It's here: Proboards Version 4

[Fritz]

The Ectozone message board, as well as GB Omnibus Fan Fic and GBWC, is hosted by Proboards, which has been around for a few years. The current version of the operating program is Version 3.

Well, Patrick Clinger (the guy who owns Proboards) has spent over a year creating Version 4, with all sorts of new nifty features.

Just today an "open Beta testing" board was opened with the Version 4 software. If you're curious as to what that's gonna be like, go here:
v4openbeta.proboards.com/

Personally, I've been following the progress of Version 4 for over six months now, seeing screen shots and such as Clinger released them. I'm definitely looking forward to this.

I'll let you know as soon as Proboards announces the date to upload the new version to us.

[Fritz]

Just a little bit of preview of V4--my profile page from tne Beta test board...

[Fritz]

Pat Clinger, the owner of Proboards, has announced the date for the upgrade to Version 4:

If you have gotten this far, then you must be waiting in anticipation, so I won't hold you back any longer from what you want. The official release date for ProBoards Version 4 will be Saturday, April 30th, 2005.

It is important to note that the upgrade can result in up to 24 hours of downtime per server. We hope to keep the downtime to a level much lower than this, but we can not make any guarantees for such a large upgrade. We will be upgrading servers to version 4 in groups, and therefore not all servers will be upgraded on the 30th. It may take up to a week before all servers are upgraded successfully to version 4.

I may have to change or remove some of the codes on April 29, and readd them when Server 31 gets it's upgrade--User Groups will work differently, I know for certain.

[Fritz]

In the interest of maybe not being the only one excited about the upgrade later this month, here's the list of new features:

This is NOT a complete list of new v4 features. There are 120 new features listed on this page, but there are many more unannounced features.



General Features (12)
Usernames will no longer be case sensitive.
The "cell highlight" hack will become a standard feature of all boards. You will be able to choose what color you want the highlight to be for both the main page and for boards (or you can choose no color to leave it standard).
Karma (optional feature). Each user can have their own karma, which other users can praise or smite a user to increase or decrease the users karma.
Reserved words will no longer effect staff members
If a category or board name is too long to fit in the jump, the forum jump at the bottom of the page will cut the name short and put "..."
An option for going to the "home" page of the board will be added to the forum jump.
If a user creates an account with the same username as someone who was deleted, the new user will not be able to edit or delete the older users posts. This will be based on a registration date check versus the time of the posting.
For dates, "Yesterday" will also be added in addition to the already existing "Today." Posts may show up as something like "Posted on Yesterday at 12:22 am"
All email addresses will have spam protection on them which will help make it so that spam bots will not be able to pick up your email address.
Numbers that are displayed such as number of posts on a board, number of posts a user made, etc will contain commas (so 10000 becomes 10,000)
Drop down menus are now used to change between different pages for viewing boards and threads. This allows you to specify any page you want, especially useful for boards and threads with many pages.
For displaying dates and times, you will now be able to specify 4 different options that will let you control the date and time. These options include am/pm or 24 hour time options, time zone choices, what format to display the date in (e.g. Jan 1, 2000, 01-01-00, etc), and options to reverse the month and day fields.

Profiles (17)
Signatures will be displayed on the view profile page
When a user's email address is changed -- by either an admin, or the user -- a new randomly generated password is sent and emailed to that user.
Last known IP address of user saved in profile
A notes section will be added so admins/mods can add notes that no one else can see
Disable / Enable account
Last login date
In addition to member groups, users will be able to have their own custom title.
You can choose if you want to see people's signatures when reading threads
You can opt to not display avatars when reading threads
You may choose to not receive any emails from the board administrators (mass emails will not send you mail)
Birthday will become a required field in the profile. As we do not allow users under the age of 13, an age check will be in place which will remove accounts of users under this age.
The server times will no longer default to east coast time. Everything will be based off of GMT. All user profiles will be updated accordingly to keep them in the correct time zone.
Location will be shown in mini profile
Registration date shown in mini profile
Clicking on "profile" at the top will allow you to view your profile. An option to edit your profile will be on that page.
Staff members have the ability to disable a user's account so that they can not use it.
If you disable a user's account, you can specify a number of days for it to last, so that after that amount of time they may use their account again.

