Beta

I have to rant about this Beta thing. This is really pissing me off.

First of all, the purpose of a Beta site isn't to make a half-assed site and then every time something goes wrong point to the tag up top and say "Oh sorry, it's in beta!"

No. Fuck you. That's not how Beta works. When you put a site up in Beta it's supposed to be a working site. It's supposed to look and feel like a real site. The primary purpose of Beta is to open it up to real world testers so you can find all those little quirks that you missed.

It's like an author handing over his manuscript to a copy editor. You're not supposed to hand in a rough draft. It's supposed to be as good as you can make it and then a pro looks over and makes it even better.

Second of all, you had months and months and months to get this thing ready. If it wasn't ready to go live, and god knows that thing isn't ready to be live, then you should have left a message board up where everyone could get together, hang out and have a place to just 'be' until the new digs are ready.

And then when the new digs are ready and the inevitable glitches happen everyone would already have a place where they can ask tech questions, submit bug reports, etc. But instead you have everyone running around like a chicken with their head cut off trying to figure out who to contact for tech support. It's kinda stupid, straight up stupid really, to have a Beta site and not have the code monkey a very visible presence.

I was a Beta tester on another site recently. The site worked flawlessly. Our beloved code monkey was a daily presence in the conversations. He kept an ongoing list of known bugs, let us know when new features would roll out and designed the site around our feedback.

It was a social community for knitters. The number of testers on that site was in the hundreds of thousands. Seriously. Hundreds of f'ing thousands!

RMM has how many users right now? Less than 5000.

Get it together guys!