Decado

DBTech News

Sorry for the delayed blog this week ladies and gents, we've been trying to get as many of our changes done as possible before going live with it.

First of all I hope you have seen our new Recommendation Engine in action. If you haven't, go to the store page immediately! Hopefully you guys like the new images and layout. There are various categories to help you filter the recommendations:

Recommended for you: These are the mods recommended specifically for your site. At the moment it is based on globally recommended products, through the week we will be tailoring it to recommend mods based on your previous purchases.

Optimization: These are the mods which will improve the running of your forum - through making it simpler for members to find the info they want, or securing it from attack through to making it run faster.

Monetization: These are products that can be used to help you make money from your forum - everything from letting members directly donate, to buying credits - to ways to spend those credits.

Gaining Users: These products are designed to stand out and attract members to your forum, making them want to sign up and be part of your community

Retaining Users: These products work to keep the members you already have and bring back lapsed members. They work by encouraging your members to strike up relationships with each other, improve communication and give reasons to return each day.

Increasing Activity: This category is full of mods shown to increase the amount of time users spend on your forum, and the amount of posting they do while there.

We have a new special running for the next 5 days - 25% off lifetime licenses for our Most Recommended mods. These are the 5 mods which are in the most "recommendation" categories: Advanced Registration, vBMail, vBCredits II Deluxe, vBShop and vBShout. To get the discount simply enter RECOMMENDED in the coupon code for any of those products.

Since the blog is late this week, if you bought any of those products in the past week and didn't use a coupon code at the time, PM @Decado and he will ensure you are given the equivalent discount points that you would have saved

We have also added a "Top Sellers" tab to our main product navigation area. This lets you see which products other people are buying - you can filter it by all time, year, month or week. This lets you make sure you're not being left behind by other forums who are using products you are not!

You may have also noticed the NavBar is significantly less busy now. Based on your feedback we have removed the mods we don't specifically use to help with support and the operation of the site to streamline the user experience. Prefer the old style? Not a problem, just access the site through www.dbtech.co instead! Your login works fine and the posts made there show up on dragonbyte-tech.com and vice-versa. You get to choose which version you prefer to use.

Site Directory: We are now officially accepting entries for our new Site Directory. This will be a list of sites running DBTech mods, including reviews from actual site owners running them about the benefits, plus optional statistics about the sites so you can compare the size of that forum to your own.

We have an optional stats-scraper mod which will update the directory with some basic statistics about your forum: number of members, threads, posts, monthly pageviews and if installed vBOptimise queries saved. It also allows you to upload a screenshot to show people how great your site looks.

You can apply for the site directory by going to your client area and clicking the "apply for site directory" button, or visiting the site directory via the sub-nav bar and clicking the link there. In future we will run contests specifically for people who are part of the site directory and using our stats mod as way of thanks

Focus Group:Our first Focus Group survey was a success, and the winner of the draw was @Papa Bear. He receives $25 to spend on any DBTech products he likes as thanks for his participation. If you would also like to win money to spend on DBTech products in exchange for 2 minutes of your time each month simple sign up for our Focus Group at this link. Your feedback helps us improve the products and services we offer and the questionnaires only take a minute or two to fill out.

New Type of Dev Blog: We are also launching our new Dev Blog series this week - it is called Improving Your Site. Each week a member of the team will be discussing ways to improve your site - either by detailing ways to use specific mods to give your forum a boost, or by giving general advice grabbed from our combined decades of experience improving and running communities. Here is a link to the introduction blog explaining a little more, and a you can read the first blog, about getting the most out of Advanced Post Thanks/Likes here.

Branding Free Changes: We are implementing a new Branding Free system which is now being trialled in our vB5 mods. It is designed to make it trickier for pirates to steal branding free. If all goes well we will be rolling it over to our vB4 mods soon as well. You can read details here.

Product Releases: In product release news, vBDonate received a bug hotfix on Feb 10th, so if you are running it you should re-download and upload the specified file. More details here.

What's Going On

@Belazor is working on vBDownloads v2
@Dylan is working on Thread Ratings v2 including a vB5 version
@Darkwaltz4 is continuing work on vBArcade for #vB5
@Ozzy47 is working on an unannounced mod
@bszopi is on a general leave of absence
@Mokonzi is working on a vB5 port of one of his mods
@the-danzor is starting work on vB5 skins

Coming Soon

Gallery-complementing mod in the next few months
vBDonate vB5 Gold in the next few weeks
vBDownloads v2 in the next few weeks
vBDownloads for vB5 in the next month or so
Secret mod from @Ozzy47
Focus Group Surveys & Prizes
Several more vB5 Ports in the coming months

Decado's Corner

Busy, busy week again! Hopefully you guys are liking the new images and recommendation bar, they were a bitch to make! I'll be continuing to make improvements to the recommendation engine over the course of the week as well.

Thanks again to those of you who participated in the first Focus Group survey, there will be another soon

I'm looking forward to your continuing feedback on the new features, layout and product images below.

Thanks for reading as always,

Iain & The DBTech Team

1 Thanks, 3 Likes, 0 Dislikes, 0

blinkster thanked for this post

Valcav, Papa Bear, CharlieDelta liked this post