ipb

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that we'll be upgrading our forum software over the weekend, in order to fix a bug with the gallery. (Thanks for letting us know there was a problem, puddingirl!) I'm still working with Invision to schedule the time of the update, but it will probably be tomorrow night. When I have a time, I will let you know.

Gallery has returned!

When I was updating the description links (the new update stopped allowing a mix of fURL links and non-fURL links), I went ahead and did some minor rearrangements for forums, for organizational purposes. Fantasy Island is now part of BPAL Chatter! The swaps area has been slightly reorganized. No forums have been eliminated, but there are two new organization "parent forums". The forums for Circular Swaps and Decant Circles/Group Orders share a parent forum (and if we ever have more "group swap/sale" forums, they will also go here), and the links to the two forums directly are in the description, so you don't need to open the forum to get to where you want. Likewise, the redirects for the three forum swap/sale tools (the price caps database, feedback, and unresolved swaps) also share a parent forum - and you can get to our tools either from the navigational bar on the top of every page, or from the description of the forum in the swaps area.

When we were tweaking the settings of the database (in an ongoing attempt to try to resolve the "cannot connect" problems we've been seeing sporadically), the posts database crashed. It has since been repaired, and we're back! As I noted in the other topic, our BBCode problems have been restored. If you missed my frustrated haiku from the forum's offline message: The mods are now testing a brand new skin - but you'll hear more about that later this week, when it should be going live.

The software update is now complete & the BBCode has returned to its working condition. Hooray! Now to tell y'all about the updates! Forums had actually a really boring update - it just fixed bugs and was setting things up for the big update that's scheduled to come out in Q1 2011. I know, all that fuss and nothing changed as far as what we see! There will be a new skin, but that's independent of this update. Blogs update is actually pretty big. Many of the changes were back end related, but here are some of the things you might notice! New "Like" system on Blogs and Blog Entries. Notification support for new blog entries, and new comments, so you can watch a member's blog or an entry. Uses a new comments system. New "Manage Blogs" area. Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet buttons on blog entries. Cleaned up design. Single column layout on individual blogs. Gallery problems have been escalated to Tier II support. Hopefully they'll get that fixed shortly! Feedback / Unresolved Swaps / Price Caps / Cookbook all had backend updates that will let me start working on some cool things, but you won't see it for a few months yet!

We recently updated the forum software. As these things tend to go, there were a few unexpected bumps. When we updated, BBCode, the Gallery, Feedback, and Unresolved Swaps were not functional. They now are, hooray! Now to tell y'all about the updates! Forums had actually a really boring update - it just fixed bugs and was setting things up for the big update that's scheduled to come out in Q1 2011. I know, all that fuss and nothing changed as far as what we see! There will be a new skin, but that's independent of this update. Blogs update is actually pretty big. Many of the changes were back end related, but here are some of the things you might notice! New "Like" system on Blogs and Blog Entries. Notification support for new blog entries, and new comments, so you can watch a member's blog or an entry. Uses a new comments system. New "Manage Blogs" area. Facebook Like and Twitter Tweet buttons on blog entries. Cleaned up design. Single column layout on individual blogs. Gallery has returned to us! Feedback / Unresolved Swaps / Price Caps / Cookbook all had backend updates that will let me start working on some cool things, but you won't see it for a few months yet!

The software update's been applied, but there are still some minor things we've got to tweak (including some of the BBCode).

The update's been scheduled for 2am today (approximately 2 hours from now). Sorry about the short notice, but since the gallery is unusable without this update, I felt it best to update sooner than later.

Swap feedback has returned! Some notes about feedback: + Old feedback can be imported, and will be - no ETA. + I haven't yet added a button in Profiles to link to feedback. This will be coming in the next month or so. + You can search feedback by appending the name of the person whose feedback you're interested to this link: http://www.bpal.org/page/swaps/feedback.php?search_value= + A consolidated page that shows all of that individual's feedback and incomplete swaps is coming. This page will also contain statistics about that user. This is waiting for a major forum software update to be finished. Additionally, because swaps have grown over the years from only 3 sections to 9, the category has been relocated under Idle Chatter category.