Bookmarks (4)
We are introducing a new system to replace the notifications system. Using the bookmarks system, you will be able to bookmark different threads and have quick access to them from your profile screen.
For each bookmark, you can specify whether you would like to receive a PM, an email, or receive no notification when a new post is made in the thread that is bookmarked.
You will only receive notification that a thread has been updated one time until you view the thread again. This means that if 10 people post before you get back to a thread, you still only get notified once. Once you view the thread, you may then receive notifications again.
An option will be available to set what your default notification action should be for threads you bookmark. For example, you can set your default action to be to PM you. Then any time you bookmark a thread in the future, it will automatically set that bookmark to notify you by PM of any updates.

View Members (2)
The top posters page is no longer limited to 1 page. You can view all pages to see where all members rank in terms of posts.
A new caching system will be used so that when you view the members list it caches the results for 15 minutes so that subsequent requests for pages are sped up significantly.

Calendar (5)
An option to set who can view the calendar (Guests / Members / Admins and mods)
Ability to choose who will be able to add entries to the calendar
Edit calendar entry ability
Improved method for navigating from month to month (won't have to click 5 times to go 5 months ahead)
Automatic addition of birthdays to the calendar.

Home (3)
The "Last Post" column will display what the most recent thread is.
In the Info Center we will add "Most users online ever was X users on X date"
Info center will display today's birthdays

Posting / Polls / Modifying (6)
When you want to use a UBBC code, such as bold, you will be able to highlight text from your message and then click on the bold icon. The UBBC tags will be instantly added around the text you highlighted.
Moderators of a board will be able to change the name of any guest posts.
Add checkbox that a mod can select to sticky a post when it is posted / modified.

[Fritz]

Categories (1)
A new "hide category" option will be available which will make any category marked as hidden not show up in the list of categories, and all boards inside that category will be hidden. All boards can be accessed if the URL of the boards is known.

Boards (9)
Announcement threads - a sticky thread, except one that shows up across all forums.
When viewing the threads on a board, you will be able to click on the number of replies. Doing so will popup a small window showing which users have participated in the thread and how many posts each person has made. The list of users will be sorted by who made the most posts in the thread.
An option will be added to choose who can create polls (guests (? not final) / members / admins)
You can choose which boards to disable post counts on, so users can't gain post counts by posting on certain boards.
A "who's online" box will be added to every board at the bottom.
The "new" image will link directly to the last page in a thread.
Administrator will be able to set how many posts it takes to get a "hot topic" or "red hot topic" icon.
A new "hide board" option will be available which will make the board not show up in the list of boards for your forum, but can be accessed if the URL is known.
Any board that does not have any posts made in it will display a message saying there there are currently no posts.

Login / Register / Password Reminder (8)
An option will be available such that people can register for an account but will not be able to use that account until an administrator has approved them (or someone who is given the power to approve accounts).
On the register page, an activation code will appear which the user must type into a text box. This is to prevent people from utilizing scripts to mass register accounts.
Password reminder emails will contain the IP address of the user who filled out the password reminder form.
All users will be able to go into invisible mode. Administrators and Global Moderators will see these users as online with "(invisible)" after their name in the users online area.
When a user accesses a page which requires that they be logged in, instead of giving an error message it will display a login box so that the user may login and continue.
If someone attempts to login to an account more than 10 times unsuccessfully within a 10 minute period, that user will be banned from the forum for a period of an hour.
You will be able to get your password reminder sent to you just by entering your email address -- you won't need to remember your username.
When registering you may specify your desired password instead of receiving a random password via email. You will receive an email with an activation code that you must use to activate your account.

Censored Words (3)
An option will be added to reset the censored words list.
In the censored words list you will be able to use the "=" character.
Option to make only "full words" matched censored. For example, if you put ass=butt in your censor, you don't want "grass" to change into "grbutt"

Ranks (1)
For user ranks (example: New Member, Junior Member) you can specify how many stars each rank gets.
UBBC code is now accepted in member rank names (instead of HTML)

Member Groups (5)
Every member group will have their own specific powers that you can assign to them.
You will be able to assign a color to member groups, so people in that member group can have their name appear in a different color.
You can decide which member groups are considered "staff members" for the View Staff Members page.
You can specify how many stars you want each member group to have.
UBBC code is now accepted in member group names (instead of HTML)

