Nekkid Ninjas

About a week ago one of our members came to us and reported that he was suddenly getting spammed on an account that he had only ever used for our site.

We started doing some looking but as it was "only one" we figured that it was most likely something on their end.

Then the second one came in. And another.

All these customers were rather unhappy. Which is completely understandable. I would be angry too if a site was giving away my email address or not looking after their security enough that it was compromised.

More than two reports means that something is more than likely wrong at our end, so we started scouring our server for possible issues, fearing that had been hacked.

We spent a few days pouring over server logs, doing file comparisons between the copy of our site on the server and vanilla installations of Joomla and installed components looking for traces of a hacker.

We read seemingly endless security reports looking for any related to our installed versions of extensions.

After several sleepless nights and a lot of hair-pulling, we still couldn't find out how they got in and got increasingly stressed. If we had been hacked, that is one thing, but if we can't find them or stop them then we are more than just hacked, we are sunk.

Just as our panic was reaching a fever pitch we found the leak. iContact, who hosts our Ninja Mail mailing list, was hacked a couple of weeks ago, and their mailing lists were compromised.

Firstly, thanks for letting us know iContact that you handed our private member's data out!

As a result we have canceled our account at iContact and we sincerely apologize from the bottom of our hearts to our members for any inconvenience this has caused.

Luckily though, no user passwords or accounts were compromised, simply email addresses.

If it makes you feel any better, all the NF staff are also getting more spam too as a result....

If you have a list at iContact, then I suggest that you notify your subscribers that their details have likely been passed onto spammers. (and try out Mail Chimp instead)

Today I'm both proud and excited to be able to announce the first alpha release of Ninjaboard 1.0. It's has been a long while coming and it's finaly here. If you don't want to read-on and just want to go play, go grab the package here [link]

The first Alpha release is not feature complete yet but already includes all the major features you expect for a forum solution for Joomla. Here is a list of all the goodies you are getting in this Alpha :

• Categories have been dropped in favor of unlimited depth forum hierarchies.
• Added a new and very powerful template engine which is capable of blending with any Joomla template with just a couple of clicks.
• Added core breadcrumbs support
  
• Backend fully Mootools 1.2, for frontend we use Jquery to be able to offer superb compatibility any template
• Coded from scratch using the Nooku Framework

Now, since some of these bullets are worthy of their own post, I'll focus on the feature we are most proud and excited about : The new template engine, codename 'Cameleon'.

Ninjaboard 1.0 comes with a revolutionary template engine which supports a new technique we call 'auto-skinning' - just like a Chameleon can change it's skin pattern
and colors to fit the scenery surrounding it to camouflage itself - Ninjaboard is capable of blending with any template you install in your site. It will simply take on the style of the template.

This is perhaps the most unique feature Ninjaboard 1.0 has. It allows you to literally setup your forum in hours, not days or weeks. No need anymore to edit PHP files and risk breaking your site, or hire a developer to make you a custom template. It will just work and look beautifully integrated in your site !

This also means that Ninjaboard is extremely lightweight and very fast as it's reusing as much of your sites imagery and css as much as possible. The actual css and images in Ninjaboard are just a fraction of what's common in forum extensions in general. Yes, performance also matters.

When you look at the screenshots below you might wonder how that's even possible, as it looks like Ninjaboard is very heavy on the graphics.

Clicking a screenshot will take you to a page were you'll see links to the template vendors demo site of it and such.

Also, we're currently setting up a live demo site were you get to try what you see pictured below, yourself. And since I'm on the Morph team, Creativa is guaranteed to support it.

If you are in business, putting your head in the sand doesn't work anymore. You need to be listening and talking to your customers, because if you aren't, they will be doing it with each other, and they won't be happy about it.

As a part of one of my day jobs, I need to read and summarize complaints about a particular automaker that are submitted to the NHTSA website in the US.

Reading a couple of hundred of these a month can be pretty soul destroying for an empathic person like me, as they almost always involve financial hardships, and occasionally injuries and even deaths. On the upside however,the process has opened my eyes to just how much communication goes on between a company's customers and how it impacts their view of the company.

Every year some friends and I participate in the Nagoya Marathon, well at least the 10 km fun run section.

Usually I do a little bit of training in the months before the race and as a result I usually finish in the top 20% of runners. This year though, I was really busy with various things and did basically no training, resulting in my worst ever time and putting me just inside the 70% mark.

While running the race this year, I noticed something very important - the flow of the race. Anyone who's done a lot of racing in scenarios with a lot of participants probably knows what I mean. It's the average pace of the race as a whole, and is very easy to spot once you know what you're looking for.

If you want to spot it, just ask yourself are most people moving away or towards you?

My wife and I were recently looking for baby beds on the Internet and we found two that we really liked, they looked good and the prices were very good.

Being Japanese, my wife is a little more into the group consensus than I am, and so she was looking around for comments and reviews on the two beds.

We found the usual stuff, and both of the beds were rated around the four and a half out of five mark. But one comment really stuck out to me. One person was saying that they had bought the bed and had it delivered to their house. When it arrived there, they opened it and found that it was broken. They then apparently immediately called the company asking what they should do to get a replacement or refund.

The support person on the other end asked them if they had a warranty card. The customer searched the box but there was no card, and support person informed them that there was nothing he could do without that card.

Obviously there's more to the story, but just the possible threat of us not being able to receive customer service without some obscure piece of paper on a several hundred dollar item was enough to convince my wife and I to go for the other bed.

For us the risk of getting a bad product is an acceptable risk to take, but the risk of getting no service or support on a product is not a risk we are prepared to take, and I'm confident that we are not alone in that thinking.

This is because customers in general are willing to accept a bad or faulty product if they can get good support for it, but they will be turned off even the most perfect product if it has a reputation for poor customer service or support.

At Ninja Forge, we know we aren't always perfect with our support but we do try to put a lot of effort into it, especially Mark. But I know we can do better. Right now we are planning out and designing a rebuild of the Ninja Forge site and something I've been giving a lot of thought to lately is how we can improve and streamline our support.

What about you? Is your customer support as good as it could be? Because if it's not, then it could be costing you sales, just like with our baby bed.