What's up SE Fans?

Are you a visual person? Well we just wanted to let you know that our good friends from SocialEngineMarket.com has just created a wonderful video resource site dedicated to "visually" showing you how to customize/utilize SocialEngine. The webite is called SocialEngine.Tv - make sure you check them out.

SocialEngine is different than most online community-building tools. While our platform is commercially-licensed and not open source, we do give our customers total access to our source code. We don’t compile or encrypt anything because we want our customers to have complete creative freedom when they customize their community websites.

The downside of making our source code accessible is, you guessed it... piracy. SocialEngine is widely pirated and not terribly hard to find in the Internet’s murkier recesses. Ostensibly, the SOPA/PIPA legislation is designed to protect intellectual property owners like us from this kind of activity. The obvious truth, though, is that SOPA/PIPA would absolutely ruin our business because it would drastically inhibit SocialEngine customers’ ability to create their own online communities in the first place.

Gigaom published a great article about the rise of social content curation on social networks and interest-based communities. At SocialEngine, we’ve seen tons of evidence supporting this. Much of the content that end-users share on the thousands of community websites powered by SocialEngine is being re-shared from other sources, or links to copyrighted content that’s hosted elsewhere. SOPA/PIPA puts niche online communities in as much jeopardy as it does the mainstream networks like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Communities powered by SocialEngine only make up a fraction of that long tail. There are millions of online communities and hundreds of millions of end-users that enjoy them every day.

We are calling on our community of SocialEngine customers, developers, service providers, and hosting affiliates to speak up in solidarity against SOPA/PIPA. Here are some ways you can take action right now:

• Outside the US? Find out what's wrong with ACTA and do something about it. Email the US state department about PIPA and SOPA via Stop American Censorship
• Look up and contact your representative via the EFF
• Complete the Take Action Checklist at Stop American Censorship

4.2 is now available to download in the client area, and we will be releasing the 4.2 trial within a week. As always, please be sure to backup your database before upgrading or making any changes!

List of features:

• reCAPTCHA - Free service that will help prevent spam bots from registering on your SocialEngine site.
• Clean Theme - Alex designed a new theme focused on simplicity. Try it for yourself. We know you'll love it!
• Janrain - Use this social login service to let your users conveniently register and login with their Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIN, Yahoo!, and other social networking services.
• Wibiya - an online toolbar platform that offers SocialEngine publishers the option to add web applications to their respective websites. Increase communication within your community!

Take a peek at our CHANGELOG for the complete list of updates.

Please contact us if you have any questions!

Want to stop bots from registering to your SocialEngine site? reCAPTCHA is the solution! reCAPTCHA is a completely FREE SERVICE that makes it harder for spam bots to register on your site. Below is a screenshot of it in action.

You might have already seen this feature in action in many of the popular websites you visit like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube. It's a pretty effective anti-spam tool and we are going to incorporate it into the next version release of SocialEngine. You can learn more about reCAPTCHA by visiting this page: http://www.google.com/recaptcha

The next version will be releasing this month - make sure to watch out for it!

Our default themes provide some variety, but for those you who find these themes too limiting, you do have some options.

Create Your Own Theme: Customize the styling of the site yourself, or hire a developer to assist you.

Third-Party Themes: Browse the selection of themes and contact the developers directly for questions and pricing. Development firms like Skayz Themes specialize in custom designs and have developed some of the highest rated themes. Some themes are focused for media sharing or even to emulate Facebook.

For two great examples of theme development, check out Shane Barcinas' Grid Theme and Webhive's Folious Theme.

Make sure to subscribe to our channel: SocialEngineTv

• SocialEngine 3 to 4 Migration

• Ning Member Importer

• Ning Archive Importer

• phpFox Importer (3rd Party)

• vBulletin to SocialEngine (3rd Party)

• Migration from iForum 3 to SE4 Forum (3rd Party)

• Blog Importer for Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr (3rd Party)

For your reference, we've added an article here: http://www.socialengine.net/support/article?q=211&question=List-of-Import-Tools-for-SocialEngine

If you've developed or are looking to develop an import tool for SocialEngine, please contact us and we will add it to the list.