We are now very focused on Shark development. The challenge is to create reliable, scalable, enterprise-level community software with PERFECTLY flexible structure, which will empower web-masters to set-up community sites that really work. BoonEx Dolphin is very popular and mature, but Shark re-caps all our experience and uses more advanced technologies from the very beginning.
We want Shark to be the software that works the way YOU want, seamlessly. Now is the time when your opinion can make effect on the final result. We will be giving our beta versions for those who participate and help, and will provide FREE final version licenses for active collaborators. Shark is due in a few months. The core engine is ready (Poseidon 1.1) - we use PHP5, XML, XSLT, AJAX and MySQL Cluster. Most classes are ready. We can build pages/functions really fast now, but still need your opinion to be 100% sure about how exactly should Shark work by default.
For now, if you want to collaborate, please comment in this blog.
Make Meaning Or Die
With the looming front page headlines of JavaScript exploits (cross-site scripting vulnerabilities) see:
“Tool Turns Any JavaScript-Enabled Browser into a Malicious Drone,” http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2108124,00.asp
the obvious question come at no surprise, how does any implementation of XML/JS into Shark or any of the Boonex apps shore up to these exploits? The article makes clear, it is not Ajax that is at fault, it is the way coders have cut and paste routines from libraries that in themselves are vulnerable to these exploits. It is generally the lack of understanding on how to write good JavaScript code. Much of the blame is on the poor documentation on JavaScript.
Caps
I would like to participate in this project.
Please let me know how I can be involved.
Thanks,
Shane
To Shane:
For now you can participate by communicating with us on this blog (via comments) - I will then personally send evaluation copies to participants.
To Caps:
As with any other technology/language/server JS can be a target for CSS attacks or DDOS attacks or viruses. With Shark we do not use any 3rd party pre-built JS libraries - instead we develop ours, with security in mind. We develop and support Dolphin for well over 5 years already and we are aware of possible problems. Orca is entirely AJAX-based in the security is built-in. JS/AJAX is used by Google, Yahoo, MS and many other majors and we believe that this technology can b used effectively with proper implementation.
I knew at some point I was going to investigate Shark.
I had anticipated about 4 months before performance and customization really became an issue.
As you know I am committed to the Boonex products.
I also believe in complete customization. I haven’t really started with mynp1 yet. the changes I have made are superficial.
Not sure what you want the Shark ideology will be, focus on performance, customization, building blocks etc.
I know from my perspective (a little HTML but no real PHP exposure) a modular system where you can design a site using some sort of menu tree, and a way to choose which html links to embed, with easily inserted variables
In other words there would be a menu tree like structure, Each part of the structure would be a page. On this page you could put php functions and resulting variables. Tied to the PHP page is a corresponding Html display page where design and result variables could be inserted.
This is kinda sketchy and not sure you understand my concept. I’ll think about it some more and try to define better my vision.
The ide is that you end up with an admin friendly site that can be built from building block (fast learning curve).
WHAT DO YOU guys have in mind and already programmed for Shark?
Eric Chipchase
www.mynp1.com
To Eric:
Nice to see you here. Your participation in Expertzzz and commitment to BoonEx products is outstanding and we are grateful for that. Now it’s the beginning of something even more exciting - Shark and I am happy you’re with us once again
Shark is modular by design. VERY modular. What you describe is basically related to how admin should manage modules to set up the site. Tree-blocks structure seems to be very admin-friendly and easy to understand. It would be great if you come up with moe details on how you see it, problalbly with some kind of visual aid - like a basic grpaph, maybe?
I will be keenly interested in Shark when the Beta version does get released for testing and I would really like to be involved.
The modular components would be perfect to simplify the customization of the package not to mention the relationship between HTML and PHP aspects of the individual pages. These branches could be saved and edited in the admin panel directly saving editing and uploading from your desktop. The string search is more limited than you would expect for a new Shark version of community software.
I would also like to see an integrated desktop rather than individual windows of all the various ” widgets”. We need the existing complement of widgets along with full “youtube” and “myspace” and more capabilities. It would also be desirable to zone the application to separate ages etc. as I think most sites today are moving to community sites and away from using Boonex software for only dating sites. We need to separate the younger audience from the images and content that the older audience may expect. One very large issue is the protection of the younger people using the site and that potential liability seen by some lawsuits being dealt with now.
In regards to showing music and other videos, MP3’s etc. a method of tracking performances so that we could have actual records rather than paying for estimated performances that could be inflated. The sharing between our users will continue to grow and our responsibilities and liabilties will continue to grow in equal or greater proportion.
Greater development of use of our website abilities without logging into the actual sites like a elaborate Presence would embed our domains as the users perfered domain/service. The question is whether it’s a paid service or somehow advertising revenue based. I don’t envision direct charges for services is the way to increase revenues as it may turn people away.
Increased services, increased revenue generation and monitoring, increased demographic categorization records of users to fulfill advertising programs, dynamic admin panel for full customization of the site in snipits that can be assembled on the page in question, but bottom line is ease of use and avenues of revenue generation.
I think your request on this blog is very broad and once we get further perhaps a forum format under various issues/subjects would be usefull like expertzzzzz.
Let me know if this is the ttype of comments you are looking for or suggest a atrget of your choosing.
Dave
Hello Dave,
Thank you for a very insightful post. Much appreciated. Let me go through your post and comment the points…
Modular system, as you mentioned, indeed gives great opportunities and I can see a lot of way to implement your suggestions by creating and setting modules in a custom way to achieve the desirable result. As for separation of functionality and representation, Shark is 100% flexible - it is totally separated and design/layout can be independently tweaked without any effect on functionality - we use XSLT to achieve that, as we believe that it is WAY better than, say, SMARTY, because it is based on a special library that is far better in terms of performance and is fully standardized lib for modern web development, while SMARTY and similar are extra layers developed by 3rd party vendors.
