One of the common features on forum is called the moderated forum.  This type of forum allows users to create posts but those posts don’t appear until a moderator has a chance to read through them and then approve them.  Non approved posts are usually deleted.

While thinking about this type of functionality, I thought of a cool way to create very interesting work flows on the forums.  As new posts are created and then approved, they move through a series of different forums until they end up at their destination.  So for each forum you can set it to be moderated and then choose the destination forum for new content.   So if you create a new post in a moderated forum, it is moved to the forum you setup as the destination.  Then when the post is approved, it is moved to the next destination.

Lets say I have five forums: Bugs,  Bug Reports – Bug Confirmed – Bug Fixed – Bug Tested – Bug Killed.   When I create a new post in Bugs, it automatically moves to Bug Reports and awaits moderation.  A moderator reads it and then clicks the approve button.  This post now moves to Bug Confirmed.  Then another moderator does his thing and then click approve and the post moves to Bug Fixed.  When the process is done, the bug entry ends up at the Bug Killed forum.  What is nice about this process is that you can have some of the forums set to private so they are hidden from other users, you can control security on each forum so that only certain people can work with posts in certain forums. 

I think a feature like this would have a lot of good use scenarios and it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement.

We upgraded our own forums to Ideal BB.NET 3.1.6 RC1.  The new version of Ideal BB.NET is now running on the .NET 2.0 framework.  There are some new features including the ability to upload an avatar, and the active posts section which highlights the most active topics based on the number of replies they’ve received.

This build is a release candidate meaning that we are hoping to release this build as the final in a few weeks so feel free to browse through it and post a few sample topics.  If you find any issues, please report them to us by using the contact us page.  (www.idealscience.com/site/about/contact.aspx).

We will be upgrading our forums to the latest version of Ideal BB.NET tomorrow.  We’ve got everything running great on our staging platform, but the migration to the production server will probably be a headache.  There will be some forum downtime tomorrow as we do the migration. 

The new version of the board is the same build that is currently in RC and after about a week or so of running it on our own servers, we’ll probably release it as final.

[Update]

The forum update is complete.  It took about 2 minutes to copy the files over and sync the database.  There was about 10 seconds of down time which is very acceptable in my opinion.

We have several customers that are having a licensing issue when using Windows 2003 in a web farm senario and customers who might be testing our software on Windows Vista.  The issue is a security one that requires that you register the xheo.licensing.dll with the Windows GAL.  Once you do this, licensing should work fine.  This issue only affects Ideal BB.NET.

If you are experiencing this issue and continue to have problems, please contact us.

I am pleased to announce Ideal BB.Net Version 3.1.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download today, February 12, 2007, in the Ideal Science store at http://www.idealscience.com/site/store/catalog.aspx. 

Features and Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused the pagers to be hidden on most of the board.  This is a pretty bad bug as you can’t page through the results on the board.  The bug was introduced when doing the .Net 2.0 upgrade as some of the .Net events seems to have changed order.
• Added the Active Topics page which lists topics based on the number of replies they have.  This link is available from the top of the page and requires that you add the necessary code to your header .ascx skin if you aren’t using the default theme.
• Fixed some issues with the movepost stored procedure that caused stats to not properly update after a move.
• Fixed issue where member counts were not updated after deleting a post.
• Fixed bug where topic page URL was not correct in RSS feed.

I hope that you find this upgrade valuable as we have eagerly anticipated launching these improvements.  Upgrades are a feature of the yearly maintenance package which allows for continued support.  When the .Net software was originally purchased, a year of support and maintenance was included.  Each subsequent year, maintenance will be 20% of the original license purchase.  These support renewals can be made over the phone at 512-401-9811×200.