If you've noticed while browsing the feedback that it jumped from 14 pages to over 2000, that's because I just imported all of the old feedback. Anything that changed in scale from 1-5 to "positive/neutral/negative" in scale was updated in the following manner: - Anything rated 4 or 5 became "Positive" - Anything rated 2 or 3 became "Neutral" - Anything rated 1 became "Negative" One important item to note is that all imported feedback have been locked. In theory, this means it cannot be edited or commented on, but I'm not entirely sure if that is true in practice.

As you may have noticed at the top of the page, skins have been updated to have links to the indices of the swap feedback, the incomplete swaps, and price caps. As well, I am in the process of updating the skins to link to an individual's feedback and reported incomplete swaps on their profiles.

You should be getting PMs when you have new or updated feedback now.

Just a reminder to everyone that this topic is not the place to arrange for swaps.

For many years, the Retail Therapy forum has become a place for e-tailers to further their own means. Before we had rules in place, e-tailers used to come on the forum to promote their products, provide customer service, or use the forum in some way that only benefited themselves and not the BPAL community at large. We've had issues of e-tailers using RT for research and development, as well as cases of e-tailers using the Lab's aesthetic and ideas to produce products very similar to the Lab and to some extent, duplicate the Lab's more popular scents. On top of this, we've had e-tailers who were untruthful about some aspect of their business, whether it was misrepresentation of their products, disregard for others' intellectual property, or just really poor customer service. Every time one of these issues cropped up, it resulted in all sorts of drama. Additionally we discovered that the vast majority of these problematic topics, as well as the companies that were represented in said topics, tended to be competitors to the Lab. This past month, the moderating team started brainstorming to see what we can do to prevent this problem from reoccurring. We considered only allowing selective topics and companies in RT and even at one point considered removing the forum altogether. However, at the end of the day, we all agreed that RT is an extremely popular and useful forum, and even though it had its share of drama, we all love it and want it to be a place where we can talk about ways to fuel our shopping habits In our discussions, it dawned on us that Retail Therapy has been growing with two different basic types of topics: product-based topics and company-based topics. These two different conversations have completely different ways about them. Product-based topics, like the nail polish topic, talked about all sorts of brands, from high-end boutique brands to indie brands coming out on Etsy. The majority of the conversation is about our love (or hate) for the products. On the flip side, every single one of the problems we have been having with e-tailers in Retail Therapy have emerged in the company-based topics. In these topics, the issues we've encountered include people re-posting announcement/updates, sharing coupon codes or discounts, and occasionally breaking our rules by arranging group orders outside of swaps forum. So we are going to try an experiment: we are changing the direction of the RT forum by shifting focus from company-specific topics in favor of product-specific topics. We believe it will solve two things: 1. It'll be easier for you to find a particular product (e.g., soap for dry skin); 2. It'll minimize the drama that keeps cropping up every few months We are also doing a small reorganization of Retail Therapy's sub-sections to reflect these new changes: => Soap-cetera will be a forum dedicated to all things bath and body product related: soaps, shampoos, bath goodies, facial products, lotions, and more. Whether it comes from Etsy or Nordstrom's, we don't care. Does it work? Do you love it? Talk about it there! => The Runway will be a forum dedicated to all things style related - fashion, accessories, shoes, and more. ===> Backstage will be a sub-forum of The Runway, dedicated to all things cosmetics & hair style related. => Veni, Vidi, Visa will be a read-only forum that contains archives of the company-based topics from what's currently Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Soap-cetera will only have topics about products -- no company topics! The Runway and the main forum will continue to run as we have had it during the experimental period. Once we have seen how the product-based topics works in practice, we will reassess the state of the forums. As of right now, we intend to convert the rest of Retail Therapy to be product based. After all, when you are looking to buy an e-book reader, it makes more sense to read one topic all about e-book readers, rather than 4 different topics for each e-reader brand that's out on the market. During the early phases of this transition, any new topics created in Soap-cetera will be queued until it has been reviewed by a moderator. Any topic that bridges multiple forums (such as clothing and bath products) will have the existing topic archived. Additionally, moving forward, there will no longer any topics about perfume in the Retail Therapy forum. Please refer to the following threads where you can discuss perfume (even non-BPAL): * What did you wear before BPAL? * What do you smell like today? This decision was not made lightly; at the end of the day, there are too many companies ripping off of BPAL that get highlighted here for us to continue to allow them free space in RT, especially since the Lab is one of our major donors in keeping the forum's server online. We will continue to monitor the progress of the forums during this time. If this experiment does not work out, we will go back to the drawing board.