When you refer to “widgets” I see a lot of mixing of what Ray does and what Shark is expected to do - hence tight integration of both is very important. Additionally as I understand, you expect a broad range of admin settings for all modules - like permissions, user levels, and analytics - all age/geo/gender/activity-specific. Well, it would be nice to see what kind of interface you’re up to, since it is a bit tricky thing that can be represented differently. Global admin panel will be available - and global settings too, but settings of individual modules can be either totally separated, or have to be standardized to be globally accessible - this would in turn diminish their flexibility. We can do both - set an array of standard settings and let create individual ones. In admin panel that would look like a |global settings| panel and |modules settings|, where the latter one is split to individuals panels, each created by developer of the respective module. Does that sound logical?
Tracking… This is a great suggestion, which is one the list and will be enhanced according your post too. Shark is a software for web-master, and proper, detailed tracking is a must. Tracking modules can be added separately, but we will definitely create a default one. I will post a question today asking for a full list of things we should track in Shark and represent for admin. Additionally, we will be providing tools for easy inclusion of, say Google Analytics into different parts of the site for even better user segmentation and activity/performance tracking.
Functionality without logging to the site… This is what Ray Desktop is for. In Ray v3 we will also introduce built-in advertising, which web-master would be able to add via integrated admin panel. You’re right about subscription-based models - I also believe that they are being under pressure and will not survive in the long-run.
And yes, blog is a bit clunky way to communicate this thing, but Expertzzz forums are for existing products support and we try to keep it as BoonEx-independent as possible. Once Shark is out we may talk about its support there, but the “Research” part will probably remain here. A bit more convenience can be achieved if you could post as a blog author too - and thus it would be closer to a forum format. So, I will open registration for new “authors” - and you would be able to post your suggestions for further discussion with others.
What I am looking for in Shark is security, scalability, ease of use, modular framework that is easily upgradible, and can handle at least 50,000 concurrent users on a single server.
The software I will be comparing it to are content management systems like Five Across
http://fiveacross.com/home.html
-marinello
To Fervor:
As you say “security, scalability, ease of use, modular framework that is easily upgradible” is exactly what Shark is built for. 50K concurrent users on a single machine is questionable with ANY software, sorry to say. And there’s a lo of dependancies - amount and settings of modules, user behavior, and the actual technical specifics of the server. We aim at 3-5K online users on a today’s average $300/month box (approx. DUAL Xeon/4Gb RAM) - and this is about 10 times better than any other universal script.
Fiveacross, which you refer to, is probably good - but hey - they use proprietary protocol and the core is C-based. In other words - no 3rd party modules, no customization flexibility, no open-source and high price. If I am wrong, anyone is welcome to object. Sites using fiveacross do not actually impress me - page response rate and load average - rendering of profile hanged my browser (Camino), and IA and functionality of the sites is far behind even Dolphin, never mention Shark. We will, however keep track on this software and will try learn from them too.
Shark, will be flexible and yet - AFFORDABLE. We are not going to charge a premium banking on its enterprise-level. We are all about our mission - Unite People - first of all and not making huge money. Dolphin, for example, is free, while it outperforms virtually all its commercial competitors by most parameters.
Hi Andre,
I see your using wordpress. I wish Dolphin had a back end admin section more like WordPress 2.1. I hope you go to school on WordPress, its plugin archetecture and so forth when you impliment shark.
Also, you have your blog set so that anyone who registers becomes an admin. That is potentially dangerous as someone could delete your posts!
When can I see a demo of shark in action?
Cheers,
M
Ok I forgot to mention some other things I really need.
1) Content management for posting movies, music, flash games etc… - so that members can not and do not need to touch html (for security reasons as well as for ease of use).
2) A robust IP blocking system that can block people from registering on the site by IP address, IP address ranges, and by Country code.
3) Secure passwords (encryption) in the database.
4) Flash movie encoding for videos instead of windows media.
5) You Tube like videos that have the site logo encoded over the videos and the ability to share videos on other sites (by making the embed code available) like youtube.
7) RSS feeds for everything - profiles, blogs, news, articles etc…
9) Customizable landing pages that can be targeted to search engines. For example if a user clicks through from google, it should read the person’s IP address, see where they are located and offer them something like “Look at these new profile from New York” etc..
10) No HTML allowed anywhere for members and definately no scripting allowed.
These are just off the top of my head.
To Marinello:
Yes, WordPress is good example of the script structure and we do consider its addons architecture too. In fact Shark should allow even more flexible modules management if things go right.
All new users are registered in this blog as |authors| - not |admins|, you can manage your own posts only.
All 10 items in your suggestions post are absolutely clear and make sense - all will be properly implemented.
i would be willing to help out in any way needed thank you
To Michael:
Welcome and thank you! for now we are looking for opinions and suggestions. Subscribe to this blog RSS or visit regularly and share your ideas on how do you think Shark should work and look like. You can also publish your own posts in this blog so that anyone would be able to comment and discuss your ideas.
I have loved/hated Dolphin, but I still believe that Boonex could / can make some great software. I am really looking forward to testing ‘Shark’. My hope is it is all and more of what Dolphin ‘tries’ to be.
Further more, I am hoping that it is much more stable, reliable, and that boonex support is better. I have lost countless hours trying to track down bugs in Dolphin — both in the script and ones I may have introduced by ‘fixing’ something.
Keep up the good work. I love your vision, and hope the software ‘lives’ up to it.
Dave — AKA wildfire
Hello Andrey,
One thing that I think is critical to any community software is the ability for members to introduce other members. I should be able to introduce two or more people to each other to build the community. This feature is currently only available in one script that I use (Alstrasoft eFriends).
Clubs or Groups feature should contain all other features of the community. So if I create a Politics Group or Club … it should then include blogs, galleries, videos, classifieds, forums, chat, messates, pages etc.. for all the members. Give more of a community feel and keep members focused on their interests.
Backend: There should be a system like WP, e107, or Serendipity for installing and configuring plugins, themes or modules through an admin interface. This interface should also notify admins of updated versions of the script and plugins.
Thank you for creating this space to discuss your projects.
The biggest I see in Shark being a success or failure is not forgetting the backend. Some of us are not programmers and are struggling to understand things. We get worried when we are told not to forget to “compile” a langauge file. The best thing you can do is to make a user friendly admin backend that takes into account that we don’t don’t know waht we are doing!
