ProBoards Blog

Version 5 UBBC Preview

2009-09-28T16:09:00.001-07:00

ProBoards is still hard at work on our next generation forum software, ProBoards Version 5, and while it isn't quite ready yet for public beta, we thought we might share some of what you can expect from us in the future.

Many of the UBBC (also known as BBCode) tags you know and love have received new options. In this blog entry we'll walk you through a few samples of changes being made.

Right now there are many different UBBC tags that you can combine to achieve a desired effect. For example, you may want to change the color, font, and text size of your posts. Currently, all of these options have separate UBBC tags. With Version 5, you can achieve the same effect with only one tag.

Using the current system, this is how you would change the font to Arial, the color to blue, and the size to 5:

[font=Arial][color=#0000ff][size=5]... your text here ...[/size][/color][/font]

With ProBoards Version 5, we have introduced all new options to the [font] tag. You can now achieve the same results as above with the following code:

[font family="Arial" color="#0000ff" size="5"]... your text here ...[/font]

Both of these codes would output:
... your text here ...

Another example of a tag with new options is the [list] tag. Currently you can only put a bulleted list in your posts like so:

Option 1
Option 2
Option 3

With Version 5, we are introducing both ordered and unordered lists along with many different list styles. Here is an example of what a list could look like with our new list options:

Square 1
1. Upper-Roman 1
2. Upper-Roman 2
3. Upper-Roman 3
Square 2
1. Lower-Alpha 1
2. Lower-Alpha 2
3. Lower-Alpha 3
  - Decimal 1
  - Decimal 2
  - Decimal 3

We'd like to go over one last example of our new UBBC tag options, and this one relates to how tables are displayed. This section may be more suited to those who understand HTML tables and a bit of CSS.

Currently our [table], [tr], and [td] tags are very basic. They have no additional options that you can add in. We felt that tables were very lacking in customization, which is why we have introduced a whole new host of attributes that you can modify.

For the [table] tag, there are new attributes width, height, border-style, border-color, and border-width.

With the [tr] tag, we have added the attributes background-color, vertical-align, and text-align.

Finally, with the [td] tag we have added rowspan, colspan, background-color, vertical-align, text-align, width, height, border-width, border-style, and border-color.

With all of these attributes you will have unprecedented control over how your posts appear on ProBoards forums you visit. There are many other tags that have received changes that are not listed here. A complete, detailed list of all attributes our new UBBC tags support will be provided in our help guide.

Please note that the upgrades to our UBBC tags are part of our upcoming ProBoards Version 5 forum software. We currently have no date available for when these features will be released for testing through our open beta. When such a date is available we will announce it here on this blog.

Updated Privacy Policy

2009-08-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

Here at ProBoards are are committed to your privacy. We want you to know what our information gathering practices are and how information you submit to us is utilized. To that end, we have released our updated Privacy Policy and invite you to read it.

New Feature: Free File Attachments

2009-08-06T20:41:00.000-07:00

ProBoards is proud to announce our newest feature: Free file attachments for all forums. Previously a paid feature, our attachment service now provides 100Mb of space for all forums free of charge with a maximum file size of 1Mb per file.

When uploading an image, a thumbnail preview will appear that is clickable to view the full size image. Normal files (such as zip files) will include a link to download the file.

Forum administrators can manage their attachments in the Administration Area under Manage Posts -> Attachments. If you wish to set who is allowed to upload files on specific boards within your forum, go to Boards -> Modify Board. Once on this page, select which board you want to modify. Next, scroll to the bottom of the page and pick which option you desire from the Posting Restrictions sections, specifically the option titled Post Attachments.

Want ProBoards to Feature Your Forum?

2009-07-16T14:16:00.000-07:00

Every week ProBoards will add one new forum to our Featured Boards list on our homepage at the top right as well as feature you on our Twitter page. Want to have your forum featured? It's easy.

