(2018-07-14, 10:41 AM)Euan T Wrote: Great to see this feedback, thanks everybody for testing it out. I do just want to make some comments about how we manage pre-releases in the future.
I know the announcement may have been hard to see, that's our fault. I made the announcement in the 1.8 Development forum rather than global as there's something weird going on with this community forum in that it won't allow us to create global announcements. I need to try and fix that this weekend. We did also post a message on Twitter linking to the announcement, but I understand not everybody uses Twitter. For the future, we'll likely add a bar to the header of the forum.
The idea of showing announcement for pre-releases in the ACP sounds good on paper, but I don't think it'll happen in the 1.8 series. We'd need to modify the ACP slightly, or post something on the blog. Posting a message on the blog could be confusing, which is why we avoided it - there would be a "pre-release" post followed very closely by a "release" post. For users subscribed to blog email updates, they may get annoyed by so many emails whenever there is a release/pre-release.
Regarding the ACP showing 1.8.16 as the latest version, that's an unfortunate side-effect of it being a pre-release. We've never done pre-releases like this before, so there is no code or infrastructure in place to recognise pre-release versions being different to full release versions, and if we added 1.8.17 to the upgrade announcement system before full release, the ACP would simply list it as a full release which would lead to confusion.
We definitely want to continue doing these pre-releases in the future, as this threads shows the clear and obvious benefit! We'll improve our processes for the pre-releases in the future as we get a bit more experience with them and work out what works well and what doesn't.
Again, thanks everybody for testing - the feedback always helps!
I don't know if you saw my earlier post in this thread, but this is what I suggested that might help alleviate some of the communication issues that you addressed in this post.
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I'd second DrGuild's suggestion in regards to making the Pre-Release Announcements a bit more prominent, especially in the main Community page.
That's a great suggestion to have a dedicated
FORUM for the Pre-Release reports (AND Official Releases, too) because I noticed with the release of 1.8.16, there are multiple threads in different forums and those can be hard to keep track of all of the reports and issues. Many of those posts were repetitive because many users did not bother to check the other forums for answers.
If the admins of MyBB can contain those kinds of threads and posts into a single dedicated
FORUM, then everyone will be forced to go to that forum and find the answers to their issues there.
I propose that the admins of MyBB consider these 2 forum additions.
Under the Development section - Create the Pre-Release forum and the Official Release forum. Do not put version numbers on those 2 forums. You can create sub-forums for specific version releases. For example: Pre-Release → 1.8.xx, Pre-Release → 1.9.xx. Same for the Official Release → 1.8.xx, Official Release → 1.9.xx
Keeping everything in it's place will enable all users to find the information quickly and hopefully will cut down on repetitive threads/posts in different forums that others might miss.
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