Examples From other places:
1) The Language management system in previous software is great and all, but you have to have an understanding of strings and I don’t know what “Compiling” does to my site.
2) Also, the English on the site isn’t very user friendly. How are we supposed to know what some of these functions are? it’s not simply a matter of renaming links when the admins themselves have no idea what the link is supposed to do (E.g. presence)
3) A more robust IP blocking system. not everyone knows how to or is comfortable with editinmg .hta access files. Fine for a free program, but not for a pay one.
4) The navigation needs to be a bit more user friendly in Shark. People go where they are comfortable. For example, I’d rather open a new program (Yahoo music) to hear a song than click on it’s link in Myspace. I feel trapped on their page as long as I can listen. not really related, but the point is people will go out of their way to stay in their comfort zone.
5) allow advertising to be integrated into the page rather than a banner.
“atomik”jon
Given the popularity of the community sites existing and the HTML customization I wonder about about no HTML being alloed. The other points I can see implementing.w
I am no php or coding expert so i am not sure if i am able to contribute as much as the others here. In fact my abilities go as far as being able to install a simple script!!!
I love the tree idea in the admin as suggested by Eric. However, the talk of resulting variables etc instantly confuses me. Which got me thinking maybe you could have the option of 2 modes in admin - simple for those like me, who don’t have a great knowledge and are worried of making mistakes (maybe even a wizard) and complex for those who know exactly what they are doing.
For me, a big plus is being able to change the design of a site easily, whether through easily editable templates installed or being able to upload and integrate your own design. As i said i have very little idea of coding and what is possible or not, but maybe having a simple design editor eith options to upload your own logos etc for those without much knowledge and more complex options for those that do.
I am not sure if this is the type of suggestions you are looking for but i hope it helps in some way! Jo
Also, as these Boonex sites are launched branding and branding re-enforcement becomes extremely important. The marketing of clothing and other branded products increase revenues and further advertise the brand. An integrated ecommerce storefront for these branded items would be something that should be part of the product.
Congratulations for the progress on Shark 2.0!
I’m glad to participate in this project.
For starters, I would like to suggest that the (partner) search facility be enhanced by giving admin the option to set up a ranking table which ranks/filters search results by profile field combinations.
One area where this feature could be used is in implementing astro compatibility. For example, the admin may set up a ranking table with scores for all the zodiac sign pairs (12 x 12 = 144 combinations in this case). So when this option is on, if a search is done, it checks the ranking table and ranks/filters the results accordingly.
There may be other areas where this feature (ranking table of profile field combinations) could be useful. Regards.
Just got the email about active collaborators getting a free license of Shark and I scooted right over.
This is something I’d like to get in on.
I downloaded and tried dolphin a couple weeks ago. At first I thought it’d be what I needed: a clean customizable social networking / dating site. But as I got more familiar with the script I found it rather limiting. Especially in the method used to setup the account types. It seems to use an ala carte subscription. I was looking more for a “level”account system. i.e. each higher level costs more but you can do more.
The system seemed powerful enough, but there were/are still too many bugs (but hey, it’s free so I can’t complain too much lol
) for me to follow through and put into testing with a community. One of the bugs had to deal with the custom fields not allowing for custom fields easily. I needed the ability to really customize the user profile fields as they would be looking for folks who shared very similar traits to their own profiles.
But I digress… The reason I came to boonex to start with was for two of my sites. I was hoping to find an open-source solution, but I’ve come to the conclusion that a commercial solution is gonna be the only one. I wanted to create a site where local theme park fans could find each other and go to a park together.
I’m currently looking at 2 commercial scripts, but if I could get in on the Shark beta I could easily test the snot out of it with a fairly active community ready to go. And my other site would test the dating site capabilities of Shark.
So what do I need to do to be able to test Shark for you guys?
BTW, you guys need help with Shark documentation? I can help out there. I’m always having to write tutorials for my clients on how to do something in their CMSs.
Hello all, I am not sure this issue has been addressed and I am not trying to be negative but this issue is very important to anyone that put together a child’s bike. I use the Dolphin 5.5 product in complete fear of the site becoming unstable and non-usable for my client base, Orca has been down two weeks with explanation Why? Because as a novice there is no solid documentation to support the software which provides a comfort level that I can troubleshoot or re-install the product I purchased. I might ad everyone I know that upgraded to 5.6 and 5.6.00X lost every mod they purchased when they installed these last dolphin upgrades, Suggestion? Yes integrate the software so these things are documented and release upgrades to mods at the same time “Fully Tested And Functional”. Seems logical from a marketing stand point failure to do these simple task has alienated an entire group of people willing to purchase upgrades and the base product “free or not”. Your company can develop a fairly good product but without strong support (respond when a business owner is down asap) and solid documentation it is not conducive for anyone to consider it. Word of mouth and several sites are complaining about these issues and sooner or later it will hurt your business. Just an observation guys it is not rocket science but it is good business. Don’t hate me I am not technical but I am business……
If there was an online demo of shark for members of boonex.org we could become our own community. Obviously, the best way to decide needed features and addons is to work as a community within that framework.
As features are added and tweaked, members could see and comment on changes and the value of those changes. As shark evolves, members would get first use for hands on evaluation.
what do i want in a php script or to foucs community script , the abilty to add music videos , having a secure way to get subscriptions from members , ohh yeah the ability to customize the script and not only the script profiles with css like myspace
marinello2003
this is exactllly what i wanted to say hope to test it soon 
Hi guys,
you invited us to say our opinion about Shark but how we can say anything about a script we didn’t try in action?
Is there any demo site in order to test its features?
I have been using Dolphin for a month now and I am very happy with its stability and safety and I hope that Shark has the same standards too.
I am Greek and I would like to translate it in Greek and I am very interested to promote it to the Greek market (I own an Internet Services Company in Athens) because there isn’t any stable and safety script that support Greek language.
