Suggestion for future Beta announcements

[GKusnick]

Each time there's a new Beta release, Jeff posts a sticky announcement thread to the top of the Beta forum. It's my observation that this thread quickly grows to unwieldy length, with many different issues being reported and a dozen or more conversations going on at once, all on the same thread. Users coming to the Beta a week or more after its release often don't bother reading through the entire thread, and end up posting the same issues again, or starting new threads for issues that have already been discussed.

What I'd like to suggest is that for future Betas (starting with 6.1.4 perhaps), the sticky announcement thread should be closed as soon as it's posted. Jeff, Qian, Andy, et al. would still be able to post updates, patches, and so forth to that thread, but user feedback, issues, questions, etc. would all go in regular non-sticky threads in the main body of the forum.

The idea is that individual threads would be shorter and narrower in scope, making it easier to find what's already been posted about a particular issue (and easier to ignore the issues you're not interested in).

Similarly, any interim patch DLLs, STV updates, etc. would be a lot easier to find if they're the only thing in the sticky thread, and not buried among page after page of unrelated posts, as they often have been in the past.

Anybody else think this might be a good idea?

[Enormous]

I agree. That sounds like a good idea. One other addition (don't know how feasible this is with the forum software) could be to require the poster to pick which release their new thread references, just in case they don't put it in the title.

[travisbell]

I concur. The master beta thread is often so convoluted it's hard to keep track of the problems and solutions.

Cheers,

[Polypro]

Good idea.

P

[MeInMaui]

I agree. And I would take it a bit farther by suggesting that when the sticky Announcement thread is retired (i.e. version is out of beta), that it be moved to the end of a locked Version History thread so that all of the release notes and related information for previous versions can be found easily in one place.

Aloha,
Mike

[reboot_this]

There is a locked (closed) beta announcement thread (which is stickied) under the title "SageTV Beta Progress Report" and is located in the beta section, problem is that the posts within it only link to the current beta at that time, with no change listing.

It might be better to have the above mentioned thread include changes for each and every beta release... maybe the public releases should be included too, to stay linear and have a place for people to refer to... so they can decide quickly which version they want.

I'm not sure about having multiple threads covering one beta version, that might muddy the waters of the beta section even worse. People should really be reading the entire beta thread before asking questions anyway, they can even search a single thread for keywords that relate to their question/problem.

edit: the beta announcement thread is not actually "closed" to posters, but there is a warning from Andy not to ever post in it.

[michelkenny]

Originally Posted by reboot_this

edit: the beta announcement thread is not actually "closed" to posters, but there is a warning from Andy not to ever post in it.

It's not closed so you can subscribe to it and get an e-mail notification every time there is a new version/beta out.