With the feedback we have gotten, we have decided to add a sub-forum to The Runway, exclusively for topics about cosmetics and hair style.

If you would like to discuss (good or bad) this, please post in this topic!

please post feature requests & problems for the search engine bpal uses for the perfumes. i'm pinning this, because i *do* use this as a springboard for ideas (even if i turn down some for the moment due to difficulty) to make the search engine even better for *you*. ask and .. while you won't necessarily recieve, you may get it future features: - "maybe you meant..." when there are no results --- basically, if you search for "rosa" and nothing comes up, it'll give a list of suggestions and possibly link so clicking on the word will search for it (eg, "rise" "rose") - only problem: how to eliminate fake words --- this has some possible implementation notes known issues: - ability to do more than AND searches, like it used to be able to do. Sorry!

You can use the search engine linked at the Lab, though it only has currently purchasable scents available. You can browse the price cap database, but it's not really ready for that sort of use yet (you need to know the category). You can use the search function on the forum and limit it to the reviews forums, but you will get a fair number of false positives. -------- I actually came here to say that the Lab's search engine has switched over to a new database and now features purchase links and prices for all active perfumes, and a description mismatch with multiple words was fixed It also will have any active limited editions in there, for the time being.

We've created a new price cap database! I know many people had problems finding things in the old one, and we had problems maintaining it (because only one person could edit it). Now we've got it searchable, up-to-date, and all of the mods can edit it, so it's all sorts of win It's a work in progress -- we're still missing a handful of oils and there will be some small changes in the coming week that will make it easier to search, but you can use it now to look up the price caps. It will (eventually) be hooked into the reviews forum, so you'll see not only the description, but also the price and have a link to purchase it directly from the Lab, and vice versa (so you'll see the reviews in the detailed scent views). This weekend, I plan on moving the BPAL search engine and the Facebook application to this database, so the search results will give the price and a purchase link. A big thanks to my moderators, evanesce, and furygrrl for helping us put in over 2,000 items!

I've fixed some lingering database issues.

For those of you who love to cook and share recipes, we now have a cookbook. Please, use it! You may add recipes, rate/discuss recipes, save them, print them, and more! For those of you who have ever had a swap/sale/etc gone bad, we have a swaplift, failed swap, and incomplete swap reporting center. Please report any swap, sale, custom purchase, group order, or decant circle that went wrong -- we let you decide who's at fault (and that can be nobody). The only reports that count against the person you're reporting are the ones where they are at fault. If you have been reported for swaplifting, please feel free to use the comments to speak up! Only you and the person reporting you can post (not even the mods can post a comment!). For those of you who miss the feedback system: I hope to get something up on Sunday. I'll bump this when it's up & update the forum-wide announcement.

