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Have you visited our Idea Room? We use the Idea Room forum to collect feedback from you, our valued user about upcoming updates, feature suggestions and improvements.

Our Idea Room is located on our Official Platform Community website (http://my.spruz.com). Our Platform Community Website was created for all site owners of sites powered by the Spruz Platform to meet, exchange ideas, and build relationships. One of the most important aspects of our community is how we want to listen to your needs, in order to bring new features, improvements, and help you grow or earn a living from your website powered by our platform.

Give it a visit, share your ideas, and grow!

You may notice a few changes with Drag and Drop on the content builder, changes to the support ticket system, minor improvements for the knowledge base system, and changes with Profile Info and Settings.

We have made some overall improvements to the dragging and dropping on the Content Builder. Now when you pick up to move a box it collapses to make it much easy to see where you are dragging the box to. This along with some other minor adjustments to make editing your dynamic pages a little easier.

The support ticket system has been moved to function from our main website. All the links and they ways you get to support tickets is the same. But this improvement solves an issue where if a site is erroring or has other issues there really was no way to enter a ticket on the problem outside of your website. We have also added a full text editor for entering your ticket details. This way you can easily insert images for us to see!

The knowledge base adding and editing of content has been greatly improved. We have added a full editor for updating content and the admin options for adding content, deleting content, etc has been made more clear.

The profile info option has been split into 2 pages.

Personal information Page: This will collect basic account details, and such. Including the setting for changing rather or not the member wants updates from the website.

Profile Settings Page: On this page users will control more of their profile display settings, and options.

In addition to these changes we have made a few other smaller adjustments.

Some of these changes are new and may have bugs. Please report bugs as they occur via support ticket.

You may notice some small changes on your website. We have been working hard to clean and polish many areas of the website.

Here is a list of recent updates that have been applied to your website released moments ago;

• Cleaner Welcome Bar: We are testing out a new look to the top bar that used to say Welcome Name. This account menu bar has been changed a bit to give a cleaner look to your website when you member logs in. We are still working on the best format and options to present in that space when a member logs in.
• Forums Edit Options - The edit options that control editing, moving and deleting forums will now be visible by default if you are an admin you can toggle them by clicking on the sort/manage button. This was done due to a large number of complaints from new users because they were unable to find out how to add moderators. We have identified this as the controls being hidden by default for admins.
• New Member Activity Box Option - You will not notice that on your member activity box a new option when you edit it that will allow you to select different activity display options. We noticed on sites with heavy forum activity it often drowned out the member profile activity. Now you can select to display all activity, forum activity or just profile activity.
• Streamlined the process for new users when they first create there website and go through the content wizard process.
• We made improvements to the Social Content Wizard Template by changing the page layout, added a login box instead of login text and a number of other tweeks.
• Theme Revamps - We have updated all themes from our basic theme series to give them all a very clean look with rounded corners for the boxes and added 3 new themes to that series.

We have so many new things we are working on as posted in other annoucments! Please give us your feedback.

We have just released an update to add Message Broadcasting ability (Sending Emails to all site members at one time). This allows you to send a mass email to your website members.

The new email broadcasting is located in the Member Management in your website management/administration area in that is displayed when you hit the green community tab and is the button called Email Broadcast above your member list.

This new feature is currently limited to our members that have our Pro upgrade plan, and allows you to send 1 email broadcast every 7 days.

As with anything new, we will continue to make improvements to it. Right now we want to carefully manage how email campaigns are sent so that we can stay clear of blacklists so that your emails are delivered to your website members when you send to them. Make sure you add this and all email broadcasts to your trusted lists in your favorite mail client this but one small part that helps us build a better email reputation.

This new feature has been added thanks to our a new mail server we brought online. We want to work hard to build our mail server reputation so that we can have good mail deliverability for everyone. Click here for more info on how mail reputation works. Giving the ability to mass mail is no easy task and for us will have a bit of overhead so that is why we do not offer this feature to everyone, and we have waited until now to release this type of feature.

We know this was a highly requested feature for sometime and now it is here, so enjoy!

The new owner/support community is http://my.spruz.com the new place to go when seeking help, advise, or just to meet other people that create websites like yours. This change will allow us to provide a common website for everyone from new site owners to expert users/designers to exchange ideas, participate in discussions, access the knowledge base and so on.