All you need to do is follow us on Twitter and send a tweet @proboardsdotcom with a link to your forum with a few words describing it. You can suggest your forum to be featured once a week.

For example, your message could be:

@proboardsdotcom http://support.proboards.com/ - Best support forum on the web!

We highly recommend that your forum not have the "Guests must login" option enabled if you want to be featured so that new visitors can see what your forum is all about.

Remember, you can enter once per week!

Follow ProBoards on Twitter!

2009-06-11T01:04:00.001-07:00

You can now follow ProBoards on Twitter! To get the latest updates from us or to leave us comments, please add us on your Twitter account!

Now Hosting 3 Million Forums!

2009-06-11T00:56:00.000-07:00

ProBoards is proud to announce that our 3 millionth forum was created! This is an amazing milestone for us, and we thank you for your continued support.

We have many exciting changes on the way, so stay tuned for new information regarding our upcoming Version 5!

Introducing Numberless URLs

2009-03-27T02:12:00.000-07:00

For quite some time now, ProBoards forum URLs have included your server number in the domain name (e.g. your-forum.proboards40.com). We are happy to announce that all forums have been seamlessly upgraded to numberless URLs.

When accessing your forum through it's normal URL you will be automatically redirected to your-forum.proboards.com. All redirects are seamless and will direct you to the correct page you were attempting to access at the old URL.

Forums which use custom domains are not affected by this change.

Scheduled Maintenance on 2/14

2009-02-13T04:58:00.000-08:00

On Saturday, February 14th at 3:00am Pacific we will be performing scheduled maintenance on all servers. Approximate downtime will be 15 minutes. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Hurricane Ike

2008-09-11T17:51:00.000-07:00

With Hurricane Ike headed towards Texas, we are taking precautions by performing an extra backup of all forum data at our data centers in Houston. This may result in slowdowns for those who are on servers 52 - 107. More information available here.

Version 5 Demo Video

2008-07-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

We've released a new Verision 5 Demo Video for your viewing pleasure. While we won't be moving towards a beta this month, we felt it would be good to make a video showing some of the great new features you can expect to see in the future.

If you'd like to join in the discussion regarding this video, head on over to this thread on ProBoards Support.

Server Upgrades

2008-07-11T19:11:00.000-07:00

Some of our servers are running on older hardware, and today we're going to start moving data from some of these older dual-core machines over to brand new quad-core servers.

This upgrade should be seamless from a user's perspective. Any large forums may take up to a few minutes to transfer, and during that time we will be displaying our standard "Backup in Progress" message.

The following servers will have their hardware upgraded with this move:

25, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 77

This process may take up to a few days to complete for us to get through all of these machines.

Win a ProBoards Mousepad!

2008-07-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

I've decided to start the first ever "Make Patrick Hold Stuff" contest over at ProBoards Support. If you'd like to have a little bit of fun and have a chance win a limited edition free mousepad then go check it out the contest!

Just in case you don't know who Patrick is...

He's the founder and owner of ProBoards. That about sums it up. Oh, and he doesn't really have mutant fingers in case you were wondering.

3rd Backup Server

2008-07-07T01:09:00.000-07:00

Our 3rd backup server is now online and appears to be functioning properly. We will be monitoring it throughout the week to ensure that it has no problems.

As an update to our last entry, we hope to have the "backup status" display available to all forums within the next 2 weeks. We do have a (working) demo of it here on our support forum.

Backup Server Updates

2008-07-02T17:17:00.001-07:00

We've determined that even with 2.6 terabytes of space that we're going to need more. To that end we've ordered a 3rd server with an additional 1.3 terabytes of hard drive space. This server should come online within the next 48 hours. With our new backup solution we have all forums backing up on a weekly basis.

Also, I wanted to touch on a planned feature related to our backups. In the future we will be offering an option from your admin panel to view when the latest backup of your forum was made. This way you can be assured that a backup of your forum is available in the event of data loss.