Best Regards
Andreas Chiou
NETEX Internet Services
Per Gilbert,
If you look at the disaster that HTML enabled comments and profiles on MySpace has created (a total spamfest and people using javascript to track users illegally) you see why I don’t want that at all on my site. I think Facebook has the right idea.
Also, Boonex, in terms of how I want the user experience to be like for uploading content and modifying pages, please register at http://ning.com and create a community page. See how their interface works, how easy it is to upload movies and images into a gallery etc.. This is the type of user experience I am hoping for in both Dolphin and or Shark.
On scalability, Marcus the creator of http://plentyoffish.com hosts his website on a single windows server, and he is able to handle 30,000 concurrent users without too much of a noticeable slow down. He probably has a pretty beafy server (like a quad or 8 core Xeon with tons of ram), but this is what I was hoping for in Shark.
To Marinello,
Myspace is getting the “eyeballs” to their site and yes it would be nice to see things cleaned up but from a purely marketing point of view they generate the revenues. 30,000 users on one server with no degradation would be great but isn’t a typical server about say 5,000 users concurrently for these boonex sites? I’ll check out www.ning.com as I’ve never been there before and let you know….
I think several people above have the right idea that support and documentation are very much in need for this product. Even if you look on the Forumzzz it is installation and modification help requests that dominate the forum.
As I mentioned earlier I don’t know if subscriptions in the future will be viable, other revenue streams of advertising and branded products requiring an e-commerce solution may be the avenue to make money from these sites.
To Geekfury:
Thank for your kindest offer to provide a testing environment - this will be very helpful. I will keep you updated through this blog about how we can arrange that. As for documentation - thanks a lot too. I will set up a temporary WIKI on this site when the beta goes out, so we could create a good manual for all of us here.
To couples2swing:
Unfortunately i have to admit that you’re right, but we are changing. Right now. With Shark, for example we are going to test, re-test until we are 100% sure that the product is superb and manuals are all fully explanatory. Support is a problem with popular products, but Expertzzz system is getting better every day and many 3rd party professionals do a great job. Just give it some time and you will see some dramatic positive changes.
To lyonsr:
Wonderful idea! The first site to work on Shark will be 4ppl, and then we will consider powering boonex.org by Shark. Shark is also planned to power Expertzzz.com and LoveLandia.
Here are BoonEx.org we will set-up an idea-sharing community, primarily with blogging features and with all other modules sandboxes. I really love this idea and can’t want to launch it. A DB transfer script from WP to Shark will be also handy in the future
To Naftilos:
I decided to invite you early to make sure that we do it right from the beginning. Many of the suggestions here ALREADY affected the development. You will be able to see every new bit that we roll out when the first demo goes out.
Dolphin is now pretty stable, mainly because it passed a lengthy development, testing, fixing and improvement process. Shark is stable by design. Early tests show dramatic performance increase in Shark compared o DOlphin and any popular rival scripts and we hope to keep this in the final versions.
To marinello:
Facebook and myspace are all good exmples, but Shark is a thing “above” both. You would exepct Shark to be capable to build both MySpace-like site or Facebook-like site if you want to, right? This also applies to HTML editing.
As for Marcus at Plentyoffish, there’s a bit to it than you think. In his own reports he is in fact running a couple of web servers, 3 DB servers, mail server and image server. Each server being quad-core r octo-core and with a good load of RAM this makes it a really powerful system, and not a cheap one. I am not saying he’s bad in scalability - in fact he’s one of the best as we see, but it’s also not a magic for me. With proprietary platform and customized servers this kind of performance is achievable and can probably be improved if you use PHP/Apache and later version of MySQL as opposed to his ASP.NET/IIS setup. Shark, however is a SOFTWARE, which has to be modular, universal, multilingual, design-flexible - all those are drawback when you think about performance. But we use the best technology available to provide the best of both worlds - performance and flexibility. Cutting Shark down to the POF-like functionality and hard-coding everything is likely to provide similar performance as reported by Markus, because remote testing shows average page-rendering results at POF. I just hope we will be able to make some live comparision soon.
To Dave Gilbert:
In Shark we will be adding achoise of revenue models like: subscription, ads, contextual ads, credits, donations, integrated storefront, and DB sharing. This is all I can think of right now. Suggestions are most welcome.
Thanks Andrey,
Your last post confirmed that many things noted here will be incorporated in Shark. I’m looking forward to the Demo release!
The www.ning.com was nicely put together but limits the individual expression of www.myspace etc that appears to be the reason for its popularity.
As myspace and others become more and more popular individuals will be looking for new ways to communicate and express themselves. We have chat, forum, multimedia etc. but what is the next step? Possibly the further blending of the above components with external content? What about private performances? Bands or others making a presentation or show to members that sign up in advance (revenues)? This would also facilitate other forms of media contractually allowing their content to be presented online on our “shark” sites. Classifieds and auction are very popular as well on current websites.
As you can see I am not looking for a dating site but a community site that can encompass all the user may desire and and have flexibility to incorporate more.
I’m throwing out ideas…
I’m thinking of something akin to blogtv.com in conceptual abilities.
AGE-SEX - eliminate these from the display and search fields - then you may have a good social site.
The AGE-SEX fields giveaway the cheezy dating feel. Outside of dating, nobody cares about AGE and SEX. In fact, people abhor yes HATE specifying that info.
DOCS - Word, PDF, Excel - how can people post their work in the most traditional forms…
How about free form downloads/uploads to include source code and exe files?
Thanks a lot for ideas. Keep throwing them in. In a few days I will make a summarizing post and will report what we’ve already done.
Yes,
I think Andry this was a great idea to generate input into the new Shark product a lot of ideas are surfacing.
Personal information needs to be controled like joindestiny has said because it can be a potential liability. The Dolphin will allow you to not show some of these fields and in others I believe the user can decide to fill this information in or not. I think privacy and protection of minors and women is an issue that will certainly be on the top of my mind when customizing any product.
A safe community environment with many features will bring the “eyeballs” to our sites. The dating site has its place but we need to be able to customize shark to be more.