Admin Features (31)
Our new Advanced Moderation Mode will allow you to mass delete, lock, sticky, or move threads on a board or through the search function.
Search Members will add a search by member group option.
Option to disable the Info Center
Ability to disable the Calendar
Ban members will have an option to ban the person for a certain period of time.
Choose to have text links or image links
A list of all boards not currently in any category, but existing, show in reorder boards.
Logo will be able to be linked to somewhere, eg your website
Instead of the confirm page after saving, it will direct to the main admin page, where there will be a 'status' box saying what has been updated.
Headers and footers will be revamped to be easier to use. Each board will have it's own page for editing the header or footer of that board.
A "global header" will be created which you can insert code in that will display on every single board.
A download header and footer data option will be available which will provide an easy way for members to backup their headers and footers.
Deleting a user who is a moderator will instantly de-mod them from any boards they are a moderator at.
When you delete a user, you will be given the option to ban that user as well. With a single click of a button you will be able to instantly ban that user by their email address, username, and IP all at once. The work is instantly done for you.
You will be able to mass delete posts by a particular user, or mass delete threads started by a particular user.
Administrators will be able to mass IM based on member group.
A "Recycle Bin" will be created where deleted threads will go. Threads and posts will stay here for 5 days, and you will be able to move them back while they are still there.
The password protection feature will evolve slightly. You will be able to create multiple username/password combinations which may be used to access a board. This way you can create many accounts, and if you want to revoke access to a board from one user, it will be easy.
All boards may have sub-boards, that is a board that is "underneath" another board.
An option will be available to force users to register before they can view your board.
On the board settings page you will be able to preview the colors you enter.
A checkbox will be added next to "Background Image" on the board settings page which will be for if the administrator wants a fixed background.
The news fader code has been rewritten to fade more evenly through the color spectrum as well as to fix a small flash that sometimes occurred in the fader of some boards.
When moving a message, you will be able to choose whether or not to leave a "Moved: ..." message on the board the topic was moved from.
Option to enable a "quick reply" box at the end of threads.
Ability to select how many posts to display per page on the board and inside threads.
Option to disallow images in signatures.
Add search by registration date option to member search.
Add search for users who have no posted in X days to member search.
Ability to have as many ranks as you want with certain post count requirements to get to each.
Customize board images will have an option to reset back to the original icons.

Instant Messaging (4)
Inbox and outboxes will have cell highlight identical to that of the boards (feature mentioned earlier).
Users will be able to keep an address book of users so that they may easily select who they want to IM.
A "check all" checkbox will be added to the inbox and outbox pages.
Option in IM Preferences to get a popup message when you have a new IM.


UBBC Code Changes (3)
The emote ubbc tag (/me) is being replaced with a blockquote ubbc tag.
We are introducing a new [irc] ubbc tag to link to IRC servers.
A new tag will be created which will allow you to post ubbc tags without them being processed.

[Fritz]

Well, the first step in the upgrade is complete:

support.proboards.com

In about two days, Proboards will start upgrading the rest of it's servers--being on Server 31, we probably won't see the upgrade for several more days. Presuming of course that the servers will be upgraded in order, of course--which means the Omnibus and GBWC board should go before us (servers 24 and 26)

A day or two before the upgrade, there will be a notice placed atop the board--at that time, I'm strongly considering going ahead and taking it into Maintenance Mode until after the upgrade.

If I do that, I'll let everyone know on the Ectozone threads on GBHQ and GBCentral. I'll also similarly let everyone know when everything's ready and I reopen the board.

[Miss Janine]

Thanks! I make the rounds of all my boards (all happily living on my Favorites list) everyday (including here and GBHQ and Omnibus, of course, even if I don't post anything), and don't want to get a weird message and freak out. Not a pretty sight.

Still trying to talk the hubby into the EJ4EVER tags for the truck...

[Fritz]

The upgrade is in progress on some of the earlier Proboards servers (1-20) It won't be long now...

I looked in the Admin panel, and there is a feature that lets me email everyone. Just to be sure, I'll probably see if that works for notifying everyone.

[Fritz]

Just to give you a taste of what we're in for, take a look at the Omnibus and GBWC boards:

ghostbustersff.proboards24.com

ludicris.proboards26.com

I expect, barring another delay, the upgrading of the server this board's on to occur sometime within the next week.

[Fritz]

Well, folks, look around---IT"S FINALLY HERE!!!


Have a look around, and if you have any questions let me know.

[Fritz]

A couple of notes:

The code that generates a pop-up box when you get a new PM is no longer in the board. The reason is: it's now a standard feature you can activate yourself! Just go into your message box under "Preferences" and you can elect to have the pop-up window come up, or even have emails sent to you when new PMs come in.

I've already had one user have a problem with their avatar, which was being hosted by Imagehosting.us. It seems there's some bug in the new software which keeps their avatars from loading here. Imageshack appears to work just fine, so I'd recommend moving your avatar file to there.