Lithium Technologies

Lithium Technologies is an online customer support and brand loyalty company based in Emeryville, California. Some of the company's services include forums, live chat, instant messaging, and a wide range of online customer interaction tools. Lithium's products are delivered on a hosted basis rather than as traditional packaged software.

Lithium was founded in 2001 as a spin-out from GX Media, which hosts a number of popular gaming sites including [http://www.gamers.com/ Gamers.com] . The company's founders include Lyle Fong, who also founded GX Media. The company sells exclusively to enterprise customers, including [http://www.linksys.com/ Linksys] , [http://us.playstation.com/ Sony] , [http://www.dell.com/ Dell] , [http://www.nintendo.com/ Nintendo] , [http://www.comcast.net Comcast] and [http://www.cingular.com/ Cingular] . Lithium Technologies is a closely held company whose financial results are not publicly available.

Because of the company's history serving customers in the video game industry, Lithium's online forums have been subject to repeated "hacking" attacks. Most security vulnerabilities were eliminated in 2003 when the company implemented new request authentication techniques that prevent spoofing.

Lithium Forums

Lithium Forums is a software package produced by Lithium Technologies, comparable to vBulletin, Invision Power Board, or phpBB. It is used by popular websites such as 1UP.com, Dell.com, AdultSwim.com, Comcast.com PlayStation Underground, real.com and Nintendo.com.

Features

Lithium forums have several features that set it off from other forums. Because of Lithium's ability of customization, some forums will have features that others do not. These include a role and ranking system, personal icons, a rating system, and custom signature.

Roles and ranks

Roles and ranks are a big part of a Lithium community. Roles are given by site maintainers and include things such as moderators and administrators. When given a role, a tag will appear next to the selected user's name.

Ranks are handed out to everyone, usually automatically, although not always. Ranks can be acquired depending on several circumstances. On the Adult Swim and Nintendo boards, ranks are gained when a certain combination of posts, minutes online, page views, and an old enough registration date is established. Other ranks, such as the rank that moderators and site owners have, cannot be achieved by regular users, and can only be given by role.

Rating system

The rating system is a way for users to rate posts on a scale from 1 to 5. It is simply a way for other users to judge another users posts based on content and information given. Because of the way the system is used, it can be exploited by Internet trolls who wish to assign a rating of 1 to every post, regardless of content. Because of this, the Adult Swim boards dropped the rating system almost entirely, only using it in a read-only Fan Review folder.

Posting

Messages can be posted in either a graphical editor or an HTML editor. The graphical editor includes things like bold, italics, underline, strikethrough, quoting the replied-to post, and a spell check. The HTML editor can do the same, except a user must type the correct tags if they want bold, italics, etc.

Icons

Icons, or avatars, can be chosen by a user to display underneath their name in every post. On the 1up boards, these include things such themes as, aliens, dinosaurs, cars, and monsters. The Adult Swim boards have icons for each of their shows, which display a prominent character or object.

Personal profile

A personal profile is given to each user, which allows access to various settings. These include tabs that contain subscriptions, bookmarking, user macros, preferences, skins, and icons. On the main page, users can customize their signature with HTML, fill out a biography, and write notes. The maintainer of a site has complete control over what does and does not show in the profile page. For example, on 1UP.com, the Icons tab is hidden, although still functional. On the Adult Swim boards, Icons are available, but User Macros are hidden, although still functional. Adult Swim has also removed the biography and note section of the main page due to legal issues.The preferences tab, among other things, includes the ability to set time zone, HTML and signature viewing, font size, and messages per page.

User page

A public user page is also given to everyone. On the Adult Swim boards, when it is viewed by another user, it includes the username, the selected icon, online status, the ability to view a tracker of every post ever made by that user, post count, and, if the online status is set to public, a Date Registered and Date of Last Visit. If you are viewing it, it becomes greatly expanded. Including the list above, you can also see your email address and whether or not it's verified, average message rating, number of page views, messages read, posts you've made, number of threads made, number of replies to other threads, times logged in, board views and minutes online. It also has the IP address and the browser used during your last visit.On the 1UP.com boards, however, this is vastly different. 1UP has removed everything listed above, and instead has implemented a MySpace-like page which allows users to upload a photo, list personal information such as age and location, and add video games they own.

Dashboard

The dashboard is a JavaScript popup that displays all the information in the user page, including subscriptions, your buddys online and bookmarks. This is where 1UP.com has decided to display their information, rather than in the user page like on Adult Swim.

External links

* [http://www.lithium.com/ Lithium Technologies]