Further to this, we are planning offer a paid backup restore feature which will allow you to revert your forum back to the state it was in when our last backup was made. Details on pricing and availability will come in the future.

Please note that this feature is not currently available, but it is in the works for a future update. I do not have a planned release date at this time.

YouTube Video Support Added

2008-06-30T23:03:00.001-07:00

As part of our never-ending effort to bring ProBoards members the latest and greatest options and features for their boards, we've implemented support for YouTube videos across all forums!

In order to take advantage of this new feature, simply type:

[youtube]YouTube Video URL Here[/youtube]

You can also use [yt]URL[/yt] as a "shortcut" to the longer [youtube] tag.

Enjoy!

New, Larger Backup Servers

2008-06-24T01:16:00.000-07:00

We just got our 2 new backup servers online from The Planet giving us 2.6 terabytes of space for backups.

Our staff is working on migrating our backup systems to these 2 machines which will then allow us to make more frequent backups and alleviate some previous hard drive space problems.

These two machines are located in a data center completely separate from our other machines. If an event should occur in the future similar in scale to the explosion at The Planet's H1 data center, we should be able to restore even more quickly than last time.

Thank you all for supporting ProBoards!

Recent Events: Data Center Explosion and Recovery

2008-06-04T00:13:00.000-07:00

On May 31st, 3:45pm Pacific Time a transformer exploded outside of The Planet's H1 data center in Texas destroying an electrical room and causing a power outage throughout the entire data center. We had a total of 25 servers located in this data center.

Upon any servers going offline we receive instant notification via a toolbar we have on our computers as well as phone notification:

Immediately after determining that there was some sort of network issue we called up our contacts at The Planet (our server host) for information on what was going on. Details were very sketchy at first with no clear information getting out. After a while we learned that there was some kind of fire that knocked out the electrical room.

We spent a lot of time with our account manager on the phone over the next few hours. We attempted to get our servers physically moved to another data center, but this idea got shot down.

Faced with a continued outage with no information on when power would be restored, we decided our best course of action would be to setup 24 new machines in one of The Planet's data centers. We were told that all of our old servers had 100% of their data in tact, but we would need to wait for power to come back online before we could access that data. Our backup server was not located in the H1 data center, and as such we decided to begin to restore as much data as possible from it to our new servers.

At 1:10am Pacific Time our first brand new server came online. We worked feverishly to setup this server and others as they came online throughout the night. We began to restore as many forums as we could from the backups that we had available. By 4:00am we had a few servers back online, albeit in a restored state from April while we awaited full data recovery.

Continuing throughout the night we restored as much data as was possible until we had each server back online to a usable state. A little bit over 24 hours after this event started, Martyn and I got some much needed sleep.

Starting at approximately 4:30am on June 2nd we began to see some servers come back online from the H1 data center. Martyn began the process of data recovery from these servers at this time. By 8:43am we already had our first server fully restored to the point it was at from before the original explosion at the data center.

We worked throughout the day and night from June 2nd to 3rd getting all servers back online with as much data recovered as possible. I am happy to report that 100% of all data was fully restored.

In an effort to ensure faster recovery of data in the future, we are purchasing 2 brand new backup servers which will be placed in separate data centers at The Planet. These should be online within a couple of days.

I would like to thank you for your patience and understanding, your overwhelming words of support and encouragement have been very appreciated by our staff.

Patrick Clinger
Founder, ProBoards.com

P.S.
We've decided to name this event the:
First Incredible Rapid Explosion of Servers - 2008.

UBBC code to use this image:
[url=http://blog.proboards.com/2008/06/recent-events-data-center-explosion-and.html] [img]http://blog.proboards.com/survivor.jpg[/img] [/url]
HTML code to use this image:
<a href="http://blog.proboards.com/2008/06/recent-events-data-center-explosion-and.html"><img src="http://blog.proboards.com/survivor.jpg" alt="I Survived." /></a>

Inside Version 5: Avatars

2008-05-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

We wanted to show you a taste of what is in development for v5. In the next release of the ProBoards® message board software we have a whole new avatar system. This system will let you design your own custom avatar -- face, eyes, hair, etc, and automatically add it to your profile. There are literally hundreds of thousands of possible combinations. What exactly are we talking about?