I would be greatly interested in seeing this program. I am using Dolphin, and I like the administrative side of this program very much. It gives an administrator a lot of control over their site.
I looked at Shark a long time ago. Seems like a hundred years! I didn’t really care for the look/feel then. But I have come a long way since then, and have a different opinion of how things work/look/behave.
Ideas will come with usage. The major need of any company is customer service and satisfaction. If you’re running a dating site you need to listen to your users. If you are running a software company you have to be more responsive to your customers wants and needs. This has been a lacking feature. Hopefully Boonex can take an approach here that will not abuse the trust either way. We all understand the potential. Lets create a union that will benefit everyone involved.
I would like to test Shark on my own server. Where can I download it?
Thank you once again. We understand the importance to keep trust of our customers and to look for what site users need. That’s why we decided to live-test Shark first and look at how users take it - on our site at 4ppl.com. And this is why I opened this blog - I want to hear form you and I want to give back.
For now, you can’t download Shark - but once it’s ready for beta testing - I will send out personal invitations for download.
Better get another three cents worth in then!
ACCOUNTING - MEMBERSHIP - BILLING!
Haven’t heard anything about this yet, and it’s one of the most important issues!
I’ve mentioned before I was an MBBS owner in the 90s. The cool thing about MBBS was its accounting flexibility.
This is how it worked; maybe we could do something similar to give total control over every aspect of the site.
KEYS: These gave access to every module on the site; each module had a specific key. Members can also have personal keys (explain why later)
CLASS: Members where in one class or another. Attached to each CLASS where KEYS that gave access to modules. CLASSES could be time sensitive. At the end of a certain amount of days a CLASS change would be made to another CLASS.
MEMBERSHIP: Membership would be assigned a CLASS with associated KEYS for that membership level. Different MEMBERSHIPS have different billing cycles, Recurrent billing is handled in house. If CC billing fails then grace period begins. If billing unsuccessful at end of grace period, triggers CLASS change.
Here’s a scenario for you:
CLASSES:
NEWUSER: 7 days, switch to EXPIRE, all KEYS
EXPIRE: Unlimited days, do not delete, limited KEYS low access (egg: do search only)!
MEMBER1: unlimited days, auto bill every 30, if fail switch to EXPIRE. All access KEYS
MEMBER2: unlimited days, auto bill every 30, if fail switch to EXPIRE. Lower access KEYS
MODERATOR unlimited days, all access KEYS plus moderator access KEYS
This is very basic but you can see how this works!
New user creates account, placed in NEWUSER; anytime during the 7 day trial they can become a MEMBER1 or MEMBER2, where they will stay until discontinue membership or billing fails. In which case they go to EXPIRE (unlimited time, limited access)
If NEWUSER does not become MEMBER1 or MEMBER2 then acct will automatically Goto EXPIRE after 7 days.
Members in MODERATOR class have regular member access and also the moderator keys that give them a pre defined admin access depending on keys given.
Also a regular member, say MEMBER1 can be given individual keys. For example, say you have a member that wants to moderate a STOREY FORUM. STOREY FORUM has a KEY. Simply add KEY to member keyring and that member can moderate an individual forum but no other forums.
We had a module that would give KEYS to MEMBERS when they did a function…. say give a key for uploading a photo or recording a video. We could design simple logic gates on the site taking members to certain pages based on their keying.
I am sure you see the potential here. Unlimited automatic control. This is a basic accounting scenario, it would be only limited by you imagination.
The other really important module is a CC billing module. Take recurring billing out of the hands of your card provider. Do your own recurring billing. Billing module should be able to receive confirmations of succefull/declined billing real time. The outcome of billing cycle should be able to make appropriate CLASS changes to accts.
Also there would be an auto email notification any time a class change or billing transaction is made. These messages should be configurable depending on the operation.
Mass Mail based on CLASSES and KEYS
A global CLASS change utility, should you ever need to take all members from one CLASS to another.
I’ve tried to make this as clear as possible, but when I set up MBBS, it took a while to really see and utilize the potential of such a accounting and billing scenario
Hopes this helps
Eric Chipchase
Thank you Eric. Billing module is pretty clear and such modules can be created in different shapes and i am sure a few of our Expertz are going to create those. As for membership levels and permissions - you raise a massive question here and it is still questionable if it should be working a a separate module managing memberships or should be a built-in settings pane for Shark. If we use it globally, then all modules should include full memberships support and should provide specifications t what kind of “keys” they add. We will talk about that and I will get back later with more info.
Dear Andrey,
We have been a customer of AE Webworks since version 1.X.
We have been looking forward to a script such as Shark for a few years now. We are currently using a heavily modified version of AE Dating 3.3. I would like to see Shark generate SEO friendly pages for each and every profile taking advantage of key words in the profile fields.
Also, the more automated the admin the better. We have to manually approve 90 profiles each day and its a nightmare. It would be great to use artificial intelligence to scan photos for nudity for non-adult websites like PlentyofFish.com does.
Also, we are looking for features such as a “black hole” for profiles to make them feel active to the user but work as though they are inactive for scammers/spammers.
A user based moderator system would be good so if a profile is offensive or spamming, enough user “reports” would automatically suspend the profile or remove it.
Please let us know when you are ready as we are approaching 20,000 unique and real members and are in need of a more robust and automated script.
I would like to participate in this great project.
Please let me know how I can be involved.
Also available for any Dutch or German translations
Thanks,
Kind Regards,
Martin
To Netwarrior:
Welcome! It’s a pleasure to see long time aeDating customers here. We grow together and I hope for long and productive relationship.
I like your idea about “black hole”. Very smart. I see you concern and this is also what we have to face at 4ppl.com at the moment. This why we decided to make shark capable to run in 100% automated mode and we will add and tweak filter to make it effective. For one they will be community-moderation features and for two - programatic filters which would try to recognize different types of spam. We will tweak them on 4ppl, so with Shark release you will already have proven automation tools out-of-the-box.
To Marbaz:
Welcome to boonex.org. There’s a lot going on here, stick around, make suggestions and follow posts - this way you will participate and will be very helpful.
