Update: It is now late into the evening on September 1st, and although it could be sooner, we will need another 24 hours before releasing the new site. We realize this is most frustrating, but even this partial release of the public interfaces of the site involved a complete strip down and rebuild of the entire site architecture. We are fine-tuning the new search interfaces, and as soon as those and some cache testing is complete, we will show you the fruit of all the work we put into this release.
Ok, so it looks like we’re going to make the September launch for the new site, but with some additional delays for authors. What this means is that the public version of the site will go live, but we will be restricting author login and new signups for a couple of weeks longer.
From bugs to some problematic features, we’ve faced delays that just won’t allow us to open things up to authors just yet, but we also can’t afford to delay the public launch any further either. Basically, we need to offer a better user experience for your readers.
So, this comes to the beta tester request. Starting on or about the 7th, we are going to allow a handful of authors the ability to login and start testing features. We’re going to pick 10 of varying experience and badge levels out of everyone who applies and agrees to meet the requirements.
Requirements:
- Set aside at least 1-2 hours per day for a week (14 hours total) for testing
- Publish something new each day, where you publish at least 1 item of each new content type you have available to your account level during the week
- Exercise as many of the other features available to your account level as you can daily, where you test each feature available to your account level at least once during the testing period
- Send in an email with any bugs you find as you find them, and include the browser, whether it’s repeatable in all browsers required for testing, your operating system, and details on what you were doing when you experienced it (You may need to install a couple of new browsers if you don’t have all 5 required)
- Email an experience feedback report at the end of each day that outlines what you did that day, things you liked, things you didn’t, and any frustrations or suggestions you may have
What Beta-Testers receive as a bonus:
- A $25 bonus for meeting all criteria listed above
- $5 for every verified bug report for the tester who reports it first
- Get to keep all of the rewards earned through use of the site
- Early access to learn how the new SharedReviews will be like no other publishing platform online
If you’re interested, send a private message to ‘peter’ with a few sentences of why you think you’ll be able to help us make sure the site will be ready for all authors come the middle of the month.
We’re going to announce those selected for beta-testing on August 31st, best of luck to all of those who apply. Thanks for everyone’s ongoing support and patience, this release is a doozy!