There's so much new stuff that I haven't known where to begin! This post is only going to talk about the new features that IPB has added (and we'll touch on other changes in another post). I think the best place to start is PMs. The private messaging system was completely overhauled to be more of a conversation than an exchange of messages. You can readily add people to the messages (but once you add them, only they can take themselves out). You can organize your posts as you used to have them organized, but the conversion didn't preserve the folder structure you may have set up. You can archive posts in-post (and it's a good idea to archive them before you delete them, especially where swaps are concerned!). You can also report messages from a PM for moderator review. Be advised that doing so will add any moderator who reads the post to your entire message - that's not much different from you forwarding to a moderator (who may forward to myself or repost in the mod area if they need advice), only the other person WILL be aware that moderators were invited in via reporting or invitation. Your PM limit is based on conversations, not replies to conversations. If you haven't noticed, you cannot reply to old PMs (which is why I had recommended archiving and deleting any that aren't relevant). There are lots of changes to profiles as well. Not every option is currently allowed, but we can now allow you to make personalizations to your profile (background image or color). You may have noticed on the front page that there is a section for the most recent status updates -- profiles have statuses the way facebook and twitter do, and you can comment on them. Some of the old profile information has been reorganized a bit. You may have noticed that the links to feedback are presently gone, but they will be returning. You can now synchronize with your Twitter account by logging in with it and connecting your accounts. People with twitter and no forum account can use twitter to join the forum. If you add twitter, you'll be able to import tweets into your forum status, and export your forum status into tweets (automatically) - and eventually, we might extend the scent of the day FB application to work with twitter. You can import your twitter background and avatar as your avatar or personal photo (but it's not required). Something similar is planned for Facebook, but I haven't yet configured it. Notifications were added, and you can (and should) go and configure them to your convenience! They will tell you anything from who friended you to who's quoted you. I find them interesting (especially the quotes ). You can read more about them here. There's all sorts of skin stuff, though it's mostly on the back end. The biggest thing is the forum now recognizes mobile devices and will provide a simplified skin with a larger font. I am told there were issues with PMs with the iPhone, but that may have been resolved (as we are using a different version than the test forum). We lost all of our skins, and will be having a skinning contest for new ones! We will also be purchasing some, and will have a donation drive. Details for both will come when things are settled down. Things are rearranged (such as the filters are mostly hidden by default), there were some things added (like the number of people in chat is at the top of the page, and the collaspable sidebar that has all sorts of good things, like status updates, new topics, and watched topics). The chat room was completely redone! Please use it - we are allowed up to 50 people at a time! Please use it - it's something we pay for on an annual basis. Search was overhauled. You can read all the details about it here.

SugarCookie created several duplicate accounts on 14 June 2010 after receiving less than stellar feedback. On 24 June 2010, we instigated an investigation into the duplicate accounts due to the sheer amount found by the analyzer (three mostly unused secondary accounts: shadowdoll, Cygnet, fairydoll; two primary accounts: SugarCookie, sakuratart) and gave them all restricted access. Between 24 June and 10 July, we had PMed both accounts and found many inconsistencies, and abnormal similarities in IP addresses (including finding that a cell phone had been used to go between the accounts a few times). On 13 July 2010, we received credible documentation from a member who had sold to SugarCookie and had reviewed their paypal account to see that sakuratart's email address was now listed. The secondary accounts were indefinitely suspended and the primary account (SugarCookie) was given a 30 day suspension. On 15 July 2010, SugarCookie created another duplicate account, playingwithaloadedgun, and all accounts were subsequently banned. Moral of the story: when on suspension for duplicate accounts, it is most unwise to create another one.

I don't know if it'll be Thursday night (15-16) or Friday night (16-17) yet, but I am going to be upgrading the forum's software this weekend. Please archive your messages by 5:00 pm (PST/"Lab time") Thursday, especially if you have ongoing swaps. The new PM function makes the email imports all weird. Feedback will become locked when the new feedback goes live. It will NOT be ported into the new system, as they are incompatible (meaning: big changes have happened to feedback). I will probably replicate the old feedback in a separate (locked) database, so it will be easily viewed. That said: the applications won't be going live immediately.

There are some "pay it forward" swaps in circular swaps, but we are talking about starting a new forum for things like contests and pay it forward. Pretty much, as soon as it's got a name, we'll do it & I'll mod the close-own-swap so those don't archive (coz they're fun to read through!) Anyone with a good name suggestion for that forum, hit the report button for this post and offer it! If I pick your suggestion, I'll give you a bigger PM box. If multiple people suggest the winner, I'll give all of those that suggested it a bigger PM boxes There's already all sorts of great ideas - and most of them are waaaaaaaaaaay better than what I was thinking! NOTE #1: PMs with suggestions will simply be deleted. NOTE #2: One report per person, please! You can have multiple suggestions in one report. I think we're gonna close this up on Friday