This change will phase out the current help forums that were part of your websites administration area, as well as allow us to make better use of the site administration welcome area for new help and resources to assist you in growing your website/communities.

The reasons for this change is many;

• We wanted to create a common community space for website creators to meet each other, get tips and access information about taking advantage of allot of the really advanced things you can do with your site powered by the Spruz Platform.
• By implementing an active community space of our own (A Company Social Website) allows our development team to work with the social features that we develop on a regular basis for you to use and to see first hand ways we can improve functionality, features, and show you different ways to use these features.
• The forums in the welcome area lacked features that allowed us to effectively moderate or even assign moderators to help us out. We are a very small team working night and day to not only support you, but develop the greatest website platform with social features on the net. Thus we are always looking for ways to free up our support time so we can spend our time planning and developing for you.
• The new community allows us to directly link new users to information quicker and more effectively.
• On the new community site we want to take advantage of our new member profile features so everyone can build new friendships that share interests about building and working on their own websites.
• The new owner/support community is built from our Developer Website and never really seemed to get the activity we wanted because of the welcome page forum area. Thus we felt while the welcome area forums were great, it took away from being able to explore development features.
• With our own community we can now and we will be assigning special moderator and admin status to select people in our community that want to help out, have great common sense when dealing with problems, etc.

You will notice that we have added and updated links on your site administration welcome page to quickly link you to the discussions on the new website and show you information on how many new posts since you last visited the support website. In addition the knowledge base information now directly links to the new community website. We will be adding more features to the welcome page that directly tie into the new support community website.

As for the old forums on the site administration welcome area, they will be completely phased out in a few days. We will have them archived for our own personal reference. So do not worry you old posts still have value to us.

When joining http://my.spruz.com make sure you do not register a new account, because you already have one. Just login with your current account and click the Join button to become part of the network.

We hope our new community website we be a very friendly and welcoming space for new and old users alike. I look forward to seeing you next on my.spruz.com

Some new updates and changes to tell you about that has happened over the last few days. Most of our latest changes have been directly related to improving data elements that are addable to your website.

Improvements

New Member Videos Element - This element will display recently added videos to member profiles or you can chose to display videos with the views. You can select a range of videos to display at one time.

New Member Photos Element - Now you can show recently uploaded photos and photos with the most recent comments. The Members Photos element replaced current member blogs element because with the new member profile system we released, member blogging is now done on the main website. Thus the member blog element was a dead element that we needed to replace. If you had this element still on your website you will find it is now replaced with a members photo element.

Member Box Element Improvement - The member box element that allows you to display members based on different types of activity has got a new activity selection to show top bloggers. This selection will list your most active members that use the blog along with their post counts.

More Member Activity Logged - We are now logging when someone adds a new profile photo and when someone makes a change to their profile page. Profile update activity is still new and will be expanded or modified base on our user feedback.

Coming Soon...

Event/Calendar System overhaul (Slated for release end of next month);

• An improved user-friendly structure for finding, viewing and adding events
• Ability to charge a fee for someone to register for an event that will be paid directly to your PayPal account
• Better RSVP options where a member can select that they will be attending, not attending or might attend.
• When posting an event their will be an option to set if an event is personal or public.
• An area that lists events you or your members have RSVP for.

Wiki/Content System (Slated for release end of next month); (Replacement to the current knowledge base system)

• Completely page based system where you can allow your members to add pages and edit pages.
• Ability to roll back or approve page changes
• Unlimited page depth, meaning new pages can be created within other pages and so on.
• Full tag support, content searching and new elements to show top authors, editors, and so on.

Member Points System (Slated for release around October 1st)

• Customizable points for rewarding member site activity
• An option to name points whatever you would like. Thus points could be EXP, or whatever
• Points will be based on activity recorded by the member activity site features. Thus anything that would normally appear in the member activity feed could have a point value attached to it.
• Points position system so that members can see how they rank against other members on your website.

In addition to the main features mentioned for the above platform improvements/additions there will be number of other features of the above systems that will be announced at a later date. So stay tuned!