Hello Boonex,
I operate www.isgodreligious.com using Dolphin and it works pretty well, even though I am no PHP expert. I am, however, knowledgable about SEO. Based on this, I recommend implementing some features into Shark such as dynamic titles in the profile and blog sections to pull in nickname, blog title, etc into the Title tag (and possibly into the Meta tags, although not as important).
Also having the ability to display a certain set of profiles on a predetermined page would be good to get everything indexed by the search engines. I.E. the admin could set a page to display all profiles that meet a certain criteria. Since search engines can’t perform searches, having the hard coded profile links on a page designated for that type of profile would help…..much like the index page featured profiles, latest profiles, etc.
The more freedom members have to customize their profiles, the better. Including the ability to use HTML and JavaScript to customize their whole profile page or just designated fields.
Also, one issue I currently have with Dolphin is that each profile seems very dependent on profile type and sex. Ideally (for my purposes anyway), it would be best if there were no overriding fields such as profile type that determine so much of the site.
A true mod rewrite of the program developed from the beginning would also help with search engine rankings.
In the meantime….thanks for Dolphin!
Thank you jwatt10k! Some great suggestions for both Shark and Dolphin _ I will have both teams look through them and we’ll add them to the roadmaps.
I am very interested in all of the Boonex products and want to jump aboard the Shark project.
I am part owner in a company that has made a complete Flash social network/small group management product. It is modular based as well. The contributor network is a big area to pull from on modules.
An online business would need something custom here and there. All the prior posts are good and SEO is a big issue. As is Spam. They’re smart, those spammers/phishers.
I guess my big question right now at the start would be, what other than a dating site, can I really use this for? How customizable is it if I’m looking for something not related to a dating site….just social networking of a more general nature?
Look forward to seeing your products evolve!
Webstage
Hello webstage!
To answer your question, Shark is designed to be used for any community-driven site. The choice would just depend on modules availability. We will ourselves re-launch a few of our sites with Shark software and will make case-studies with sample modules setup. For example, 4ppl.com will be a Shark-powered DATING site; LoveLandia.com - collaborative publishing community (sharing love poems and voting for them friends); then Expertzzz.com - which is, as many of you know, a community of webmasters with downloads, forums, etc - nothing dating-related. So, these samples should pretty much show the flexibility of Shark and more case studies should follow.
Due to the web 2 weave, the most important point is to provided a stong api, some widgets to users for building external services around the community and including some external services like plaxo or jabber …
I’m most interested by Business networking and used Linkedin, Xing, Viadeo, etc.
I currently managed a free community of around 2k users of French sales peoples interested by best practises exchange …
We have a dedicated social networking plateform but plan to change due to a lake of instant messaging and collaborative (wiki) services.
I also made some specific php development for the French Amnesty International community, by example web2fax/mail getway for sending personnalised urgent actions all around the word …
I will be interested by a test of the Beta and I would really like to be involved.
Sorry for my poor english language, my French is better
You’re right - API is of the major importance. We are will backed by Expertzzz community and API is essential for horizontal growth. Shark also uses XSLT, XML, AJAX, which are all fairly new technologies and some may require tutorials to get started with modules development.
Been looking a lot on Boonex products and after I read about the Shark and talked to Mike Letcher I knew that your products where correct.
I would love to give my opinion since I will be using it when it is ready
Have not got that big of skill on the programing part, so please let me know where i can help.
Carl W Cheesman
Hello cheesman!
Welcome to boonex.org. Just follow this blog and I will let you know how you could help. Your help will sure be rewarded.
Hi Admin
I am very much impressed with the Dolphin application, and its great that this great application is available for free.
Well, for shark, my main suggestion would be to have an option to integrate that with some major forum applications available, like phpbb/mybb/smf etc.
By integration, I mean having the same username and password, and an option to have the same profile……..
And an other suggestion would be to include an option to manage ads from the admin panel for those who are not good at programming - basically making it easy for non-programmers to manage the ads on the site.
Well, thinking of more options… will post here if there are any.
Thanks
Thank you mahesh! Much appreciated.
It may be a small point but if there are more non-programmers one of the basic customizations is changing from the dolphin, orca, barracuda, ray, fish images/logos that come with the software. Perhaps if the images could be chnaged from the admin panel easily then the non-programmer could be up and running his branded site even sooner……
Small point I know but the forum keeps seeing people ask about changing images and text repeatly….a better text editor would be advisable as well.
I’m hoping to see the demo or live trial example of Shark soon as we have talked about a good many ideas. It will be interesting to see them implemented.
Do you have a target date or is the launch dat coming up soon…..
Direct text editing and logo/header editing are now on to-do list, as per your suggestion.
Target date for 4ppl launch is 24th of April, which is a soon as next week. All other dates will depend on how this site performs in real-life conditions. Anyway, we;re working on Poseidon 1.1 - our proprietary core engine, which makes development a brisk, so things will move on faster than ever.
I think it would open some doors up if profile type was completely customizable, to the point you could name them, set permissions and select the associated profile fields / display options for that type. This would give an unlimited number of possible membership type/profile type combinations.
Also, if there was some modules similar to squidoo.com to pull in ebay feeds, google maps, paypal payments, adsense; it would save having to open fields up to javascript for members to add certain things.
All about the widgets too……digg, technorati, feeds
Agreed. Well, our part is to make it flexible and acceptable to 3-rd party modules. All the features ideas go to modules developers. We have to set standards, provide API and maintain high standards for Shark modules.
thnx for doing this firstly, secondly the 10 suggestions from marinello2003 are definitely needed.
i will speak from a general point of view and not coding since i don’t program and actually am now looking for a tech partner for a site because most scripts aren’t workable enough for non-coders.
ads need to be very flexible in size and location on site and have good management as far as rotation, pixel tracking etc. must think of the sponsors who are keeping us alive and their wants.
being able to truly make the front page look anyway you want and then using all the community features as simple links to elements on that front page. for example, the ‘recent logins’ window and size, shape, arrangement of profile pics doesn’t look exactly the same on everyone’s site using shark. myspace, facebook, cyworld all have similar features but their layout is all different. we should able to all use shark and have our sites look as different from each other as the ones mentioned.
and if shark can only handle 3-5k users online at once how can our business plans aim to get anywhere near a facebook or even friendster. beating myspace isn’t our goal but growing to several million (or more if we’re lucky) certainly is where i think a lot of us want to be and have to aim for that to get real business partners. will shark be a reliable script for this?
thnx again, really want to consider this as a script to use, steve
Thank you for comment steve007.
