We received an email quite a while back from an ex-trialist who kindly provided feedback on the his Boku site, at one point during the email he compared us to a competitor saying:

“Well, no insult intended, but when I showed my admins the site, they told me "it looks like a piece of paper" Please don't get me wrong, I'm not sure what programs you use but if you check out [insert competitor name here] (I'm sure you did) it's like looking at a TV picture with HD.”

A piece of paper! We thought this was quite funny at first, it is a strange analogy to make, but it stuck with us and we gradually began realised that the guy was right. When we originally developed Boku we threw style and ease of use out of the window in favour of more power captain and a bucket load of features.

Given this as inspiration in November we began work on codename “Boku HD” the latest and I dare say greatest version of our clan management system. Boku 2.0 is not just going to be an arbitrary number change introducing a few new bits and pieces, it is a complete recode, and redesign from the ground up (if you will excuse the cliché!).

So I am pleased to announce officially that at the end of January we will be beginning the private alpha of Boku 2.0! We really want you to get involved, as involvement at this early stage can really help us steer the project and allow us to cater to your needs.

So if you would like to get involved in the Boku 2.0 private alpha please let me know as soon as possible via my Xfire (bokuBlackice or by joining the Boku Xfire group).

Please note that for the time being this alpha will only be available to current customers.

This week we have updated with a new feature which lets you hide users from your main views.

In your user admin, press the hide button next to a user, and that user will then be hidden.They will then not show up on your public view pages, or in your main user admin screen.

To restore them, go to the hidden user screen and press the restore button next to their name.

New Features:

• Hide Users Function

Fixes/Enhancements

• Added user admin pagination

Boku V2

The second coming... yes folks we are working on V2, which is a genuine complete rewrite, which is going to look, work and feel a whole lot different. In the meantime we shall continue to fix bugs, and help out with V1, however we want to put 100% of our time on V2.

We currently estimate that V2 will be launched around April 2010. We have also added a little bar that suggests how far we have progressed.

If you have questions, or suggestions for the new version please post in forums.

Hi guys, we've written a few tweaks for the forums this week, to help you out while reading your ever growing number of forum posts.

The much requested "mark all as read" button now exists in the top right corner of a forum category view, and will as it says - mark everything in that forum as being read.

Remember the system only keeps forum posts that are less than 3 days old as new/not read, and then it automatically marks them as being read/old.  

New Features:

• Added mark all as read button

Fixes/Enhancements

• Fixed forum pagination when searching
• Fixed forum search button not showing in certain instances
• [updated] Allow spaces in username
  

Hi All,

Quick post to let you guys know we have started up our own Xfire group. You can find us here!

And also to let you know we have upgraded our server information system, and added the following games:

Not as exciting an update as new features, but we've been running some profilers on the site, and we've been making changes to the way the site is delivered to try improve their performance.

So hopefully you should notice your site is running faster now.

Also remember that this weekend in the UK the clocks went back an hour - so you can use the timezone feature to change your timezone.