Decado

DBTech News

Quite a bit of news this week:

First of all I'll announce the release of two new mods: The first is the latest mod from @Dylan : vBNominate. This is a mod that lets your users nominate each others content easily and simply without having to visit specific pages etc. For instance if they are reading the forum and see a funny post, they can nominate it for post of the week etc from that page. The admin can set up specific contests like this, or let the mod easily run contests weekly/monthly. We're interested in your feedback on it and what other content/functionality you think it should have. You can read details on the beta here. You can also read about the Gold update/ release of thread ratings at that thread, including the oft-requested repositioning of the ratings box on posts/threads.A Lite version has also been released.

The second mod is Forum Live Feed & User Wall. It's a bit of a mouthful, I know. It essentially adds a facebook-style wall(s) to your forum. Both an overall wall with general forum activity that is fully customisable with content userside and adminside, as well as a personal userwall for each user that lets you see what they have been doing, their latests posts, uploads, blogs etc etc. It makes your forum a mini facebook in a lot of ways. You can read about it here.Where you can also read about vBShout v6 going gold.

There is also now a manual available for vBSecurity in the package and also here.

What's Going On

@Belazor is working on an update/gold for User Wall
@Dylan is in the working on an update/gold for vBNominate
@Darkwaltz4 is working on vBArcade and a new modification still.
@Ozzy47 is updating Staff Only Hidden Posts and starting a new project
@bszopi is working on a new secret project that's likely to be quite long
@Pandemikk is still putting the finishing touches to vBAnalytics.

Coming Soon

New version of Staff Only Hidden Posts will be out next week.
vBAnalytics will hopefully be in beta in the next 1-2 weeks also.
vBNominate will be receiving regular updates over the next few weeks.
Forum & User wall will also be receiving regular updates over the next few weeks.


Decado's Corner

I suppose I should cover the security issue first. Ugh. I'm sure most of you got the email letting you know what's been going on. Behind the scenes there has been a bunch of other stuff as well. Apparently we got blacklisted on a bunch of spam filters during the incident, so we've been having to help people out who didn't receive their password reset notification. In addition some people only received that, and not the security newsletter, which meant a bunch of people wondering WHY they got an email saying they had requested a password reset. Fillip has spent the majority of the past couple of days adding new AntiVirus software, Firewall software and doing literally dozens of small tweaks to improve/boost security. We're considering putting it together into a recommendations document for vBSecurity pro. I literally got woken up by Fillip on the phone the day it happened. Trust me when I say that's NOT how you want to start your day :P. On the plus side we're as confident as we can be that we're secure now. We've actually set up some tracking software and seen some attempted attacks get repelled since we "finished" the security upgrades.

I'm happy to answer any questions you guys have about it, but for obvious reasons I can't give out specific details on certain things that could present a security risk.

The Demo site will be back soon by the way, we'll be moving it to its own virtual server juuuuust in case it had any potential security holes in it because of the admin-based setup it was running. We doubt it, but better safe than sorry.

Onto happier news - TWO new mods this week, A really interesting mod from Dylan called vBNominate. The premise of the mod is to make it easy for members to create competitions out of great content on your site - from signatures to posts to threads. Rather than be forced to do it from a central location they can just nominate it from pretty much anywhere they see it in threads and posts. It's a pretty unique concept and has the potential to really liven up forums - hopefully you guys will give it a shot and let us know what we can do to make it work even better on your forums. It's something that has a TON of expansion potential as well.

The other mod is one you guys have been requesting for a long time - a facebook style "Wall" mod. I decided we should go the whole hog and add the user walls feature in there as well. This is another mod with a lot of expansion potential and we're interested to hear from those of you who grab the beta what direction(s) you would like to see it go. For now we have it focused on standard forum actions until we get that feedback, but later we will be expanding it to plug in our other mods, as well as other popular mods if possible. It has a main area which updates whats going on forumwide, and the user wall is a great way to keep up with what your friends have been up to - you can set your privacy settings to only let friends etc see your wall, or certain parts of your wall, as well if you like. I'm really excited for the potential this thing has =D

Total side note, but are any of you wonderful people running minecraft servers? I miss it but don't know of any friendly servers that aren't ridiculously huge or something by now...

Cheers for reading - your support is very much appreciated! I look forward to your comments and as always will try to answer any questions you have.

Iain & The DBTech Team