IndexU Support

With the integration of IndexU and wordpress many users will have found that their passwords have changed. I do apologize for this and you will need to request your password be sent to you.

Of course you can change your password once you log back in. I am pretty much done with the integration test so I should not need to reset the passwords again.

Integration is 90% complete, and once it’s done I’ll have it posted as the first addon/mod for paid members only.

UPDATE

I also found out tonight that I broke something else as well.  Apparently I set everyone’s role on the blog to blank. Which means that you weren’t allowed to do anything but look, even if you logged in you would have had issues viewing the content you could normally view. I apologize for this as well and that has been fixed.

It was with the best of intentions that I broke things.

I’ll try not to let it happen again!

I have decided to implement a subscription feature for Indexusupport.

Paid membership is priced at $50.00 per year and includes the following

• Free databases
• Three DMOZ slices per member per year
• Un-encoded mods and addons
• Tips for paid members only
• Live support
• Free themes
• Payment modules

Live support not available on weekends or holidays and is limited to 10 incidents per year. An incident is defined as a definite and separate occurrence of a single issue requiring no more than 30 minutes of time to complete. This issue will be worked on until it is fixed but will only include a singular issue. Custom programming is not included.

So how can you benefit from paid membership?

1. The live support should be more than enough to pay for itself over the twelve months of your subscription
2. Themes are currently for sale at a cost of approx $50 each. For the price of one theme you could have access a number of themes.
3. Un-encoded mods give you the ability to see exactly how they are written and modify them if you require.
4. Payment modules allow you to accept payments from more than one source.
5. Some of the databases are sold for almost as much as the membership for just one database. This is a huge cost savings.

Sign up for membership today!

I don’t know what happened, but directory-owners.com now redirects to Google.com

For those that haven’t been there before, directory-owners was a forum for, what else, directory owners. Almost all of the major scripts were represented there and it was a nice place to go to find discussions that relate to all types of directories.

I do know that the site was for sale recently, and that there were issues with a mod that I involved myself with, but I don’t think things were bad enough to close up shop.

So if the owner of D-O is reading this, and you would like a moderator that doesn’t play sides and isn’t afraid of banning people and who has mod and admin experience with VB, I’m willing to take it on.

Hopefully we’ll see it back again soon.

Update - The site is back now,  no mention of any downtime or redirect on the site.

I found that a great feature of the admin panel was to include the last five postings from the Nicecoder forum, so I decided why not add the same thing for Indexsupport.com?

Of course this gets my site more exporure, but since a lot of my visitors visit their admin panels more often than they visit the blog I figured this would be a great addition to your new site.

This mod/addon is only for the SVN version of IndexU, or what is being called IndexU Deluxe.

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Some time ago the domain name indexu.com was dropped. It has since been in the hands of a domain name speculator who used it for domain parking.

Tdomain IndexU.com domain was recently dropped and today it went to auction. I have been monitoring the name for a while and once that I saw it drop I purchased backorders from a number of companies.

It was snapnames that picked the domain up and after a two day auction I am happy to announce that the domain IndexU.com is back in the hands of the owners of the IndexU script.

It was a good auction, and the name was acquired for a decent price. You shall soon be able to visit the nicecoder website by using the domain name of IndexU.com

Congrats to Nicecoder for this wonderful catch.

I am currently in the process of testing out a third party application on the server called amember.

Since it’s new to me I’m not too familiar and I’ve already broken a few things (like the admin login, fixed now).

So the reason for this post is just a note saying that there may be login issues while I’m getting it to work with both wordpress and indexu. For now simply log in normally and it should work. If it doesn’t please send me a message on the nicecoder forum.

Once the integration has been figured out I’ll make the rest of the changes needed and then i’ll post a “how to” on using amember and IndexU.

One of the most commonly asked questions is how to edit the templates that come with IndexU. While this is really basic stuff some users just don’t know where to look or what to do to edit them.

The editing of template files does not need to be done via FTP, they can all be done in the admin panel providing your installed and setup your IndexU properly.

If you receive an error when saving these files that says anything about fwrite or fopen then you have not setup IndexU properly and you need to go back to the Install Guide and search for CHMOD

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I’ve had this idea for a while, but since I had no use for it I didn’t do anything with it. Another user on the forum posted details about him using a visual editor on his site but did not post details on how to do it. I do hope he posts it as a mod.

This mod is all about the free TinyMCE editor. It can be used to offer a very simple editor, or a complex editor like you would see on MS Word.

Installation and the actual modification are very simple. I should have done this long ago and if I knew it was this easy I would have.

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Just as a note I would like to mention that I have moved a few pages, changes the tutorial pages to actually look nice and moved a few files around.

The tutorial pages require users to login now, as they should have when I first posted them. They also use part of the default theme for the site so they are no longer bland and boring.

The directory now requires users to log into the blog to view. This is causing a minor issue with a javascript error but for now I will leave it as it is simply because it’s not causing an issue.

And for those wondering, I’m not going to spill the news about how to make users login to the blog so they can view non blog pages. That one is my own secret for now.

The tutorial pages, all manuals and the script comparison page have all moved. I did my best to update every post on this site and on the Nicecoder site to reflect the new locations.

However, if you notice a broken link please let me know about it. I moved the pages to better organize the site, to make it easier for me keep track of where things are, and to make it easier when I need to update some of those items. Sorry for any inconvenience as I realize this may break some bookmarks you had.

This post shouldn’t really need to happen, but since I do support and see dozens of requests come in for help and the amount of sites that use simple passwords is amazing.

Let me give you an example of a few, without actually using their passwords. Yes some of these may be valid passwords for someone’s site but not to current knowledge any site that I have ever worked on.

First the username. By default the IndexU username is “admin” without the quotes. But this can be changed easily. How many sites have I worked on for customers that did NOT use admin as the username? One.

Seriously, just one.

Passwords are a different story. I have no idea how many times I’ve seen passwords set to simple words that are in pretty much every brute force directory that exists. Passwords like

• Passw0rd
• the site owners city name
• the site owners first name
• the site owners last name
• paperclip (I guess there were some nearby and it was something to type in)
• 1111111111 (not kidding on that one, 8-10 characters, all the same)
• the sites domain name (seriously!)

Of course you do realize, that if you use your name or city or address as your password, that information is usually public in your Whois record.

If you really want to keep your information and site secure then please use a strong password of at least 8 characters that uses a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters (like $, %, ^, &, # etc). It’s combinations like those that make it MUCH harder to crack a sites password.

Remember that once a user has figured out your password and is in your admin panel the possibility that they now know your cpanel (or worse, WHM) password is greatly increased because most users use the same password for everything.

Now all they need to do is check your whois, see what your email address is, and try to log into your webmail account. Once there they can try to transfer your domains.

It’s not worth it to be lazy. If you really need to, write that password down on a piece of paper or a business card and place it in your wallet or in a CD case next to your computer. Heck you could write it on a cd and people might think it’s a CD Key for some program and not your password for your email or website.

My customers get assigned passwords, and most of them like it. The ones that don’t like it ask to have it changed and I flat out say no. It’s for my security as well. If someone is hosted on my server and gets hacked and their domain is suddenly trying to send out 50,000 emails per hour (wouldn’t happen due to limits, but it’s possible on some machines) then it would make me look bad, and could get my whole server blacklisted which would suck big time.

Take your time, and learn about what you’re doing. And if you need it, ask for help.