As for “3-5k users online”… I said “We aim at 3-5K online users on a today’s average $300/month box”. I was trying to say that Shark is going to support that many users PER BOX. And the ber I suggested is quite good comparatively. You could run a site the size of PlentyOfFish.com or Match.com on just ten servers $300 each. Of course you can run it on a super-high-end mainframe-class server, but in most instances clustering is better. Google, for example, runs on hundreds of thousands smaller machines as opposed to expensive high-powered servers.
The idea is to make Shark flexible to grow and add redundancy - you should be able to drop in a few extra servers when you DB growth, and handle the load, instead of migrating to a huge machine, since migration, per se, can be a major hassle for a big site.
Andry,
Any word on Shark release?
The suugestions in this blog have they all been incorporated or selectively incorporated.
Let us know….
Hi Andrey:
I am very interested in participating in the Shark testing process.
I have read all the comments so far, and they are great, but there has been one major thing left out of the discussion, which will be very important for my sites.
Member participation incentives:
Take a look at Newsvine.com’s Leaderboard:
http://top.newsvine.com/users
All aspects of members’ participation is tracked.
Building community means recognizing and rewarding those who are actively helping to develop the culture.
I will be developing an international website with multiple languages, and I will be wanting to reward people for increasing levels of involvment in helping build the overall community, and the sub-communities based on linguistic groupings. This community will have its own virtual economy, but real-world business will have a role as well.
Most friend and dating sites and many dolphin-type social network platforms emphasize rating people on physical attractiveness.
How about allowing rating of people on social attractiveness?
How about minor changes to the code that would allow a block to say: “Rate this person’s contribution to our Community.”? and have it available anywhere where someone might submit an article or make a comment or add something for the communities benefit.
I’d also like to see discrete sections for groups, where each one could have their own photo section, videos, music, forums, blogs, etc. to help build their own sub-community sense of identity.
I hope that my community will have a chance to particpate in the development and validation of Shark.
Regards,
Communitybuilder
@Dave Gilbert
We are in the process of putting up a road map with all suggestions incorporated into a plan. I will let you know where to see it very soon.
@communitybuilder
Totally agreed with “member participation: point. Shark will definitely have such module. We’re playing with similar thing already and on our site - LoveLandia.com (powered by VERY raw version of Shark) - here - http://www.lovelandia.com/members/ you can see what we already have.
Thank you for you suggestion about groups too. Pretty much what we are in to now.
I am new to the community software, however my partners and I would like to see several items in what we put on the web for our users.
The individual members are important to any site, however we would like to build out comunity on the basis of the groups. If it is set up this way then the users should still be able to search members, or groups. The search all groups should give up a page that list all of the groups in order by master listings. Members should be able to create groups according to their likes and interests under header groups. For example: If I were to set up a group called Classic Cars then everyone interested in classic cars should have the ability to join that group. Likewise if someone wanted to create a group under Classic Cars called Illinois Classic Car Collectors, then he should be able to.
Modules or other software packages should be easy to install and integrate into the system. The “face” or look and feel should be easy to change and edit so that all of the sites out there running the software do not look alike.
There should be a way to select any part of the community and make it a pay for membership site. Also in the groups area as listed above, the member that is setting up the group should have the option to allow members to join or restrict the membership, and also charge for membership if he wants. This should be something that can be split be the community owners if they wish since they are covering the overheads for the site.
The modules that are built for the system need to cary the username and password throughout. Likewise, something needs to be build in to allow for other scripts that use the same type of database to use/or reflect the same type of lateral movement throughout.
A module needs to be built specifically for informational or “columns” like in a newspaper so that members can go there and read up on events or other information that is specific to thier needs that are posted.
Blogs, classifieds and dating services need to be add ons and not part of the community package or at least be selectable as an option and if not selected they need to not show up.
The menu system should be easy to add items to and give the admins the ability to link other software to the community through the menu system. They need to be able to name the items as they wish also. For example we are refering to our groups as circles of friends. I should be able to very easily change the name from groups to circles and it cary throughout the system.
Another way that add-on scripting could be accomplished or even give members from within the community to get to other information is to create an add on module that frames in any other site within the community so that the users stay within the community.
Just some thought of what we are looking for.
Andrey,
I have recently, in the last few months, found your guys’ company. I have installed Dolphin on my server to play around with it, and it has been great! I am amazed to look at the forum and see how on top of everyone’s questions you are, and its clear you guys really know your products.
I think all of these suggestions for Shark are great and that these different things will push it over a lot of your competitors. However, I think you should still keep one thing in mind. A lot of webmasters will be wanting to make community sites that are targeted not necessarily to people that are REALLY into computers. At times, I think that the amount of features on a site like Dolphin can be overwhelming when a user that is not very computer illiterare sets up a profile and navigates through the site. I know Shark will have even more great features, however this may become confusing for some. It all depends on what kind of an audience the webmaster is looking to target.
My suggestion is this: It would be nice if Shark’s Admin Panel had some kind of feature where you could actually disable pages on the site and temporarily remove the buttons to those pages. Later if you wanted to put the page back on you would have the option to do so. Sure you could go in and edit the template html files and the php coding, but it would be nice to be able to disable and enable ENTIRE pages through Admin. I did not see a feature like this that allowed you this kind of control throughout the entire site with Dolphin.
If it is not clear what I mean, here is an example: Suppose I do not want a “Browse” page AND a “Search” Page. It would be nice to disable the “Browse” page through admin and all the links with it, but later enable it again if I changed my mind.
