Hey everyone, quick update on what's happening next Monday, November 22, 2010. All times are Pacific Standard Time, which is where Los Angeles, California is.
At 9am, I'll be marking all beta registrations to receive their invite codes later in the day. Any beta registrations that come in after 9am will have to wait for our week 3 release on December 6th.
We'll be rolling out some changes to the live beta site and verifying that the code works as intended and doing lots of internal testing.
In the afternoon, when we feel the code base is tested enough, we'll send a newsletter to all users who registered for the beta, even after the 9am cutoff. This newsletter will explain more about what we've been working on, what's in the new release, that sort of thing.
Once that newsletter is sent, I'll work on getting invite codes sent out to everyone who registered before 9am that day, and those users can begin helping with what we'll be calling our "open beta." The Email you'll receive with your invite code will explain what we need from you as beta testers.
It's important to note up front that several things will seem "missing" from the site, such as the forums, leaving comments, rating the games, that sort of thing. Some user profile settings may be available, but as we've already explained, changes you make on beta may get overwritten if you change your AG2 profile later.
The full details of what's going in the beta release, and what major pieces of the site are still missing will be detailed in the newsletter.
Other than questions of "what's in the release" or "what's missing from the release", are there any questions about the process or what will be happening next Monday?
I agree, I love the homepage very much! I also love the code-fu that James implemented--things slide over and move when buttons are clicked! Very, very shweet.
To clarify, the "invite code" that you get in the Email that's a 10-character code like "a1b2c3d4e5" is just to get you past the beta sign-up screen. Once you're past that screen, you'll use your AG2 username/password.
If you ever see the beta sign-up screen again (or if you try a different browser/OS, you'll need to use your invite code again. That's why we give you multiple activations, so you can help us test multiple browsers, etc.
All 500 invite code Emails were sent as soon as we sent out the 560-ish newsletter Emails.
Check your spam folders, especially if you have a Yahoo account. They like to mark our stuff as spam. If they have a "this isn't spam" button, please select our messages and hit that button for us, maybe that'll help in the future.
