletin.org PLEASE use your mod of the month vote, vote for ANYONE, even if you don't want to vote for us it's fine. We're hoping to make DBTech have the most MOTM wins of all time, despite only being around for a couple of years. As things stand we're not too far off, we have 3 wins out of something like 7 nominations, the leader has 5 at the moment.
Finally i'm going to present you guys with a few ideas i've been knocking around and you can give me your feedback on them:
1) A "global" branding free license costing, say, $500, which will be usable with all of our mods (present and future).
2) A "reward card" system to partially replace the current loyalty bonus. The idea would be that instead of getting an X% discount you would instead be given DBTech points. DBTech points can be used in place of dollars when making purchases. This means you could save up enough points to get a new mod completely free of charge. It would mean if a new mod came out while you were short on funds for instance you could still grab it. The thinking is that the current loyalty bonus would still exist but would have a much lower cap (probably around 15%) and people with a large bonus would either get to keep their current bonus, or be given an equivalent amount of DBTech points based on their purchase history. (E.g if the reward card rate is 10%, and you have spent $1000, you would get $100 of DBTech points as if you had been gathering them from day one).
3) A referral program, similar to hosts. Essentially you could put links etc on your site and for every person you send that makes a purchase you would get a certain amount of DBTech points to spend on mods.
I float ideas like these around quite often, but I figured I would get feedback from you guys on them and see what you think! Remember to let me know if you would like to Beta test vBAnalytics!
Thanks for reading, looking forward to your feedback!
Iain & The DBTech Team0 Thanks, 0 Likes, 0 Dislikes, 0
Email Blog Entry
Go to Profile
Mark as Read