Well, see it for yourself in our online demo! This demo shows a few of the options which will be available when version 5 is released.

Check it out and play with it, enjoy!

Version 4.5 Fully Released

2008-04-22T06:51:00.000-07:00

We have completed our roll-out of version 4.5 to all forums. If you are experiencing any problems with your forum please visit our support forum where our staff will be happy to assist you with any issues you may have.

Special thanks to Martyn Dale for all his hard work on this release, and to everyone who helped test it out!

Future upgrade discussion

2008-04-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

There has been a bit of talk on the blog lately from some who would rather have the option to upgrade or not to version 5 when it becomes available due to some concerns they have. I would like to address those concerns.

Planned v5 Upgrade Process

First, I'd like to talk about the v5 upgrade process and what our plans are at this time.

Before v5 is released we will re-open our BetaZone which allows you to make a copy of your forum to test with before your real forum goes live with v5. This will allow you to play with all the new settings, update your layout, etc. Essentially you will have a "test" forum that you can play with.

One of the great (until now, unannounced) features of version 5 is the ability to export many of the settings on your forum to import them on another forum. This means you can set everything up on your test forum, export your settings (for things such as your skins, headers and footers, etc), and then save them into your forum once you upgrade to v5.

When version 5 is ready to be released, we are going to give all board owners a period of 2-3 months with an option to upgrade to v5. This way you can take all the time you need to make get your changes ready for the upgrade. After this period of time we will then force-upgrade the rest of the forums that have not opted to upgrade ahead of time.

We feel this is the best approach to give all forum admins the time they need to make sure their forum upgrade goes smoothly.

Templates in v5

As was documented earlier, version 5 is implementing a new templating system. This gives you full control over the HTML of your forum. This also allows you to change or even remove some things that you don't want them.

For example, some have expressed a desire to not have the "last 24 hours users" box. In version 5 you can simply remove the HTML code for this from the Info Center template. Further to this, in v5 there will be a simple option in the settings area to remove this box as well. This is just an example of how you can customize the HTML code in your v5 forum.

Headers/Footers Codes in v5

Some have said that they are worried that the future v5 upgrade (because of the size of the upgrade) will mess with their layouts.

We are overhauling all the HTML for version 5. Many of our coders have requested that we add new features to the code such as using id="[name]" on any elements that would be useful for coders to access. Other changes include naming of all forms. As a result of the major HTML changes, the majority of JavaScript codes that are in use today will not work in version 5.

Further to that, the new codes that will be developed to be compatible with v5 will be much easier for our coders to create.

Another important thing to note is that many, many of the codes in use today are designed to manipulate the HTML of the layout. These codes will not even be needed any more in v5 because we let you edit the HTML code yourself!

So, what is going to happen?

First off, our code database will be upgraded to have all new codes that will work with version 5. Again, we are giving 2-3 month grace period before the upgrade so that you can prepare your forum upgrade. If you have header/footer codes that you need to be updated we will make sure those new codes are provided in our code database.

Now, instead of simply upgrading your forums and keeping all the header/footer codes in which will not work, we will provide a copy of your headers/footers in your admin area and you will need to add in the new JavaScript codes which work with v5. Again, the majority of codes from v4 / v4.5 will not even be needed since you have direct access to the HTML.

We understand that for some forums which have extensive headers and footers this may be a fair amount of work, but the end benefit will be tremendous because of the amount of control that we are putting into your hands.

Last Thoughts

We will take your suggestions to heart in regards to this upgrade. I appreciate your constructive criticism and hope that this discussion will help alleviate some concerns you may have about this future upgrade.