So, pack all the features you guys can muster up into Shark, but just give us the freedom to really control what we want to use to an even greater extent that Dolphin already does.
SIDENOTE: I just wanted to comment on a feature that Dolphin’s Admin has that is more conveniant than all of the other Admin’s I have played with for other companies. I love how easy it is to edit strings. It really helps with customizing all of the wording for EVERYTHING on the site. Please keep that feature for Shark!
I would love to help out with any kind of feedback you are looking for. Also, I’d be glad to elaborate on anything I have said.
Thanks,
Jason
Another item that I would like to see in Shark is a module that allows you to add Video Conf. to the entire site. With the ability of the site owner to charge fees for the service. Let’s say two people from across the country could get online and share “fish stories”.
@G_Jeffrey
Thank you. Good points. many of those are module-dependent and looks like Shark should be flexible enough to cater your needs.
@JasonB
Just “played” with dev.ed. of Dolphin 6 and I agree that there should be a way to actually disable/remove features/pages via admin. panel. We will look into it and will try to provide such functionality ASAP.
Wih Shark, we try to put users first - that’s why we run itin live mode first. You will get a product that passed all nessesary tweaks needed to make the site great for USERS.
Thanks for your comments!
When will the evaluation copies of Shark and the Beta release of Dolphin 6 be available?
Thanks to your team for thinking of the site owners with these peoducts.
Dolphin 6b - in about 10 days.
Shark 2.0b in about 50-60 days.
Hello Andrey,
Is Dolphin 6 available yet? I would like to get a copy and set it up so that I can see if it will meet our needs. One of the items that I need is for the software to be more group oriented instead of Individual oriented. I would also like to know if it will be an easy upgrade from Dolphin to Shark when Shark is complete? I know that this may not be the place for this post other than the question about the upgrade to SHark. Shark is the software that I am interested in, however I need to get our site up and Dolphin 6 has been promoted to meet most of our needs at the current time.
THanks and Regards,
Jeff Hopkins
Hello Jeff,
Dolphin 6b will go out to the wild next week (I hope). Upgrade to Shark will be as easy as possible, but don’t expect same set of features until Shark projects matures to a least v3.
Hi,
In my opinion everything has to be SEO friendly and easy customizable, thinking of user / group- or clubname in meta tag and title.
Next to that build in features for payment by mobile phone or banktransfer.
All the other things i would like to recommend are named in ealier posts.
Thanks in advance for all the work and I will look forward to the release of this amazing script.
Hadion
Thank you for suggestions. Yes, SEO is on our top-priority list and I will soon be posting updates on how we move along this direction.
Tag cloud is needed, tags will come from popular keywords within a users profile, thus making it increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate users.
@Tony
Good one. Thanks.
Hi Andrey,
I have been an aeDating software member for a few years now and unfortunatly had to stop because there was so many bugs and i’m not a coder and did not have the funds to have that fixed so i’m hoping shark will be cool. I like what I see on 4ppl.
I would like an option in admin which can be enabled for verified profiles. With all the scammers these days, lots of members want to know if they are dealing with real people.
A profile which displays a verified text/image, would give other members more confidence to signup for the site.
4ppl is free so everyone signs up including many scammers. I know because i’m on 4ppl and I have already been contacted by many scammers.
Maybe a system can be designed which would be able to scan profile descriptions which are identical. What I mean is this. Scammers sign up with lots of accounts and most times they use the same description. It would be nice to have a function to for example scan the database for identical description if a profile is reported to the admin by another member.
Good luck with shark and count me in for testing if/when possible.
Regards,
Harvliet
Thank you Harvliet!
Yes, you’re right - scammers is the major pain and now we are working exactly on this issue. It’s a lot more complicated than what you’ve said and the anti-scam system we’re building includes A LOT of tools. I can’t reveal them all now due to security reasons
, but to give you an idea…
4ppl will be watching visitor IP, browser, network and something else. It will track texts, behaviors, reports percentile, response rate, profile ratings and again something else ;). It will gradually define a scammer and will start “working” with it. “Working” includes - gradual service denial, hidden restrictions, blackholing, deletion and “sticky” banning.
This is not all. It’s a tip of the iceberg, but the rest should be known by a site operator only, hence you will see how it works, but will know the system only when you have Shark in possession. You would be able to tweak setting from time to time to keep scammers busy trying to figure out a workaround, which they hopefully will not be able to do. Our goal is to run 4ppl completely admin-free, so this filter will do the job and will take the admin salary :). Just hope it wouldn’t spend it all for beers and chicks.
Hi Boonex,
I know there are a lot of posts currently with a lot of suggestions, however I will just explain what I am proposing to do with my site and a few suggestions:
I am looking to creat a fully interactive, UK only dating website with tons of features.
1. I think you should be able to alter the ‘Location’ fields so it displays towns in my country and not different countries;
2. Memberships - I want my site to have the ability to allow women to date for free, however I want men to pay a flat rate. i.e £10 on joing and £10 a month. This will allow unlimited access to the site, chat etc providing they continue to pay.
3. All forms, including ‘Join’, ‘Profile’ etc should be completly customisable - I.e allow you remove any field or add any field.
This is much more things that I want from my site, but as always Dolphin provides the majority of that. These are just a few things that don’t seem to be included (Unless I’m thick :), no comments please).
Security is paramount, but you guys appear to have that covered. My only main concern is preventing people to spam message advertising rubbish.
Apologies if this has already been covered - Keep up the good work and I will continue to post ideas and suggestions.
Kind regards
Craig
——> HOW DO WE GET RANKED
DOES anyone know of any software that could help us get better ranked and how does ranking work ??
——————-
lets put aside all the ideas of next version (any good suggestions) wuld be nice to share
Ranked? Do you mean ranked in search engines? I dount it’s about software. Nowadays it’s so much more about marketing and word of mouth, that triggers natural linking. Search google for “free persoanals”, “free dating site”, “community software”, “dating software” - they are our target keyphrases and we used no software.
** ANDRE **
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as for shark ANDRE id be interestted in testing it, i have another .com name and it would suit SHARK cause the name i purchased was hard to find