Quick post today letting you know about an upgrade we've made to our search feature within Activeboard. Previously, there was a delay between when a comment was created and when it could be searched. This delay could be a few days, or as long as a few weeks! This is obviously not ideal, so we fixed it!

With the new search functions, you can search (and find!) a post/comment immediately after submitting it. This will help your users find the most up to date content, and improve your overall forum experience.

Happy searching!

One of the new features we're excited to unveil for ActiveBoard is the new Emoticon Management Console! From here, you can track your custom emoticon usage, and access the new ordering feature we've made available. 

Usage Statistics

 First off, lets dig into the usage statistics. Each time a post or private message uses a certain emoticon, the use is recorded and added to the total uses. The total number of uses to date can be seen under the Forum/Private Message Uses column. Additionally, each time an emoticon is used in a chat message, the use is recorded and can be seen under the Chat Uses column.

So what do you do with all this information? Well, once you get a sense of which emoticons are the most popular, then you might decide to order them in a specific way. This brings us to the next big feature: "favorite" emoticons!

Favorite Emoticons & Ordering

Each custom emoticon now falls under one of two categories: favorite or regular. Favorite emoticons will be displayed before regular ones whenever they're split into multiple pages. Lets take a look at how this can be set up.

First, lets get to the management console. Open up the administration panel from your ActiveBoard, and go to Settings->Posting->Custom Emoticons and click configure. Now click on the "Manage" tab to open up the management console. Adding emoticons to your favorites is very straight forward! Simply select the emoticons you wish to add, and click the "Add to Favorites" button (see screenshot).

Now, once you have several emoticons set to favorite, you can further order them by specifying an internal order. To change this, simply enter new values into the "Order" field, and click "Save". Your custom emoticons will now be displayed according to the order specified (1 = first, 2 = second etc). You can use this feature to push popular emoticons to the front of the list, to avoid unnecessary searching through page after page of unused emoticons. The following screenshot show's the admin panel settings.

 Finally, the result! The favorite emoticons have been pushed to the front of the list so that they're easy for users to get at.

 We're currently working on a ton of great stuff, but we're always looking for other ways to improve our products! So please don't hesitate to submit a feature request via email (general@sparklit.com), support request, or through the "Make a Suggestion" link in the tabs at the top on your Administration Panel.

Are you looking to gather more information about your user base? Add some advertising to monetize your site, or perhaps to advertise your site on Google? Manage your site indexing and how it shows up in Google?

Well, you definitely can and here's how to do it with Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). Note that Google requires that your site be verified for some time before they allow you to change some settings.

Sections of this post:

• Setting up GWT
• Applying GWT to ActiveBoard
• Verifying GWT
• What you can do after verification

Setting up Google Webmaster Tools

1) Sign up for a Google account via GMail or any of their other services -- it's required to setup Webmaster tools.
2) Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (GWT).

Once you have access to a GWT account, and have signed in:

3) Begin adding your site to GWT by entering the site URL. (ex. example.activeboard.com)

4) Verify ownership of the site by clicking on the "Alternative methods" tab, and selecting the "Add a meta tag to your site's home page" option.

5) In the content that appears below the option, copy the content value of the meta tag (example below), and then we'll go over to ActiveBoard to apply it!

Applying the verification code

1) Navigate to your forum administration panel, and click on the Display section.

2) Click on the SEO & Meta section tab at the top of the page.

3) Paste the copied content value from the previous section into the Meta Verification Key field, and then save the settings.

Finishing verification in Google Webmaster Tools

If everything was entered correctly, you now have access to managing your domain in Google Webmaster Tools. However, if run into any problems along the way, feel free to contact Sparklit support and we can give you a hand sorting things out!

Things you can do once this has been setup

AdWords

AdWords ads are displayed on Google search result when someone's search include one of your keywords. Ads appear under 'Sponsored links' in the side column of a search page mostly and sometime in other places. The benefit to AdWords is that you'll be advertising to an audience that's already interested in your business. The cool thing about Google AdWords is that you can let contextual targeting match your keywords to content and show your business to the audience where appropriate.

AdSense

Google AdSense is a easy way for you to get started monetizing your site! You can display targeted ads from Google on your website. Combine this with our AdButler product, and you can sell and manage advertising inventory on your forum!

Analytics

Google Analytics can help provide additional information about your user base, and statistics about their browsing habits and location information. This way, it means you can have a more reliable investment on your website based on the data gathered for you by Google Analytics.

Apps

Google Apps is extremely affordable cloud based office collaboration suite that offers your business benefits such as flexible and effective communication as well as hugely reduced costs in maintenance. It offers web based applications such as Google Apps mail, Google Apps calendar, Google Apps sites, and many more.

Diagostics

Crawler diagnostics provide very useful information regarding the Googlebot's activity on your website. These stats take into account much of the information about about what Google sees and indexes on your site, including providing information that ties into AdSense, AdWords and other Google products.