It is important to note that if our members feel that they need more time to prepare their forums, we will give you that time. We would like nothing more than for this to be a smooth upgrade for all of our members and will provide you the support and assistance you require in this process.

New V5 Feature and Beta Info

2008-04-04T15:05:00.000-07:00

Another great new feature in the upcoming ProBoards Version 5 is our new auto-save feature. As you type your message it is periodically saved on our server. In the event that your browser crashes or other problems occur, when you come back to the post page your message will be automatically restored for you to continue working on.

Now, plenty of people have been waiting to hear when we think Version 5 will come out. While we're not set on a date for that, we do have an estimate for when our beta period will begin.

I will say that the absolute earliest I could expect a V5 open beta would be July, but please, don't come down on me if it's not here by then or even soon after. V5 will not be released before it is complete to my standards. If it takes extra months of work, that's what it takes.

Version 4.5 Upgrades

2008-04-03T19:15:00.000-07:00

We have begun the process of mass converting servers to version 4.5. Today we started on servers 70-89 and hope to push forward with more servers in the coming days. I understand many of you have been waiting for this update for a while now and I am happy to announce it is on it's way to you.

Anyone on servers 70-89 can simply login to their admin panel and click the upgrade link at the top to convert their forum. Anyone who does not opt to convert now will be converted within a few days automatically.

Welcome Adam!

2008-03-19T16:44:00.001-07:00

We have recently added a new staff member, Adam Petersen, to further assist and speed the development of Version 5. Adam will mostly be working behind the scenes, but I'm sure he'd love to get a welcome message from people :)

Welcome aboard Adam!

New Version 5 Features

2008-03-15T15:12:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to introduce some more new features that you can look forward to in Version 5.

With the introduction of Version 4.5, all forums can already expect an update letting them restrict categories based on a member's post count rank. We've taken this a step further in V5.

In addition to having this capability for every category, every board will also have the option to be restricted to certain member groups and post count ranks.

This means that you won't have to create a new category specific for each member group (or post count) that you want to make boards for. Just go straight to making a board, throw it in whatever category you want, and only those with the correct permissions will be able to see and access it.

Another new feature we plan to add is a "name history" in each member's profile. Sometimes people get confused who a member is because they changed their display name. Now you will be able to see a list of names that any user has been known as in the last 30 days just by viewing their profile.

More updates soon!

Answering some questions..

2008-03-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

I have had a few questions come out recently regarding the new icons (in the blog post below), so this entry is to address those questions along with one other frequently asked question.

Is this the actual size of the buttons?
Yes, this is the real size. All icons in v5 will be slightly larger than before and much more readable.

Am I stuck with the blue color?
No, you aren't. We will have many colors of icons to choose from available for every board so that you can pick what matches best. We'll also have one neutral gray set available that can work with any color board.

What if I want to resize the images down?
That is your option. The ability to change any image you want via the admin area will still be there waiting for you :)

Besides these questions about the menu buttons, we have one question that is consistently coming up:

When will v5 be released?
This is a tricky question. I know many of you are waiting on your server to receive version 4.5 still. We are working on that roll-out, but wanted to make sure we had every bug smashed first.

In terms of a planned roll-out for version 5, no date is set in stone. It is hard with such a large release to put a date out there. Knowing our members, if I set a date people will be hounding me to release on that exact date regardless of any bugs that may still exist in the system.

The fact is this is a major project, we are actively developing it and working hard to get it done. It is a ways off, and we are updating you about our progress on this blog to keep you informed. When an estimate does get announced, it will be simply a date that is the earliest possible release date. It will not be a planned release date. Please take it as just that - an estimate, not a solid release date. Everything from new features to unforseen events can all delay a release.

That being said, our very-rough-earliest-possible-estimated-release-date will be announced in the next issue of the ProVision: Vision Press due for around April 1st.

As we move down the road, the best I can do for you is to keep this blog updated with as much information as I can publicly reveal. We will keep you informed as to when things are in the final stages and at that time we will announce a better estimated release date.