One customer reported that they were having some issues with the subscription feature on Ideal BB.NET version 3.1.6.  Specifically they said that if they had multiple people subscribed to a single topic and a new reply was added to that topic, multiple emails would be sent out to those subscribed users.

Are any of you experiencing this issue?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about subscriptions lately and I think there needs to be a daily digest option where all emails can be sent out in a digest format.  A feature like this would require a SQL job or some kind of Windows service to periodically send out those kinds of emails.  Is this a feature that you folks would be interested in? 

[UPDATE]
We did in fact have a bug in subscriptions which I just fixed for the next release.  If you are having this problem and need a quick fix, send me an email and I’ll shoot you over the fix.

Since many readers of this blog likely own an iPhone, you will be interested to know that Ideal Science is currently in development of iPhone applications, details soon to come.  I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on any application that would make your day-to-day life easier/simpler/more efficient.  Any subject is welcome, including real estate, social/work networking, etc……. We are all ears over here at Ideal Science!

Apparently there was an issue with the license files which would cause the demo version to appear expired.  I just uploaded a new version that corrects this problem.  Also, some files were missing in the Ideal Admin folder which have also been uploaded. 

Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause you.  If you’ve already installed the software, just replace the idealadmin folder with the one included in the new zip file and drop the *.lic files from the /ibb/bin folder in the zip file into the one on your board. 

It took a while, but Ideal BB.NET 3.1.6 is now available for download in both demo form and from the customer section of our web site in its full blown ready for product form.

This new version includes support for .NET 2.0 so make sure that your web platform supports the new framework before trying to install it.   There are some new features from the previous version, but the biggest change is that it now uses the 2.0 framework.  We haven’t had a chance to take advantage of many of the new framework features, but we do plan to in the future. 

This new release ditches the installer that we had shipped in previous versions.  The installer was bulky, hard to debug and didn’t support upgrades and merges.  After several days of deliberations we just decided it wasn’t worth supporting anymore.  So you’ll have to do a manual install which is fairly easy and similar to most other .NET web applications so it shouldn’t be too much trouble.

The next release will include both bug fixes and new feature upgrades.  We’ve already started on it and plan to have it ready to go at the end of June.  Of course if we find any serious bugs in the 3.1.6 release we will provide bug fixes for it and possibly minor releases in between 3.1.6 and 3.1.7.

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.