Crawl Rate

The Googlebot processes indexes each of the pages it can find on your site to compile a list of keywords and importance which is then used in Google search results. Sometimes, however, you might not want to be indexed too frequently, as it does add some additional traffic (a trade off for having better search results). For example, if your site is very relevant to it's topic, but very small and doesn't require much updating.

Changing the crawl rate for your site can help reduce the amount of traffic you get from Google.

It's worth noting that some of the services provided by Google Webmaster Tools require you to have been using it for some time before you can change them. If one of the options you want to change falls under this category, just be patient and check back every so often until you have enough data to access it!

NOTE: This is a guide to setting up Webmaster Tools, but please note that we (Sparklit) cannot guarantee that the data collected by Google is identical to our own data collected as every service has slightly different methods and criteria for such data collection!

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The much anticipated forum theme & template system for ActiveBoard has arrived!

On March 8th, we will be migrating all ActiveBoards to use the theme system. This will not affect your general forum usage, and may be enabled at any time at your own discretion prior to the migration.

The theme system will provide you with an improvements to the way you change the style on your forum through an on-the-fly visual style editor, individual page template editing, and theme management for keep old styles, for example, a seasonal Christmas style.

If you have any questions, or run into any problems along the way, please submit a support request or email our general[at]sparklit.com inbox and let us know! We'll have it fixed as quickly as possible.

Up and coming in the wide world of ActiveBoard are some significant changes to the way that themes work, and the addition of both an on-the-fly style editing system, and a template editing back-end for the power user. Clients will be able to completely customize the way their forum looks and feels.

An overview of the new features includes:

• Updated Administration Panel Sections
• New Themes & Theme Selection
• Easier-to-use Style Editor & Preview System
• Theme Template Editor
• Theme Backup and Storage Manager

Administration Panel

We took a good look at the options available in the Administration Panel with regard to the style of your ActiveBoard, and the options which govern how much of what displays, and the custom HTML options. The end result was a split from "Style & Appearance" into two new sections, "Theme & Style", and "Display".

The Theme & Style section encompases the browsing and selection of themes, style editing and previewing, header text and logo, forum icons, template editing and lastly theme management.

The Display section consists of the options which handle how many topics and comments per page show up, their default order, the SEO and meta configuration, and both your inline and custom HTML fields.

Themes & Selection

We've been aware that our theme selection has been a little dated for some time now, and wanted to do something about it. My colleague Willem was set to the task of devising a quick and snazzy way of selecting themes for your ActiveBoard, and he's come up with a slick system to accomplish the task.

Style Editing

Modifying the style of your forum has been a thorn in everyone's sides for a long time -- how to accomplish this in an usable way which is completely dynamic. A problem? I think not!

The new ActiveBoard style editor allows you to change the look and feel of your board on the fly, without leaving the page. You can view the forum, and navigate around with your changes visible even before you actually apply them to make sure they're just the way you want them.

Template Editor

For a long time, we've wanted to offer additional customizations to ActiveBoard on a per-client basis, but technically speaking this is difficult when you're using an internal framework and only the content is dynamically created by the clients and the members of their boards.

As a result, we've come up with a template parsing system which will allow you to modify the layout and display of the majority of your ActiveBoard.

This is actually related to my post from a little while ago, Templates & Layout Customization, which outlined template parsing in BlogBaker. The template parser in ActiveBoard has been expanded, so technically speaking it is more powerful than the options available in BlogBaker. We'll be bringing BlogBaker up to speed in this regard soon!

Theme Manager

If you can create, modify, and save themes... you had best be able to manage them too! We're not letting anyone down in this regard, and will be providing a theme management system to keep track of your saved themes. You will be able to activate any theme from the manager, edit them, delete, and also preview the theme on your forum as if you had activated it. In other words, your users will never be impacted while you test!

Magic & Beyond

Well, unfortunately it isn't magic! Sparklit is keen to provide all of our clients with high quality, ingeniously designed software which both the geeky power user, and the happy-go-lucky casual user can use easily and painlessly!

I'll also include a little hint of two things to come:

Search Upgrades

We'll be adding an upgraded search system which will support some fancy additional options: such as + to indicate the word must exist, - to indicate the word must not exist, and " to indicate a string of text which must exist in a search. This new search application will be based off of an implementation of Sphinx Search.

Permalinks

For the SEO-interested folks out there, and anyone who would like to see some pretty URLs... they're on the way! Imagine your forums having their own pretty names... an example from our example ActiveBoard might look like: http://example.activeboard.com/forum/suggestions-and-feedback

Keep your eyes out for these upgrades and more! Also, we're always open to feature suggestions and are also often able to do custom programming jobs for our clients as per their needs. SO! Don't hesitate to submit a feature request via email (general@sparklit.com), support request, or through the "Make a Suggestion" link in the tabs at the top on your Administration Panel.

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