I'm pleased to inform you that we have a new build of our community platform coming in 24 hours or so. The big change... a new editor tool for the community forums.

That's right, there will now be a word style dynamic html editor for everyone to use in the forums. Yes, you heard me correctly, I specifically called out the forums. Article and blog integration was a little trikier, so we decided to get the forum control out first, then follow up with articles and blogs in the next release.

As you may or may not know, we keep a top-secret restricted testing ground that is, in just about every way, an exact replica of our public site. Here we test the latest features and such, and also use it as a guinea pig when we need to try something out. We have now set it up so that you special guys can check out these new features before anyone else, as well as help us test them to find bugs or flaws in operation.

I'd love to have you guys check it out today, and give us the scoop on your feedback or any bugs you happen to run across.

A few ground rules for using this site.

#1. Please do not share the username or password to this site without explicit permission from me.

#2. Remember that it's an exact replica, so that means you'll need to hold off on a few specific actions when testing. We have an elaborate notification system that e-mails users when threads have been moved or posted to, and also RSS features that update when new threads or articles are created. RSS is disabled on our mirror site, so don't bother testing to see if RSS still works, and you don't have to worry about users getting false RSS feeds. Second, certain parts of our e-mail notification system IS ACTIVE. A random post to a thread won't notify the user, but certain moderation functions like moving threads will send an e-mail to the creater of the thread. To prevent sending accidental false notifications, we recommend that when testing moderation functions or testing parts of the forums, create a thread on the mirror site that you can play with. If you move it, you will get a notification, but it will only go to you.

#3. Since both sites look identical, it's hard to tell if you're on the mirror site or the real one. Glance up at your brower address bar before you do anything to make sure you didn't wander over to the production site.

What's changed

Not many user features have been altered this go around except for the new editor.

Your mission

We'd like you guys to play with it, test out it's various functions, and look for any bugs, glitches, or strange behaviors. Yog, you may want to run through some of the moderation controls to make sure they're still working correctly. Don't forget to jot down your thoughts and opinions about the new features or things you think should be different. We always love to hear it.

We'd love it if you could both mess with it using different browsers. Firefox is usually the most compatible with our site, and it's what nearly all of our developers use, so it's typically the most stable. However, please use IE as well since that's still 90% of the browser market.

We're really excited about this release. We know one of the weak points about our forums as compared to the competition (TC), is our editing tool. This new editor should leapfrog us into a new direction since it smokes the meta-based systems that many sites are still using.

Known issues

-Can't create new thread via forum topic page in IE

-Editing posts messes up formatting (try to confirm)

-HTML source editor doesn't load info in firefox (try to confirm)


To access the mirror site, go to the following URL:

http://mirror.dvrplayground.com

Username: capable
Password: moderator

I'd recommend you both e-mail your results to me rather than post them here. I can get them to our development team faster if they're in e-mail form.

If you run across strange formatting, try to nab a screenshot. It help to be able to see what you saw. Also, if something behaves screwy, try to give a description of what you did that caused the problem.

I'll be around to answer any questions you guys may have, and otherwise, have fun! We think you guys are going to love it.