Over the next several weeks you will also see added functionality to some of our other areas as we work to bring you the best in over all functionality and features in one platform. Please follow us at http://twitter.com/spruz for up to the minute announcements on smaller but big changes over the next several weeks.

One of these small but big changes, includes the option to change the format of the information displayed in the Member Box element. How would you like to decide how to format the member picture? Chose from list, tile, and full detail format types on the Members Box Element!

Announcements on smaller changes will be done every week to 2 weeks to summarize updates that have taken place since the last announcement, but for the latest updates make sure to follow us on Twitter!

Over the next several months we will be improving the overall quality of themes in the website theme library. This will be accomplished by the removal of themes that do not meet new quality standards and by only approving new theme submissions that meet or exceed our new quality standards.. This is where you come in, we will be opening a new program to pay you on themes you submit to the theme library that get approved by us.

How this new program works is starting on July 20th all theme designers that submit themes that meet our new quality standards will earn cash or credit each time a theme is installed to a website. So if you have some design talent, and you know CSS, this will be a great way to earn additional revenue.

Each time a theme is installed you will earn .25 cents, plus you still have the opportunity to optionally charge for your theme design and earn 70% of the theme price.

Terms and Conditions of theme library submissions:

Upon submitting a theme for review to the theme library you acknowledged you are the owner or copyright holder of any graphical content used in a theme. You do not need to formally enroll into the theme design program until first payment is due. Payments are paid once you have a payment due balance of greater than $100.00 and are issued to you within 30 days of your payment request. Upon your first payment request we will require you to complete and sign additional documentation for tax and accounting purposes. Themes submitted by the designer are subject to review, themes submitted are added to the theme library at the discretion of Spruz Inc and may be pulled at anytime from the library for any reason.

More information about submitting a theme for review can be found at http://my.spruz.com/?page=content&cid=38498

Get your updates from us at twitter! We will no longer put out updates on small improvements, updates or fixes. Instead we will be posting smaller changes and improvements on http://www.twitter.com/spruz

We will hover occasionally do posts that summarize changes, improvements, and new features on more of a monthly basis rather then when those updates or changes occur. To stay more informed please follow us on http://www.twitter.com/spruz 

We have lifted the member limit on Lite plans. Now all our plans offer unlimited members. Go to http://spruz.com_name/?page=info to view all of our plan options.

Our Lite plan is our most affordable plan option. Upgrading to Lite removes advertisements, expands your file space by 10X or more and gives you priority support ticket response times.

Other recent changes include;

• Adding content to profiles has just gotten much more apparent. We have removed the Plus Sign to go with more of an inline menu for things like adding elements, widgets, photos and videos. This was done based on feedback from members that contact us about how to add things to their profile. We noticed the + sign was not an apparent way to display how members can add things to their profile pages.
• Free sites now have an Edit This Page option that makes it easier to know where to go to customize a page. The edit this page will not show on upgraded sites.
• We have made some adjustments to the blogging system to make it easier for users to share your posts on sites like Facebook, Email, Digg and so on.
• New Share Options have been added to the bottom of pages on Free websites, we will have a how-to for our upgraded members so you can optionally add a share this at the bottom of all your pages.
• The Blogging system is still getting reworked to add post approval options, make it easier to edit and delete categories and much more.
• New and Improved Community Search page to give active communities more focus. We have 1000's of visitors per month that are just looking for networks to join. Check it out by going to http://spruz.com_name/?page=spruz&cmd=search

We have some many cool things that we are working on for release over the next few months.

Spruz, Inc. Defies Weak Economy with Explosive Growth

We have just completed another update that brings the addition of Video adding to the member profiles. This update allows users to create a video to display on a page from YouTube. All a member has to do is use the URL or share link from YouTube and fill out some basic information.

The videos allow full comment and tag based searching. We will add support for other adding videos from other places in the future based on your feedback.

Some other recent improvements include; improved member searching on the member search page, video searching, fixes for the sub menu drop down on the site navigation and other odds and ends.

Items we are working on now and over next few weeks;

• New Event Calendar that will have many improvements over the current calendar system
• Updates to the Site Blog System, including blog approval and better category structure/management.
• Member Point/Rank System
• Improved Sharing with Facebook and other sites to help your site grow more.
• Member Reminder Emails

As always please report any problems or issues to us via support ticket.