Message boards function are a means of communication. You could say that was the entire point of having a forum and you'd be quite correct. We work our best to deliver a useful product, but I don’t think we really communicate enough with the public. Our community is often touted as one of our strongest aspects, but that's because our members are so wonderful, not because we relate with you to the best of our ability. At a recent meeting, we decided that more team/community interaction and bonding was needed. This is one effort to start us off.
We hope to make these newsletters either quarterly or monthly. They will contain comments from the team that are probably of interest to modders, currently involved members and new members wanting to be more involved. Not everything warrants a full announcement, and reading through a ton of posts to pick up on individual sentences isn't probably something you have time for. This newsletter should help to summarize everything in one go.
First, we are going to talk on the subject of
releases. As you have probably noticed, we released
SMF 1.0.7 and a patch for SMF 1.1RC2 not too long ago. This went very smoothly and there haven't been any major problems reported from upgrading. We ask for your help. Please mention these updates to the Admins of any forums you're a member of which haven’t updated yet. SMF 1.1 RC2 brought with it a lot of new features and a new theme. This was a big step for us to take and the feedback has been very positive; but as with every major code release, there are bugs. None of these bugs are too serious,
but alas, we have a few, this means we’re going to have a third release candidate (RC3). We feel it is needed to ensure a better release and less stressful time for users of the final version, making sure to keep our reputation intact.
While we're on the subject of
bugs, we intend to squash them but we can only fix them if we know they exist. We have implemented a more efficient system for working with bugs once they are reported. We will be refining this process a bit more in the coming days. We need your help; we need the community to report all bugs they find to the
SMF Coding Discussion board. With our new system, we aim to provide more feedback and status reports on bug killing.
For a long time, there hasn't been a lot of information available in one place so we present the
Online Manual to counter this. We need feedback and requests. If you think something should be on the manual, please post and ask for it. If you wish to write something, please notify one of the members of our Doc Team to be sure it isn’t already in work, and if it isn’t we will do our best to incorporate your work into our manual.
Pink is a controversial color on the team, you may have noticed the ugly/beautiful "On Hiatus" badge of some of our team. This is to identify that those members may not be posting for a short while as they have had to attend to other things but are intending on coming back. We stand behind the fact that real life always comes first.
With 1.1 Final on the way we will soon be moving our concentration to the next version of SMF, for this we will need your input, so start dreaming and post them to the
feature requests board. We also would like to ask your help at the release of SMF 1.1 Final to
digg the site. We will make sure there are more details available about this soon.
Well that concludes our first newsletter, as with everything else, we love your feedback, so please post it and let us know what else you'd like to know about. Thanks for reading and I hope it's given you more insight on what's happening at the moment.
