I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.  I certainly did.  Now that the holidays are over (at least until Christmas) its time to get back down to business.

The next version of Ideal BB.NET is coming along nicely.   I’ve got almost all of the kinks from the .NET 1.1 to 2.0 upgrade out.  I’ve also managed to squash a lot of bugs since the last release.  Developing in Visual Studio 2005 is proving to be more efficient than the older version of VS.

I’m hoping to put together a beta version next week which I’ll release to the public and then a final shortly there after.  If you want to participate in the beta, please email me (you can get my contact info from the about page.)

Update:
I justed finished the last bug fix before the first beta.  We are going to do some internal testing to make sure that we didn’t break anything else and then we’ll release it next week as a beta.  This new version is labeled 3.1.6.xxx with xxx being the build number.  We are now syncing up the build numbers with the actual release numbers.  (The last released build was 2.1.5.xxx so being that we moved to .NET 2.0 we incremented to 3.)

In addition to forum software,  Ideal Science offers hosting, moderating, skinning, and consulting.  Customers of hosting provided by Ideal Science enjoy the ease of letting us manage their forums.  Managing includes installation, configuration changes, and  upgrading to the latest version.  Moderating is a new service that Ideal Science offers.  This includes but not limited to monitoring the content of posts as well as assisting users with registration and password/account problems.

Please contact Ideal Science for more information and pricing on hosting, skinning, moderating, and consulting services.   I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and a wonderful weekend.

 

As we near the weekend, testing of the upgrade to .Net 2.0 is coming to a close.  Soon, you will be also be able to make this fairly simple upgrade on your Ideal BB.Net forum.  Ideal Science will be providing documentation and support to ease the process of this upgrade. The benefits of .Net 2.0 will be covered in later in upcoming posts.  Have a great weekend! 

Welcome to the new Ideal Science blog based in the beautiful city of Austin, Texas!  I will be posting information on the latest developments of Ideal Science forums but would also like to speak on a range of other topics.  Please feel free to leave replies listing any topics that may interest you. 

In the next few weeks, Ideal Science will be releasing Ideal BB.Net Version 1.6 that will be .Net 2.0 compatible.  This important release includes a new avatar feature that allows registered users to upload a personal avatar.  Also, in response to numerous customer requests, there will now be a ‘how to guide’ for users of the forums.  This document includes everything from creating a post to using the advanced search option.  As always, Ideal Science welcomes any suggestions for future features.  Keep these recommendations coming!  
 

One of the more important features that I’m working on for a future version of Ideal BB.NET is digg like ratings.  If you haven’t seen the digg web site (www.digg.com) you should check it out. 

There would be several phases to this feature.  The first phase would let you “digg” a post if you like it by pressing a button next to the post.  We would store the number of diggs that a post gets as well as the quality of the person that supplies the digg.  The client code would use AJAX so that users can digg multiple posts on a page without having to refresh the entire page.   Users would be able to view the number of diggs a post received next to the post itself.

Phase two would then provide different windows into the posts based on the information pulled from diggs.  For example, one view could show a listing of posts based on which posts are digged the most.  This would allow users to view content that is more popular rather based on users who actually read it and dug it.   Another view could show posts based on ones that have no diggs so that administrators could remove those posts keeping content very relevant and popular.

Phase three would then bring the digg ratings into the search results.  You would be able to search based on diggs as well as filter the search results based on diggs. 

I suspect that this feature will be very popular and extremely useful.  The key to keeping a good forum is making sure content stays on point and digg ratings would allow posts to be rated by users which would allow the better content to filter to the top.  I’ve already started writing the specs on this feature but I don’t have a time frame on when it would be done.  I need to get to some bug fixes first.   Hopefully by January we can have this feature in a shipping version of our product.